Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses — past the headlands —
Into deep Eternity —
Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?
-Emily Dickinson
Friday, June 18, 2010
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Reprise of 2009 commencement speech
I thought I'd share here a speech I gave last year at this time at the Albany Academy for Girls commencement. My niece Hannah was graduating. I was celebrating my 35th reunion. My father, his 70th from the Albany Academy, the boys' school across the road. Brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces have also graduated from the two schools. The reason I think this is relevant here is it expresses some of what drove me to find Valdesca and sail her this winter in the Sea of Cortes. This morning, I dug this out to remind myself.
AAG Commencement Address, June 8, 2009
by Claudia J Lewis
Today, I’d like to put out there some themes that have emerged in my life in the 35 years since I sat here in MY white dress. Hopefully, those of you graduating today will find something of value here as you go about your lives and make all the decisions ahead of you about what courses to take in college, what major to declare, whether to continue beyond a bachelor’s degree, whether to have a career or family or both, whether to be a hippie vegan back-to-nature dirt farmer or a suit-wearing, Lexus-driving, banking maven. The themes I’ll put forward—that I’ve come to value—are perseverance, self-reliance, community, and Nature, as in that thing we think we’ve conquered but in fact we depend on for our very existence.
I’ll start out with what I don’t want to talk about—cancer. Although I have been fighting cancer for 5 years, I don’t want to be defined by cancer. In fact, I’m trying hard to find definition beyond cancer. I live with it every day—an endless cycle of doctors’ appointments, treatments, annoying side effects, medical tests, reports to friends and family. An endless cycle of ups and downs—but surprisingly more up than down.
I also don’t want to be defined too narrowly by my resume, or my biography. Sufficit to say, I am privileged, as all of you are. Yes, I have worked hard. But up to a certain point, accidents of birth and connections make more difference than hard work. Going to the Academy gives you a leg up on college admissions. And once you go to, say, Brown, that helps get you into a Cal State Los Angeles master’s program with no background whatsoever in the sciences. And having done that, it’s not that much of a reach to get into Harvard. And in my interview for a Fulbright Fellowship, one of the evaluators (who was at Caltech) said, “Well, you seem to have come out of nowhere scientifically. But if you’re good enough for Harvard, I’ll put you forward for a Fulbright.”
All of which isn’t to say that training for my profession was a cake walk. There were plenty of 70-hour weeks. However, in some ways it has been a matter of just putting one foot in front of the other. As Woody Allen once said, “Ninety percent of life is about just showing up.” To get a PhD takes perseverance more than IQ. It takes believing in yourself, believing that you are capable of original thought.
For a scientist, I’ve actually had a rather checkered career. No straight and narrow for me! In college, I chickened out of majoring in geology because in my FIRST geology class the professor wrote some differential equations on the blackboard and said that those of us who hadn't had physics and calculus yet didn't really need to worry (I worried).I didn't even know what calculus was. So I majored in American Civilization. It wasn't until after college, while I was working at a small wood energy research lab in Santa Fe, that I discovered I could do science. One task I had was to run experiments on creosote buildup in different kinds of woodstove chimney. I set up 6 identical Fisher Baby Bear woodstoves with identical lengths of chimney but different kinds of insulation. Then I fired the 6 Baby Bears for two months straight, loading each one with an identical, weighed quantity of newspaper, kindling, and cordwood. This required chopping cords and cords of firewood, taking care to get all the pieces the same size. At the end, I dismantled the chimneys, dried them in a low-temperature oven, weighed them, and compared them to their original weights to get the creosote accumulation. And we published a paper in 'Mother Earth News'. I realized that there was no mystery to doing science. I was good at it! So I took evening courses in College Algebra, Calculus (!!!), Physical Geology, and Chemistry. After that, I knew I was ready to get the geology degree I always wanted.
I finished my master’s degree at Cal State in four years rather than the more typical two years because I had to do all the undergraduate geology courses and physics, chemistry, and calculus. I then went to Harvard for a PhD, which took five more years. For anybody counting, I went through 26th grade. I did my thesis research in Baja California, which took 11 months to complete, 11 months of camping out in the Sonoran desert. With a field assistant, we’d drive up a dry wash in the mountain range I was studying and find a place protected from flash floods, where we’d set up camp. Then for a week or so, we’d hike out every day in a different direction to map the rocks before changing camps. By now I think you can see how sticking with it can get you to your goals, despite your doubts about your abilities or how many times you have to move across the country.
One characteristic that ties it all together for me is that I have an openness to experience that isn’t unique but HAS determined my trajectory and impelled me through life. I’ve been willing to take risks, to follow my heart, to think for myself, and ignore the expectations of other people, though I had to learn to do these things. If you don’t open yourself up to making mistakes, you close yourself off to learning anything new. If you merely follow a pre-determined path, you’ll never really know what you’re made of.
