Salish Sea

Bring Out Your Dead

We buried my sister on Mount Shasta amid sunlight and the sound of shofars. Turns out that shofars aren't typically used at funerals by the Jews but then my sister wasn't Jewish. I suspect she wanted to be.

My sister managed to marry her passion for religion and quarter horses...

The shofar is, of course, a ram's horn used mostly to signal the new moon. Even in the hands of an expert I hesitate to call it a musical instrument. In the hands of my dead sister's friends it was more like the bleating of an aggrieved wildebeest.

I don't really know if they were close friends or merely co-religionists, fellow believers in Jesus the Jew, a rather slippery messianic faith that included singing in Hebrew and the wearing of prayer shawls and white ceremonial dresses. My sister wore such a dress when she took the Glory Ride in 1996.

She was called KaTaHa then (but not by our mother). It sounds rather aboriginal but was actually a loose concatenation of her maiden and married name, Kathleen Thrasher Hunt. The Glory Ride, more commonly called the Pacific Coast Trail, threaded through the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains from Mexico to the Canadian border. It was on horseback. My sister managed to marry her passion for religion and quarter horses in an act of will and imagination that still staggers me with its acrobatic elegance.

I was never very clear on the details of her faith. She used a lot of Hebrew words, referred to God as YHWH and Jesus as Y’shua, and seemed to enjoy street theater. There were a lot of Hebrew words at her funeral and the shofars were purely theatric.

She had lived for years on Mount Shasta, a sanctuary for fringe beliefs. I suspect she had some trouble reconciling her own fringe fundamentalism with the Wiccans and crystal gazers that came as pilgrims to the mountain during the Harmonic Convergence but she was too kind hearted to be vengeful. She would never have made a good televangelist.

When my sister died, he drove her body cross-country in the back of his pickup.

She died suddenly in Colorado, ostensibly of diabetes but I suspect the coffee enemas contributed. It's my ill-advised opinion that you can survive only so many coffee enemas a day and five or six is too damned many! The quack who treated her thought otherwise. His only credentials were a recommendation from my sister's significant other and his own claim that the treatment enabled him to continue drinking when his liver should have long since failed.

Her significant other was named Ron. I don't doubt Ron was dedicated to my sister; I question everything else about him. He was one of those who believe that Federal taxation is a blatant violation of the Constitution, apparently unaware that the Constitution is a living document whose interpretation is continually changing and often contradictory, much like the Bible. Living his beliefs, he went off the grid—no credit cards, no loans, no legal ownership, not even a driver's license. There was no way to connect him to the house he owned in Colorado, the RV he owned in California, or the pickup truck he drove between them. He spent a lot of time in jail for his beliefs, mostly for traffic violations.

When my sister died, he drove her body cross-country in the back of his pickup. I can't begin to imagine what a macabre journey that must have been.

We buried my sister on Mount Shasta amid sunlight and the sound of shofars. She died at the age of 57, a brief life but an interesting one. Perhaps that's all we can hope for reasonably.

Assassins

The guy in the bar claimed he worked for the CIA north of the DMZ during the war (for me the war is forever Viet Nam) as an assassin targeting high ranking Viet Cong. It may have been true. I was never sure. He worked for me tenuously, marketing a charter boat I was running out of Monterey. For several weeks after I fired him I carried a knife and kept clear of the shadows.

The truly deadly men I've known were unrecognizable. They looked like the guys I surfed with at Rincon and Ventura County Line or the kindly uncle with a Jerry Colonna mustache. They were decent, reasonable sort of men; one of them was in the crowd when Jane Fonda paraded down the streets of Hanoi. He was waiting for the order to pull the trigger.

The kid I roomed with in San Diego was blond, freckled, and quick to smile. He didn't seem haunted by what he had done nor especially proud. If I persisted, he would tell about traveling up the Mekong in a rubber boat to the headquarters of a VC regiment, stealing into a hooch where the officers slept on a bamboo floor, murdering the one in the middle without waking those on either side, and leaving the ace of spades as a calling card. PsyOps they called it. It was supposed to have a more demoralizing effect than a simple body count.

My commanding officer in the 621st Nuclear Artillery Battalion was a lanky, six foot guy named Lt. Bean. In country he had been a LRRP (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol.) They were called lurps and they were deadly. Supposedly every dead lurp cost the enemy 400 of their own dead.

As a lurp Bean would dress in black pajamas and bamboo hat and spend weeks at a time in North Vietnam. His job was reconnaissance, ambush, and assassination. He was very good at it, so good they gave him a battlefield commission.

What surprises me most is how ordinary these men appeared, and how dangerous they were in reality. They seemed to have transitioned effortless from killing as an occupation. I don't know if they were haunted by nightmares. If so, I suspect they dreamed more of  the death of their friends than of their enemies.

Perhaps that is one  measure of what we are and the discrepancy between what we wish to become.

Old Hands

My hands have grown old without me. They seem a strangers hands—wrinkled, weathered, like a desert landscape eroded and seamed by arroyos. They seem roughly familiar but much older than me, as if they had lived a life other than mine. The skin drawn across the back of my hands is thin as the nest of a paper wasp. Old friends. Bookends. A newspaper blown through the grass falls on the 'round toes, the high shoes, of the old friends.

Photo attribution: espoirala

Long, Strange Trip

I stood on a manicured lawn that sloped to an architecturally precise creek designed especially for Microsoft. I drank white wine, ate peanuts, and listened to Toad the Wet Sprocket on stage. A pair of osprey circled effortlessly overhead, rising on a column of heated air. No one seemed to notice. Clouds massed on the eastern horizon above the Cascades and I had one of those disconcerting moments when the commonplace becomes oddly unfamiliar like looking into a store front window and mistaking your own reflection for that of a stranger. How the hell did I get here?

I have those moments periodically—once on the deck of a Valiant 40 anchored at Hanalei Bay, drinking Tanqueray and tonic  just prior to my first Trans-Pacific delivery; another reading Carlos Castenada in a six-wheeled vehicle while on maneuvers with the Fourth Mechanized Division across the high plains of Colorado; and again while living on a beach in Baja California, watching the body of a sea lion slowly erode week after week. How the hell did I get here?

I've come to the conclusion that there's no possible way to predict where my life will lead me. (Half the time I'm not even sure where I've been.) I had no inkling that I would become a yacht captain or launch nuclear rockets from a truck bed or work for Microsoft. It's just too weird to be credible.

The Grateful Dead always said it best.

Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me;

Other times, I can barely see.

Lately it occurs to me ...

What a long, strange trip it's been.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Toad and the Wet Sprockets, Greatful Dead, Valiant 40, Hanalei Bay, Fourth Mechanized Division, Baja California, Charles Thrasher

Color Me Red

I recently took one of those personality tests popular with large corporations, the kind that assigns each personality type to a color quadrant. I thought I was blue - cool, dispassionate, analytical. Turns out I was wildly off-target.

In reality, I'm undeniably red - driving, dictatorial, interested more in results than relationships. I'm not even vaguely warm and fuzzy, not even in my sleep. In short, I'm an asshole.

Recognizing my true self has been liberating. I no longer have to fain interest in other people's opinions or their children. (In all honesty, I don't dislike all children, just the ones near me.) Nor do I have to pretend that corporations are driven by anything other than self-interest.

I have embraced my inner asshole.

As a newly declared curmudgeon, I should urge others to also come out of the closet but I don't really care.

And you know that silly questionnaire every new employee is required to complete, the one with the inane request: Name a guilty pleasure? Well, I no longer regret my answer: Sheep.

Battle of Elliott Bay

If the killing of a pig can be called a war then yachtsmen armed with shotguns can be called a battle.

