Westbound

Phew, difficult week here at the U of Williams-Mystic. Project proposals, essays, and reading galore. But in 12hrs we'll all be heading to Seattle tomorrow morning for our Pacific Northwest Field Seminar!

Basic itinerary is as follows:

Saturday: Hartford, CT to Seattle...dinner with my sister!
Sunday: Seattle
Monday: Seattle to Tacoma to Portland
Tuesday: Bonneville Dam to Astoria
Wednesday: Astoria to Newport
Thursday: Newport to Coos Bay to Charleston
Friday: Charleston
Saturday: to Portland...flight home!

This will be on the exam:
Space Needle, Crowley Marine tugboat, Pike Place Market, Seattle Fisherman's Terminal, Container ship terminal, Point Defiance Park, Columbia River, Crown Point, Bonneville Dam, Multnomah Falls, Cape Disappointment, Youngs Bay Salmon Pens, Cannon Beach, Youngs Bay Terminal Fishery Net Pen Project, Sea Lion Caves, Oregon Dunes National Seashore....

No internet access, but I will be reachable by cell.

Forgotten Photos

A few that didn't make it on in January...

Beyond Hope by Derrick Jensen

I really enjoyed this article published in the May/June 2006 issue of Orion magazine. The full text is online and well worth the read, but I copied a few excerpts below:

...False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities...Does anyone really believe that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we ask nicely? If only we get a Democrat in the White House, things will be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They are already not okay, and they’re getting worse. Rapidly.

When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins...And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.

ASL

An afternoon workshop on American Sign Language hosted by one of my lovely housemates is just one example of the many reasons why, once again, midnight rolls around and I find myself staring at an insurmountable heap of reading. I haven't a dog's chance of sorting out all the characters in Searoad by my morning class, but hey, I'm learning a new language one pop song at a time...

Pequot Hill

Pequot Hill is roughly a ten minute run from our house on Bruggeman Place. Past Drawbridge Ice Cream and Mystic Pizza, the main road leads up a hill overlooking the Mystic River, which divides the towns of Stonington and Groton. There on the hill, at the corner of Clift Street and Pequot Avenue, is the John Mason Monument, or at least that's what GoogleMaps says. Today only a tree in the triangle of the intersection marks where the statue used to stand. John Mason, who "overthrew the Pequot Indians and preserved the settlements from destruction," has since been removed (*).


This intersection, bordered on all sides by picturesque wooden New England estates, is estimated to have been the center of the Pequot Village back in the day. In the above illustration, the circle of soldiers are all closing in on that spot where the mailboxes and recycling bins now mark the top of the hill. The offensive in 1637 wasn't meant to be a massacre, but a tactical decision was made to surround the village and set fire to it. Under John Mason, the English settlers along with Narragansett and Mohegan allies prevented the Pequots from fleeing their burning village and killed those who tried, leading to what is sometimes called the Mystic Massacre. Well of course that's only part of a more recent historical tradition.

The New York Times
June 16, 1889, Wednesday
To Stand on Pequot Hill; A Heroic Statue of Major John Mason.Connecticut to Honor her Heroic Soldier on the Spot Where the Pequots Were Exterminated.

Fast forward to 1992 when activists within the Pequot nation demand the statue be removed and destroyed claiming it represented the genocide of their people by John Mason. The citizens of Mystic protested the proposal since the monument commemorated part of their founding history. As Leigh Fought continues in her book, A History of Mystic Connecticut: From Pequot Village to Tourist Town:

Emotions ran high, and Groton town meetings on the subject became intense and heated. A commission was appointed to research the merits of the arguments on both sides, and to recommend a solution.

Both parties reached a compromise in 1996 and the statue was removed though not destroyed. While construction was being done on the area, graffiti replaced the plaques in proclaiming the merits of the absent Major, but now at the top of Clift Street there is nothing that would suggest to the passerby that any of this had occurred.

Last post from offshore...