More than anything or anyone, the wilderness, or Nature with a capital N, has been my guide and perpetual source of peace, inspiration and strength. My appreciation of the outdoors began a long time ago—camping out on islands in Lake George, waterskiing on a glass-calm lake not long after dawn, picking blueberries and swatting mosquitoes on Prospect Mountain. My first real experience of what nature could teach me about myself was the Outward Bound course I took at Hurricane Island after my junior year at the Academy. Twenty-one days of rain, sleeping on oars, navigating in pea-soup fog, rowing despite the blisters taught me I was pretty tough. I didn’t love the rain but I figured out how to stay warm and dry.
At some point, likely senior year, I came across a book in the Academy library that someone had had the good sense to buy. It was called “On the Loose” by Terry and Renny Russell, two brothers (not much older than me at the time) who put together a book of their photos, quotes from other authors, and wisdom of their own from their travels together on rivers, in the desert, and in the mountains. They rattled around in an old pickup truck and ran whitewater rivers and climbed peaks and played the guitar on the beach. “On the Loose” became a kind of prescription or exhortation for me. I wanted to do what they did, but in my own way.
After my freshman year at Brown, I had a summer job at Hurricane Island doing logistics from a subsidiary island base near Bar Harbor, ME; I had to provide all the food and gear for 36 students and 8 staff. Mind you, I was 19 years old and I had no idea how much 17 year old boys eat. I nearly caused a mutiny. After working two summers at Hurricane Island, I signed on for a 3-month trip sailing and rowing from Maine to Florida, with other Hurricane staff, on a 30-ft-long, open boat (basically a glorified coast guard life boat). We left Hurricane in early October, in the late afternoon, and ran smack into a storm. We sailed all night, waves crashing over us as we huddled in our foul weather gear. I remember sunrise vividly; the wind had died down and we made a pot of coffee on our two-burner gas stove and dug into the brownies we had made before leaving Hurricane. Fortunately, things never got MORE exciting than our first night, though we had lots of adventure.
As a junior at Brown, a group of kids I didn’t know found out I had worked for Outward Bound and asked me if I wanted to join their Group Independent Study Project on the Colorado River. We would get academic credit for two semesters. And we would spend 45 days in July and August on the Green and Colorado Rivers. The idea was to study the archeology, history, geology, environmental policy, art, music, and literature of the Colorado River drainage, a river that provides life-giving water to 7 arid western states, has some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet, and has seen history-making whitewater descents. After the river trip, we would synthesize what we learned and prepare an hour-long multi-media presentation for the Brown President’s Colloquium Series during commencement week.
As you might imagine, we had a blast. The six of us did the river in two inflatable rafts and a little hard plastic boat called a Sportyak. We had so much time—45 days!!—that we were able to hike up many side canyons and even take a backpacking trip into the Maze, in Canyonlands. We had so much time that some days we would decide just before sunset that we really were sick of this camp and so we’d throw everything in the boats and float a mile to a new camp. In retrospect, that was an amazingly unpretentious trip. It wasn’t about gear at all. We wore cutoffs and sneakers. It was about being on the river. It was about learning what the desert had to teach us. Was it worth 6 credits?
Aldo Leopold, in his book “A Sand County Almanac,” expressed the power of wilderness travel to teach us unforgettable lessons:
Terry and Renny Russell, from their experience of wilderness, learned a few things, too. Here’s a piece of theirs on wilderness travel from “On the Loose” that still sticks with me today:
And how to rely on yourself. I’ve learned that in spades. Like the time in Baja California when we had both batteries, the main one and the backup, go dead. We felt that kind of uh-oh you feel when you realize this might not turn out the way we planned. There was just a thin veil of technology between us and total doom. We had to hike out 12 miles across the burning desert to the main road and hitchhike into San Felipe to get a new battery and find somebody to take us back to our vehicle, which was way off in the hinterland. The guy who took us back in was visibly nervous when I kept getting out of the vehicle to find the tracks we made in the sand on the way in.
So what does wilderness offer me at this stage of my life, if not the chance to be ever more self-reliant? For the last few months I have been reading books of nature writing—Edwin Way Teale, Ann Zwinger, Terry Tempest Williams, Ed Abbey, Ellen Meloy—most but not all writing about the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest desert. I’ve been feeling a deep need to connect to the natural world, but it’s a little hard to do on a chaise longue in my dining room. So I started reading about other people’s trips to wild places. Within the nature writing genre, there are different flavors and not all of them suit all occasions.
Some years ago I started a book by the author and naturalist Ann Zwinger. The book was called “Down Canyon”, about a year in which she took 12 trips through the Grand Canyon, one a month. All those years ago, I didn’t get very far with Down Canyon. I wanted to read about whitewater, the big rapids that drive the pace and tenor of most days on the Grand.
But Zwinger scarcely mentions rapids. Her focus is near, detailed, contemplative. She describes the patterns of light on the water, the sound of birds just before dawn, the peregrinations of bugs on a sandy beach. When I read Down Canyon recently—really for the first time!—I realized how much of the Grand Canyon I didn’t see on my 4 raft trips through there. I was always focused on the whitewater—balancing the load on my raft each morning and tying everything carefully so that even upside down I wouldn’t lose a soda can; scrutinizing the river guide so I always knew where I was and what rapids were coming up; stopping to scout the biggest ones and throwing sticks in the current to plan a bombproof route past the big recirculating holes and stopper waves. I spent so much of each day in taut suspense at outcomes that I didn’t have time to really see.
