Passage

For the reader who has never piloted a small vessel from one point to another I thought you might want to spend the day with Charlotte and I as we make a passage from Governor Bay, MI to Harbor Island, MI on northern Lake Huron. Come along with us on Carrie Rose, our 32-foot Nordic Tug and two other tugs. I will say nothing of the years it took to obtain and prepare the boat (and crew) for this trip but only of the process itself. My first thought was to simply sketch the transit, but I am convinced that the fun is in the details, so here goes.

The process starts the day before the voyage. Once we are tucked away for the night—anchor set or tied to a dock—we begin to consider options for the next day’s cruise. Many factors influence this: weather, distance, safety, stores, fuel, our fellow boaters and location, location, location. Charts (paper and electronic), cruising guides, past log notes, recollections and scuttlebutt (a sailor’s word for gossip) are reviewed.

The first consideration is should we even go. If we are in a beautiful spot, why leave. If the weather is iffy, why leave. If we are tired, why leave. The prejudice is to keep moving. It is hard to ignore and on the Great Lakes it is often justified. We motored day after day, twenty-two in all, on our way to Lake Huron from Chicago. At first because the weather cooperated and then because we needed to stay ahead of ill weather that was to bring high winds and waves. In more hospitable climes we might have lingered a little longer in each port but this was not to be. When there is a window of opportunity dive, or rather drive, through it.

Government Bay, MI is a lovely anchorage in the Les Cheneaux Islands or as they are locally known, the Snows. Carrie Rose was anchored in the northwest corner of the bay to cushion herself from blustery NNW winds. Her big Bruce anchor was securely set into mud eighteen feet below the keel and with 70 feet of chain attached to the bow she wasn’t going anywhere.

Since the weather was fair we decided to head east towards De Tour Passage in the morning. The wind was forecast to be light and build to 10 to 15 knots from the west as the day progressed. This meant we would be traveling in a following sea. With the wind behind us we glide. It is definitely preferable to pounding into heavy seas as we did last year. So as far as the weather was concerned it was a go.

The first destination considered was a small cove in Whitney Bay on Drummond Island, MI. To get there we have to avoid several reefs, points of land and one very large lighthouse. As we were not traveling alone the consensus was to skip Whitney Bay in favor of Harbor Island, MI. This lengthened the trip by about 8 miles (for the purpose of our discussion distances stated are nautical miles). To reach Harbor Island we need to round the before mentioned lighthouse and travel north through De Tour Passage. But I get ahead of myself.

I have a night-before-cruising-ritual. I study the charts, and on the chart plotter and/or the MacBook Air’s navigational program create a route for the next day’s journey. It is how I familiarize myself with the path ahead. The route, while not automatic, keeps me engaged and though not cast in stone often takes me precisely where I am going. To do this I need to create waypoints. Waypoints are specific locations defined by their latitude and longitude. I follow them across the seascape. They are identified on the charts and represent turns, hazards, navigational aids, harbors, etc., etc. I have navigated this way since GPS became available. It has its good and bad points but overall I doubt many cruisers would go back to the not so distant pre-GPS times, so let’s keep those satellites flying!

In the morning I wake a little edgy. It is hard to enjoy breakfast. I have some tea or coffee, the usual toast with peanut butter and jelly but I am more focused on the day ahead. The first task, that is after I rid the boat of the overnight spider carnage, is to go into the engine room. This is a familiar space. It is not big but it is efficiently laid out. I look in the bilge to make sure no new fluids have appeared overnight. I scan the engine’s coolant level; check the oil and the fuel filter. Then I chill out and just look at the valves, hoses, pumps, and all the components that make us a viable boat. Once I am satisfied that the engine room is in order I move to the pilothouse.

Departure is usually 8 or 9 AM. Today we have 28 nautical miles to travel, so 9 o’clock is a reasonable time to leave. The boat is made ready. This means securing every object that might fly through the air or slide across the floor. Even on calm days experience has taught us that we never know what awaits us on the water. The fewer surprises the better.

Now in the pilothouse I take the covers off the instruments. The Furuno radar and the EchoPilot forward-sounding depth sounder occupy the space to my upper left. Directly in front of the wheel are the engine instruments, another depth sounder, the rudder angle indicator and various switches for windshield wipers, heat, anchor and running lights, and the bilge pump. To the right is the single handle topped with a maroon knob that controls the throttle along with forward and reverse. The next level forward has a portable VHF radio, two ancient Garmin GPS’s, a fan, and a small chawan (tea bowl) in which I store pens, pencils, a knife and the family band radio along with whatever insects that have manage to crawl in and die.

In front of this is an empty space where the computer resides and beyond that the regal Ritchie compass reigns over all the electronics. Directly above and a little to the right are two VHF radios and a defunct Loran-C. Despite the above there is still space for charts to the right and the left. There is more below. The bow thruster control, the generator’s gauges and start switch, DC and AC electrical panels, and an inverter to keep the computer charged. It is a lot of equipment to deal with and we have a simple boat compared to most.

But this must be getting boring. Let’s see if we can get Carrie Rose moving. To leave the anchor has to be raised. I go to the back of the boat and fetch the hose that attaches to the wash down pump. I use this to wash the mud and debris that collects on the chain and the anchor. They live down the little hole into the bowels of the boat. It is best to clean them to keep the boat from reeking. As 9 o’clock approaches I remember that I am not travelling alone and the other two boats are following a similar process. It is time to start the engine and energize the bow thruster. The gauges are scanned for any abnormalities and once the oil pressure alarm turns off we are ready to go.

Maybe I should stop here and explain what a bow thruster is. Whoever the person was to think it a good idea to drill a hole sideways through the front of the boat is on par with the person who realized that airports could be made into shopping malls. A bow thruster does just what it says; thrust the bow to the port or starboard. For a barely maneuverable boat like mine it was a revelation. It is used at idle to control the boat while docking or turning in tight channels. It also helps when in reverse. Without it the boat goes where it wants but with it I can put it where I want it, within reason that is. I do not want to sound too cocky should the marine deities or gremlins hear me and choose to put me in my place.

So, now it is finally time to raise the anchor. It should be firmly dug into the bottom after spending the night holding us in place. It should not want to come out. I take the supplemental line off. This line stretches and acts as a shock absorber to take the strain off the chain’s attachment to the bow. Then I make sure I am clear of the chain and the windlass, and start to shorten the chain. It is done in spurts. A little chain and the boat moves forward, a little more and a little more until the anchor is out of the water and stored on deck. Now the boat is free of its earthly attachment. I tidy up and we are on our way.

To be continued next month . . .

Conveyance

We are in Wisconsin now. We got here in our Nordic Tug. It is our conveyance of choice, except that is when we are on terra firma. Then it is a Subaru Outback. The Subaru has a certain cache about it, but it is a boring station wagon. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining especially when I am trying to get in or out of my garage in a blizzard. Then I think this is the best damn boring station wagon ever made.

What I am noticing here is the multiplicity of Harley Davidsons. Of course I know they are made in Milwaukee. I am not that dumb. But still there are a lot of them and everyone that I see is different. They are all customized to some extent. They are a labor of love, and I am sure that the gruff guys and gals that drive them dream of the low lumbering sound in the middle of the winter.

A friend just bought a hot rod VW. It is 4-wheel drive and for such a small car has a tremendous amount of horsepower. Of course this is not enough horsepower so it will be modified to have even more tremendous horsepower. It seems he thinks it is his last chance to have a muscle car and he is probably correct about this.

I have been thinking in a similar vein. After lusting over a suitable RV, that is if one can lust over an RV, and realizing that a VW camper van was not going to work, I changed tack completely. My new scheme consists of a used Corvette (I have wanted one since I toured the Corvette assembly plant in Tennessee) to travel from national park to national park. I figure I will lease it for the summer from CarMax and trade it in for something more practical in the fall. And for some strange reason my wife thinks this is not a bad idea. We will see . . .

This summer, as the last, we are spending three months on Carrie Rose. The only definitive date is to be in St. Ignace, MI by June 20. I think we can do this, weather permitting, but last year to get there a day late we had to motor through the Straits of Mackinac in the fog. My hope is not to repeat this again as I would like to grow old and cantankerous, and every hour spent in dense fog shortens a life equivalently.

Other conveyances I have dreamed of are vintage BMW motorcycles (I have an un-ridden one), a Mazda Miata, a two-seater Mercedes of a certain vintage, a BD-5 (look it up), a Thomas Morris Annie (another one to look up), a Nordhavn 46 (okay, I will quit telling you) and the new, not yet released, Honda Jet. This last one has made me rethink my life. If I had known it would exist I would have tried hard to make a fortune that I could then squander on a machine like this.