The battle occurred on a Saturday morning in 1909 when members of the Elliott Bay Yacht Club landed in force at the foot of Charles Street, South Seattle. They were opposed by burly lumbermen.

With the substantial help of Hiram Gill, Seattle's wondrously corrupt mayor, the yacht club had secured a long-term lease on the waterfront lot. The lease was contested by the Erickson Mill Company which actually had buildings on the lot. Possession might normally be nine tenths of the law but in Seattle, Hiram Gill was the law.

Adloph Rohlf's new yawl Acquilla was pressed into service as a gunboat. Four shotguns were mounted on her gunnels to dissuade the yard employees. The Acquillla arrived on the sunlit morning with decks cleared for action, accompanying a pile driver. The lumbermen tactically withdrew and pile driving began.

The Post-Intelligencer reported that "a pitched battle between a pile-driving crew working for Elliot Bay Yacht Club and employees of the Erickson Mill Company...was narrowly averted yesterday at noon..." The paper failed to mention that the battle was narrowly averted by the threat of deadly force.

The Seattle Yacht Club officially merged with the Elliot Bay Yacht Club later that year, and the battle of Elliott Bay became part of its legacy.

Resources: The Centennial History of the Seattle Yacht Club 1892-1992

Technorati tags: Elliott Bay, Puget Sound, Elliott Bay Yacht Club, Seattle Yacht Club, Alolph Rohlf, Hiram Gill

Smugglers on the Sound

Puget Sound has always been smugglers' water--two thousand miles of crumpled shoreline sprawled across two countries often at political odds. It has been the haunt of sailors smuggling Chinese and opium, whiskey and wool, men like Blue Jay Jimmy and the infamous Smuggler Kelly who smelled badly and whose name was used by exasperated mothers to frighten their children into obedience.

Settlers on the Sound considered it onerous to pay duty on products more cheaply available in Canada, especially Canadian whiskey, and the citizens of Port Townsend were very fond of whiskey. It was said you could dig ten feet deep on Water Street and still smell the cheap whiskey saturating the soil.

Folklore has it that the term bootlegger was derived from the common practice of Port Townsend sailors tucking bottles of whiskey into their high sea boots when returning from Canada.

A brisk trade smuggling Chinese immigrants from Canada developed following passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Bigots may have resented the thrifty Chinese but their cheap labor was needed and men like Smuggler Kelly filled the need, usually landing their cargo on a remote shore in the dark of a moonless night. Where the Chinese labored, opium also became a commodity.

Prohibition was popular in Washington state until it became law. Most men found that having neither a job nor a drink was an insufferable burden. Supplying liquor illegally provided an income for many during the Great Depression. An entire economy was supported by bootlegging— an army of office workers, accountants, teamsters, lawyers, mechanics, salesmen, and boat crews—including at least one legitimate boatyard.

The Blanchard Boat Company of Ballard was struggling during the Depression. Commissions for new boats were non-existent; even repair work was rare. N.J. Blanchard, the man later responsible for building the famous Blanchard Knockabouts, kept his yard afloat building open launches. They were politely called fast commuters but were in fact rum-runners, all engine and cockpit, designed to carry a light load faster than the Coast Guard could follow.

Not only did N.J. build rum-runners, he ran liquor for Roy Olmstead, the Seattle police lieutenant who decided that being a bootlegger was more profitable than jailing one. Besides becoming Seattle’s largest employer, Olmstead pioneered Seattle radio. His wife broadcast a program of children’s nursery rhymes from their home in the Mount Baker district. All of Olmstead’s boats listened religiously to the broadcast which included encoded instructions. The station call signs were KFQX, later to become KOMO.

Olmstead loaded liquor onboard old schooners in Victoria, B.C., then offloaded them into small boats among the islands of Haro Strait. He preferred smuggling in foul weather to avoid interdiction by the authorities and hijacking by the competition. His boats drove at flank speed through squalls as dark as sin, their running lights doused, and landed crates of liquor on isolated wharves, at boatyards, and even yacht club floats.

In his autobiography Knee Deep in Shavings, Norm Blanchard wrote, "Every cabbie in town knew that for the right price, a customer could get a bottle of bootleg whiskey at the Seattle Yacht Club." Most of that whiskey was supplied by Roy Olmstead and likely delivered to the dock by his father, N.J. Blanchard.

I have a copy of The Centennial History of the Seattle Yacht Club 1892 – 1992. Oddly, I have yet to find a reference in it to smuggling or bootlegging.

Wreckage

The captain of the Kennecott was best known for the smile permanently fixed to his face. That and the habit of stuffing newspapers beneath his clothing rather than wear a proper sea coat on the bridge. Laughing John they called him. His officers said they had never seen him without that smile until the night the Kennecott wrecked on the shoals of Queen Charlotte Island but I think it first faded in Yokohama.

The Kennecott was the pride of the Western fleet. Modern—the first deepwater vessel to burn heavy crude in her diesel engines, fast—turning better than 12 knots on her sea trial, and expensive—she cost the Alaska Steamship Company $1.2 million when she was launched from the Todd Shipyards of Tacoma in 1920. She was also the pride of her captain.

September 1, 1923 was a Saturday, hot and humid. The Kennecott was still a day out of Yokohama, in deep water, and never felt the tsunami generated when the submarine fault slipped in Sagami Bay at 11:58 a.m. local time. The earthquake measured 8.3 on the Richter scale. In a moment the floor of Sagami Bay was displaced over 700 feet; submarine ridges were abruptly upthrust 180-300 feet; the shore buckled by as much as 24 feet.

A commuter train overturned and fell into the sea carrying 500 passengers. Others were buried alive when train tunnels collapsed.

Within a few minutes of the event tsunamis 16 feet tall swept the shore. The anchor rodes of many ships in the harbor parted. Oil from ruptured storage tanks spilled into the harbor and ignited. Wooden sampans burned like torches.

In the Honjo and Fukagawa districts of Tokyo, 30,00 refugees clutching whatever belongings they could salvage from the wreckage were herded into an open park by the encircling fire storms. Their piteous belongings served only as fuel. They were asphyxiated where they stood, praying for some unlikely salvation or cursing whatever god had abandoned them. Their bodies, piled like windrows, were incinerated.

It was an unimaginable catastrophe. The final estimates were 100,000 dead and another 40,000 missing, presumed dead, their bodies drifting with the tide, buried beneath the rubble, or burnt to ashes.

It was like anchoring at the gates of hell.

The Kennecott arrived next day and dropped anchor at the gates of hell. The bay was choked with debris and bodies coated with crude oil. The mass of refuse moved sluggishly with the tide. Yokohama burned. Yellow dust raised by the collapsed buildings mixed with smoke and everywhere there was the smell of charred flesh.

Captain Johnson touched the horror. Sampans full of the dispossessed crowded alongside his ship begging for food and refuge. The Kennecott was a cargo vessel, strictly beholding to the profit margin of her owners and unequipped for humanitarian aid. He refused them, turned them back to their likely death.

He went ashore to make arrangements to discharge his cargo into lighters. He saw the devastation—80% of the city leveled—and picked his way through ruptured streets choked with bodies and rubble. He probably saw mobs of enraged Japanese hunting Koreans. It was wildly rumored that Koreans were looting the dead, setting fires and poisoning the wells. Another 2,500 were murdered because they spoke Japanese with a Korean accent.

At night the city burned with a macabre beauty.

After several days of waiting in Yokohama harbor, fending off the dead and the dispossessed, the Kennecott offloaded her cargo and sailed in ballast for Cordova, Alaska. It was probably days at sea before the crew could clean the smell of death from the ship.

