An Ode to Alaska

Oh no, an ode, an ode to Alaska.

A place that cannot be described in words

Cannot be captured

Photographs, still life, moving, or paint.

A place that can only be Felt.

Seen, touched, smelt, heard, and tasted.

A place that must be run in, and swum in,

and rushed about

and sleep deprived in

A place that was meant to be Enjoyed.

One Giant Playground.

A sacred one.

An ode to a world that once was.

A world that was beautiful.

Harsh, and forbidding, and untold. Unsung.

A place that wants to kill you.

And you must adapt

Learn, change, grow

To survive.

You must be the fastest, the strongest, the fittest

So the bears don’t catch You, for their dinner.

They catch salmon.

And so do you.

And it’s delicious, that soft, pink, flavorful skin

And you’re glad it isn’t just the bears who get it.

And that they didn’t get you.

That is why this place is still (mostly) Pristine.

Something most of America, most likely most of the world

Has forgotten about.

We live in neat houses on hills, overlooking more houses and telephone wires, and bills

And we can’t even imagine what it’s like to overlook an endless forest, with an endless sky, reaching out to the endless ocean, sitting alongside endless mountainous peaks that all go on forever

And no other human or building or smoke signal in view.

Perhaps I am strange to desire such a thing.

But at times, it seems terribly desirable.

It is a magical place, a wondrous place.

With its forests of Fireweed

That bloom and change like the rainbow circles around the sun,

or at the base of enormous sea cliff snow melt waterfalls, sitting in fjords carved out by glaciers

And the sunset takes hours to cycle through its paces

blues to greens, reds, yellows, oranges, purples, pinks, and so forth

back to shades of blue and grey and darker blue

before they begin to grow lighter again.

Anything Is Possible.

It defies all reason.

It simply is.  

A Year in Motion

Well, it looks like I once again have a bit of catching up to do. I haven’t been very consistent in keeping this blog up, but I can’t say that’s a surprise. I’m not very consistent about most anything.

Sooo…I worked on the tallship Hawaiian Chieftain from January to late April of last year (2012). It was an intense and challenging experience, and it changed and impacted me in a variety of ways. The first third to half of it was not very fun, mostly because of some social discordance with the crew, but that was eventually resolved, and by the time I left I felt good about having stuck it out, and that I could happily return to that boat or her sister, the Lady Washington, any time in the future and be welcomed by whatever overlapping crew might still be around or remember me. (As I mentioned in past posts, those boats tend to have a lot of rapid turnover in crew, so it is not uncommon to find more unfamiliar faces than familiar if you leave and come back a few months later.)

And return I did. I spent the month of May 2012 frolicking around Providence, helping my friends in that graduating class celebrate their end of college. Then I returned to California to partake of the Marin Shakespeare Company acting internship a few miles north of San Francisco. On my way back to the west coast, I took a detour to Aberdeen, Washington, the home port of the aforementioned Grays Harbor tallships, where they were docked at the time.  Aberdeen is not a place I would recommend to anyone who has not been there. It is basically a depressing shit-hole of a place with no redeeming qualities that I witnessed, except that there is some decently pleasant scenery outside of it, and that it’s near water, and it’s not terribly far from places of greater civilization, like Seattle and Olympia. But I didn’t go for the place, I went for the people who were still aboard the boat.

After a brief visit, I acquired my first-ever rental car, an outrageous monstrosity of a luxury sports car, fittingly dubbed the Silver Mullet, and along with my former crew-mate Chloe, began a highly-condensed road trip 800 miles down the West Coast, completed in a day and a half. We drove from Aberdeen down the Redwood Highway 101, along the magnificent cliffy coast and through the impressive forests to Arcata, CA in Humboldt county. We stopped briefly in Portland, OR to have a coffee with our ex-bosun Shane, and again in Eugene to pick up our ex-cook Knucklez.  I was also stopped in a speed trap in Grants Pass where the out-of-state plates and gaudy appearance of the Silver Mullet, and perhaps suspiciously poor and young-looking drivers of said vehicle earned me a hefty speeding ticket. (Luckily, I managed to get out of paying it.) By the time we reached Arcata I was sick as a dog, and only able to communicate in a series of verbal squeaks and honks.

The next day, I finished the drive to the Bay Area with Knucklez in tow, and went to meet Alex and Tinka, the lovely couple who were to host me in their San Rafael home for the remainder of the summer. By that time, I wasn’t really able to communicate verbally at all. Not the best way to start an internship with a Shakespeare company and meet a whole bunch of new people, but I muddled through and eventually got my voice back.