For the time being I am not doing too bad. For me it has always been essential to dream, actually daydream. All those idle thoughts that coalesce without knowing it, and then one day the stuff you thought you were wasting your time dreaming about comes true. It is amazing when it does. It is as if you need to be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.

I suppose this is what the conveyance is about. Not so much rubber on the road, water under the keel or wind over the wings. It is the realization of a dream.

June 2012

Inevitable

In my line of work I confront the inevitable daily. On more challenging days every 15 minutes can bring another life altering revelation. Enough water has passed under my bridge that prognosticating is less subjective then it use to be. Numbers tell the story of kidney, liver and pancreatic function, of blood sugar and fat and thyroids. The ultimate measure is blood pressure, only five (hopefully not six) digits and a /.

Across from me the numbers sit. I am amazed how many people will pay the co-pay for a sniffle but are unwilling to make the same commitment for diabetes, hypertension, elevated cholesterol and the various diseases that stem from them.
Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, each encounter is custom made. Even if you do not realize it you are being a fitted for haute couture or tailored for a suit from Saville Row. The doctor is someone who has devoted their life to their craft and so many hours that most are enigmas even to their families. It is not often you bump into such expertise and think so little of it.

With my time in practice now measured in decades I spend the visit watching for subtle signs of disease. Of course much of what I do has nothing to do with a patient’s well being but instead with placating legal, governmental and insurance bureaucracies. But today I am thinking about the patient—with their numbers—sitting across from me.

I watch and listen. I lay on hands and stethoscope. I gaze into various orifices, and look at slides of secretions and peruse the numbers on the screen in front of me. If we had a past visit I hope the specialist’s recommendation made it into the electronic medical record, as well as any tests results. And then I sit back (not too far as I am only on a stool) and in the few seconds allotted to me, put the above into context, offer a plan and wait for feedback.

In the past few years this process has been derailed. Now in many encounters the process is reversed. Patients have been empowered by Google. The plan comes first and the person waiting (or not) is the patient not me. I respond in various ways to this depending on first impressions, as I have not been able to follow my usual protocol.

If the patient is hale and hardy but convinced they have an exotic wasting disease I have been known to chuckle. It is not intentional. It just has to do with the shear improbability of the situation. I know I should not discount their concerns but I also know there is no reality to this encounter. Often their concerns lead to demands for specific tests. Many of which I have never heard of or have no idea of how to order.

Medicine is a scientific art. Ask any real scientist and they will tell you that most physicians practice a black art. I agree with them. Several things that set aside a MD/DO from a Ph.D. are the need to make time constrained decisions and the fact that biology is fickle, no double blind controlled studies here. This is best represented, in its most extreme form, by a Code. It is the situation that most unnerved me as an intern. And I am not just talking about the heart related codes. There are also Code Whites for violent behavior and Code Reds for fire. Each presents a different challenge.

This brings to mind the several months I worked as an intern at a particularly dysfunction, now defunct hospital. I would manage to drag myself to the call room for an hour’s fitful sleep after a night laboring on the floors. Without taking off my scrubs I’d fling myself onto the grubby bed inhabited by the ghosts of interns past. With eyes forced shut I tried to ignore the ever-present list of tasks that resided in my pocket. For a few minutes before the sun crept up onto the surface of Lake Michigan I hoped to sleep.

Each night that I was on call, just as I dosed off a heavily accented voice would announce a Code Red. The implausible certainty of this was maddening. To complicate matters further sirens could be heard far off in the distance. Why am I telling you this, because I had to make a decision: ignore what was in all likelihood a false alarm and catch twenty minutes of shut eye, or burn up in my sleazy little bed.

Ask your self, what would you do. Remember, put it the context of not having slept for several months, of being sticky and dirty from the 36 hours of work, of having gunky stuff in the corner of each eye and greasy hair. Context is every thing. What did I do—I got up, usually in time for the code to be called off. By then sleep was impossible. Like a zombie I wandered back into the hospital, pulled the list out of my pocket and pickup where I left off.

Another time at a more collegial institution I tucked myself in for what would be on most nights a more reasonable sleep. There were nights here where I even dreamed, that is when my fellow cellmate wasn’t fending off the occasional mouse. But one night, with the beginnings of REM fluttering in my eyes, a Code White was called on the psychiatric unit. This along with rehab and the telemetry units were my responsibility.

No hesitation this time, I got up and made my way to the sequestered corner of the hospital that housed the psych unit. Its design was fatally flawed. The nursing station was located in the rear and even though I pounded on the door no one responded. Worried now but with intimate knowledge of the layout I entered through a common door from the pediatric unit (another fatal design flaw).

Once there I joined forces with the security guard, and several large male and one petit female nurse. As most interns figure out, you have the ultimate responsibility with the least experience. The fact of being thrust into this position builds character and depending how you handled yourself, respect.

The Code White was due to a large ferocious male patient. He had threatened the staff and with some effort had been corralled into a small room. Now he was threatening to break out and create more havoc. Eyes turned towards me. I was so tired that any lack of confidence faded away and I made a quick decision. A syringe was loaded up with Haldol, given to the petit and agile nurse, and the rest of us stormed the patient and subdue him. He rapidly calmed down and I was left to salvage what I could of the few remaining hours before life returned to the hospital.

My training was full of decisions. It was inevitable. I draw upon them now as I sit across from my patient. I wait for a response to my entreaties. I know that inescapable results will follow. My mind’s eye sees the future playing out. If I get the wrong answer my heart pangs. I have not gotten through to them. I failed and I express it, often in the stark language of disease.

I think of the procedures, of wasted time and treasure, of shortened lives. I am not always right, but more often right then wrong. I have experience on my side. But life goes on, and I have had to become somewhat immune to pain and suffering. It is inevitable after all. Gautama Buddha taught us this thousands of years ago.

May 2012

Blank

I cannot explain it but when Charlotte and I turned Carrie Rose, our 32-foot Nordic Tug, south from Canada last summer my mind went blank. I usually wait for a word to materialize before I begin to write. A story is typically attached and one finger at a time 700 to 1000 words appear. It is an automatic process remarkable for its consistency over the last half decade, but as I said the “Word” eluded me.

The Word has become a companion. It keeps me occupied. I sit and write and let my mind wander without restraint, neurons fire and the results pixelate onto the screen. It is expansive rather than absorptive.

A cup of espresso or a bowl of matcha in the early afternoon will often stimulate word smithing. The caffeine replaces afternoon languor with a creative edginess. It makes dinner seem far off and fills an otherwise empty space. I can relate to this aspect of my Italian ancestor’s life style. Around the beginning of August caffeine stopped inspiring. I have had to struggle to get even this far, but I am confidence that the Word lurks close by and will intercede if I persist.

Carrie Rose’s pilothouse is a quiet place where inspiration can be found, but that is when I am swinging on our mooring in Chicago’s Montrose Harbor. It was not a writer’s sanctuary on our extended cruise last summer. Cruisers are a gregarious lot. There are many distractions. Granted there are some loners who anchor out and live spartan lives, but even they will talk your ear off when on land.

The other quandary is Carrie Rose herself. She is irresistibly cute and conjures up all types of romantic visions. Passers-by are compelled to share these with me. At first it was a novelty. I was proud to have a conveyance that stirred so many souls. Now, after eight years of ownership it has become a bit taxing. I am polite as I divulge specifications and handling characteristics. I am careful about being too opinionated, not wanting to ruin any dreams because what is cruising about if not dreams.

And dream I do, of far off ports, bigger boats and new equipment, both the mundane and the exotic. I dream as I lie awake looking out the forward hatch at the stars. I dream while asleep, though not as peacefully. For unknown reasons my boat dreams are complicated. It may be the stress of being afloat. There are many responsibilities. Or it may be my place to work on issues I do not realize I have while on land.

My ill ease with blankness surprises me. After years spent reading and thinking about emptiness I now realize it is a foreign concept. I fancy myself an enlightened individual, but alas I am a fraud. A fraud that feels awkward without a mind full of thoughts. So I am back where I started from: a longhaired teenager groping for meaning and looking for direction. I thought I had found it in the Word but I see now this was a mistake. Dependence has lead to grief.

Of course what will it matter if I never write another word? The vast majority of humanity never wrote another word once out of high school, if they ever got that far. My father was one. He was denied an education due to what we would now call socio-economic factors, and then was called the depression, WWII, poverty and discrimination. It was a constant source of embarrassment for him even if he rarely voiced his true feelings. When he did I would try to comfort him. It did not work, so maybe I am trying to even the score with the universe.

Since my almost illiterate upbringing I dreamed of writing. I practiced in various ways, so when the time came I would be prepared. After the age of 16 I never let a word pass I did not know the meaning of. I kept a journal, which started with a type of poetry and later evolved into prose. I wrote haphazardly about travels, relationships, frustrations and milestones.