These last few months, I’ve really longed to be on the river. Not just the Grand. Maybe the Grand least of all. Contemplative stretches, where I can float, and just look, and listen.
Since I’ve had cancer, I pay more attention to the details. Not the details that I used to obsess about in order to ensure the outcome I wanted. But the details of this moment—all the things that make this moment unique and lovely and worth living.
I bought a canoe recently. A 14-ft forest green-faded-to-teal Mad River canoe. A few weeks ago, Tim and I, with a couple of friends, floated a flatwater reach of the Rio Grande I’d never floated before. The banks of the river were lush with spring green. We saw ducks and redwing blackbirds and some goats in a pen, and blooming fruit trees, and a guy firing up his woodburning hot tub. We took out at Embudo Station, a restaurant right on the bank of the river, and had dinner and watched the river flow by.
The amazing thing about my illness is how much I’ve come to love and appreciate my friends and family. My cancer isn’t just about me. It affects, or afflicts, my whole community—my friends, my family, and my co-workers. As a self-reliant person, I had a hard time accepting help. At one point this winter, Tim and I were frazzled with trying to find anything I wanted to eat. We were down to about 8 things that I found appetizing. A friend of ours offered to organize cooks to bring us meals twice a week. What a difference that made! Hungarian mushroom soup. Salmon chowder. Moroccan lamb with melon balls and mint. This food tasted great; it was wrapped in love. And in a thousand other ways now, I know that I am loved.
So I’ve learned to be self reliant, but I have also come to appreciate the value of human community and, through my travels, the interconnectedness of all things in the natural world, including humans. As I have come to regard myself as a part of something much bigger than me, I feel like I get saner and make better decisions about my life and my needs on this Earth. Who needs more stuff? How about more time on the river with people I love? The writer Bill McKibben is a passionate advocate against the pursuit of MORE. The pursuit of ‘more’ does not make us happy. He prescribes a deep connection to nature as the antidote to the quintessentially American pursuit of more. McKibben says, “Interconnection is anathema to a consumer notion of the world, where each of us is useful precisely to the degree that we consider ourselves the center of everything. Advertising and hyperconsumerism are designed to make you crazy. Nature, like close-knit human community, is designed to help you stay sane.”
So the advice I have to offer you, senioritas, for what it’s worth, is to stick with your passion, don’t let anyone talk you out of pursuing your dreams, believe in yourself, help to build a resilient community around you, and look to the natural world for peace and sanity.
Best of luck on your journey.
AAG Commencement Address, June 8, 2009
by Claudia J Lewis
Today, I’d like to put out there some themes that have emerged in my life in the 35 years since I sat here in MY white dress. Hopefully, those of you graduating today will find something of value here as you go about your lives and make all the decisions ahead of you about what courses to take in college, what major to declare, whether to continue beyond a bachelor’s degree, whether to have a career or family or both, whether to be a hippie vegan back-to-nature dirt farmer or a suit-wearing, Lexus-driving, banking maven. The themes I’ll put forward—that I’ve come to value—are perseverance, self-reliance, community, and Nature, as in that thing we think we’ve conquered but in fact we depend on for our very existence.
I’ll start out with what I don’t want to talk about—cancer. Although I have been fighting cancer for 5 years, I don’t want to be defined by cancer. In fact, I’m trying hard to find definition beyond cancer. I live with it every day—an endless cycle of doctors’ appointments, treatments, annoying side effects, medical tests, reports to friends and family. An endless cycle of ups and downs—but surprisingly more up than down.
I also don’t want to be defined too narrowly by my resume, or my biography. Sufficit to say, I am privileged, as all of you are. Yes, I have worked hard. But up to a certain point, accidents of birth and connections make more difference than hard work. Going to the Academy gives you a leg up on college admissions. And once you go to, say, Brown, that helps get you into a Cal State Los Angeles master’s program with no background whatsoever in the sciences. And having done that, it’s not that much of a reach to get into Harvard. And in my interview for a Fulbright Fellowship, one of the evaluators (who was at Caltech) said, “Well, you seem to have come out of nowhere scientifically. But if you’re good enough for Harvard, I’ll put you forward for a Fulbright.”
All of which isn’t to say that training for my profession was a cake walk. There were plenty of 70-hour weeks. However, in some ways it has been a matter of just putting one foot in front of the other. As Woody Allen once said, “Ninety percent of life is about just showing up.” To get a PhD takes perseverance more than IQ. It takes believing in yourself, believing that you are capable of original thought.
