Month: January 2014

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Hot Topic 1: Plastic in the Northern Pacific Gyre… What I saw and what I learned about the legendary Floating Ocean Garbage Patch

OK, for those who don’t know, there is this famous Urban Legend about this huge patch of Garbage that floats between California, Hawaii, and Alaska, that is twice the Size of Texas (ever driven across Texas?) and just loaded with plastic. The mental impression is that you can walk over it, it’s this huge dump of plastic.. I have seen beaches littered with plastic, and heard about others. There is a famous spot that collects litter in Baja, due to the movement of tides, on the ‘elbow’ of Baja near the town of Guerro Negro, a spot called Malarrimo Beach, which I used to hear about when I lived there, so this was not a new idea to me… I was willing to believe the worst. I had seen around the world jokes and actions about it.. there were famous jokes about lost flip flops.. in Zanzibar Tanzania, they made a huge whale as an art project out of flip flops that rolled up on their shore, and sea plastic art is the new sea glass, with hippies in all sorts of beach places making designs out of bottle caps and  the like… there was even a guy named Papa Nutreno who made a barge out of Plastic and tried to float the seas… I had seen the Nuetrenos and heard their story in Key West once, and amazed a guy in Panama years later who tried to resurrect one of their boats by actually knowing the story.. we were both amazed by the odds of anyone making that connection as we tried to tug a Floating Nuetrino contraption out of a mangrove near Portobello that he wanted to turn into a bar.

http://www.floatingneutrinos.com/Message/Poppa%20Neutrino%20Speaks.html

A year or two ago I finally got a bug in my ass to start to learn about the famous garbage patch, maybe as I subconsciously meditated over trying to take this trip, and the first place I found some really good demystification mixed with an entertaining look at the matter came from Vice Magazine:

http://www.vice.com/toxic/toxic-garbage-island-1-of-3

hard to not get a kick out of young Thomas Morton, and the shipboard puppy love! I was only armed with this video when I got on the ship, but it had taught me a lot…

I am now finding that people are exploring this idea in other places:

This video isn’t quite as fun, they are a bit more earnest fair to say, but this is a group that sails from Brazil to Cape Town trying to find a similar patch in a gyre there, and sadly or not, they find one… it’s becoming a universal problem.

http://www.plasticizedthemovie.com/

I could link direct to the YouTube version, but why not let their page get the traffic…

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Anyhow, What did I see.. I saw the sea! I will keep using this joke, because one of the people I had consulted before taking this trip, who had come home from Korea in 1964 on a Military Transport had made the joke, and it turned out to be quite true… anyhow, what I am pleased to say is that I saw a lot less visible plastic than I expected, in fact, I saw hardly any the whole time, and you can see it.. if you see anything the size of a coke bottle, it pops out, even from such a large ship, because the sea tends to be a fairly consistent color… you spot birds and anything out of the ordinary in ways that start to surprise you after a bit, even on a boat with 4 or 5 floors of free board… If I could see just about any bird within a quarter or half mile, I became pretty confident that I would spot any flotsam and jetsam, and I did, and it happened like three times the whole trip.. I found his a relief… I had prepared to be horrified..

There are two major reasons I didn’t, perhaps. One reason you might have gleaned from the Vice Movie or, Plasticized…that the pieces are small to microscopic… and the other might have had to do with the fact that we went north of the gyre by a few hundred miles would be my guess.

I’m gonna steal Wikipedia’s map to prove my point:

Marine Debris Poster (4) AI9

we were maybe 500 or 1ooo miles north of it most of the way.

There were like 4 times I saw flotsam, and let me repeat that I was prepared to see these horrible garbage dumps, so not to downplay what is going on, but thankfully, it’s not depressing to cross the ocean.. it did give me the escape, as a visit to Alaska does, from the endless environmental degradation I see everywhere else… I also expected the waters off of china to be horrid.. they were interesting, loaded with fisherman, the air was thick with smog, and  the water muddy and oddly tinted, shallow and strange, but it wasn’t a floating rubbish bin as I had worried.. I stared at the sea for days, and like I said, I saw flotsam like 4 times… the most interesting moment being a time where I was hanging out with the Boson on the very front of the ship.. he and I hung out a handful of times, so I don’t remember if it was the two hours it took us to check all the bilge alarms on the ship (we must have walked 2 miles and climbed 400 ft of ladder), or the time I hung with him while we pulled up anchors in Nakhodka, or when they painted anchor chain while I hung out a few days in, but I remember it being early in the trip, just a few days out from California, me still struggling to get a basic context for things, and we were looking out to the front chatting, right on the little forecastle, and this line of flotsam went by, and instead of ignoring it like it was a common thing, he got big eyes and said “wow, looks like a fishing boat might have gotten in trouble!”.  It was a scum line with like 5 or 6 items on it, but it proved to be so irregular to see anything like that that I now realize it must have been a sunken like he mentioned, or one that had gotten in trouble, maybe up near the Aleutians or on the West Coast, and dumped some of its contents… the stuff was still together in a patch..it doesn’t stay like that for long..