I tried to study grammar and finally gave up the didactic approach, and just read to see what more accomplished writers were doing with commas, semicolons and colons. Funny, nobody did the same thing. Once I realized this I was liberated.

Now it is time to get back to the real world or my perception of it, blank as it may be. I am grateful that anyone cares about my dissection of experience. The Word is my contribution to civil discourse and I hope it will continue to visit me for many decades. I will not bother to understand why it abandoned me last summer. Maybe it was the great expanse of clear fresh water we traversed that wiped my slate clean, now isn’t that is a pleasant thought.

April 2012

Leaves

Green leaves, purple crocuses and red-orange robins are surely a confirmation of spring with a capital “S”. All seen, prematurely I think for this early in March, as I got out of the house and went for a walk to inspect the neighborhood. Almost a reason for a dog, but no, I will pass on that.

To make it through my 58th February is a great achievement. I cannot say that it was without foreboding. This streak of pessimism is what sets us Midwesterners apart from coastal inhabitants. My sentence this year was cut 10 days short by a trip to Costa Rica. Ninety-degree heat to languish in, wild painted birds to spy on, twisting turning roads to negotiate and hot springs to soak in; not a bad stretch in paradise.

Somehow winter vacations feel fake, like cheating fate. Try as I may I can’t help but look over my shoulder. It is as if the black-cloaked symbol of Death in Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal follows me around. I know I know it is an overreaction. This is a fault I have been working on since teenager-hood. I blame it on the disappearance of my Etruscan lineage or maybe it is my Sicilian side’s fault, probably both.

There is so much to tell while on vacation that I find it hard to just send a postcard. Sights and sounds, taste and smells, language and art are the things that make a trip worthwhile, and I want to expound on them. I have not even mentioned the inhabitants. They are the most intriguing part of the experience. Farmers and ship captains in Norway, cellist and luthiers in Italy, tea masters and potters in Japan, historians and artist in NYC, I have met them all. It is fun to lie in bed during the twilight between wake and sleep, and wonder what they are up to in their different time zones.

But back at home green leaves signal it is time to get in the garden, all 400 square feet of it. It needs raking, weed-and-feeding, soil turning and winter damage repairing. This year the garage should get new trim and a coat of paint. And the house deserves to have its cracks filled. Its been ignored for years. The cost will be astronomical but then we have to live somewhere.

It is also time to reacquaint ourselves with neighbors who disappear every year from November to March. New projects are proposed and maybe, if lucky, completed. Each year I hope for more trees and less concrete, and seem to get more of the latter. Parking pads migrate from the alley to the back steps, stone and brick decks are set into the grass, new garages appear, there seems to be no end to the construction even in the small spaces we visually share.

Green leaves also signal for the windows to be opened. I hear the house say—ahhh! Early warm spells arrive with strong gusty winds from the Gulf. This sets the local collection of chimes chiming. I am not sure why mine, the progenitor, has silently lived in the basement for the last few years. I guess it decided the neighborhood was noisy enough. I think I will pull it out of storage and add its sonorous tones to the choir.

The green, purple and reds bring vibrancy to Chicago. It endears the city to me and I am not sure if I could claim this if I spent the winters in a higher climate zone. Does this mean that I need to suffer to reap the rewards of springtime . . . I think not. That would be too soap operatic. Better to get out in the backyard and move dirt, paint trim and fill cracks, so there will be time to visit when summer comes with a capital “S”!

March 2012

Water

When was it decided I prefer to travel by water rather than by land? Unofficially it began at eleven but the seed was planted much earlier. Planted in utero by a cheerful, curious and fearless father whose positive nature overwhelmed a reticent, practical mother.

The first boat I boarded was a small well-loved sailboat floating in Chicago’s northern most harbor. I had been asked to crew by my friend Larry’s father. I think I was Larry’s surrogate. He had no interest in spending any more time with his father then he had to. I found myself amongst thirty-something wild men and one demure female—the consort of the captain. As you would expect from a crowd of sailors this was my first exposure to bawdy humor and language. Though the details are murky, my fellow crewmembers did not hold their saltiness in check due to my presence.

Quite a bit of beer was drunk during and after the Wednesday night races. This fueled the complete reliving of every tack and jibe in vivid detail. The same level of detail was exercised towards the captain and the captain’s mate. Mind you none of this was subterfuge. It was out in the open to enjoy, and I blushed as I tried to comprehend the exact nature of the comments. The birds and the bees never materialized in an organized fashion for me. So I puzzled and dreamed and longed for when I would be part of the cognoscenti. I think the crew shared in my dreams for I never saw another woman grace our little goddess of a sailboat, Tien Hou.

Tien Hou, the protector of sailors and fisherman, and my protector from the frigid waters of an unforgiving Great Lake. Tien Hou’s thin glass shell nuzzled me as I lay between her two halves: wet, nauseous, scared and tired. After my initial race she heeled and took me the twenty miles back to her harbor where I quickly evacuated and swore never to come back. Within a few days I returned chastised and ready to race again.

Nothing and everything has changed in the 50 years since then: now a captain and not crew; now a propeller and not a sail. Now I lie in my floating home and wonder what would it be like if I had never taken that first sail? I would be frustrated and unfulfilled. I am sure of it.

I continue to get wet, scared and occasionally wonder if it isn’t time to call it quits. I know it will be over one of these days and so I work on my legacy of hard fought dreams. As my mother journeyed into her nineties we had many discussions that concerned her childhood. Memories suppressed by the demands of daily living that now, without the faculties to deal with the present world, wandered out from the recesses of her mind. They surfaced and countless hours were spent discussing the facts of the first few decades of her life.

My plan is to spend the end of my life, if not physically on the water then spiritually in a watery world of my own making. I can sense it now as I sit at my kitchen table with the first winter storms converging from the north and southwest. With the boat gently rocking and yawing beneath me I look out the pilothouse window and see the chiseled skyline of Chicago shimmering in the heat of a summer night. I hear the whoosh of the Rhode 19’s catching gusts of wind as they round the point of the harbor.

I feel the sway and buck of a seiche’s contrary wind and current as low and high-pressure systems battle it out on the lake. The harbor fills and empties three, four, five feet, repeatedly stirring up the beer can strewn mud from the bottom and depositing it on the surface of what is usually clear steely water.

There are wild nights. Nights where 50 mph squalls pull the mooring lines taut, and except for the worst of them, make a cozy boat cozier. I watch nature play out its fury and in the process fill the dingy with water. I don yellow foul weather gear, and with Charlotte close at hand least I miss step, bail water out of the little boat so it does not disappear beneath the waves.

Days of heat and days of cold; days of glorious cruising and days of frustrating repairs; days and nights full of wonder because what is holding me up is hard and soft, comforting and deadly, eternal and ever changing. It moves without moving. It falls and rises with the wind, the moon and the rain. It is translucent and opaque.

It recreates itself in an instant, and I too morph as I float, levitated on its positive and negative charges. Hydrogen and oxygen bound together in a mutual relationship that parts for the bow and fills in aft without a trace. Affecting without being affected. Changing without being changed. Water!

February, 2012

Three

I am not sure about good luck but bad luck comes in threes. At least if I am having a run of bad luck I hope it will end at three. After three disasters I suppose our ancient forebears would start to think about sacrificing a virgin—male or female depending on their proclivities—to appease whatever gods they were worshiping at the time.

Right at the outset I have to say I am not a great believer in luck. Luck and superstition are two sides of the same coin, and the thought of giving up my free will to the willy-nilly nature of a universe I cannot control gives me no comfort. My approach is to be aware of my environment and ready to accept what comes my way. What is the saying, luck favors a prepared mind.

But I admit I have been the recipient of dumb luck even as I deny belief in it. I suppose fate, karma or kismet might be alternative terms, but these have other implications associated with them. No, luck is just luck. No substitution needed.

Why does bad luck come in threes? Three is just a prime number divisible by one and itself. It could be that three has a personality like in 6-6-6 for the devil or 9-1-1 for an emergency. I was raised with the Holy Trinity: The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost. The Hindu religion has the Trimurti: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva, and their wives the Tridevi: Saraswati, Lakshmi and Parvati.

A minor chord has three notes: a root, a minor third and a perfect fifth. The Japanese haiku favors three lines to describe the universe. And of course there are the supposed trivial numbers we live with so intimately that we forget their existence: area codes, the three numbers of our high school locker’s combination lock, and our social security and phone numbers that split into three segments.

There must be something that makes us pick three. Maybe our collective psyche has decided that groupings of three are just more interesting and thus easier to remember.

There are many Rules of Three from mathematics, to medicine, literature, statistics, etc., etc. And now that I think of it, good luck weighs in here too: the third time’s a charm. But this assumes you have failed twice before, so it is not altogether an uplifting story.