For a scientist, I’ve actually had a rather checkered career. No straight and narrow for me! In college, I chickened out of majoring in geology because in my FIRST geology class the professor wrote some differential equations on the blackboard and said that those of us who hadn't had physics and calculus yet didn't really need to worry (I worried).I didn't even know what calculus was. So I majored in American Civilization. It wasn't until after college, while I was working at a small wood energy research lab in Santa Fe, that I discovered I could do science. One task I had was to run experiments on creosote buildup in different kinds of woodstove chimney. I set up 6 identical Fisher Baby Bear woodstoves with identical lengths of chimney but different kinds of insulation. Then I fired the 6 Baby Bears for two months straight, loading each one with an identical, weighed quantity of newspaper, kindling, and cordwood. This required chopping cords and cords of firewood, taking care to get all the pieces the same size. At the end, I dismantled the chimneys, dried them in a low-temperature oven, weighed them, and compared them to their original weights to get the creosote accumulation. And we published a paper in 'Mother Earth News'. I realized that there was no mystery to doing science. I was good at it! So I took evening courses in College Algebra, Calculus (!!!), Physical Geology, and Chemistry. After that, I knew I was ready to get the geology degree I always wanted.
I finished my master’s degree at Cal State in four years rather than the more typical two years because I had to do all the undergraduate geology courses and physics, chemistry, and calculus. I then went to Harvard for a PhD, which took five more years. For anybody counting, I went through 26th grade. I did my thesis research in Baja California, which took 11 months to complete, 11 months of camping out in the Sonoran desert. With a field assistant, we’d drive up a dry wash in the mountain range I was studying and find a place protected from flash floods, where we’d set up camp. Then for a week or so, we’d hike out every day in a different direction to map the rocks before changing camps. By now I think you can see how sticking with it can get you to your goals, despite your doubts about your abilities or how many times you have to move across the country.
One characteristic that ties it all together for me is that I have an openness to experience that isn’t unique but HAS determined my trajectory and impelled me through life. I’ve been willing to take risks, to follow my heart, to think for myself, and ignore the expectations of other people, though I had to learn to do these things. If you don’t open yourself up to making mistakes, you close yourself off to learning anything new. If you merely follow a pre-determined path, you’ll never really know what you’re made of.
More than anything or anyone, the wilderness, or Nature with a capital N, has been my guide and perpetual source of peace, inspiration and strength. My appreciation of the outdoors began a long time ago—camping out on islands in Lake George, waterskiing on a glass-calm lake not long after dawn, picking blueberries and swatting mosquitoes on Prospect Mountain. My first real experience of what nature could teach me about myself was the Outward Bound course I took at Hurricane Island after my junior year at the Academy. Twenty-one days of rain, sleeping on oars, navigating in pea-soup fog, rowing despite the blisters taught me I was pretty tough. I didn’t love the rain but I figured out how to stay warm and dry.
At some point, likely senior year, I came across a book in the Academy library that someone had had the good sense to buy. It was called “On the Loose” by Terry and Renny Russell, two brothers (not much older than me at the time) who put together a book of their photos, quotes from other authors, and wisdom of their own from their travels together on rivers, in the desert, and in the mountains. They rattled around in an old pickup truck and ran whitewater rivers and climbed peaks and played the guitar on the beach. “On the Loose” became a kind of prescription or exhortation for me. I wanted to do what they did, but in my own way.
After my freshman year at Brown, I had a summer job at Hurricane Island doing logistics from a subsidiary island base near Bar Harbor, ME; I had to provide all the food and gear for 36 students and 8 staff. Mind you, I was 19 years old and I had no idea how much 17 year old boys eat. I nearly caused a mutiny. After working two summers at Hurricane Island, I signed on for a 3-month trip sailing and rowing from Maine to Florida, with other Hurricane staff, on a 30-ft-long, open boat (basically a glorified coast guard life boat). We left Hurricane in early October, in the late afternoon, and ran smack into a storm. We sailed all night, waves crashing over us as we huddled in our foul weather gear. I remember sunrise vividly; the wind had died down and we made a pot of coffee on our two-burner gas stove and dug into the brownies we had made before leaving Hurricane. Fortunately, things never got MORE exciting than our first night, though we had lots of adventure.
As a junior at Brown, a group of kids I didn’t know found out I had worked for Outward Bound and asked me if I wanted to join their Group Independent Study Project on the Colorado River. We would get academic credit for two semesters. And we would spend 45 days in July and August on the Green and Colorado Rivers. The idea was to study the archeology, history, geology, environmental policy, art, music, and literature of the Colorado River drainage, a river that provides life-giving water to 7 arid western states, has some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet, and has seen history-making whitewater descents. After the river trip, we would synthesize what we learned and prepare an hour-long multi-media presentation for the Brown President’s Colloquium Series during commencement week.
As you might imagine, we had a blast. The six of us did the river in two inflatable rafts and a little hard plastic boat called a Sportyak. We had so much time—45 days!!—that we were able to hike up many side canyons and even take a backpacking trip into the Maze, in Canyonlands. We had so much time that some days we would decide just before sunset that we really were sick of this camp and so we’d throw everything in the boats and float a mile to a new camp. In retrospect, that was an amazingly unpretentious trip. It wasn’t about gear at all. We wore cutoffs and sneakers. It was about being on the river. It was about learning what the desert had to teach us. Was it worth 6 credits?