The first two months of the internship were great. I learned a lot, had great teachers, a fantastic group of fellow interns, and got to work with an array of talented, professional Bay Area-based actors in Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, I was stuck as a fairy in a rather silly and cheesy Hawaiian-themed version of that play until the end of September, two full months after the internship was over, all but four of the other interns had gone away, and sitting around backstage for 3 hours 2-4 times a week was the ONLY thing I had going on. That was not a great situation for me, and I started to get a little stressed out and angsty about where I ought to go next, and what I wanted to do.

By the end of the summer, I had been living off my earnings from my first Alaskan summer for a full year, by being extremely disciplined and frugal and scoring gigs on the boat and in the internship where I didn’t have to pay for housing, and I realized that it wasn’t really feasible for me to pay for an extended vacation in Australia/New Zealand as I had been hoping to, and that if I really wanted to pursue acting in San Francisco, I needed to either get a car or get an apartment closer to the heart of things, both of which I probably also couldn’t afford, unless I first found some kind of paying day job.  And I wasn’t really sure I wanted to do that.

So I ended up getting involved in another community theatre project, extending my stay in San Rafael until the end of October, becoming increasingly indecisive and unhappy all along, and then I went back to New England to spend Halloween with my pirate pals in Salem, MA, and to hang out with my family through Thanksgiving, basically buying myself a bit more time to flop around and try to figure out what to do.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that I might as well continue to pursue a tallship sailing career. I had, at that point, a notion that if I keep working on boats, learning skills, gaining “sea time” required to move up in rank and get Able Seaman and Captain certificates from the Coast Guard, I could with time come to run my own tallship, which I plan to operate as a pirate-themed tourist attraction. This is not something I can present glibly when amongst other tallship sailors, since they generally look on anything pirate-related with disgust and disdain, but I am fairly certain that this would be an excellent way for me to help fulfill the most desired destiny of the Brown a capirates, and fill a promising, currently overlooked niche in the tallship community. Most tourists who come aboard Grays Harbor boats for tours or “Battle Sails” (where we maneuver around each other and fire cannons) WANT us to be pirates. Little kids come dressed up, cute and excited about being on a pirate ship. And then most sailors shit all over their dreams. “We’re NOT pirates,” they say, gruffly, impatiently.

I don’t see the point of that. Why not embrace it? Why not have a sense of humor about being part of something fairly antiquated and obsolete, and give the people what they want? If I were running the show, we would do just that, Put on a Show! Dress like pirates, talk like pirates, sing sea shanties, do some swash-buckling, swing around in the rigging, make it interactive and FUN! People would pay a killing for that kind of sail, and it would be fun, at least for many of my friends, to be part of that crew.

So, that’s my entrepreneurial vision. (And don’t you dare anyone try to steal it. Because I will find you, and steal it back. ;) However, I discovered fairly quickly in my second go-round return to West Coast educational tallship vessels that this somewhat far-off dream has little to do with the day-to-day reality of being an unpaid, fairly inexperienced deckhand aboard one of these boats run by a struggling, disorganized non-profit. To escape the grim climate and boredom of being in Portland, Maine with nothing to do in November, I applied to work for LAMI (the Los Angeles Maritime Institute) during their winter maintenance season. I lasted about a month there, but I knew within the first few days that it was a bad fit. I have no love for that part of the world, San Pedro (where the docks are) is another shit-hole, roughly on par with Aberdeen in lack of interesting activity or inspiration, I had few crew-mates and basically no formal instruction helping me to develop my mariner career skills. We didn’t even go sailing very much. Just cleaning chores, trying to find maintenance tasks I could help with…and somehow trying to fill the rest of my time. Bad news.

So I jumped ship when the Grays Harbor boats came to town around Christmas. I spent about a month on the Lady Washington, so I could try yet another boat I hadn’t worked on before, and also so I could earn a little money, covering for their purser while she was on vacation, then I finally hopped back over to Chieftain, where I had the most friends and felt most comfortable with the rigging and operating procedures. Ended up working on three different boats in three months, and wasn’t really happy or satisfied on any of them. It became clear to me that I didn’t really want to be there, I’m not really in the right headspace or time in my life to pursue my long-term pirate ship plan through that avenue. But I became increasingly less sure of what I DID want.