Our offshore seminar (Feb. 1-12) from Key West to the Dry Tortugas was an amazing experience that certainly is easier to write about on land. At the time, most of us were sick and all of us were nauseous and dirty. We were sleep deprived and pushed to do things we had absolutely no idea how to do. At some points I desperately wanted off the boat and at others I didn't want to sleep in case I missed something. Life on a tall ship isn't for everyone, but SEA runs an amazing program and I can't imagine not doing something like this again. Below are some miscellaneous pictures from the trip. Thanks for reading and enjoy!

Key West

...in a few words...

6-toed cats,

roosters...everywhere,

bungalows,

tchotchke,

90 miles to cuba,

old stuff, monuments, and wrecking museums...

conch shells...

Abandon Ship!

...just a drill...

Ft. Jefferson

After sailing without sight of land for about 5 days we were all captivated when Ft. Jefferson suddenly seemed to appear one morning. We spent that evening at anchor enjoying a bit of calm water and BBQ ribs.

The next morning we set out in groups via motorboat to tour the island. It was weird to see the Cramer off in the distance as we had spent so much time on it.

Ft. Jefferson, on Garden Key, is part of the Dry Tortugas National Park. The keys were named Las Tortugas by Ponce de Leon in 1513 then soon "Dry Tortugas" to indicate there was no fresh water there. They are a cluster of seven islands, composed of coral reeks and sand that lie 70 miles west of Key West, Fla.
The construction of Ft. Jefferson began in 1846 in an attempt by the US to control navigation to the Gulf of Mexico, but was never finished. It served as a prison for deserters during the Civil War and later a quarantine station. The Army abandoned the fort in 1874.

In 1908 the area became a wildlife refuge and the fort was named a national monument in 1935.

It took about five minutes to walk around the perimeter of the island and we spent the day exploring and then swimming!

It felt unbelievable to walk and swim after being confined to a deck for so long. We all soaked up the sun and ran around before returning the Cramer for the remainder of the trip.

Balancing Act

This morning I woke up and hopped down from my top bunk and almost fell over. Over the past couple days I've occasionally felt very unsteady especially in the morning. It's not a dizzy feeling, just an unbalanced feeling as my body readjusts to being on stable land. On the ship, most of my classmates got seasick and I certainly felt nauseous for a couple days. A steady supply of Bonine kept a portion of us in the clear, however, mealtimes were always quite the experience.

Photo courtesy of Kris Arden

We ate at gimbled tables which stayed level while the rest of the ship rolled back and forth preventing the plates and food from sliding off the table. It was difficult to remember that technically it wasn't the tables moving but the ship itself rotating about the tables.

Disaster struck if you happened to stop the movement of the tabletops with a knee or elbow. On a couple occasions the table would stop on the labs of the downside eaters and the plates on the high side would fall up! But if you didn't interfere, literally nothing would fall off the tables. If you weren't on the surface of the table you were subject to movement...

Sailing along the EEZ

"One night in August 1994, 19 people squeezed into the 20-foot fishing boat Analuisa and motored out of Mariel, Cuba. Their destination, 90 miles away, was Florida and freedom. The Analuisa, now preserved at Mystic Seaport, is part of a larger story as well. For hundreds of years, the sea that divides Cuba and America has also tied them in an often contentious connection. In an engagingly objective way, Dr. Roorda reviews the long history of Cuban-American relations through wars and liberation, slavery and freedom, economic embrace and bitter embargo, artistic endeavor and cultural conflict, vacation revelry and family upheaval--a relationship that remains emotionally charged to this day."

Description of: Cuba, America And The Sea: The Story Of The Immigrant Boat Analuisa And 500 Years If History Between Cuba And America By Eric Paul Roorda

The Analuisa on exhibit at Mystic Seaport

So in 1959...hmmm okay I can't procrastinate writing my paper for that long....this will be quick, I promise.