So all this to say that while I expected to find something that looked like a raft party on Lake Meade or Lake Powell minus the people, something out of the T and A movie Piranha, what I saw on the macro level were clean seas, all the way past Japan where the Tsunami had occurred some two and a half years before, and past China which is the New Enviromhagheddon, and while I saw haze and perhaps strange weather, I never saw junk… the problem, as described, is sadly microscopic…

 

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The Glacial Near Miss

We are still a few days from passing through the straits between Honshu, Japan’s main island that contains Tokyo, and Hokkaido, kind of the Japanese Alaska, but more like a Japanese Maine or Michigan (not saying it isn’t nice, it does look nice, but there is a tunnel under the strait to it…) My computer is giving me fits by trying to get me to pick a region, even though it seems to have no problems playing movies from every region, so I decide to play Tropic Thunder in the crew lounge (little did I know that two months alter I would be visiting areas of Myanmar still ruled by factions of the Shan State Army that inspired this movie), knowing that the Filipinos will get a kick out of some if not all of the humor in the movie, and I am half curious to see who laughs when. I knew that Ben Stiller’s Tom Cruise take off adopting a Vietnamese kid would be funny to them, and predictably, when he flings the kid off the bridge at the end of the movie, they were howling, but they laughed at some of the subtler stuff too, telling me a few of them do understand English much better than they speak it, and that they can be cheeky even though it seems a national obligation to just agree all the time and smile a lot.

Fresh from this paternalistically seditious success, I decided to retire to my room, but something got me curious to peek at the bridge, maybe because the ship was kicking relatively hard (nothing 130k tons kicks that hard comparatively, the officers keep reminding me, many of them having cut their teeth on remarkably smaller vessels, but you know the seas gotta be big for it to move at all unpredictably). I arrive on the bridge, it in it’s typically blacked out state at night, to find one of the smarter young mates, a kid named Carlos from Manilla with 4 years of a Filipino Maritime academy under his belt, and Luarenin, the 3rd mate, on watch. When you show up on deck when it is blacked out, just a few dark screens on, every other light blocked by a curtain in the nav room, you take a moment to figure out who is there by pausing as you approach the console to let your eyes adjust, and they often say something to you when you show up to let you know who is there, since it is like walking into a darkened movie theater. Often times people engage you in talk because nothing is going on other than the normal rounds: Hit the dead man switch every 9 minutes, plot the location once an hour, rip off and file the weather fax and warnings, and look for traffic. You can go from Oakland to Japan and never see another ship they have told me, and we have seen 2 so far, one which was perfectly silhouetted by the setting sun during our pig roast the second day out, so I find it exciting, well, it’s not that exciting, it’s two ships literally passing in the night, but to a brain raised on disaster movies, and given the relative lack of outside impacts on our little bubble at sea, it is exciting for me.

But let’s say it’s slow motion exciting. I know realize how much compressed narrative it takes to make this stuff movie sexy. I had fantasies of constantly dodging fishing ships and the 7th Fleet in some secret emergency a la The Final Option or The Hunt for Red October… but to quote someone I talked to before I got on the boat who had a similar experience crossing the Pacific from an army deployment in Korea in the mid 60’s.. What did I see?.. I saw the sea. No more, no less, he was wisely implying.

When I came up on bridge I discerned it was Carlos and Luarntin like I said, but they seemed preoccupied… I had been scanning the controls at this point for over a week, maybe once or twice a day, learning a bit more every time, so I was able to put together pretty quick that they had approaching traffic, on a course that was potentially dangerous, and to make it more exciting or dangerous, they couldn’t see it yet.. it was a foggy night, and even huge ships often only have like 4 lights, just like any other.. the one you are looking for first is usually the mast light, which should be visible as many as I would guess 8 miles away on a clear night, but this was not a clear night.. it was blowing 30 knots, I can’t tell you how big the waves were because I was still learning to judge that from my pampered position on this behemoth, but maybe 30ft, possibly more (spray was smashing over the front rank of containers, which must be 80 feet above the water level if not more), and there was rain and fog.