Last summer while cruising on the Great Lakes two of our fellow travelers and us had a series of mishaps. You guessed it, three. Due to the other side of the coin—superstition—I have been cautioned against uttering the precise details in print. I will respect this wish. After the third mishap we three invoked the rule of three and it held true until we all arrived safely home.

Where do I go from here? Is this story about the number three or about luck, maybe neither. It is a point to jump off into a stream of consciousness. After all our life is made up of action and consequences. If they are grouped in three, so be it. If they are not, so what. Superstition, astrology, horoscopes and soon video poker should not bind our lives. They limit the self.

As a young man I consulted the I Ching’s tripartite view of the world thinking it a benign tool. My mistake was treating it as a philosophical toy. Study that could have gone into something productive went into an endeavor that hindered my growth for many years. It was as if I had time traveled and altered history, my history. Was its prediction inevitable, I doubt it. Could I have ignored it, certainly. Could I forget it, never!

It is the coin’s double sided nature again. Now I know to stay rooted in the irrefutable laws of the physical world and leave parapsychology to the psychic. Bad luck and good will come no matter, in ones or twos or threes. We live in an ever-expanding universe, take advantage of it. Stand in the clear frigid night and sense the movement of the cosmos. Revel in its vastness and beauty. Use the time to describe the world, in three lines:

Freezing nights upon us —
Hiroshije’s prints
Expand on reality.

January 2012

Horizon

In my Chicago neighborhood a horizon is hard to come by. I venture to the shore of Lake Michigan or travel vertically to the upper floors of skyscrapers to when I need to see one. This is the legacy of our glacial past, which left us with barely a hill to stand upon. Far from being discouraged by this, I have searched out unique horizons for most of my life. Most are memorable for their association with the sun, but not all.

In the east, Florida’s sun coalesces from a deformed reddish glow that comes from deep below the Atlantic’s horizon only to set a white-hot orb amidst the cheers of the revelers at the tip of North America. And in the West off the California coast, the naked sun unceremoniously plunges into the cold Pacific. In the middle of Lake Michigan it rises and sets with no hint of the influence of land. And as a young man I watched the golden globe rise and set over a horizon of the picturesque islands of the Aegean and the Adriatic, not to mention the vast Mediterranean Sea.

Then, as impossible is seems, there is the lack of sunrise and sunset. In the seas above the Arctic Circle the sun heads straight for the horizon and inexplicably starts back up while still high in the sky permeating everything in a golden fluorescence. In the same region’s deep valleys the sun secrets itself behind mountain silhouettes only to hint at its magnificence. This premature horizon makes winter seem endless.

In Osaka I stood opened jawed before the window of a high rise hotel and I watched the staccato skyline taper off into the distance demarcated by the sickly glow of mercury vapor. Then after a sleepless night I watched it inundated with the ghostly mingling of dew and smog.

On a recent afternoon with the sun high in the sky I sat waiting for the traffic light on Balbo Street to change. I looked east across Lake Shore Drive and focused from the street, to the deserted harbor, and finally, settled on Four Mile Crib sitting three miles east of Monroe Harbor.

At first the horizon appeared flat but this was an illusion. The water close to shore was sheltered from the Northwest wind and barely showed a ripple. Further out though, the horizon was roiling. The closer I focused the more detail I discerned at the interface between the water and the sky. Waves were galloping south in riotous fashion with white caps decorating the peaks and a deep cerulean blue concealing the troughs.

The detail was millimeters thick. I felt as if I was looking at it with the oil lens of a microscope. Then a horn blared and the moment was lost. I raced across the intersection and turn north towards home. I was glad not to be on the lake that day.

This summer I had a similar experience. A stiff east wind had been blowing along Lake Huron’s length for several days, so when I left my snug anchorage that morning I resigned myself to a lumpy ride west toward Mackinac Island. This time instead of sitting at a traffic light I was steaming south through DeTour Passage between Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Drummond Island with Lake Huron before me.

Again I focused on the horizon. That is after dodging the two crisscrossing ferries and then steering clear of a several-football-field long lake freighter. It had descended from St. Mary’s River and was also bearing for the freedom of the open lake.

On its southern end the DeTour Reef Lighthouse demarcates DeTour Passage from the lake. It is an imposing structure that sits in solitude surrounded by water and submerged rocks. A somber sight on any day, it was especially so this cool gray day with low clouds scudding overhead. The horizon beyond it was as alive as the one I watched off Balbo Street, but this time I was heading straight for it at 7 knots.

Maneuvering in large seas can be nerve racking. I wonder how the boat and crew will take the assault. Neither, especially the former, has let me down and this time was no different. We were lifted onto the swells and glided off their backsides into the troughs. It is difficult to describe being a part of all this moving water. That is for another time.

Once amongst the waves the horizon disappears. Your worldview shrinks to what can be seen and felt within a few boat lengths. The next horizon I remember was in Little Traverse Bay where it was tinted by a perfect amber sunset that melted into the lake and into my memory.

Maybe it is because I have lived my life deprived of horizons that I hold fiercely onto the memory of each. Maybe it is how the sun and the earth play this game of sunrises and sunsets, vying to see who will be the most spectacular. But probably it is the realization that each one is unique: one time, one meeting (ichigo, ichie). Never to be repeated again.

Time has a way of focusing the mind especially at this time of year. I remind myself not to become complacent. Not to hunker down in my neighborhood of bungalows and wait for Spring but to venture out and seek the next horizon.

December, 2011

Nature

Late one stormy night while driving the back roads of Chicago I spied Mr. Fox and Mr. Rabbit in close proximity. The former was on the move with his long bushy tail trailing straight out behind him, except that is when he stopped to mark every other tree. The latter, with ears erect and tracking, looked alert despite being as still as Michelangelo’s David.

To the north lie the crumbling wall of an ancient cemetery, and to the south a tall uninviting, but unobtrusive green corrugated metal fence of a large industrial concern. My wife’s relatives repose just over the north wall and it is also the location of my first summer job where I most likely cut the grass around their graves. Thus it, the cemetery, is a familiar place. Not in the least creepy or at least not until I saw Mr. Fox and began to think of his nighttime exploits.

He looked dusky, as all city dwelling animals tend to look. Go to the suburbs and the squirrel’s fur radiates multiple hues, but here in my bungalow’s backyard they come in any color as long as it is dull grey. And that goes for the sparrows and possums. I am not sure about the skunks. I only smell them as they pass under my backyard windows. Of all the animals that inhabit my little corner of Chicago the raccoons seem the exception. They always look fit and well groomed, even as I try to extricate them from the attic.

But that is beside the point, let me not get distracted. The sight of the rabbit’s close call further confirmed my thoughts, thoughts of the seriousness of the natural world. I see a dog wag its tail and smile, a cat purrs in my lap and I anthropomorphize them. But I think if set free without a loving human to feed them, they would quickly turn on me to satisfy their hunger.

The natural world is an unforgiving place. We have done a marvelous job of isolating ourselves from it, but occasionally I seek it out. I have traveled to unruly lands: Israel moments before the Yom Kippur War, Northern Ireland in the first year of the Troubles and Greece during the junta. Closer to home I have hiked in the wilderness home of the grizzly and summited a few 12,000 foot peaks and even closer, I have spent many days on the blue waters of the Great Lakes.

Of all the time spent on the Great Lakes, many more hours have been consumed contemplating the weather. I know that if I make a mistake I am in for an unpleasant experience, if not a dangerous one. I hope for an uneventful passage. More than hope, I plan for it, and contrary to popular opinion I often remember an uneventful voyage and forget a bad one.

The natural world is not divorced from the middle of the city. How many life and death struggles take place each evening. Late one afternoon as I walked to the now destroyed Michael Reese Hospital parking structure I heard the shrill cries of a mother squirrel and her baby. The dense hedges that surrounded the parking garage supported a remarkable diversity of creatures and it was there that I witnessed the drama.

I went searching for the commotion and saw a large crow, several times the size of the mother squirrel, raiding the nest with a yelping baby squirrel between its beak. I startled the crow causing it to drop the baby. Mother squirrel quickly grabbed her baby by the fur and fled back to the nest. The crow did not hesitate to bound up and kidnap the baby once again. The mother’s unrestrained aggression towards the crow was futile, it barely noticed her.

I decided that as unseemly as this spectacle was, I best not get involved. Turning away I dare not look back. This was nature playing out its destiny. It was on a smaller scale than on the plains of Africa or the northern reaches of the Americas where lions and wolves cull the herds of antelope and caribou, but it was just as sobering.