In Cordova she loaded copper ore for the Tacoma Smelter. On the passage south the captain, always a prudent navigator, missed Dixon Entrance while steering for the Inside Passage and piled his ship onto the shoals at the north end of the Queen Charlotte Islands. She was impaled on the rocks just offshore. The officers and crew escaped by breeches buoy from the bridge of the Kennecott to an offshore stack and from the stack to the beach. They survived two days on the wild western shore of the island, stoking large fires to keep the bears at bay, before being rescued.

Captain Johnson sat in the stern sheets of the motor launch that carried the Kennecott's survivors to Prince Rupert. It was night and no one saw him slip overboard. At least, no one called out. Laughing John chose to end his life in the sea.

It might have been the loss of his ship, his pride, and possibly his livelihood that caused him to commit suicide. Certainly that was the opinion of many but I believe that devastation witnessed on such a scale can wound a man’s soul. It was not just the wreckage of the Kennecott that drove Captain Johnson to despair but the wreckage of Yokohama.

Technorati tags: Yokohama, earthquake, 1923, skipwreck, Queen Charlotte Islands, Kennecott, Captain John Johnson, Laughing John, Alaska Steamship Company.

Beer Can Racing

Urban legend has it that casual, weekday racing earned its name because most of the participants didn’t know how to read the race rules and couldn’t tell a windward mark from the starting line; they simply followed the empty beer cans tossed overboard by the leading boats. It’s probably apocryphal, much like the story of the submarine surfacing in the middle of the racing fleet on San Francisco Bay, but it does emphasize the informal character of the Friday night races.

Container ships berthed on the Oakland Esttuary.
Photo attribution: Laura A. Watt

The beer can races in the Oakland Estuary were sponsored by the Encinal Yacht Club. Encinal wasn’t as officious as most yacht clubs and the Oakland Estuary wasn’t really an estuary. It was a tidal channel that separated Oakland from Alameda, deep enough to barely permit the navigation of large container ships that berthed at the Oakland wharves.

Through much of the 1980s I worked for charter fleets and sailing schools on the Oakland Estuary. Working on the docks of Alameda made the Friday night races convenient. We’d knock off work early, fill the cooler with beer (Corona mostly), and sail for the starting line. Usually someone arriving late would make a pierhead leap for dramatic effect.

The boat was most often a J-29. The J had an outboard motor but it was rarely worth the effort to mount it on the transom. Typically it remained in the dock box and we sailed the boat out of the slip. In light air we’d hang on the shrouds and alternately pitch our weight outboard, rolling the boat like a big dingy to gain steerageway.

The starts were made exciting by the narrow starting line which was rarely set athwart the wind. Sometimes it was a beat, other times a reach, and occasionally a dead run. At least once we crossed the start with spinnaker set.

Ships turned end-for-end in the Oakland Estuary.
Photo attribution: Laura A. Watt

Container ships arriving from trans-pacific ports added to the excitement. The big ships were too large to turn mid-channel so the tugs would accompany them to the turning basin at the end of the Estuary where they were turned end-for-end, then brought back up the channel to their berth. In one race the first boats had just rounded the windward mark near the Rusty Pelican and set their chutes when a huge ship with the Hapag Lloyd line steamed through the fleet. The boats working to windward were constrained to less than half the width of the channel, short tacking viciously. The boats sailing downwind were hard pressed to steer clear of the boats close hauled and the pilot onboard the container ship must have been near cardiac arrest, small boats disappearing from his view on beam and bow. It was chaotic. Perhaps not as bad as a submarine…

Downwind run on Oakland Estuary.
Photo attribution: Laura A. Watt

The story is that boomers—the big submarines that carried ICBMs and lurked for months in the depths, waiting for the dreadful call to action—often came through the Golden Gate submerged to maintain secrecy, surfacing only as the bottom of the bay shoaled near Alcatraz Island. This particular boomer surfaced in the middle of a racing fleet on a spinnaker run in a fresh summer breeze. A summer breeze on San Francisco Bay is typically 20 knots. The sudden presence of a ship in their midst caused some consternation. The fleet was scattered like bowling pins. Boats broached and gybed all standing. There were knock-downs and death rolls.

Supposedly the sailboats were too quiet for the sub to hear with passive sonar. It’s pretty unlikely but even less likely things have happened with submarines. More than one ocean-going tug has been towed under stern first when its towline has been fouled by a submarine. But that’s another story.

Technorati tags: Sailing, Oakland Estuary, Alameda, beer can racing.

Darkness Visible

Since I left a hard and unforgiving church at the age of 18, I’ve believed neither in heaven nor hell, neither God nor the devil. Instead I believed in an endless continuum between those extremes, a human continuum. “For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Now my disbelief has been shaken. The actions of a single man in a one-room Amish schoolhouse seem so unconscionably malicious that I’m nearly forced to believe in unadulterated evil, in darkness made visible.

That a man could separate sisters from brothers, teacher from students, and then began pumping bullets into the body of Naomi Rose Ebersole, age 7; Anna Mae Stoltzfus, age 12; Marian Fisher, age 13; Mary Liz Miller, age 8; and her sister Lena Miller, age 7, staggers even my credulity and I have seen a fair amount of cruelty.

This was no distant assassination. This man stood close to his victims, close enough to be splattered with blood and brain, close enough to see in detail the devastating damage a bullet does to flesh and bone, to smell the stench as children died and lost control of their bodies. This man came as close as I can imagine to surrendering his soul to hell.

By neighbors’ account he seemed an ordinary man, a quiet man—good father, loving husband. Then one day he walked into a schoolroom and in a calculated moment transformed himself into a mythic image, an angel of wrath, blood drenched and awful. The truly terrifying thing is that such madness is not divine but human. This was not a myth but a man who surrendered himself to darkness and left behind a swath of shattered lives—the families of the victims and his own. The truly terrifying thing is that such madness might overtake any one of us. If it happend to one, why not another, why not ourselves? How can we be certain otherwise? That is the real heart of darkness.

Transcendence

Most of my life is over. There are far fewer years ahead than I’ve already left behind. It’s understandable that ambition’s grip has slackened (like everything else about my body) and that I’ve become preoccupied with meaning.

I’ve believed many things in my life—most of them foolish—but I can no longer believe in the inordinate rewards and punishments of Christianity, the reassuring revolutions of the wheel of karma, nor even the houris and hashish of Islam. What’s left to me is the cold comfort of Sartre, the intellectual exercise of existentialism that lacks heart.

Recently Barbara commented on something I had written, Beaks of Eagles. I’m quoting her comment in full because it was, well, remarkable.

“Do you know if the following is true? When an eagle reaches the age of 50 (approximately), his beak begins to freeze shut, and he can no longer eat. Some give up and die, but some find a cave or cleft in the rock where water is present. The old eagle goes into the cave and beats his beak on a rock until it is broken off. The eagle drinks water for 40 days until it grows a new beak. The eagle then pulls its old feathers out and an oil sack grows and is filled with oil (over the heart). The eagle then breaks the oil sack with the new beak and spreads the oil over his body. Beautiful new golden feathers grow in, and the eagle is renewed. The eagle's body is also strengthened through this process. The regenerated eagle is then able to fly higher than it ever could before and see better than it could before.”

Frankly, it matters less to me whether it’s true. I could research the life history of eagles but the result would be irrelevant. What’s truly remarkable to me is its mythic quality. It is an elegant, powerful myth of renewal.

An eagle’s beak is it’s most obvious attribute. It defines the bird for most of us. Without a beak in good repair, an eagle can’t survive. In fact, many raptors in the Pacific Northwest have recently been seen with malformed beaks. No one yet knows the cause but, unable to hunt and feed effectively, they are starving to death.