I applied for a few things, particularly whale-watching boats in a smattering of places, including the gig in Seward I had said two seasons ago that I might want to come back for this summer, but I didn’t feel confident any of them would come through. In the end, around Valentine’s Day, I decided to offer my services as a WWOOFER on my big brother’s little organic farm in Descanso, 40 miles east of San Diego. They were expecting some baby goats in early March, and as Adam and Jess are also both PhD students at UCSD and had a baby of their own in September, my niece Alice, they could use an extra pair of hands to tend the gardens and greenhouses and chickens and feeding and milking their little herd of goats.

I’ve never been particularly interested in farming or gardening, and I suspected there might be some challenges to living with/working under my elder brother and living in a fairly remote and isolated village with mostly animals for company (there were), but I also figured that I would have a little more time and space to get my head together and make plans for where to go and what to do next there than I did on the boat, where I was usually too tired to do anything at the end of the day, there were many distractions, and privacy and internet access are difficult to attain. I also thought it would be nice to spend some time around family, getting to know my sister-in-law and baby niece.  That ended up being my favorite part of the whole experience.

I’ve never cared too much about infants. I was waiting for Alice to reach the more interactive stage of 2-5ish to really get interested in her, but living at Tanglezone (what they call their farm/property) for a month, I totally fell in love with her, even more than with the incredibly adorable baby goats in my charge. She’s not just any old baby, and not just because we’re related. It’s clear to everyone who meets her that she is very intelligent, joyful, strong, and she’s got a big personality waiting to develop and wow us all. At 6 months, she can already stand up unaided sometimes, and play the piano, and while I was there she started babbling and making the first movements toward human speech and crawling.  She’s a real cutie, and I’m very happy we got to spend time together, bonding and whatnot.

Anyway, that was a good and productive time overall, especially once we had clarified what we expected and needed from each other.  Descanso is an idyllic little piece of paradise, where all the neighbors are super friendly, the weather was mostly warm and sunny and gorgeous during the day, the goats were frolicsome and usually not impossible to manage, there were lots of cool birds to watch and listen to, and I figured out my “next step” plans within the first week I was there.

It turns out I DID get the job in Seward, working as a deckhand for Kenai Fjords Tours, and as soon as I got the offer, it seemed strange to me that I had ever doubted that ought to be my path for this summer.  From everything I know of it so far, it is my dream job, at least for the moment. I’m going to get paid to live and work in one of the most beautiful places on earth, being friendly to people, learning about a different kind of boat, going out into Kenai Fjords National Park every day to look at glaciers and whales, porpoises, sea lions, sea otters, orcas, bald eagles, and all kinds of other awesome wildlife and scenery. I get to spend another 5-month “summer” season in indescribable, incomparable, (literally) awesome Alaska, just 2 or 3 hours south of my friends who are still living or working seasonally up in Anchorage, but having a new experience in a new place. In the meantime, I can save up some money so that this fall/winter I can go to Oceania, and probably also Asia, and do some serious hard-core traveling and backpacking free-style adventuring.

So yeah, I’m pretty stoked about it. My excitement is compounded by the fact that when I found out the news about this job, my brother’s friend from high school, Scott, was visiting the farm, and when I mentioned that I would like to have a car to use for the summer, he offered me his Smart Car, my lifelong DREAM car, because he rides a motorcycle in the summer and didn’t want it to just sit in the driveway. Another example of outrageous serendipity, good fortune, and good people combining to make my life THE BEST.

The condition, of course, was that I had to get the Smart Car from San Francisco to Seward. This turns out to be a journey of 3,500-4000 miles, depending on what kind of detours you take on the way. So that, of course, was quite an adventure in and of itself. 

Escapes from the jaws

Note: I originally wrote this post in mid-September 2012. The events described took place in late March 2012. 

How many near-death experiences have you had?

I've had so many, I barely remember most of them.

Of course, there are varying degrees.

There are moments when one could have died, had a car been a few inches or feet closer to the right, or when one feels like death was a near miss, because of a slippery footing while climbing something. It's hard to know how valid those feelings are. Sometimes one would have just broken a limb or been horribly maimed, and not killed at all. Sometimes one is merely being dramatic.

However, there are at least a few moments I've had in my life where I had to step back and appreciate the fragility of life.

One of the most potent and effective such lessons I had recently while I was working on my boat.

1. The Hawaiian Chieftain is a big pretty steel sailboat. She has a 75 foot steel mast, that doubles as the diesel engines’ exhaust pipes, and 13 sails, including several large squares that crew must scale the mast (via shrouds/ rope ladder thingies) to unfurl and furl.