This event came back to me as I watched the fox and the rabbit’s paths cross. For all our preconceived notions while sitting in the comfortable cocoon of modernity, the natural world is unrelenting. I have no illusions that the lake is concerned with my well being. If I get roughed up on the way to the next port I am grateful to reach safe harbor. Just as I am sure that Mr. Rabbit was, in some rabbit way, happy to have escaped the notice of Mr. Fox . . . for this time at least.

Waves

Surfing down a wave in a 17,000 pound 32 foot piece of pointed plastic can be simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. The noise resembles a washing machine’s spin cycle. As I am lucky enough to have a functioning autopilot I stay ready to slide off my comfortable seat and disengage it to save our little ship. If I did not have one then I would have already anticipated what the following wave was going to do and started to correct for it.

Each boat responds in a unique way and each wave presents a different challenge. Waves come in waves. On the Great Lakes, my hub of experience, they come in series of sixes or sevens. Each series is characterized by increasingly larger waves. Occasionally one is demarcated by a large wave out of proportion to the others. Waves in the Great Lakes have a short period (the time between crest) of about 6 to 8 seconds, so it can be several minutes between series. And within that cycle there are even longer cycles, which generate larger waves. These big ones sneak up on you.

The Perfect Storm made us familiar with rogue waves. Of course I am not talking about anything on that scale. The waves on our fresh water lakes are known more for their steep close packed nature than their towering size. Our waves beat you to pulp with their quick repeatability, rather than engulf you whole like those of the oceans. That said, remember the Edmund Fitzgerald and beware.

If driving into them, we pound; if traveling across, we swing like an upside-down metronome. If they are behind, well, then we slow as we get sucked back into the troughs, and speed up as we are lifted and flung forward by the front of the approaching wave. Speed can increase from 5 to 12 knots in an instant. Some following waves quietly gurgle as they pass. Others pick up the stern to a point where gravity takes over and starts the boat careening into the wave that has just passed.

It is then that the boat does something usually the purview of young bleached blond men and women on exotic islands, surf. The boat feels lively and light as it skips along on the foaming water of the breeching wave. When the speed of the wave matches that of the boat, the rudder loses it grip and the boat starts to turn right across the offending wave. This (broaching is the technical term) cannot be allowed to happen.

If sideways to a sizable wave it can overwhelm and flipped the boat over on its side or worse. I turn the wheel as far to the left as possible, far enough to feel the rudder bite into the water and the bow begins to swing to the left. Of course I do not want to go too far that way either, so a bit before the neutral point I bring the wheel back to center.

All this takes several very long seconds and thankfully large waves, in most cases, herald the beginning of a new series with smaller waves in the forefront. I take a breath and recover my heading. Once in a stable rhythm the autopilot is reengaged. I sit back to wait for the next one to appear. It may or may not, so I keep alert.

I have been at the helm of many boats from square sided tubs to sleek double enders. From heavy cruising boats to ultra light racers. All behave differently. My present boat does not sail but powers through the water pushed in front of a large four bladed propeller with over two hundred pounds of torque behind it. It seldom exhibits any strain despite the conditions it finds itself in.

She — the boat — has a fine entry that flattens out to a shallow V and ends in a broad, billboard like stern. The tons of water that make up a following wave love to push it around, but thanks to a large rudder and a long deep keel it is not often bested.

The operative word here is often. Off of Michigan’s Little Sable Point this year an odd combination of wind, waves and terrain, both above and below the water, twist us in such a fashion to dislodge furniture, nick-knacks and anything else not Velcro-ed down, including us. It occurred with such a noise that I considered, if only for a second, the sanity of being out on the water.

In another boat, like our former Swedish sailboat Lenore, the wave would have simply parted at the stern and passed by with a whoosh. Lenore loved — more than me — strong winds and big seas. She had a hidden stern as fine and pointed as her bow. A boring boat in anything less than 15 knots of wind she became more comfortable as conditions worsened. Once her sail was shortened she would steer herself, managing tacks and gybes with ease.

Lovely she was, but slow and cramped and so Carrie Rose, the 17,000 pound piece of pointed plastic, replaced her in 2003. We traded ocean-crossing ability for the RV comforts of a coastal cruiser. A good choice overall, but a choice that has me wishing for her when the waves get their dander up and start to carry us downwind on another adventure.

October 2011

Rocks

Rocks are not a big part of my life in Chicago. There is the occasional one I dig out of the garden and sometimes I find myself admiring the fossils that reside in the stone that make up the buildings downtown. But that is about it. I found John McPhee’s Basin and Range interesting but geology was my least favorite science in college. I admit to a fascination with Japanese rock gardens and the Japanese veneration of particular rocks. Last year I sat at the edge of the Ryoan-ji dry rock garden in Kyoto and quietly soaked in the ambiance.

But in the Northern reaches of Michigan and into Canada the rocks demand attention. The farther north Charlotte and I traveled from Chicago the more subservient the environment became to its rocks: telephone poles are supported by piles of rocks at their base because there is no soil to bury them, foundations that only go down inches rather than feet, and minimal top soil—most of it having been pushed to central Illinois by the glaciers that scraped this area down to bedrock.

Rocks define the North Channel of Ontario where Carrie Rose, our 32’ Nordic Tug, carried us this spring and summer. Our attention was directed to avoiding the multitude of barely submerged rocks that inhabit these waters. To keep from hitting them we used our eyes, two sets of charts, several local cruising guides, an outdated Garmin chart plotter, an even older back-up GPS and a newly purchased navigation program for my MacBook with another GPS plugged into its USB port. Believe me we needed them all.

After much travail I was able to load the computer with the current Canadian and U.S. charts. They display rocks that mariners have been charting since Admiral Bayfield made his way here in the early 1800s. But there is no guarantee that the charted rocks will be where they are supposed to be and that uncharted ones will miraculously surface. Every cruising guide on every page cautions this inevitability.

As I write this Carrie Rose is having a well-deserved rest in Petoskey, MI. This is the land of the famed Petoskey stone. These dusty grey stones have a lace like filigree pattern and are the coral remnants of an ancient sea. During past visits we bought a small bud vase and a Pandora charm made out of them. This year we decide to find our own and so, the bikes were taken off the boat, cleaned of spider webs and ridden down a path west of the harbor. At the first beach that appeared slightly remote we walk down the stairway to the beach. Once there, with heads bowed, we start searching. Within 30 seconds I find one, and then another and another. Granted these were not prime examples but after a little cleaning, sure enough they were Petoskey stones. I now understand, as one local told me, that the entire landscape from here to Mackinac Island is composed of them, just waiting to be found by naïve southerners like us. When we get back to the boat Charlotte sits sanding our treasure to bring out their hidden details. With this level of intensity she should have them gleaming by next year. A worthy pursuit considering she has just retired.

We left Chicago in early June to get to the North Channel of Lake Huron and cruise amongst its ancient rocks. The rock culture is intense there. Mountains of gleaming white quartz defy description. Your eyes want to attribute the whiteness to something else besides the rock itself, but you can touch it and feel the sun’s heat that radiates from its mirror like surface.

The celebrated islands in the North Channel are the Benjamin’s. They are a small group of islands in the shape of a C that are composed of pink quartz. It is not easy to get to them, nor is it easy to stay. Their poor anchorage is exposed to winds from many directions and its bottom, which has been scoured by thousands of anchors has questionable holding. To further complicate matters, most days it is filled with cruising boat vying for the few safe places to anchor.

To climb its treeless dome of exposed quartz is to commune with rocks as old as any found on the planet. For a Christian nation it smacks of animism. This is behavior I expect from the Japanese with their reverence of Shinto’s kami-sama, spirits associated with the natural world. Most of the national parks in Japan have Shinto shrines to provide for the spiritual needs of their visitors. But here amongst the fifty and sixty year old middle class of North America it seems sacrilegious.

Of course as luck would have it Carrie Rose broke down just as we entered the Benjamin’s. We were towed east to Little Current, the largest town on Manitoulin Island, for repairs. We linger there for two weeks waiting for engine parts and never setting foot on the coveted terrain we had been removed from. Instead we spent our time with the town’s friendly and caring people, and with the transient community that cruise this rock-ridden archipelago each summer. A couple we barely knew offered us the key to their behemoth Ford and encouraged us to take in some of the sites while they were away cruising. We accepted and went north into the odd landscape of the Le Cloche Mountains. Once the size of the Rockies these hills of white quartz are billions of years old and they look it.

I wish I could give you an accurate description. The land is an odd mixture of trees, water and convoluted, rounded stones folded upon themselves. The shear rock faces radiates heat, and foliage hangs on for its life, as do the cottages that are tucked into every crevasse. The energy the earth poured into this landscape for billions of years is tangible. I am unaccustomed to such intensity and it makes me nervous.