The myth warns that the strengths we have relied upon in youth will not serve us in old age. We have to surrender that strength, transcend ourselves or die. That act of transcendence is painful and solitary. The old eagle beating his beak against a rock is a powerful image. It speaks of sacrifice and vulnerability.

The 40 days of solitude drinking only water sounds like a vision quest or Christ’s wandering in the desert. With its renewed beak, the eagle then plucks every feather from its body. The process must be infinitely painful, like the Sun Dance of the Lakota Sioux. The eagle stands naked and bloodied, raw and exposed, waiting for rebirth.

In a final act of self-sacrifice, the eagle impales its heart on it’s own beak. Little wonder that many give up and die rather than suffer rebirth. It is an act not only of sacrifice but of integration. The eagle is renewed.

This is a myth worth believing.

Technorati tags: Eagle, myth,  rebirth.

Killing Canoes

The Makah are people who live close to the sea. For over 2,000 years they hunted grey whales off the unforgiving coast of Cape Flattery until the whales were hunted near extinction by other men whose only wisdom was greed. It was a dangerous occupation. Boats could be stove in by a whale’s flukes, capsize or break apart in heavy weather. Entire crews could be lost and villages devastated. Two millennium of seamanship taught the Makah that their boats were more than tools—they were sentient, capable of loyalty or betrayal, and accountable. A boat that betrayed its crew to their death and survived itself was traditionally burned. One boat, however, was spared.

That boat had been selected from the Makah forest reserved for ceremonial woodworkers. It had been chosen as a living red cedar, felled and hauled to the men’s longhouse where it was sculpted by hand. In that boat was vested the Makah’s hope for the resurrection of their tribe, the first boat to hunt grey whales off Cape Flattery in five generations. They named it Hummingbird.

Hummingbird ignited a controversy that burned across the world. She was both venerated and vilified. To many she represented an unforgivable sin—the gratuitous killing of one of the great whales. To others she symbolized the rebirth of the First Nations and the regeneration of an ancient wisdom. When the Makah completed their first successful whale hunt in 1999, it was onboard Hummingbird.

In July, 2006, Hummingbird again participated in a cultural event—the annual Intertribal Canoe Journey where many of the First Nations from throughout the Salish Sea undertake long canoe journeys to celebrate their cultural heritage. On July 26 she was off Dungeness Spit, in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, on a passage from Neah Bay to Sequim.

Hummingbird had left Neah Bay in the company of several other canoes and chase boats participating in the tribal journey. By the time they had reached Port Angeles, the west wind was blowing hard and creating waves of six to seven feet with a six second interval. Many of the crews were already in trouble and required a tow from their chase boats. By the time Hummingbird had reached Dungeness Spit, she was alone.

The wind was gusting to 35 knots. The seas were steep and breaking. Running before the seas would likely result in the canoe burying her bow in the trough and broaching. Turning beam-to would have invited capsize. With a six second interval, there was no time to recover from the impact of one wave before the next struck. Inevitably, the 32 foot canoe capsized.

The crew of six was pitched into the 54 degree water. One man—a hereditary chief of one of the First Nations of Vancouver Island, British Columbia—drowned in the cold water. The canoe was recovered next day from a beach near Dungeness Spit.

Ben Johnson, tribal chairman of the Makah, later announced that Hummingbird would not be burned but retired and placed on display at the Neah Bay marina. The rancorous history of the boat wasn’t forgotten, however. Sea Shepard, an extreme animal rights group that forcibly led the opposition to renewed Makah whaling, posted the following on their website.

"The boat that took the life of Yabis the baby gray whale in 1999 has now claimed a human life. [Yabis was apparently the name given the gray whale after it was harpooned by the Hummingbird’s crew.]

"What goes around apparently comes around," said Captain Paul Watson. "In my opinion that boat was cursed the moment the harpoon left it and entered the body of the whale."

It seems the Makah are not the only ones who believe in animism.

Technorati tags: Makah, whaling, canoe, Hummingbird.

Wild Man

When they brought John Tornow’s body to the undertaker’s on April 20, 1913 he had already been dead three days. The streets of the small Washington town of Montesano were filled with jostling crowds. They had come to see the dead man’s face, to touch his burlap clothing, to breathe the scent of decay. They had come to reassure themselves that John Tornow was truly dead and, through some inexplicable communion, to share in the dead man’s power.

The restive crowd surged forward when the Tornow family tried to keep the body from public display. R.F. Hunter, the coroner of Grays Harbor County, surrendered decorum to good sense. “Fully 650 people passed through the room where the gaunt figure lay within a space of 30 minutes,” reported Portland’s Morning Oregonian. “Thirty Deputy Sheriffs forced the crowd to move in single file and prevented, by force, [their] tearing off bits of the ragged clothing from the corpse, cutting off locks of hair or whiskers or cutting off pieces from the table where the cadaver lay." There were hundreds more who couldn’t get into the morgue.

The crowd filed past, some like mourners at the funeral of a saint, others like bumpkins at a county fair. The Wild Man lay stretched upon a wooden table, his hair and beard matted, his clothes patched with burlap sacks, insulated with pine nettles, and stained with blood, his hobnailed boots stolen and too small for his feet.

He was born to a respectable, pioneering family from the Wynooche Valley near Grays Harbor. Their child was restless around others and comfortable only in the wilderness. They suspected something was seriously wrong with their child at age 10 when he began to escape to the woods for weeks at a time. He was a deadly shot with a 30-06, having learned to shoot from the hip to keep his sight clear of the black powder cloud. His trademark was a single shot to the heart—precise and deadly.

At age 19 he was already a man—six foot two inches and 200 pounds—when his father committed him to a sanatorium in the Oregon woods. For 12 months Tornow was treated for insanity and then he escaped into the forest. Nothing was officially known of him for another year but loggers around Grays Harbor began sighting a wraith among the trees—a big man who moved as silently as a cougar. He was mute mostly, silently staring, but he did once warn that no one should follow him. “I’ll kill anyone who comes after me. These are my woods.”

A year after that warning, on September 3, 1911, the bodies of Tornow’s nephews, Will and John Bauer, were found under a pile of brush. Will Bauer had been shot neatly between the eyes, his brother beneath the left eye. Both bodies had been stripped of their weapons; Will was missing his shoes.

The killing may have been justified. Tornow and his nephews had jointly inherited property which couldn’t be sold without the signature of all three. The Bauer brothers had earlier been unsuccessful in persuading Tornow to return to civilization for the sale. His death may have been their alternative.

Posses immediately scoured the woods without finding Tornow but the loggers were spooked. Logging operations around Montesano virtually stopped and hunters shied from the woods.

Then in February 1912 a trapper named Louis Blair and his partner found the carcass of an elk in the Ox Bow country north of Montesano, a carcass left by Tornow, they believed. Deputy Colin McKenzie, a friend of Blair’s, and Game Warden Al V. Elmer began tracking Tornow with a bloodhound. On March 9 the bloodhound wandered  into Louis Blair’s Ox Bow camp alone.

Another posse was sent to find the missing deputy. McKenzie and Elmer were found in a shallow ditch beneath a fresh mound of earth. Both bodies had been stripped of their clothing and weapons.

Blair began tracking Tornow in earnest, driven by revenge for his friend’s death and the $3,000 reward on Tornow’s head. He partnered with Charles Lathrop, a childhood friend of Tornow. At first Tornow fled but eventually became angered at the persistent chase and turned to confront them.

The final scene came in April 1913 when Blair, Lathrop, Deputy Sheriff Giles Quimby, and a pair of bloodhounds tracked Tornow to a rough cabin built in a swamp beside a lake west of Matlock. The cabin was approachable only across a small foot log.

