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.