Laurentin and I sill hadn’t bonded yet.. he was one of the few officers that held me at a suspicious distance..in fact of all the guys on the ship, he was the hardest nut to crack, the rest just didn’t speak English I later figured out.. not that any Romanian is unfriendly, he isn’t, but his public persona was quite sour by Romanian standards.. he was the scoffing grump of the crew, not that he couldn’t be warm, he was to me, often, but also kind of saw me at first as a big smiling potential nuisance, and I had to prove myself as not someone who was going to break an ankle in the middle of the Pacific…he’d been at sea for I bet 25 years, and he doesn’t want trouble.. I walk around in flip flops, and I think he underestimates me a bit, and there was no point in trying to verbally convince him of anything about me.. he was like a cliché of an old army NCO.. show me don’t tell me, Leroy! Later in the trip I would go to great lengths to try to break him down, and I learned that a lot of it had to do with a skepticism of Americans, as he felt that there hadn’t been much wrong with life in Romania before the fall of communism. I decided to grab a pair of binoculars, there are always about 4 pairs floating around the control areas of the bridge, and look for the damn thing. One more set of eyes couldn’t hurt, no one had really made too much differentiation between me and the crew, and maybe I could win some points with ol’ larry with a bit of earnest American help..

After about two minutes of scanning, I saw the faintest of white lights, a few degrees to starboard of the visible crows nest behind the bow that is about 200 meters in font of us always, and hangs like a little white painted cloud at night, kind of a constant marker of our nose position, unless, of course, the ship breaks in half or something. I called it out, and he seemed to find it at the same time, and for the first time, I got some approval out of Lawrence.. nothing glowing, but he didn’t seem to mind the help.. Finally I was something more to him than just a mysterious crazy American willing to pay for something he needs to be paid to do, and my help was accepted.

Here is where it got funny. My brain is racing at the speed of Speed 3.. two ships charging at each other in bad weather on the wild north pacific ocean! Hundreds of thousand of tons of cargo and life and environmental devastation in the balance, Dennis Hopper has rigged the Exxon Valdez to plow into Long Beach or some shit, and Keanu only has 10 minutes to save the world..

In our case.. that 10 minutes was a foot tapping boring ass time staring into the gray.. you see, our boat goes 21 knots when we are going full, about the max before diminishing returns in fuel, but we had slowed due to the inclement weather, so maybe 17 knots, and the other boat must have been doing 12 or 15, but that still means you close at like a minute and a half per knot, maybe 2.. this is Top Gun at glacial speed. So we go from “bogey at 12 O’Clock, Mavs!” to…..: “how’s about those Mets…?”… as we watch the light slowly materialize maybe 5 miles away from the mast light to eventually a red running light marking his port side, and this and three other instruments, from an IFF type thing (Identify Friend or Foe, something that reads data released by the ship by radio waves, and can even plot it on your other screens. Info like name, registration, size, and heading) to different radar and GPS screens. The other ship goes by about a mile to port, some 8 minutes later..

I watch him slip off the port side and away, trying to read his name by the light he has on his stern to match it up with the weird Indonesian sounding name that our instruments gave us, kind of wondering if I am the only one who had turned this into a harrowing near miss at sea, wondering if their watch officer was sweating like Ted Striker in Airplane, or just dreaming of vanilla sugar cookies like everyone on the bridge seems to, and realize that things really do happen at a human pace out here…

I decide to turn in, chuckling to myself about getting so quietly jazzed up about something akin to a wrestling match between Galapagos Tortoises, a bit embarrassed that I got so excited so quickly….glad I didn’t voice any excitement to give Lawrence any other impression than that it was just one more sugar cookie cravin’ night for me as well, wishing I was eating pan fried salt-less chicken on the boardwalk in Constanta after a night playing hide the gypsy with the wife and reading Dracula adventures to the kids…

it has been an eventful night by Libra standards!

Lawrence and Chuck do give me a warm good night as I head for the dim light of the staircase, and I do feel like I have accomplished something… which is a rare feeling when you have time… nothing but time…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER2VNU3R0gA

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What’s it like?

