Port of Seattle and Tacoma

There's much more to write, but I just wanted to get the pictures up for now...

View of Seattle from the tugboat Crowley...

Watching a container ship being loaded (or unloaded) by crane operators.

A morning at the Port of Tacoma...

Inter-modal transport...

Seattle!

Sally Cleveland, an artist of the Pacific Northwest, describes her work as neither environmental or political but rather "a combination of personal history and the exploration of a dark, beautiful, and awkward region." I thought she described the region perfectly with those three words.

Walking through an old alleyway of Seattle. A wall of gum on our left, and a wall of art on our right.

"It's all very new, and all very tentative, for Seattle is a city that can't decide what to wear." (The Good Rain, by Timothy Egan)

Seattle is named for a Coast Indian who allied his tribe with Arthur Denny and David Maynard in the effort to build a city on Elliot Bay. At that time the draw to Seattle was basically the timber yards and brothels. Fast forward some generations (of fires...gold rush...Boeing plants...) and you get the city of two million. As Egan puts in perspective, "Seattle was a filthy, foul-smelling lumber camp and vice pit that would, within a few generations, be called the most livable city in America."

Okay, I left a bunch out, but I have algae waiting on me in the lab, but the history of Seattle is pretty interesting so I recommend reading up on it. I'll sign off with another great excerpt from Egan's The Good Rain:

"...the growth angst has an edge because it goes to the very reason why people live in Seattle. Here in the corner attic of America, two hours' drive from a rain forest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to."

Pacific Northwest Field Seminar 2/27-3/6

Get ready...over the next couple of days everything is going up...chronologically (ish)....


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Solar powered sea slug

Just enjoying an afternoon with some algae when I notice there's something on my Bryopsis plumosa specimen that isn't Bryopsis plumosa. It's about the size of a Grape Nut and perfectly camouflaged, but I abduct it with my eyedropper and put it in a dish to examine under the microscope...It turns out there's about four of these little guys on my sample. Placida Dendritica to be more precise.

(it could fit in this "O")

And they are all busy siphoning chlorophyll from my Bryopsis to fuel their own photosynthesis. Craziness. Especially because I can't stop thinking about how much they look like the forest spirit from Miyazaki's film, Princess Mononoke.

Deal to Save Everglades May Help Sugar Firm

FIELDS OF CANE United States Sugar's Clewiston sugar cane refinery. A $1.75 billion deal to sell land and assets to Florida was reduced to 72,800 acres, in separate parcels, for $536 million.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/us/08everglades.html
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and DAMIEN CAVE Published: March 7, 2010

[Yes, I am aware this has nothing to do with the Pacific Northwest field seminar, but I'm hoping it'll distract you until I find the time to post about the trip...which will be soon...I hope]

Back in Mystic!

I just returned from the Pacific Northwest field seminar! Pictures and details coming soon...

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...