I sense the billion-year history of these rocks and think of my few meager decades. I leave the North Channel sobered. It put my allotment of consciousness in context. The time here on earth before I become an elemental particle again is the universe’s gift and I better not waste it!

September 2011

Coasting

I thought we had enough time, is a common refrain on Lake Michigan. At present I am sitting through the third thunderstorm of the last three days. I thought I had enough time to get to our destination by today but I did not. Prudence dictates I remain in the harbor and it gives me some unexpected time to look around and absorb the scene. In the last few days I have seen a cast of characters pass through the different harbors I have been sequestered in.

The best were two elderly gentlemen in a small open sailboat of British design who are sailing, weather be damned, south along the east coast. After seeing what they have been through I feel like a wimp for staying put through these few “inconsequential” major storms.

Then there was the couple that spent the last eight summers cruising the Great Lakes in their large traditional (read slow) ketch. They go where they want, when they want with no strings attached.

A fellow Nordic Tug owner whom I have met at rendezvous’ appeared late yesterday in the heart of the worst of the worse weather. I “caught” him as he turned into his slip with the wind blowing his little ship a beam. Once tied up he described fighting progressively higher winds and seas as he approached the harbor only to turn back three miles to rescue a disabled sailboat.

This reverie could go on but I will stop. The storm clouds have move on to reek havoc over the horizon and blue sky has returned, as have the tourist that fled at the first sign of rain. There is a bit of going native about cruising even if every harbor town is full of ice cream and t-shirt shops. I have hardly seen a soul on this trip up the eastern shore, that is excluding the fishermen three miles out from every harbor mouth,

I have had the lake to myself. This was most evident while passing through the Manitou Passage. A lonely stretch of water bounded by South and North Manitou Islands to the west, and Sleeping Bear and Pyramid Points to the east. It is primordial compared to other areas of the lake I have experienced. The forces and the time involved in shaping this terrain, both above and below the surface of the lake, occupy my thoughts as I negotiate through the various nuns and cans, and lighthouses that mark the passage.

I get the same feeling when I focus my telescope back in time from the moon, to the planets, to the Milky Way, and to our local group of galaxies and beyond. My mind relaxes, shedding filters that are normally in place and roams. It is a common thread for most voyagers. It is why you can meet people as you wander and instantly fall in sync with them.

At least for me there is superstition involved in this. When I was growing up my Sicilian mother (bless her soul) enforced many different entreaties. The oddest being that opening an umbrella inside the house meant a family member would die. I am sure I killed off a few of my dear aunts due to my inattention. My traveling companion Charlotte is a good antidote to this line of thinking. She always speaks the obvious in any situation. I seldom do, fearing I will tempt faith. I am not convinced this is a good practice but I have silenced my objection to it.

One thing that differentiates coasting from other types of boating is housekeeping. Besides charting and never ending maintenance someone has to shop and cook, wash the dishes and make the bed, and do the laundry. Granted the grass doesn’t need to be cut or the garden weeded but the above more than makes up for the lack of those chores. This is why charter captains and their pampered guest exist.

Maybe one day I will succumb to be pampered but not today. Today I will swing in each beam sea, drive into whitecaps and squalls, ghost through early summer fog and wait out weather in a safe harbor.

Coasting involves pairing down to the essentials, no end of endless horizons and fellow travelers that are not so much about the trip as they are about the spirit of the trip. So when I really think about it I do have enough time, because how much time does it take to absorb the spirit of a place.

August 2011

Crossing

I am sure there is a gospel song called “Crossing to the Other Side” but that is not what I am about here. I am about crossing Lake Michigan from west to east. It is always a judgment call when to leave and I usually get a case of irritable bowel syndrome before setting off. It shows I take the venture serious.

The best times in the past have been the morning after one of our hell raising storms. The world, or at least the atmosphere, calms down for about three days; its energy spent. Then the cycle begins over again.

At times like this the lake is flat and oily. Not much good for sailors but just right for Carrie Rose to glide along soaking up the miles at 8 knots. And there are a lot of miles to soak up on Lake Michigan. The shortest crossing is about 45 miles, the longest 100 plus. I wonder how many Chicagoans have crossed the lake in small boats. It must be thousands. We should have a club like the circumnavigators do, but this is a topic for another day.

Once I get there, mid lake is an interesting place, or maybe phenomenon is a better word. It has a crystalline quality as if the air has had all contaminates scrubbed out. It is sweet and it glows.

As with most things there are rituals involved with casting off. If I am not coming back for a while I take the bridle off my mooring. Otherwise, by the time I get back it will be covered with green slime, ugh! I make a note of the time and the engine’s hours. The GPS’s are warmed up with the appropriate waypoints entered. Carrie Rose passes her neighboring sailboats and heads out between the green and red towers at the harbor mouth. Once clear I increase the RPM’s to 1700 and off I go, trailing Chicago’s skyline.

It takes a long time to lose sight of its cliff face of buildings but after a cursory look, I look forward. Depending on the time of day I negotiate through a gaggle of sailboats and then pass the defunct Wilson Ave. water intake crib with its contingent of cormorants patrolling the surface of the lake for tasty morsels.

In deeper water, some 5 to 10 miles out I catch up (pardon the pun) with the fishing fleet. When I first started cruising I would try to avoid them. Altering my course while still distant but somehow I always ended up right in their path or in the path of their multiple propeller seizing fishing lines trailing off the stern. Now I know better. I keep steaming along, knowing that most times their cryptic trolling pattern will move them out of my way by the time I reach their first noted position.

Then it is wind/water/sky in differing doses depending on the day. As you can imagine it is never the same twice. I settle in and monitor the horizon, the radar, and engine temperature and oil pressure gauges. I listen to every tappet’s clicking, monitoring for any change in tone that may portend disaster.

I have neglected to mention a device that I have invested countless hours and treasure in, the autopilot. It is a Simrad AP24. I only say this so those interested can look it up and marvel. Once free and clear of most obstructions I turn it on and sit back. The autopilot keeps me on course with a minimum of effort; this is an illusion. I know this because steering a boat on a single heading requires much anticipation, skill and in challenging weather a tremendous amount of concentration.

On this day the winds were diminished but still from the north, as they have been for weeks. So, of course I knew it would be a rollicking ride across a beam sea and I was not disappointed. Carrie Rose is a wonderful boat but has a wicked roll. There is nothing gentle about it. She gets up on one side and quickly snapped to the other. At times like this I wish for a seat belt. The ride just got worse from mid lake until I entered the St. Joseph-Benton Harbor breakwater.

It is disconcerting to be wallowing in the open lake and then abruptly change to the flat water of the harbor channel: to go from open water navigation to close quarters maneuvering. To complicate things further — though less now that I have experience to draw upon — I am often somewhere new. I change from tensing every muscle to stay in my seat, to tensing every sense to get into my assigned slip.

Sound like fun? Well, not always but more often than not, and in the depths of February these are great memories to relive. Maybe I will write that song and get Kris Kristofferson to sing it!

July 2011

Prepare

Today is the 11th. It has been 6 days since I started my leave and I am now just getting around to a nap. In those 6 days I put the finishing touches on my new dingy (four coats of varnish, rowing hardware, garboard drain), worked out how to hang it from the davits, tucked away the garden with weed suppression cloth and mulch, helped a friend bring his boat to the harbor and put up its two beautiful wooden mast, paid an enormous credit card bill, said goodbye to friends, packed and then move everything — and I mean everything — to the boat where I seemed to start the process all over again.

It has been a blessing that the weather prevented us from venturing across the lake. There is never enough time, but at some point enough is enough and you have to leave. Lists have there place but only if you are willing to disregard them. I have spent a lifetime reading about other people’s adventures. A common theme is that they depart before their lists are completed. And this is usually after years of study and hard work.

Any task requires triage. There is a compelling scene in an episode of MASH where one of the surgeons needs a third party to tell him that the patient he is trying to save requires too much attention and that he needs to care for other less wounded soldiers. He could not make the decision himself but once nudged he moves on.

Some of us are better at separating the wheat from the chafe than others. Many people spend their allotted time in preparation and never leave. They delay, waiting for the perfect moment: for the right amount of money, the next electronic gadget, the perfect mate. It never happens and so, they stay put and watch others leave.

I am using a trip as a metaphor. I suppose if I were a better writer I would not have to tell you this, but if I had waited to be a better writer I would never be writing this. I wonder about the Lady Gaga’s of the world. Granted she is talented but so are many others and they never get anywhere. What drove her, what drives any of us?

I have often cajoled young medical assistants whom I find intelligent and therefore bored with their jobs to go back to school. None have taken my medical school suggestion but several have become nurses. To motivate them I tell them in four years they’ll be done, and if they do nothing they will be four years more frustrated.