Aldo Leopold, in his book “A Sand County Almanac,” expressed the power of wilderness travel to teach us unforgettable lessons:
No servant brought them meals; they got their meat out of the river, or went without. No traffic cop whistled them off the hidden rock in the next rapids. No friendly roof kept them dry when they misguessed whether or not to pitch the tent. No guide showed them which camping spots offered a nightlong breeze, and which a nightlong misery of mosquitoes, which firewood made clean coals, and which only smoke. The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts…against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.
Terry and Renny Russell, from their experience of wilderness, learned a few things, too. Here’s a piece of theirs on wilderness travel from “On the Loose” that still sticks with me today:
So why do we do it?
What good is it?
Does it teach you anything?
Like determination? Invention? Improvisation?
Foresight? Hindsight?
Love?
Art? Music? Religion?
Strength or patience or accuracy or quickness or tolerance or
Which wood will burn and how long is a day and how far is a mile
And how delicious is water and smoky green pea soup?
And how to rely on your self?
And how to rely on yourself. I’ve learned that in spades. Like the time in Baja California when we had both batteries, the main one and the backup, go dead. We felt that kind of uh-oh you feel when you realize this might not turn out the way we planned. There was just a thin veil of technology between us and total doom. We had to hike out 12 miles across the burning desert to the main road and hitchhike into San Felipe to get a new battery and find somebody to take us back to our vehicle, which was way off in the hinterland. The guy who took us back in was visibly nervous when I kept getting out of the vehicle to find the tracks we made in the sand on the way in.
So what does wilderness offer me at this stage of my life, if not the chance to be ever more self-reliant? For the last few months I have been reading books of nature writing—Edwin Way Teale, Ann Zwinger, Terry Tempest Williams, Ed Abbey, Ellen Meloy—most but not all writing about the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest desert. I’ve been feeling a deep need to connect to the natural world, but it’s a little hard to do on a chaise longue in my dining room. So I started reading about other people’s trips to wild places. Within the nature writing genre, there are different flavors and not all of them suit all occasions.
Some years ago I started a book by the author and naturalist Ann Zwinger. The book was called “Down Canyon”, about a year in which she took 12 trips through the Grand Canyon, one a month. All those years ago, I didn’t get very far with Down Canyon. I wanted to read about whitewater, the big rapids that drive the pace and tenor of most days on the Grand.
But Zwinger scarcely mentions rapids. Her focus is near, detailed, contemplative. She describes the patterns of light on the water, the sound of birds just before dawn, the peregrinations of bugs on a sandy beach. When I read Down Canyon recently—really for the first time!—I realized how much of the Grand Canyon I didn’t see on my 4 raft trips through there. I was always focused on the whitewater—balancing the load on my raft each morning and tying everything carefully so that even upside down I wouldn’t lose a soda can; scrutinizing the river guide so I always knew where I was and what rapids were coming up; stopping to scout the biggest ones and throwing sticks in the current to plan a bombproof route past the big recirculating holes and stopper waves. I spent so much of each day in taut suspense at outcomes that I didn’t have time to really see.
These last few months, I’ve really longed to be on the river. Not just the Grand. Maybe the Grand least of all. Contemplative stretches, where I can float, and just look, and listen.
Since I’ve had cancer, I pay more attention to the details. Not the details that I used to obsess about in order to ensure the outcome I wanted. But the details of this moment—all the things that make this moment unique and lovely and worth living.
I bought a canoe recently. A 14-ft forest green-faded-to-teal Mad River canoe. A few weeks ago, Tim and I, with a couple of friends, floated a flatwater reach of the Rio Grande I’d never floated before. The banks of the river were lush with spring green. We saw ducks and redwing blackbirds and some goats in a pen, and blooming fruit trees, and a guy firing up his woodburning hot tub. We took out at Embudo Station, a restaurant right on the bank of the river, and had dinner and watched the river flow by.
The amazing thing about my illness is how much I’ve come to love and appreciate my friends and family. My cancer isn’t just about me. It affects, or afflicts, my whole community—my friends, my family, and my co-workers. As a self-reliant person, I had a hard time accepting help. At one point this winter, Tim and I were frazzled with trying to find anything I wanted to eat. We were down to about 8 things that I found appetizing. A friend of ours offered to organize cooks to bring us meals twice a week. What a difference that made! Hungarian mushroom soup. Salmon chowder. Moroccan lamb with melon balls and mint. This food tasted great; it was wrapped in love. And in a thousand other ways now, I know that I am loved.
So I’ve learned to be self reliant, but I have also come to appreciate the value of human community and, through my travels, the interconnectedness of all things in the natural world, including humans. As I have come to regard myself as a part of something much bigger than me, I feel like I get saner and make better decisions about my life and my needs on this Earth. Who needs more stuff? How about more time on the river with people I love? The writer Bill McKibben is a passionate advocate against the pursuit of MORE. The pursuit of ‘more’ does not make us happy. He prescribes a deep connection to nature as the antidote to the quintessentially American pursuit of more. McKibben says, “Interconnection is anathema to a consumer notion of the world, where each of us is useful precisely to the degree that we consider ourselves the center of everything. Advertising and hyperconsumerism are designed to make you crazy. Nature, like close-knit human community, is designed to help you stay sane.”