Tornow was waiting in ambush. He had been warned of their arrival by the sudden silence of the frogs he had tethered around his cabin—an old Indian trick. Blair was the first to die. Lathrop fell next. Deputy Sheriff Quimby, the furthest from Tornow’s position, rapidly fired seven times, emptying the magazine of his 30-30 and then dove for cover.

In the silence that followed Quimby couldn’t know if he had hit his mark or whether Tornow was playing possum. The frogs resumed their chorus. Night was approaching. Quimby knew he wouldn’t survive the night if Tornow was still alive. He made a precipitous dash through the woods to the nearest logging camp. The only sound he heard behind him was the baying of the dead trapper’s bloodhounds.

It was another day before the posse and pack horses could return to the cabin. They found Tornow’s body propped against a hemlock tree. He was wearing a black hat that had once belonged to Deputy Colin McKenzie. A search of his shack revealed that he had been surviving on a diet of elk meat and bull frogs.

They buried John Tornow early in the morning to avoid repeating the scene at the morgue, then mounted a guard around the grave all night to keep the tourists away.

The graveyard in Matlock is small and easily overlooked. A headstone now marks the grave. The legend reads “From loner – to outcast – to fugitive.” People leave flowers at the graveside and trinkets—a toy bear, small change, useless objects. It reminds me of the Makah tradition of breaking the possessions of the dead and leaving them beside the grave. Tornow was 33 years old when he was killed. The timing seems ironic.

In his brief life and violent death, John Tornow had become the unwitting symbol of our deepest desires and darkest fears. Every rumor and report was avidly followed by the press. Lurid reporting fired the archetypal imagination of millions across the country. He was labeled “the Wild Man of the Olympics,” “Cougar Man,” “a Mad Daniel Boone,” and “a Thoreau without Brains.”

At the height of his notoriety the forests of the southern Olympics were filled by thousands of well-armed men and baying bloodhounds. On February 20, 1912, 17-year-old Brian Hatcher was shot to death by a companion who mistook him for the devilish “apeman.”

Tornow became the man who defied convention, who abandoned civilization for the freedom of the wilderness and, for a time, successfully defended that choice. He seems to represent our ambivalence toward nature, our terror of the dark woods that endlessly competes with our desire for wildness. I suspect it’s that fear that drives us to treat nature so ruthlessly.

Technorati tags: Olympics, Pacific Northwest, John Tornow, folklore.

A One-Eyed Irishman

Old Ben Shanahan was a one-eyed Irishman, a dory fisherman recruited from the Gloucester fleet by Codfish Kelly to come to Seattle and fish the Bering Sea. That was before the first great war, the war to end wars. In his book Salt of the Sea, the Pacific Coast Cod Fishery and the Last Days of Sail, Captain Ed Shields remembers Ben Shanahan with fondness.

"He had only one eye;" Shields writes, "the other one had been lost during a barroom brawl... How the others looked after the fight was a question never answered, but we all figured that if Ben lost an eye, the other men fared much worse."

During the long night watch onboard the Sophie Christenson when the crew kept warm by walking the length of the weather deck, old Ben Shanahan sometimes told stories about that night in 1918 onboard the halibut schooner King and Winge in the Lynn Canal just south of Skagway. It was late in October and snow was falling when the Princess Sophia, a Canadian Pacific Steamer southbound from Skagway, struck Vanderbilt Reef and stranded. There were 345 persons onboard – 75 among the crew and 218 men, 35 women, and 17 children among the passengers as well as a few dozen horses, and an English setter.

The Princess Sophia's wireless distress call was received at Juneau, some 30 miles from the reef, where the King and Winge immediately got underway. E.P. Pond, a professional photographer, came onboard with a pierhead leap.

The King and Winge was alongside the Princess Sophia before first light and offered to take passengers off in her dories, as many as the schooner could carry. The dorymen knew their boats and their own abilities but the captain of the steamer, Captain Leonard Locke, thought the risk too great to transfer by dory in the dark.

It was unlikely the dories could come alongside to offload the passengers directly. They would have been stove in against the vertical wall of the ship's hull or foundered on the shallow reef. More likely the passengers would have to be fitted with life jackets and floated to leeward where the dories waited to recover them. The shock of cold water and waves would probably kill the most frail. Others might simply be lost in the darkness and die of exposure. There were certain to be casualties.

His ship was hard aground and in no immediate danger. The Princess Sophia was fitted with a double bottom and her hull was sound. The tidal range in the Lynn Canal runs 15 to 20 feet. The next high water might refloat her if the weather held. Rather than risk his passengers and crew to the uncertain mercy of the sea, Captain Locke gambled on the weather.

The King and Winge lingered through the day, ready if Locke thought better of his decision. On her deck Pond took photographs of the stranded steamer as the tide fell and the seas rose. As the weather deteroriated, the schooner finally had to abandon her post and run for shelter in the lee of Benjamin Island.

By the time the U.S. Lighthouse Service tender Cedar arrived it was low tide and the steamer’s hull was completely out of the water. The Cedar took shelter alongside the King and Winge waiting for the turn of the tide.

Onboard the steamer was a contingent of soldiers including Auris McQueen. That day, waiting for the Princess Sophia to refloat, he wrote a letter to his mother.

"It's storming now, about a 50-mile wind and we can only see a couple of hundred yards on account of the snow and spray. At three A.M. yesterday she struck a rock submerged at high tide, and for a while there was a some excitement, but no panic. Two women fainted and one of them got herself into a black evening dress and didn't worry over who saw her putting it on. Some of the men, too, kept life preservers for an hour or so and seemed to think that there was no chance for us...

"We had three tugboats here in the afternoon, but the weather was too rough to transfer any passengers…The wind and the sea from behind pounded and pushed her until she is now, 30 hours after, on the rock clear back to the middle and we can't get off."

It was the last letter Auris McQueen ever wrote.

Late that day the Cedar received a desperate wireless call. "Taking water and foundering, for God’s sake come and save us." The rising tide and seas had loosened the ship’s hold on the reef. The Princess Sophia was slipping into deep water.

The Cedar signaled the King and Winge and they both got underway in a blinding snow storm. It took courage and skill to sail into the teeth of a gale with no visibility, no auxilary engine, no navigation other than dead reckoning and a reef as your destination. The men onboard the schooner knew their situation could rapidly become as desperate as those they hoped to help.

When they arrived at Vanderbilt Reef it was dark already and the Princess Sophia no where evident. At dawn the next day all that was visible was the steamer’s masthead and the bodies on the water, floating in life jackets or lashed to life rafts, the corpses covered with bunker fuel oil. Of the 345 onboard, only the English setter survived. It was later found oil-soaked and suffering from exposure at Tee Harbor. It was the worst maritime disaster in the history of the Pacific Northwest.

It seems likely that the rising seas pounded the Princess Sophia on the reef, holing her double hull. Eventually she slid stern first off the ledge, sinking to the bottom like a headstone.

The salvage divers later recovered the gold from the ship’s safe, the ship’s bell, and many of the personal possessions of the dead.

Technorati tags: Princess Sophia, King and Winge,Pacific Northwest, shipwreck.

A Modern Madness

I've written about the intense resistance to renewed Makah whaling in other posts [Devouring Intelligence, Makah Whalers] but I’ve struggled to understand the depth of that resistance until I read an article by John Wickham titled "Resistance to Makah whale hunt exposes modern madness" published in Indian Country Today.

In that article Wickham writes "The fierce public resistance against the Makah whale hunts confirms our modern irrationality — a kind of madness in American attitudes towards nature that lies at the roots of our global ecological crisis."

I suspect that madness is deeply routed in American culture. We are rushing toward self-destruction with the abandon of berserkers, ruining the Earth’s ability to sustain life, at the same time discounting an ancient aboriginal wisdom that dramatizes the mystery of life and death that unties us all.