She is usually crewed by 9-15 people, though sometimes crew counts go as low as 6 or 7 and as high as 17. Usually at least half the crew are untrained "newbies" two-weekers who've come out to learn to sail. There are 7 paid officer positions, and everyone else on board lends their services at the low low price of free, in exchange for bed, lodging, travel, knowledge, skills, confidence and adventure.  Not a bad deal, really.

The Officers, in the order of the Station Bill

1. Captain -drives the boat, buck stops here, generally oversees the boats activity, sets tone for crew morale

2. First Mate -right hand man to Cap'n. helps organize and schedule crew chore bill, days off, etc. oversees safety onboard, and should help with crew management and morale as well. (look out for crew when Cap'n isn't, be a bridge between forces, fill gaps, etc.) head of training trainees.

3. Bosun - in charge of everything above-decks. How the boat looks--the wood rails, paint jobs, tarring, rig tuning, rig repairs, quality of coils, aloft training, overall boat prettiness.

4. Engineer- in charge of everything below-decks. water, pipes, electricity, engines, batteries, coolant, propellers, heads, bilges.

5. Purser- in charge of the money, keeping the books, the paperwork, running the store for gift-shopping tourists. (my job, as of about a week into my first 2 weeks, until I left)

6. StewCo (Steward/ Educational Coordinator). in charge of pretty much everything else. Dealing with the public, running tours, ed. programs, scheduling, PR, port reports, boat laundry, getting bunks and "funnies" (our historical reenactment-ish uniforms used when interfacing with public)

And finally, last but certainly not least, the most important person on the boat:

7. The cook.

I saw every single one of these positions change hands at least once this past nine months of my affiliation.  To say nothing of the rates of crew rotations amongst the volunteers.

I'd estimate I met roughly 75 people in the time I worked on (and later briefly visited) the Hawaiian Chieftain, and fraternized occasionally with the crew of our sister ship, the Lady Washington.

But that's all beside the point.  The point is that this boat makes it way through the world, while I was on her, up the coast of California, in fits and spurts, stopping for usually 2 weeks at a time in any given port. Oxnard, Ventura, 3-day crazy transit to Oakland, Oakland, Redwood City, San Francisco (for a day, unfortunately), Sausalito (for almost a month, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), then back out under the Golden Gate Bridge (riding/flying atop the highest yard) up to Bodega Bay, where they REALLY put us through hell, then on to Eureka, and finally Crescent City.  That's where we were in the 3.5 months I worked, January 15 - April 24.

While she's docked, she ties up to the dock with four (and sometimes 6) huge, thick "mooring lines" with big bowlines tied by us latching her onto those big old cleats and keeping us from drifting off into other boats, rocks, or off to sea. 

I can't really emphasize how important this whole mooring line, mooring procedure thing is. It's probably one of the most dangerous, if not THE most, and most important things that we do as a crew on the boat. And we usually dock and undock at least once or twice a day.  

Sometimes we are able to leave crew ashore for various reasons while most of the boat goes off on a sail. Perhaps the cook, off to buy provisions. Perhaps the purser, off to the post office. Perhaps we have too many passengers and too many crew to fit our Coast Guard specifications, so a few crew get kicked off and get a few hours for themselves. And we usually have at least one or two people with the day off. And often the other boat gets there first, and we just tie up to them, or they move our mooring lines for us. 

But when none of these are the case, someone must play the "jumper."  The jumper's job is to jump off the boat onto the dock, when the boat is closely safe enough, to then run around as the captain tries to maneuver this huge, unwieldy boat safely around many other obstacles, while the crew stands poised to throw mooring lines, or run around with roving fenders, or call out the distances we are from hitting various things, to hopefully catch all 4 mooring lines as they are thrown, even if that requires lunging for them, almost into the sea, and getting those things hooked on around the cleats so everything goes according to plan.  When LEAVING a port or a dock without outside assistance, the jumper's job is to run around unhooking those bowlined-mooring lines and "casting them off" back towards the boat, so the sailors handling them can haul them on in without getting tangled up in the active propellers, and then safely launch him/herself from dock up onto the boat before they get too far from the dock, without misjudging the distance and falling into the water between boat and dock, and getting either crushed, drowned or prop-mangled to death.

Needless to say, it's a tricky and demanding task, not for everyone, and not for the faint of heart.