So the advice I have to offer you, senioritas, for what it’s worth, is to stick with your passion, don’t let anyone talk you out of pursuing your dreams, believe in yourself, help to build a resilient community around you, and look to the natural world for peace and sanity.
Best of luck on your journey.
Another bump in the road
It's been a while since my last post. I have been busily transcribing my journal from our Baja trip. I wrote so much I got tendinitis in my wrist, which means I have to go the chiropractor three times a week and the acupuncturist once a week. I was writing in a 3" x 5" notebook for much of the trip, using a ball point pen. I used to like the resistance of a ball point, that friction on the page. I guess I'll have to change to something else that moves more smoothly for the Pacific northwest trip.
This voyage of the intrepid Valdesca and her captain and first matey has been nothing but bumps in the road, as faithful readers will recall from previous posts. Yet another faces me now. I got back my most recent PET/CT scan results yesterday and they show a new tumor in my abdomen. I have to do something about it, and fast, because the last time I had a recurrence the tumor grew from the size of an avocado to the size of a grapefruit in three weeks. It's a lemon now. So next week, I'd like to think I'll start chemo again. It's not that I like chemo, oh no. It's nasty. But chemo has gained me some precious time, time enough for trips to Brazil and Peru, Spain and Mexico. Time to sail Valdesca in the Sea of Cortes. Time to write and think. Time with my nieces and nephews. And hopefully time to sail again in the San Juan Islands and the Inside Passage.
The fitting out continues apace, despite the bumps. Tim has made the new thwarts. They are hanging in his studio, each day sporting a new layer of polyurethane. We have begun mounting new hardware. First, deck chocks for the Danforth. Kind of hard to know exactly where to put the Danforth. It's such a spikey, pokey thing. We're trying out the deck to port of the tiller, forward of the main sheet horse. It seems to be mostly out of the way of mainsheet and mizzen sheet, and body parts for crying out loud.
The new genoa jib has arrived. It's a beauty, in a deep dark port wine tanbark with Sunbrella along the foot and leech to protect the sail from the sun while furled. It will be sweet to have some extra canvas in those light airs up north. The spinnaker arrived, too. It has panels of light and dark blue and red corner patches. It was a racing sail for a Flying Scot. I am making a spinnaker launch bag out of red nylon, using a kit from Sailrite. And I just got the spinnaker halyard and sheets from a company that had short pieces of Staset polyester braid for half price as they were the ends of spools. This is a great path to consider when rigging such a small boat. Buy the end pieces of line and save a lot of money. None of the sheets or halyards on Valdesca are more than about 35 ft long. I found remnant line out there up to 60 or even 80 ft lengths.
Well, it's going to be in the 90s here today. Wish I could put up the sails on my little boat and sail away.
This voyage of the intrepid Valdesca and her captain and first matey has been nothing but bumps in the road, as faithful readers will recall from previous posts. Yet another faces me now. I got back my most recent PET/CT scan results yesterday and they show a new tumor in my abdomen. I have to do something about it, and fast, because the last time I had a recurrence the tumor grew from the size of an avocado to the size of a grapefruit in three weeks. It's a lemon now. So next week, I'd like to think I'll start chemo again. It's not that I like chemo, oh no. It's nasty. But chemo has gained me some precious time, time enough for trips to Brazil and Peru, Spain and Mexico. Time to sail Valdesca in the Sea of Cortes. Time to write and think. Time with my nieces and nephews. And hopefully time to sail again in the San Juan Islands and the Inside Passage.
The fitting out continues apace, despite the bumps. Tim has made the new thwarts. They are hanging in his studio, each day sporting a new layer of polyurethane. We have begun mounting new hardware. First, deck chocks for the Danforth. Kind of hard to know exactly where to put the Danforth. It's such a spikey, pokey thing. We're trying out the deck to port of the tiller, forward of the main sheet horse. It seems to be mostly out of the way of mainsheet and mizzen sheet, and body parts for crying out loud.
The new genoa jib has arrived. It's a beauty, in a deep dark port wine tanbark with Sunbrella along the foot and leech to protect the sail from the sun while furled. It will be sweet to have some extra canvas in those light airs up north. The spinnaker arrived, too. It has panels of light and dark blue and red corner patches. It was a racing sail for a Flying Scot. I am making a spinnaker launch bag out of red nylon, using a kit from Sailrite. And I just got the spinnaker halyard and sheets from a company that had short pieces of Staset polyester braid for half price as they were the ends of spools. This is a great path to consider when rigging such a small boat. Buy the end pieces of line and save a lot of money. None of the sheets or halyards on Valdesca are more than about 35 ft long. I found remnant line out there up to 60 or even 80 ft lengths.
Well, it's going to be in the 90s here today. Wish I could put up the sails on my little boat and sail away.
I'm sailing awayset an open course for the virgin seacause I've got to be freefree to face the life that's ahead of me
On board, I'm the captainso climb aboardwe'll search for tomorrow on every shoreand I'll try, oh Lord, I'll try to carry on
-Styx
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
More gearing up
I needed to discover how many ways there are to be intelligent, how many ways of being open to the world.