"Our affluent society seems obsessed with an urge to destroy the planet and its wild species, as if towards an apocalyptic suicide. Underlying this madness is a modern denial of man's 'ecological unconsciousness' or biophilia — a fundamental psychic need or craving of our genome to connect intimately with wild nature's diverse other life. If repressed by poor parenting and culture, an individual's full emotional maturity becomes stunted into adulthood as an ecological attachment disorder. Left untreated, this failed development of self, when aggravated by society, never moves beyond the pre-adolescent impulse to control early fears in a frightening environment."

We grew up in fear and have never outgrown those childhood fears. We remain afraid — afraid of the solitude, afraid of the night, afraid of the vast encompassing wilderness, afraid of our impending death. Paradoxically, we seem intent upon destroying ourselves while all the while denying our own mortality.

There is a much greater mystery here than the killing of a gray whale.

Technorati tags: Makah, aboriginal whaling,Olympic Peninsula.

Departures

I will miss being on the water early in the morning, even if only as a passenger onboard a ferry. I’ll miss watching the gulls flock after schools of baitfish and the cormorants fishing in line abreast and the river otter that sometimes scampers over the breakwater at low tide. I’ll miss walking through the village with the mist clinging to the trees and sunrise over the Cascades and the blinding path of the sun across the water. I’ll miss the tugs with their tows on a short hawser often times queued three deep in the shipping channel. And I’ll miss running down Puget Sound between mountains piled on either side by unimaginable forces over geologic time.

There is a cost for every decision. Sometimes the cost is obvious. Taking a studio apartment in the city, my wife and I will each recover three hours every work day that would otherwise be spent commuting across the sound. Living in Belltown, we’ll be close to the Seattle’s main library, theaters, bookstores, and the excitement of the city. Keeping the house in Kingston, we can always return to the quiet of a coastal village on our days off although our days off now rarely coincide.

But I will not be able to count the flashes of the light at West Point each morning or see the breathtaking view of the city emerge from the water as we round the point.

It feels like I’m leaving something behind.

Technorati tags: Kingston, WA, Puget Sound,  Seattle, ferry.

Devouring Intelligence

In 1999, the Makah tribe killed a gray whale. The killing ignited a firestorm of controversy that spread around the world.

The hunting of whales was a right guaranteed the Makah by the Treaty of Neah Bay signed in 1855. It is a right unique among the treaties between the United States and the sovereign aboriginal nations. It’s clear and unequivocal. In return for surrendering their sovereignty and tribal territory, the Makah were assured they could hunt whales off the coast of Cape Flattery forever. Given our historic disregard of aboriginal treaties, it may have been a bad bargain.

The Makah had been hunting whales from cedar canoes since before the birth of Christ, perhaps even before the birth of Rome. It was central to their culture. They stopped whaling in the 1920’s. There were simply too few whales left to hunt. Commercial whalers had ravished the fishery, hunting with ruthless, unrestrained efficiency.

In 1999, the Federal government granted the Makah permission to take five Pacific gray whales each year. The stipulation was that the whales had to be hunted in the traditional manner. The protest was so strident that Coast Guard patrol boats were necessary to defend the Makah whaling canoe from animal rights activitists  during the hunt. Only one whale was taken.

Four years of legal challenges have since mired the Makah in court. In 2004, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Makah could not go whaling again until a new environmental-impact statement and a waiver of the Marine Mammal Protection Act were issued. So much for treaty rights.  Last month, the Makah formally requested the waiver.

It will likely be several years before the issue is settled. Opposition groups will raise legal objections at every opportunity—the legal equivalent of a running skirmish. Already protests are being raised in letters to the editor of the Seattle Times.

One recent letter read "I've always marveled at how people can say they ‘respect’ and ‘honor’ the noble beasts they kill. This is just one more example of a society refusing to understand the fact that whales are intelligent mammals." [Italics belong to the author.]

At the core of most arguments by animal rights activists against Makah whaling isn’t the risk to the gray whale population but the intelligence of whales. Simply stated, it’s immoral to kill something as smart as a whale.

But where do you draw the line? At what point does an animal become smart enough not to eat? Pigs are pretty smart. Is it more moral to eat stupid animals? Should the saintly live on a diet of slugs and slime mold?

And how do we measure an animal’s intelligence, anyway? Do aquatic animals need different criteria than terrestrial? Can the same test be applied to mammals and reptiles? We’re not even agreed on how to measure our own intelligence much less that of another species.

Basing the morality of your dinner menu upon the intelligence of the main course seems to me a slippery slope. The only rationally defensible position is that of a vegetarian and even vegetarians are hard pressed to defend the taking of any life, even a vegetable's life, to support their own.

The awesome, awful mystery is that life feeds on life. There is a web of indebtedness that enmeshes the whole food chain. The subsistence hunter who stalks his prey and kills by hand is intimately aware of that debt. For aboriginal peoples the hunt was a profoundly serious mystery that encompassed the life and death of both hunter and hunted.

Surrendering participation in that mystery to professionals—stockmen, slaughter houses, and butchers—has distanced us from a fundamental reality. Life feeds on life. The hunter eventually becomes the prey. We have grown arrogant in our isolation, unwilling to admit our dependence, and resentful when that dependence is dramatized by the Makah.

In the natural world, a balance is maintained, often at great cost to particular populations. In the world we have created, payment of that debt hasn’t been forgiven, merely postponed.

The issue we should be addressing isn’t whether the Makah hunt whales from hand-carved canoes but the insanely self-indulgent culture we have created that is voraciously consuming this planet’s resources. The debt, when it comes due, may be more than we can pay.

Technorati tags: Olympic Peninsula, Cape Flattery,  Makah, aboriginal whaling, animal rights activitists.

A Sailor's Gait

When the foot ferry lies alongside the Kingston dock and an east wind blows across the Sound, the short wind chop strikes the beam and the boat sometimes develops an abrupt, awkward motion. I’ve watched commuters stagger and pitch across the deck, spilling their coffee, collapsing into their seats, muttering apologies. Nothing is more mundane than the earth beneath our feet—solid, imperturbable, unmoving. Our perceptions are grounded upon it. Our balance depends upon this immutable fact, this unmoved earth. And then the earth moves.

I’ve lived through earthquakes in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. When the ground pitches and heaves beneath your feet, your body becomes utterly confused. You stagger like a drunken sailor, unable to regain your balance, much like the commuters on the ferry. When the earth moves, we’re betrayed by our body's expectations.

The same disorientation occurs after a long passage on a small boat. Your body is again confused but this time by the solidity of the shore. It was especially true after weeks of beating to weather along the Pacific Coast north of San Francisco where the waves are consistent as clockwork, six feet at six second intervals, daylight and dark, and the wind blows without ceasing. Too rough to cook or take a shower; braced with knees and elbows to stay seated in the head; sleeping in foul weather gear, nursing bruised ribs. Days so rough you couldn’t find your mouth with a spoon.

When we came ashore we walked with legs spread wide in a rolling gait, lurching between handholds and never a straight line. Little wonder sailors were always thought drunk ashore. They staggered like drunks even when sober as a stone. Not that they were often sober.

At 7:15 am, I’m pretty sure the commuters are sober.

Technorati tags: Puget Sound, Kingston, Washington, sailing

A Gladness of Gulls

This morning the air was filed with wings. The gulls that roost on the roof of the covered slips at the marina were circling in a silent, compact flock. A moment later an eagle passed overhead, intent upon some errand that had nothing to do with gulls.