Despite all the insurance payments we make each month most things in life require a leap of faith. You can get educated up the ying-yang and still not amount to anything, but not likely. Besides, being well educated has its perks. For one thing most of the stuff that other people worry about you can disregard. There is nothing like calculus, chemistry, physics and biology to give you a firm basis in how the world actually works.

I guess I should explain what’s got me down this path. It is leaving the harbor. My wife Charlotte, after close to thirty years in the corporate world (because she went back and got educated for a life in IT), retired. And because I have always had ants in my pants, I took a leave from the office and we decided to cruise to Canada. The North Channel at least and maybe Georgian Bay in the northern waters of Lake Huron.

So we sit here in Montrose Harbor in the fog and rain of early June, and wait for a favorably day to cross to Michigan. It is often like this on the Great Lakes. The weather has a way of dictating the schedule. I have learned to listen to mother nature. And just how do I do that, well mainly on the Internet these days.

Prior to the Internet we were at the whim of the marine weather broadcast on channel 1. Listening to it was a bit like listening to the Chairman of the Fed: hanging on every word and searching for their hidden meanings. Now I can see the jet stream and the radar and the satellite pictures and data from buoys in the middle of the lake and read a synopsis of current and future trends. I can watch the next storms come off the northwest Pacific or be gathered up from the Gulf and flung at us by the jet stream.

It is not perfect but it is a whole lot better then it used to be. So I hope that after all this I am prepared. I think the fact that I can nap, subconsciously means I am. We will see. Remember there are no guarantees but that is not reason to try.

June 2011

Landscape

The earth is inconceivably old, so ancient that to allow ourselves — conceited moderns — to dwell on the inexorability of time, well, all the anti-depressants in the world might not be able to quell the anxiety. And in the context of the universe the earth is but a four billion year old infant.

Our nervous system is designed to deal with this. It is in the business of dampening our sensory experience. If you ever take off the dark glasses put on your dilated eyes by the ophthalmologist you have a sense of the overwhelming nature of our world. Any light, let alone the sun, will paralyze. It is the same for the temporal universe.

It might be better not to think of what this means for us personally. This is the job of religion. Most are founded on the premise that there must be more, this cannot be all there is. You mean we will never see each other again, there has to be a better place, where do we go when we go, what about our thoughts and prayers, and what about our stuff: written words, sculptures, boats, telescopes, children, relationships.

What about them? I doubt the earth cares. We, or at least I, need to get over it. At times I think I have, but dark thoughts still linger in the back of my cranium. After watching my father die a cruel sudden death and my mother a lingering one I thought I was liberated. Now I am not so sure. Each stiff morning I look into the bathroom mirror and evaluate my life. It is instructive.

It happens in an instant. I am amazed how quickly a life, at least mine, can be reviewed. And this is before I have even had a cup of tea. Once the shower’s warm water hits my body the moment is over only to be relived around seven the next morning. What I find interesting is, rather than being depressed by this, I look forward to it. This condensed reverie makes me feel alive.

The fact that I continue to care is comforting. I still have goals and fight the cynicism built up layer-upon-layer year-after-year. I feel secure in my positive moroseness. I welcome it. It scratches an itch that needs to be scratched.

And so this lead me to my inner landscape, or maybe landscapes, the plural is better as there seem to be many. How do I see them — I doodle. The sculptor Darrin Hallowell forbade me to say the d-word. I sketch. I draw. I do not doodle. And though I greatly respect him, I am not sure I agree. I am untrained and have had a similar style since I was a kid.

I know it is a weird habit. I do it everywhere and on anything. I especially like the white butcher block paper that so often covers the tables of Italian restaurants but I am not averse to marking up the agenda of quarterly meetings. I think I have done some of my best work while eating ravioli with marinara sauce. The vast expanse of white paper provides an almost unlimited palette except for wine glasses and the breadbasket.

It is an unthreatening surface unlike an 8 ½” by 11” sheet of paper, a blank document in Word, a page in a sketchbook or the white gesso expanse of a canvas. These require a commitment and invite criticism. To use them I have to expose part of myself to the outside world. Turn myself inside out as it were.

If I like what I have done, I tear off the red stained drawing and sign it (take ownership really). Once home it is filed away in a thick folder with many other similar scrapes. When I worked in steel I used many of these ideas to create at first 2 dimensional, and then through the prodding of my fellow students, 3-D sculptures. I learned I could only make what I could draw.

I call my style expressionless abstraction. Who knows what any of it means. I enjoy people’s reactions when they see the work. They try hard to make it concrete. To make it represent a thing, anything, from the real world. But sadly it is a little like trying to find Yankee Doodle Dandy in a work by Pierre Boulez. It ain’t gonna happen.

All of us have an inner landscape. For some it is so painful that they will do almost anything to suppress it. Think Michael Jackson, Diana Arbus, Mark Rothko, Virginia Wolf. For others they cannot keep it in. It gets expressed in every waking moment of every day. Think Picasso, Dickens, Bach, Ansel Adams. Their willingness and courage to share their inner vision, even if in the end it killed them, has left us with an incredible body of work. It fills the museums, libraries and concert halls of the world.

And here I speak of time again. The above artists occupy at most 500 years. I am not sure how far back we have examples. The cave paintings in France are still only 30,000 years of history and do little to fill in the billions of years. But this is a misunderstanding on my part. Our inner landscapes are the expression of all that time. Time well spent solving problems and creating new problems to solve.

Volume 5855 (4), 5/20/11

Months

I have frequented the Art Institute of Chicago’s Japanese print gallery for close to forty years. In all that time I doubt that I have seen the same print twice. The exotic prints fueled my life long fascination with Japanese culture. A recent show exhibited prints with hidden calendars. Many sequestered within the intricate folds of kimono.

The prints were made during the reign of the lunar year. To plagiarize the posted information there are long months (30 days) and short months (29 days) within a lunar year. The concept of the long month — dai no tsuki — got me thinking about how to react to the recent events in Japan: how to come to grips with the loss of a coast, with statements regarding the safety of plutonium-saturated soil, with a decimated fishing fleet and with the destruction of four nuclear reactors.

How do our collective psyche process the lost of life due to the recent seismic activity in Indonesia, Haiti, and Japan? Even a decade ago we could not relive the calamity minutes after it occurred. We would read about it in unadorned black and white text, see a few pictures of the aftermath, but not watch the ocean engulf towns, roads, cars and trucks. It is nearly too much to comprehend.

I admit to being risk adverse. I do not need to see tragedy to know it occurs. I blame this reticence on my medical training. While medicine is a fascinating study, it is also cruel. Injury and disease do not discriminate. We are prey to its whims whether as spectators or participants.

At least technologically we are better off than our ancestors. That is if the electricity and the “supply chain” remain intact. The world, or I should say our place in the world, is tenuous. The earth shakes and turns itself inside out with no thought of retribution. Motion is a constant no matter if on a quantum scale or on the scale of colliding galaxies. In the end it really has nothing to do with us.

At best we attempt to engineer safety into our constructs. At worse we ignore it. When the roofs blew off of the reactor buildings I thought of stored fuel rods. When I saw helicopters dropping water, I thought of how many it would take and how much fuel would be needed. And when I saw fire trucks spraying water into the buildings, I thought of the courageous workers who must know they have sacrificed themselves to protect their nation.

My wife Charlotte and I traveled from Tokyo to Hiroshima and back last year. All the time marveling at the beauty, the infrastructure, and the density that appeared out the window of our sleek train. And as I reminisce, I think of the vast population trapped a few hundred miles South of the epicenter of the earthquake. I find myself grieving for the people of Japan as I did for my nation when I watched the second plane crash into the World Trade Center.

In New York City last summer I had the privilege of seeing Hounsai Daisosho, Urasenke’s retired 15th generation Grand tea master, make a bowl of tea and place it on the altar of a recently restored Catholic church just a block from Ground Zero. It was a solemn moment imbibed with thoughts of the sacrifice our nation has made since that day.

And now transpose that event — the bowl of tea offered to make the abstraction of peace a reality — to another nation in need of peace to honor its dead and to rebuild its national treasure. If a bowl of tea can begin to do that, and I think it can, then let both our nations begin to rebuild their spirit.

It is time to rejoin our commitment to each other’s spiritual needs, to each other’s success, and to each other’s commonality. Many long months will be needed to reverse this tragedy, but all that have been lost deserve no less.

Volume 5852 (4), 4/29/11

Creatures

Creatures surround me in Japan. They have no blood or sinew to move around with but they are everywhere. There is nothing creepy or supernatural about them. They are just there, as the birds that reside in the trees and bushes of my backyard are, even if I cannot see them. Out a bus window, when an elevator door closes, in subterranean walkways, up the side of buildings; I am aware of them.