In the months I worked on the boat, I saw 4 or 5 people act as jumper. Most of the time it was my bosun Shane.  He's been sailing for many years, he is young and fit, graceful and agile, and Competent in most areas of running old Chiefie. As bosun, he did the bulk of the life-risky stuff, and it never seemed too dangerous, except for that time our captain almost crushed him and our smallboat near the fuel dock in Oakland. (Oakland was a very stressful place for us.) Earlier in my Chieftain career, I saw our engineer Eamon do it a few times too. Eamon, also, is a badass sailor who knows his way around that boat like no other. I'm pretty sure our first mate captain-to-be Shiney performed the feat with ease a few times before taking over as captain. He's been sailing since he was 16 or something, and is way more comfortable on a tallship than ANYWHERE else in the world. I think Purser Erik may have done it once or twice too, before he took off, pretty early in my time on board.

Twice, I was offered the chance to try it.  I wasn't given much instruction on the matter, Cap'n Kyle just thought I was ready, I guess. I did pretty well that first time, I think it was when we left after our one day in San Francisco.  It pumped my adrenaline in a way going aloft never quite did, except maybe those other two near-death-type times, but I got the job done, got all the mooring lines and myself safely back onto the boat, and we took off.  

Several weeks later, Cap'n Shiney gave me another chance, "to impress" a friend who had come to see me, with whom I had walked around running purser errands for a couple hours while we refueled in Oakland a few days before taking off from Sausalito to Bodega. 

A few mistakes were made in how my instructions were given. No one ever impressed upon me the importance of priorities when being the jumper.  No one ever said "It's much MUCH more important that you get safely back onto the boat than that the boat makes a clean exit on first attempt, and we make it look cool." In fact, framing it as a chance to show off convinced a show-off, performer like myself that looking cool was in fact the priority.  And efficiency too, was usually emphasized on the boat.  With alacrity!

I wasn't really thinking clearly. My head was pumping with caffeine, nerves and adrenaline. I'd only done this once before. Shiney told me to do a bunch of complicated things, reordering the mooring lines and whatnot. So I did, but that caused me to take off the wrong line in the wrong order, so I had to go back and fix my mistake, by which point I became overwhelmed and even more anxious and confused, and all the while, the boat moved further and further from me. 

Also before getting back on the boat and starting to drive, Shiney had told me that if I couldn't make it to the opening in the door at the low point of the main deck, I should jump for the shrouds.  The best thing here would be for you to have seen the boat in person, or at least have a picture, but I must just try to paint it with words.  The shrouds go up towards the top of the mast at an acute angle from the rib-line of the boat. At the rib-line, there is a plank of wood that sticks out about a foot from the steel side of the boat. Below this, a couple steel bars called channels support it.

So I jumped for the shrouds, but the boat was too high and I too low, down there on the dock, and they were moving too far and quickly away from me. Instead of the shrouds, I caught a hold of the channels, which meant I was essentially hanging half upside down by my arms, looking up at this piece of wood over my head, above/around which were the shrouds I wanted and could climb. All I had below me was the smooth, steel, inwardly curving side of the boat, a little wet, and generally not much of a footrest.

I’m a good climber, and strong, but getting up from that position would have been super-human. I’m not sure even Shiney or Rangi could have done it, though I don’t put much past them.  So I hung and dangled and kicked there for a few instants, while the rest of my crew on the boat totally flipped out and panicked, because they were sure they were about to witness my sudden and grisly death by boat, and then I fell into the water.

My first thought was to look behind me and see where the boat was, how much space was between me and it, and whether it was moving towards or away from me.  Depending on this information, I could judge if my best chance for survival was to wait, and climb back out onto the dock, or try to dive under the dock and/or boat, avoiding the propellers and shedding my life jacket on the way to avoid being crushed. Luckily, it didn’t come to that. There were a few inches on either side of me and the boat and the dock, and although it seemed to move closer for an instant, it then began to retreat, away from me and the dock. I was able to scramble/get pulled back up onto the dock, the boat came closer, and I stepped aboard, now soaking wet in dirty fuel dock/pump out Bay water, and was grabbed and helped up by my first mate and perhaps one or two other strong hands.

I stood and dripped and gaped there for a beat or two, then Shane, who had been aloft for most of this situation, brought me up an emergency blanket from down below.  I went off, stripped off my dirty wet clothes and shoes, and got immediately into the boat shower, as we took off and headed back to Sausalito.

The rest of the crew dealt with the trauma in each of their own quiet, private way. Ashley the engineer, who hadn’t always liked me or cared much about me up til now, went down to the engine room and cried. Her engineer’s mate Chloe smoked a cigarette. The only time in her stressful 3-5 months on board when she did so. Most of the crew still doesn’t like talking about or remembering this story.  I’m sure it was even scarier for all of them than it was for me.  I didn’t really have time to be scared. I only had time to react, and survive.