Most of the gulls returned to their corrugated roost but a few dozen took stand on the gangway between the wharf and the Verlaine, the barge that serves as the ferry dock for Kingston’s mosquito fleet. The gangway is favored by gulls later in the day but typically not in the mornings. They seem to have a sense of propriety about such things.

After the ferry was secured alongside the Verlaine, a crew member crossed the gangway to greet arriving passengers. Gulls rose into the air like newspapers surrendered to the wind. He must have noted their unusual numbers. He might have briefly wondered why. He would not have known the cause. He hadn’t seen the eagle pass, entraining gulls in its wake.

Much of our lives are like that. We seem like characters in T.S. Eliot’s poem, wandering between rooms, entangled in conversations begun before we arrived and leaving before they are ended.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Time and Tide

How the steam engine unmade time.

I live in the village of Kingston on the west shore of Puget Sound opposite Seattle. Kingston was built on a bight of the shoreline called Appletree Cove, an anchorage well protected from the southerly gales of winter. It’s a general anchorage, meaning anyone can anchor as long as they wish without paying port fees or penalties. From the streets of the village you can see the white riding lights of the boats at anchor even in winter.

The village has always been backed by the forest but facing the sea. Shingles and lumber were originally freighted by schooner from the cove and later, produce from truck farms. Everything—people and passengers—were originally carried either under sail or under oars.

Commerce was paced by the wind and tide. A pig farmer from Kingston couldn’t promise to deliver twelve sows to Poulsbo at twelve on Tuesday the fourth. Tuesday, maybe. If not, then Wednesday or even Thursday, depending upon a fair wind and a favorable tide. It wasn’t until the invention of the steam engine that a boat could buck a headwind—or no wind—and keep her schedule despite the weather.

The steam engine was one of those pivotal inventions that changed the rhythm of our lives. It’s an historic watershed—or a wound. Before the steam engine, our lives were governed by wind and water, daylight and dark and the turning of the seasons. After the steam engine, the rule of mechanical time became absolute. We woke and worked and went to sleep by the ticking of the machine.

Joseph Conrad, among the foremost novelists of the 20th century, approached it from a slightly different perspective. Conrad was a sailor, rising through the ratings from ordinary seaman to captain, first onboard sailing ships, then steam ships. In his autobiography, The Mirror of the Sea, he wrote about the transition from sail to steam.

The machinery, the steel, the fire, the steam have stepped in between the man and the sea. A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway. The modern ship is not the sport of the waves. Let us say that each of her voyages is a triumphant progress; and yet it is a question whether it is not a more subtle and more human triumph to be the sport of the waves and yet survive, achieving your end.

Having known both sail and steam intimately, Conrad condemned the latter. "...The seaman of the future shall be not our descendant, but only our successor."

The steam engine may also have loosed the storm of greed that has swept our culture and threatens our planet. It’s hard to imagine we could have become so thoroughly rapacious without its mechanical advantage. And it’s hard to imagine that we would have succumbed, as a people, to the servitude of greed without having first been enslaved by mechanical time, by the ticking of the machine and the factory whistle.

Technorati tags: Puget Sound, Kingston, Washington, Joseph Conrad

Riding the Rocket

"You're responsible for ruining the life of my child!" The woman was standing in a puddle, her face inches from mine. Her child stood dripping beside her - wet, disheveled, but hardly ruined.

It was my job to get them wet. Not just wet but saturated - wrinkled flesh, t-shirts sagging around their knees, an expression of childish rapture on their faces. Their mothers didn't wear so well.

Mothers came in two extremes. Either they'd shield their kids from the stinging spray with their own bodies or they'd steal the rain jackets off their children's back. The theft was mostly symbolic. The jackets we supplied were pitifully inadequate and thin as onion skin.

We told them they'd get wet. When they bought their tickets at the pier, when they boarded the boat, before we left the dock we told them they'd get wet. And afterwards, as they shuffled away, their tennis shoes squelching on the wooden planks, their response was most often quizzical: "I didn't think we'd get wet."

The crew knew better. As I turned the Sea Rocket's bow toward the Ocean City inlet, they'd shrug into foul weather gear - pants and jackets with the hoods drawn close and sun glasses worn like goggles. When we came abeam of the of the Ferris wheel and I pressed the throttles full forward, trimming the bow down, and the Detroit Diesels roared and the first spray fell onto the deck, then even the most obtuse passenger realized they'd bought a ticket on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

World's Largest Speedboat

The Rocket was billed as the "World's Largest Speedboat," advertising hyperbole mostly, but her 72 foot length and patriotic paint job were impressive. Her twelve cylinder, twin turbo-charged engines were capable of driving her relentlessly in excess of 20 knots.

She operated out of Ocean City, Maryland, a town with a modest and circumspect population of a few thousand in winter but a summer population that blossomed like pond scum. Gangs of adolescent girls roamed the boardwalk at night while the streets echoed with the thundering exhaust of muscle cars. There was so much sexual posturing the town resembled a bird rookery in breeding season. It was a town haunted by a sense of unreality as if Disney had commissioned Hunter S. Thompson to design a theme park without walls.

We carried one hundred and thirty passengers seated on the exposed decks. When the Rocket pitched into a stiff headwind the effect was stunning. Spray would curl from her bow like spindrift from a breaking wave. Driven by an apparent wind of 40 knots, the spray struck with the impact of birdshot. The passengers bent double with their heads tucked between their legs in the classic crash posture. Spray raked the decks fore and aft. Elaborately styled hair collapsed in ruins. Children squealed. And on rough days when the north wind blew and the beaches were abandoned, the life guards alone in their towers would momentarily lose sight of the Rocket when she became buried in her own bow wave.

With the season well advanced we often ran ten times a day and carried 1200 passengers. The logistics were intimidating. Fifteen minutes typically from the time we secured our mooring lines to the time we slipped them again, exchanging one deckload of passengers for another.

The last run of the day especially amused the crew who were by that time slightly shell-shocked. Women came aboard in pantsuits, elegantly coifed and ready for dinner afterwards. They left looking like accident victims. More than one husband personally thanked me for saving him the cost of an expensive restaurant. And a few mothers accused me of ruining their children's lives.

The woman in pink came onboard for the last run of the day. She was the size, shape and color of the hippos that danced in Disney's Fantasia, wearing a pink t-shirt and pink shorts. She was accompanied by a dwarfish man with a dark scowl. She must have felt herself graced by some special dispensation; she would not get wet no matter our warnings. When she sat in the most exposed seat on the boat the crew looked at each other like kids behind the teacher's back.

The initial run north along the beach was uneventful. The prevailing wind was astern. It wasn't until I turned the Rocket into the wind that the fat lady began to sing, writhing and squealing with the impact of each wave, her hands ineffectively outstretched to defend her enormous body against gallons of salt water launched with the force of a fire hose. Her consort made a comic attempt to shield her body with his own. He ruffled in a threat display whenever I looked aft. And when she left the boat, scowling, her clothes clinging to her mountainous topography, she left behind a pink imprint of her buttocks spanning two seats.

Black Plague & Boatwrights

Fair warning: This post is about widely disparate subjects strung together by apprehension.

Port Townsend occupies the intersection of Admiralty Inlet and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It has always been a haven for cranks and eccentrics, people who dreamed and failed greatly. Port Townsend hosts the annual Wooden Boat Festival, the perennial Wooden Boat Foundation, and arguably the highest density of wooden boatwrights found outside Mystic Seaport.

A wooden boatwright’s art is compelling to a few but marginal to most, who think of it (if they think of it at all) as a quaint recreation like Jamestown, Virginia—people in period costumes doing obscure things without electricity—or a hobby like those enthusiasts who re-enact Civil War battles on weekends. Slightly cracked, of course, but harmless.