I enjoy the getting ready part of a trip, perhaps as much as the trip itself. It's part of the adventure, especially if you need, as we do, to make changes to your rig and re-orient for a different climate. We learned a lot of things about our rig in Mexico that we are trying now to fine tune. Before I talk gear, I'll show you some maps of where we are headed.–Abbott Gleason
My friend Andrea asked me to post a chart of the area where we will be sailing in August. She, too, is a sailor and wants to see where we'll be. It's fun to ponder the difficulties of a new area, the tides and currents, anchorages, crossings, and shipping lanes. The basic idea, as of 10:45 PM Tuesday May 11 (could change tomorrow or the next day), is to start in Bellingham and sail to Lopez Island, stopping perhaps at Lummi Island, and Sinclair and Cypress Islands. From a base on Lopez, in Mud Bay (south of Spencer Spit), we'll hopefully do some circumnavigations, of Lopez and San Juan and Orcas, with side trips out to Patos and Sucia and Matia. And there are some other interesting outer islands, Stuart and Waldron. We might explore part the Inside Passage as well, but I need to explore routes some more.
Map from yachtpals.com
Here is a link to an interactive chart of the islands where you can zoom in and sail around and look at all the navigational aids and the shipping lanes. I'll try later to upload another interactive map that shows landforms.
I have been devouring books on sailmaking and rigging, learning how to splice double-braid rope and how to rig a spar catcher for the gunter, the stick of wood that holds up the top of the mainsail. That stick of wood tends to bat you on the head whenever you lower the sail in a breeze. This trick will make sure it stays upright and out of the way when we reef or scandalize the main (a slick way of saying dropping the main in a hurry). Today, I rigged brass thimbles on the luff of the main, which is to say the edge that abuts the mast. I want to try lacing the sail to the mast in lieu of the hoops we have been using. I found a way to lash the main that makes it easier to raise and lower the sail, which has been a problem not only with the hoops but also with a basic lacing. It's hell when the wind is blasting and you have to reef but you can't get the bloody sail down. So you get out the boat hook and push on the hoops or the laces and try to get them moving. Swearing all the while like a buccaneer.
Spar catcher
Photo (and rig) by Jerry Barnett
My plan for the lacing comes from a great old book by Colin O'Brien called 'Sea Boats, Oars, and Sails.' This method allows you to pull the sail off the spars easily so that you can store them away in a warm dry place. This should be useful in the Pacific northwest. Sails are particularly vulnerable to rainwater. It makes them rot. This method also reduces the turbulence created by air flow around the mast. You get a better airfoil if the sail is not cinched in tight; O'Brien says several inches between the sail and mast are fine, even a foot. And the sail tends to make a nice smooth surface instead of wrinkling at every grommet. The ease of raising and lowering means that we'll also be able to adjust the downhaul for light airs and stiff breezes. This kind of fiddling can make your boat go a lot faster, important not only in racing but in light airs, which we expect to see many days in the San Juan Islands.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Beachcombing finds
A taste of things to come
Last year in late July, Tim and I went up to Seattle to visit our friends Peggy and Rolf, who have a cabin on Lopez Island. I was just reviewing photos of that trip and thought I'd post a few here as that trip really got us rolling on the idea of sailing. Peggy and Rolf bought their property some years ago with their friends Chris and Nancy, who built a second house on the property right next door. Both are right on the water in Mud Bay. They all share everything, like a family compound--a vast barn full of sea kayaks and bikes, a bunkhouse that could sleep an army, a pile of crab pots, and an oar-powered dinghy to set the pots and collect the crabs.
The week we spent on Lopez was full of beach combing, hikes, bike rides, crabbing, eating crab, sea kayaking, and sailing. Tim and I arrived during crabbing season. I bought my license, which entitled me to go out in the boat and watch Peggy and Rolf sex the crabs, throwing back the females and juveniles, and then prepare them for the pot by ripping off their backs and separating the edible parts from the seagull food. I didn't want to interfere in what was clearly a professional operation. These guys know their crabs. This year, though, I'll do some of the dirty work, at risk of getting pinched.
One day we organized a sea kayaking expedition to Spencer Spit, about 6 miles up the coast of Lopez. Some of us kayaked and some sailed. Then some of us traded places after a walk on the spit. Chris has a 23 ft sailboat that he keeps on a mooring by their house. In that 6 miles back to the mooring, in which I became enchanted with the GPS chart plotter and fish finder, I realized that I really missed sailing. And that was all I needed to get me going again. Next thing I knew, I was looking for a boat of my own.
This summer, we'll tow Valdesca up to Washington and sail her over to Lopez. With a base at Peggy and Rolf's, we'll sail all around the San Juans, hopefully circumnavigating Lopez, San Juan, and Orcas Islands and getting out to Patos and Sucia.
The week we spent on Lopez was full of beach combing, hikes, bike rides, crabbing, eating crab, sea kayaking, and sailing. Tim and I arrived during crabbing season. I bought my license, which entitled me to go out in the boat and watch Peggy and Rolf sex the crabs, throwing back the females and juveniles, and then prepare them for the pot by ripping off their backs and separating the edible parts from the seagull food. I didn't want to interfere in what was clearly a professional operation. These guys know their crabs. This year, though, I'll do some of the dirty work, at risk of getting pinched.