They are piled up in arcade games, hang off cell phones and backpacks, stand guard at temple entrances. They advertise on the side of shopping bags, enforce rules on roadway signs and adorn bento boxes. They are corporate logos and live on the front grills of cars.

The creatures can be sacred and profane, cajoling and demanding, edgy and cute, entertaining and menacing. And I mean “and”. What I have noticed about the Japanese is their comfortableness with the singularity of duality. I lack a better way to describe it.

Here in the USA life is more cut and dry. We have only two parties (usually), we like things simple, just give us two choices and that is enough. Be dam-ed with the complexities of the world. We want it one way or another and are comfortable with this even if we know it is a gross misrepresentation.

Think of our beloved city of Chicago. We are going to have a mayor not named Daley. And though we know this is for the best, deep down inside I am sure even strident opponents of the Daley regime are nervous. They had a well-defined foe in him. It was they against him, but those days are over.

Of course this duality does not exist for all creatures. Some are painfully cute and others, well, I know to give them a wide berth. They may be comfortably evil, but they are evil none-the-less.

I see “cute culture” in all walks of life in Japan. In cityscapes and on mountain trails, whether state sanctioned or anarchistic. It is hard to miss it walking down the streets of Tokyo. It seems a large part of the society participates in or consumes it in various ways.

I am part and partial to this. When I look around my house I see everything from trolls to saints perched on various precipices. Recently after my mother died I was sorting through her things and came upon several of my father’s beloved objects. He always had a small troll (who’s hair he had closely shorn) hanging from his keychain. In opposition to his worship of false gods my mother had a small icon of her namesake St. Teresa close by.

I suppose there is a certain duality in this but let’s get back to Japan. One thing I notice is that most the creatures are fuzzy save for one and that is the only reptile I see represented, the frog. Froggy is everywhere.

Somehow I missed froggy on my first trip to Japan. My senses were overwhelmed but not this time. This time I saw frogs on top of frogs with more baby frogs clamoring all over them. At one particularly large example I asked out loud to no one in particular, “What does this all mean?” and a friendly fellow traveler explained the play on words.

Frog or kaeru has the same pronunciation as the Japanese word for return. So frogs, because of this lucky coincidence, are lucky. They represent the returning of things (family, friends, money), which have gone or have been given away, as well as people or things returning to their place of origin. A frog croaks and brings good luck to travelers.

I guess we have St. Christopher who continues to show up on dashboards even though he was defrocked years ago. I tend to think I am above the fray but I am reluctant to take the St. Christopher medal off my trawler’s pilothouse wall. Why tempt faith when you have someone, be it an inanimate object, so willing to help you navigate through life’s shoals.

Volume 5846 (4), 3/18/2011

22

February is hard to imagine in t-shirt and shorts. Its relentlessness is the rub. Once it gets going there is no stopping until spring and even then, it reluctantly succumbs to the earth’s precession.

February is the reason Florida exist. It is hunker down time. It is a time of strained backs and unexpected heart attacks. It is also inspiring. Inspiring northerners to work hard for southern condos, Caribbean cruises, hot tubs, theatre tickets and subscriptions of all types; and inspiring introspection.

And so, I sit at the kitchen table listening to the Hammond B-3 of Jack McDuff on the radio. I hear predictions of 22 inches of snow before the blizzard blows through sometime tomorrow afternoon. I notice from the corner of my eye that it’s 12:22 and that the adjacent outdoor thermometer reads 22 °F. I first think how lucky I am to be warm and cozy, and then I realize there it is again, 22.

Numerology is not my thing but this winter the number 22 is significant. Twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit has stared at me from my car’s thermometer for weeks on end. For so long I have become acclimatized to it.

As if on autopilot I shed my heavy winter coat for a lighter one, even though 22 °F still awaits me each morning. My blood has thickened. I am heartier. What would have killed me in July, I now find a mere inconvenience. I try to remember the physiology, but forget it and just enjoy my newfound warmth.

Twenty-two is a magical number this year. The second year that increased jet stream gyrations suck frigid Artic air into Texas and turn the warmth of the Gulf into feet of snow burying the eastern seaboard: gyrations that ruin many a vacation and freeze a state full of oranges.

I am skeptical of the weeklong build up to this storm, but in the end admit that it is a brilliant blizzard. There have only been a few in my lifetime. That is if you ignore the winter long blizzards of 1976, 77, and 78. Those inspired me (a mailman at the time) to go back to school and get off the street.

Today is 2/2/11. Ummm … two 2’s, and then two times eleven get you another twenty-two. Okay, I have to stop. I cannot have cabin fever yet. It has only been a few hours. I am sure I have at least 22 books to read and probably twenty two hundred songs to listen to. I must get to work entertaining myself, but then type 22 into Google. This is a mistake.

It is a number and a year. It is highways in Canada, America, India, Iran, Israel, Japan and Vietnam to name a few. It is a bus route in New Jersey and an episode of The Twilight Zone. 22 is a construct of the human mind, a mind that needs language to represent the physical and emotional world.

Recently in Japan it was pointed out to me that our 150-letter text message limit is a limitless 150 words in kanji. With 150 words another world can be created but I won’t today. I will lightly lunch and at 2:22 have a shot of espresso, suit up and go out to attack the approximately 22 inches of snow that has blown into much higher drifts. All the while dreaming that next February I will find myself somewhere that is 22 °C.

Volume 5842 (4), 2/18/2011

Sounds

1

It is seven-thirty in the morning a block south of Shinjuku Station in Tokyo and I am ordering a tall wet cappuccino at the local Starbucks. It is a bit more challenging than I thought. The “wet” does not translate, so I compromise—a good thing to do in a foreign country—and get a latte. My order is passed on in a singsong manner and I retreat to a corner to wait.

The drink requests get more and more complicated as people crowd in. I hear venti this and grande that, macchiatos and frappuccinos, and every other combination imaginable. In my pre-caffeinated stupor I listen to beautifully perky voices repeat the drink orders in one long aria.

An American businessman next to me winces when the choir hits its final high note and says, “It is really too early for this.” I think he probably drank too much sake last night, but keep it to myself. Starbucks at home will feel dour after this.

2

Three weeks fly by. I travel south and north, and south again across the vast city that is central Honshu. From Miyajima to Nikko I speed past cities, riverbeds, rice fields, factories and Fuji-san while enveloped in a mere whisper of sound. I pass through tunnels at 250 km/h with nothing more than a quiet whoosh.

While waiting in Utsunomiya for the MAX (an indescribable white, yellow and blue two story bullet train) to take me back to Tokyo I hear birds chirping. This is new. The only birds I have heard in Japan thus far are the large crows that rule the skies. I’ve been wondering where all the songbirds are hiding. But here, waiting for the shinkansen I find myself searching for the illusive birds I can hear but not see. They call to each other from across the station’s platforms. I fix my gaze on the rafters and see only speakers and realize that Japan’s sound engineers have synthesized these birds to keep me occupied.

Instinctively my shoulders relax and my heart rate slows. I take a deep breath and smile. It is another of the intriguing things that make Japan so interesting. Then the atmosphere abruptly changes. The birds are banished by a new escalating sound. I straighten up and pay attention, immediately aware of my environment and the task at hand: getting on the train in one minute or less.

Chirping birds morph into a dissonant ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong-ding that progressively becomes more frantic. Above the din a regal chime precedes a clear voice describing the route of the not yet visible train. As the train nears the station the sounds change to a rapid-fire high-pitched ping, but only for a few bars. The ding-dong remains, calmer now. I have been alerted, really warned, that the train will soon appear.

There is a short burst of pinging once the train is in sight. As the brakes squeal the ding-dong sets the pace for the orderly shift of people and goods. Thirty seconds into the transfer the ping restarts and does not relent until the doors close. The station’s conductor begins cajoling people to get where they are going and to do it now. Of course I am only speculating. I do not understand Japanese, but the meaning of these auditory clues seems universal.

The conductor makes one last visual check, turns a key and horns blare like half time at the United Center. The pinging’s volume ramps up—nothing can stop this train from leaving. There are multiples ahead and astern. It must move to keep the inexorable rhythm of modern Japan in step.

Suddenly, like Charles Ives’s Central Park in the Dark, all the sounds occur at once in a grand fanfare and it is over. Metal rolling on metal and the whirl of the electric engines that power this remarkable creation take center stage. For a short time visuals take over as the train accelerates towards its destination.

Only two riveting minutes have elapsed. Of course the infrastructure is impressive, but more so is the collaborative system that accomplishes such tasks. It takes guts, and dreams, to build this collection of sci-fi trains. I am humbled and think next time I will spring for a ride on the N700. The fastest train in the fleet!

Volume 5839 (4), 1/21/2011