In the near future we may have a pressing, practical need for the boatwright’s skill and that of sail makers who can stitch cotton duck by hand and sailors who can handle a cargo schooner in the dog holes of the outer coast.

Warning: jarring change of subject ahead.

I am half-way through the most terrifying book I have ever read. Regrettably, it’s non-fiction.

James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency is fascinating in the same disturbing sense as a traffic accident or a road kill. It’s a reminder of our mortality not just as individuals but as a species.

Kunstler’s premise is that humanity’s continued well-being is precariously balanced on the continued supply of cheap fossil fuels. Without cheap fuel, all the other props supporting our material culture—and the overwhelming burden of our population—begin to snap like wooden scaffolding. We’re talking food production, medicine, transportation, navigation, communications, heating, refrigeration. We’re talking famine, pestilence, warfare, chaos. These are the horsemen of the Apocalypse, folks.

Kunstler argues that our fate is inevitable whether in five or ten or fifty years. I won’t belabor the point. Kunstler’s argument is book length. Suffice it to say that he makes a convincing argument.

I cannot speak to the facts or whether Kunstler’s logic is flawed but his basic premise—that oil and natural gas production will peak within the next few decades, if not the next few years, and then decline—seems uncontested.

I've been so obsessed with this lately that my wife has outlawed the book as a topic of conversation; still I can’t help but think what our world will be like without oil or natural gas to drive the machines. Soon the satellites would fall from the sky and we will be plotting our courses by sextant and dead reckoning again. There will be no blast furnaces to make stainless steel, no fiberglass to shape into hulls, no Dacron to weave into sails. Not to mention famine, pestilence, warfare, and chaos.

To quote from W.B. Yeats, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..."

The Chinese have a traditional curse: May you live in interesting times. If Kunstler’s premise is even partially accurate, then we are likely to live in times far more interesting than the visitation of the black plague on medieval Europe.

Technorati tags: The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler, apocalypse

Dangerous Bourgeoise

James Howard Kunstler’s new book The Long Emergency has been getting considerable play recently, partly because of an excellent marketing effort, mostly because of the book’s incendiary subject matter. That subject, simplified, is that we stand at the peak of our material culture. In another year—maybe five—we’ll begin the descent.

Our economy depends upon a ready supply of cheap oil. Every aspect of our material culture depends upon it—agriculture, transportation, production, security. But cheap oil is about to end. World oil production has peaked—now or in the next few years. We’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. Recent record prices for gas in the U.S. is merely the first wobble in an increasingly unstable economy.

Kunstler’s most salient point is that we don’t have to exhaust our oil reserves to crash the economy. All we need do is begin the slide. The increasing cost of fuel will make the sale of goods transported by a long supply chain unprofitable. It will no longer be possible to make Huarache sandals in China, ship them across the Pacific in cargo containers, haul the containers cross-country to a distribution hub in Ohio, then truck them to a Walmart in Hoboken and still sell them cheaply.

In other words, things are going to get local very quickly.

He also believes there will also be an increasing divide between the affluent and the rest of us. The middle class will be hardest hit and most outraged by their loss of entitlements.

Years ago while working as a marine consultant on the San Francisco Bay, my company was approached by a man preparing the government’s emergency response to a massive earthquake in the Bay Area. Their scenario was that bridges and underpasses would be unsafe to travel, surface transportation impossible, airports incapacitated, and helicopters unavailable—the local pilots preoccupied getting their families out of the devastated area. The only movement would be on the water. He was preparing a mobile, marine, emergency command center.

He told me that government research on the public response to a truly massive disaster indicated the most dangerous segment of the population was not the poor and dispossessed—they have ample experience surviving adversity—but the middle class. The experience of the middle class is mostly limited to well-stocked supermarkets and a line-of-credit thick as an anaconda. Neither would exist three days after the disaster.

They are well-stocked with firearms, however, and after several days watching his family go hungry, the stock broker or middle manager is likely try to take what he needs by force. Personally, I find few things more disconcerting than a man with a receding hairline, midlife paunch, and a 12-gauge shotgun.

Technorati tags: The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler, apocalypse

Missing, Presumed Lost

David Koch’s recent disappearance set me thinking about other losses. In the age of commercial sail when ships often went missing and word traveled only as fast as the wind there were formal hierarchies of loss defined by the underwriters, Lloyds of London predominantly. When a ship was late in arriving at her port of call, she was reported to Lloyds as overdue. When the length of time overdue became worrisome, she was reported missing. And finally, when the silence stretched into months and hope seemed naive, she was reported missing, presumed lost.

Never was a ship declared utterly, definitively lost without a witness, someone who could testify to her death, but when a ship was known to have been wrecked, the place of her loss became an inseparable part of her name—the Andalusia, lost on the Godwin Sands, or the Black Watch, lost off Cape Horn, or the Southern Star, lost in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The formal hierarchy of a man’s loss is measured in days rather than months or years like a ship. Already the authorities are ready to declare David the equivalent of missing, presumed lost. In my mind, at least, his name has become inseparable with a place—David Koch, lost on Grouse Mountain.

Technorati tags: David Koch, Grouse Mountain, ship wreck

Sense of Place

It was said of the old schoonermen who sailed out of Gloucester to fish the Grand Banks that they could place their position by tasting what clung to the bottom of the lead when it was heaved back onboard. They knew the texture, weight, and consistency of what lay fathoms beneath their keels as intimately as a farmer might know the dirt in his fields or an Inuit discern the subtleties of snow.

The lead was shaped into an elongated shot, secured at one end and hollowed at the other. It was armed with tallow or wax poured into the hollow and allowed to cool. When the lead struck bottom, whatever was loose clung to the tacky substance—mud, sand, clay, pebbles, tube worms, bits of shell and the detritus that rained down from the sunlit sea.

The leadline was knotted and the man heaving the lead could feel the knots run through his gnarled fingers. When the line went slack, his hands would know the depth. Four fathoms, he would shout, or six or twelve. And if the line became plumb without slacking, no bottom. It needed a young man to heave the lead far ahead when the boat had a bone in her teeth but an old man to understand the meaning.

It took years of mindfulness to make such fine distinctions. It took intimacy with wind and waves and scudding clouds, storm petrels and humpbacked whales and shoals of cod, bottom topography, currents and water temperatures, time and distance, sunlight and squalls and the temperamental seasons.

I want to know this place where I stand as intimately as those old men knew where they sailed. I want to know what made the dirt, what shapes the wind, what gives weight to the weather. I want to learn the secret lives of the plants and animals and the history of the aboriginal people who first inhabited this place. After a lifetime of wandering, I want to earn a sense of place. In large part, this blog is the record of that desire.

Technorati tags: Grand Banks, lead line, Sense of Place

Lost on Grouse Mountain

David Koch is missing on Grouse Mountain. He has been missing since Wednesday, five nights now, and there remains only a slim probability of his survival.

I met him Tuesday afternoon. He was making a promotional tour for his magazine, DM Review. He had a boyish face and thinning hair. His smile seemed expectant, as if someone were about to deliver a punch line. His conversation was softly spoken and hesitant or perhaps merely polite, paced to encourage interruption. He was, after all, from Wisconsin where time flows like glacial ice.

The Vancouver Sun reported the contents of his rental car left at the base of Grouse Mountain. There was the stuff typical of a business trip—dress shoes, white shirt, black suit, laptop, Blackberry—and the embarrassingly human details—a receipt for a Butterfinger and a nail file bought in Beaverton, Oregon. It’s rather startling like peering from the window of an elevated train into someone’s apartment and witnessing an unguarded moment, a candid gesture or expression that is utterly unimportant and completely human. He liked Butterfingers. It’s simply not something you expect to know about a dead man you met only once.