One day we organized a sea kayaking expedition to Spencer Spit, about 6 miles up the coast of Lopez. Some of us kayaked and some sailed. Then some of us traded places after a walk on the spit. Chris has a 23 ft sailboat that he keeps on a mooring by their house. In that 6 miles back to the mooring, in which I became enchanted with the GPS chart plotter and fish finder, I realized that I really missed sailing. And that was all I needed to get me going again. Next thing I knew, I was looking for a boat of my own.
This summer, we'll tow Valdesca up to Washington and sail her over to Lopez. With a base at Peggy and Rolf's, we'll sail all around the San Juans, hopefully circumnavigating Lopez, San Juan, and Orcas Islands and getting out to Patos and Sucia.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Whaddya gonna do?
View Larger Map
Playa Bonanza, Isla Espiritu Santo, Mexico
Tim and I have had many debates these last few months about keeping in touch with friends and family. In the old days, you wrote a postcard if you wanted to brag about the white sandy beach you had been laying on. With the advent of GPS tracking instruments, on our Baja trip we were able to send updates on a daily basis to a list of 10 e-mail addresses. Each person on the list received a message like this:
Valdesca SPOT
Latitude:26.1191
Longitude:-111.2865
GPS location Date/Time:02/27/2010 18:29:58 MST
Click the link below to see where I am located.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=26.1191,-111.2865&ll=26.1191,-111.2865&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1
Message: All passengers aboard Valdesca are OK.
If you go to the link (OK, go there, I'll wait), you'll see the beach on Isla Coronados where we camped on the night of Feb 27. As you can see, it's a magnificent crescent of white sand on the flanks of a volcano. If you zoom way in, you can even see the texture of the bottom and a boat entering the big cove to the southeast. We sent these OK messages out every day. It was a sort of safety system in that we could also have chosen to push the '911' button which would have activated a search organized out of Houston, Texas. For the service, we paid something like $100 on top of the $100 cost of the SPOT tracker we carried with us. It's portable (a little bigger than a cell phone) and waterproof so in the event of a wreck we could have called for a rescue. The great thing about the SPOT was sending the OK messages. It was like sending out 10 postcards a day. Those 10 recipients could see exactly where we were, nearly in real time. They could find out the name of the place and look up more information if they wanted to. They could check the current weather in that location and the forecast to see what the winds were doing. They could figure out if the next day was going to be slack or frisky or if we'd be pinned down by a big blow. The SPOT messaging system turned out to be stupendously useful for the times when we had scheduled to meet Peter. He could watch our movements over the course of several days and see where we were in relation to the pre-arranged meeting place. He could tell if we were going to make it or not. And if not, where he would need to meet us in a rental car. We figured out that we could send a repeat OK message at an unusual time of day to make the point that "We are HERE!" and Pete figured out that it was our way of telling him where to find us.
Another way we stayed in touch was via this blog. In the flurry of getting ready for our Mexico trip, I figured we'd send e-mail messages now and again to a few select people. Then I realized it was going to be really easy to use Facebook to post updates. Some people, who shall remain nameless, were adamantly opposed to Facebook as they fear their privacy would be compromised by initiating a Facebook account (which is required in order to read our Facebook page since we only make it available to pre-approved friends). OK, OK, so I decided to start a blog. This, as it turns out, is easy as pie. The only hard part is that within eblogger there doesn't seem to be any easy means of sending out an e-blast every time you add a new post. The followers need to visit the site every so often to see if there are new posts. Since we sometimes had long lapses between posts (due to lack of internet access out in the middle of nowhere), I imagine this got tedious for some followers.
I tried to keep blog readers apprised of the SPOT Adventure site where they could track our progress. The only problem was that our OK messages with locations were not automatically logged onto the site; I found out at the end of our trip that I have to personally upload the SPOTS I want the world to see. And only the locations from the current month had been saved for me to upload. This is something that SPOT needs to fix in the future. The user should be able to make this automatic. If anybody out there has this figured out, let me know.
On our way home, I realized we were going to be overwhelmed by people wanting to know how the trip had turned out. One way to inform people is to have a slide show soon after you get home. That way, you can tell all the stories once to bunch of your friends. Even better, we thought, was uploading a slide show to Facebook. There, people could see a culled selection of photos of our trip, a lot more than we could offer via the blog. Of course, there was a great hue and cry (by people whose names I will not mention) about how they don't do Facebook. So I figured out a way to upload the slide show to the blog. What we hoped to avoid was having to spend hours on the telephone recounting our adventures, to the delight of our friends perhaps but turning the trip into a fossil for us. For the most part these techniques of staying in touch have worked, except for my sister Anne who just told me she no longer does email. She has an assistant digest all her email into bullet points. All the email from family goes into a folder titled "Family-to read later." Or maybe never, she said. All those beautiful Google Earth postcards I sent her from Mexico ended up in a dead letter box.
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