Imagine the worst turbulence you've felt on a plane than add a side to side rolling motion and keep that constant for a couple days. And this wasn't even a real storm. These small 10-12 foot waves caused 48 hours of non-stop rolling back and forth that can't quite get captured in a photo or video clip. I learned that any picture of waves in no way shows true depth or height. We were in a tall ship...but the waves often washed over the sides...so anyone who came on deck had to clip it to a line running the length of the deck. [My story about gimbled tables to come soon].

30 second video clip

Sailing 12 NM from Cuba, perhaps we gained just a tiny bit of context surrounding this history of boats like the Analuisa. Needless to say, on multiple occasions I turned to a friend and expressed my amazement that people are able to survive crossing the straits in some of the makeshift vessels you see pictures of. And of course many don't, or are interdicted along the way or at their destination...

"Coast Guard crews have interdicted 90 Cuban migrants during fiscal year 2010, which began Oct. 1. The Coast Guard interdicted 335 Cuban migrants during the same period in fiscal year 2009 and 630 for the entire fiscal year."

Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter

About a year and a half ago a young man came to the front door of the house in Key West and said that he had hitch-hiked down from upper Minnesota to ask your correspondent a few questions about writing. Arrived that day from Cuba, having to see some good friends off on the train in an hour, and to write some letters in the meantime, your correspondent, both flattered and appalled at the prospect of the questioning, told the young man to come around the next afternoon. He was a tall, very serious young man with very big feet and hands and a porcupine hair-cut...

Monologue to the Maestro by Hemingway was published in Esquire in 1935 and is said to include his best statements on writing and art...read the whole text here.

Going Aloft!

After completing a list of skills (lines, navigation, boxing a compass, safe line handling, etc.) we were cleared to go aloft. One morning my friend and I were cleared and immediately started climbing.

We had super snazzy harnesses that most of us chose to wear every possible moment (I mean come on, doing dishes is so much more exciting when you have a harness on). Anyways, the moral of the story is that as it turns out you actually don't clip in until you get to where you were going. Which is at the top of course...

View from halfway up the foremast...

A note about food and garbage...

While on the boat we ate pretty well, and gave a lot of it back to the ocean not only due to seasickness, but also in compliance with Coast Guard garbage regulations. Once a vessel is more than 12 NM away from land it is permitted to dump most garbage overboard and release most waste into the ocean. Emptying the trash during midwatch was a duty I was fortunate to have on multiple occasions. All trash was divided into two bins: plastic and everything else. The plastic trash got stowed, but the everything else got dumped as soon as we were outside the 12NM zone.


Overboard it went with a few shakes. You couldn't really see it in the dark, but it still felt very weird. I'm used to putting the trash out then not having to think about where it goes. (But then again everything on land makes it into tidy landfills and sewage treatment plants would NEVER pump raw sewage into the ocean). Well, when you're in the middle of the ocean there is very little capacity on board for trash and other waste. On the Cramer we created very minimal trash and gray water (water from showers and sinks), but imagine what a cruise ship produces? I'm sure they're not limited to one shower every three days. But I bet the passengers aren't doing the dumping themselves either...

Bunk Love

Our accommodations on board consisted of one of the upper or lower bunks that lined the walls below deck. Once you managed to crawl in and lie down, the "ceiling" was less than two feet above your head. Everything you brought had to fit into this space so needless to say we packed light and learned to fit everything into the little cubbyholes at the foot of each bunk. I had an upper bunk overlooking the main saloon (dining room featured above).
Living in one of these was definitely a love hate relationship. I preferred to be up on deck at all times, but at moments it was nice to get just that little bit of alone time before you fell asleep. I'll also never forget that voice outside my curtain from someone on the off-going watch whispering, "Gabrielle, Gabrielle, 20 minutes to watch." On the last day we completely emptied each of our bunks and scrubbed all the white surfaces down with bleach and the wood surfaces with oil. This was bunk love.

Sunsets

I have much more to fill in about the trip, but it'll have to wait...until then, goodnight!

Sight!

Below are some pictures of things we spotted, with some excerpts from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea...

Seed?

One of my favorite moments was seeing dolphins for the first time. I stopped trying to get a good shot of them because they surfaced for only a split second. Later in the trip I was lying on my back in the net under the bowsprit and heard the faint sound of air being pushed out of a blow hole. I looked underneath me to see a pair of dolphins surface on the starboard side of the bow.

Little Jelly fish

Bigger jelly fish (Portuguese Man o' War, and By the Wind Sailors)

When someone spotted the first jellyfish, we rushed to the side to take pictures, but we soon realized they were everywhere. At the end of the trip there were literally hundreds of them caught in the sargassum as we sailed at the edge of two converging currents.

...nothing showed on the surface of the water but come patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind it in the water...The iridescent bubbles were beautiful. But they were the falsest thing in the sea and the old man loved to see the big sea turtle eating them.

[We were lucky to also see a couple giant sea turtles swimming by the ship on our return to Key West.]

Lobster Larvae

"Flocks" of flying fish were always a surreal sight. They looked more like huge insects because they were so shiny and sort of hummed over the water. You could only see them if you were already looking out at the ocean because they moved so fast. Anywhere from 5-15 of them would suddenly shoot out of the water and skim across the waves and plunge back in after less than 10 seconds.

In the dark the old man could feel the morning coming and as he rowed he heard the trembling sound as flying fish left the water and the hissing that their stiff set wings made as they soared away in the darkness. He was always fond of flying fish as they were his principle friends on the ocean.

And then of course was the phosphorescence!

Lines and Sails

[Please forgive any technical errors I make in this post, plenty were made on the ship as well. ]

During one of the firsts night on the ship, my watch officer called into the lab for us to help strike the jib. A couple of us groped our way over to the jib down-haul as our eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness. It was just past midnight on our first 11pm-3am watch and none of us knew what we were doing. When it was time to furl the sail our mate yelled out to the first three in line to call out their names. She repeated them back then instructed us to come up to the bow and clip our harnesses into the cable running along the bowsprit. I had seen the net under the bowsprit during the day but had never climbed out to it, let alone in the dark.

In order to furl the sail you have to balance on the cross hatches of the net while working with both hands to "flake" the sail canvas. Furling the sail that night was a blur of just following precise orders while the sail magically folded between the four of us and got tied down. All the while the bow was slowly ascending then dipping down to crash on the surface of the water. It felt like at any moment our feet would brush the surface.

We were harnessed in and standing on our safty net, but that didn't stop the adrenaline, especially when a foot slipped through and you ended on your hands and knees. We had spent the past week onshore memorizing the name of the sails and practicing knots, but this first night of sail handling wasn't about learning. It was simply about carrying through a task with a sort of urgency that seemed to persisted every time we worked with sails.


Within several days we were expected to get a grasp on all the sails and lines that made up the rigging of the ship. Each of the nine sails along with bonuses like the storm stays'l were connected to some combination of halyards, down hauls, in-haul/out-hauls, braces, and sheets. The commands consisted of readying ourselves at a line then easing it or "hauling like mammals!" which was followed by us yelling "2,6, heave!" We also sometimes hung off deck boxes to make the most of gravity while "sweating the line." There was so much to learn about line handling and proper procedure with such large sails.

Towards the end of the end of the voyage we gathered in our respective watch groups to compete against each other in a relay line chase. As soon as the race started it seemed like all my practice went out the window. The boat was rocking and we were all stumbling around while the rest of the watch yelled "hot" or "cold" from the quarterdeck. Suddenly C Watch got their next index card..."Form a Congo line and dance to the bow and back." Halfway through we all started to realize this meant we had won. We had upset certain rivalries among the watch officers and consequently made ours very proud.

Despite our victory we still had a lot to improve on. Everyone later laughed about how they originally thought the mates kept saying things like "jive" instead of "gybe" or couldn't figure out what part of the main sail was the "sheet". The best of these moments was when my watch officer told us "prepare to brace yourself for the starboard tack." My friend and I promptly went over to the right hand side of the boat and grabbed the railing. Our watch officer had to yell at us several time before we realized that she was trying to get us to adjust the topsail braces as we were turning...