What’s it like? You are a thousand miles from anywhere, and even if you get bored it feels like none of the worlds problems could touch you if you can just let them go, and moonless at night in the middle of the Pacific, Venus can reflect and dance off the water it is so brilliant.  you are surrounded by space but you can’t step into it, that would be a mistake, and high walls, like a medieval keep, and it feels safe, isolated and safe. You live in a 9 story condo, with a bunch of people who don’t require you to lock doors.. they feel as removed as you do, and you don’t have to explain too much. The Condo floats on a box the size of a small park, a huge intricate jungle gym to explore, it never stops moving to remind you are alive, making noises as the containers creak back and forth, and the pulse of the prop never lets you feel too alone despite the distances, like a mothers beating heart. The View is always water, but it never stops changing, the wind blows fresh from at least one direction, and there is always a new port to look forward to. Could it offer Shangri La?..if not, you have the boat to return to. There is no surfing the web, or texting your friends, or stressing social plans. There is email, but no attachments… it can bring bad news as well as good. You consume media, but it’s pre selected,no surprised unless you create one for yourself. You read books, you think, you remember, and you explore. You Floss your teeth better than you ever have given yourself time to. You feel good enough that you wonder if it would be more, or less fun with a woman you love but still want to explore.

There is enough time to focus on people, and the people have often taken that time to become interesting: The Crew  of this particular boat was made up of two groups, Romanian Officers and Filipino Crew, except for one Second Officer who is Filipino, a crack navigator named Leo with a 4 year degree in Commercial Shipping, and a few cadets who are mostly Romanian. Even though some of the Filipinos outrank the Romanians, especially in the case of Leo, they separate socially, and the Romanians get the Men’s Club type officers lounge and the ostensibly nicer food. The Romanian officers feel like a slightly suspicious but mischievous fraternity, and the Filipinos like a beach Karaoke party where you still make it to confession the next day. I eye the one group like Dean Wormer from Animal House, with amused suspicion, the other like Dean Wormer might feel being force to hang out with the Campus Christians…. short bursts are exceedingly pleasant.. anything longer… Romanians are what you get when a Russian and an Italian have kids.. drama and narcissism mixed with a sense of humor and some mature perspective. Everything is a big deal, but nothing will kill you… There is a kind of acceptance that they will never be the top dogs in the world, but then again, who wants to be.. they are wary of authority but happy to do their job.

Filipinos have that affability, that best described as puppy like innocence, playfulness, and amiability.. they act forlorn sometimes, but it tends to be pretty adolescent stuff. Conversations revolve around exchanges of well publicized facts and some pretty genial Jr. High joshing.. but they respond well if you get a little bluer with the humor, like kids who respect their rebellious 7th grade math teacher too much to make the joke themselves, but will laugh if he does, and kind of like being judged worthy of it. Wow, the teacher made a sex joke. He must really like us! A few come across a bit savvier, a bit wiser, like the guys in the kitchen, whom I didn’t begin to hang out with and appreciate until the end of my trip, but it does take an east coast attitude to question niceness, so maybe I shouldn’t complain, as they were all nice as hell.

The wild card on this trip is 6 former longshoremen from North Germany who are installing a 6600 volt version of shore power.. think of your buddies plug at his nice yacht marina times, well times 45. They have been working about 8 hours a day consistently since we got here, cutting holes in bulkheads and welding, running this 2 inch thick insulated and shielded conduit in bunches of 6 that will allow the boat to plug-in on shore. It starts with these two refrigerator looking things ( dubbed them that, hoping the name sticks, feels like you can reach in and grab a beer if you don’t get electrocuted first) that they will plug the shore power in from on the rear deck, one each side, through a huge junction box the size of, well, a small walk in, and then up into the ships electrical room through the secret gangway as I call it, these secret hallways that run the length of the ship below deck. If pirates ever attack us, these things are like Chu Chi was for the Americal Division, along with a bunch of other passageways that led to places like the bow thruster and bosons supply. They are a jovial group, all from Hamburg now, but a few from East Germany before the Fall of the Wall. They all have enough English to fool me, but a few of them can have thoughtful conversation as well. We are the ship outsiders, and they are kind of my purge valve for western European thinking. I admitted I have an ex girlfriend whose parents hail from Hamburg, and have a few wacky stories about my three trips to Germany and my family history there (along with 50% of all of America) to kind of get to be in the club. Four of them are huge, they look like a death metal band, or essentially like what you would want a band from Hamburg to look like, while the Electrician, the top guy in some ways, nearly 60, is a bearded pleasant old guy, what you would want an old German sailor to look like, the kind of guy who would thoughtfully shrug and sigh before he ordered torpedoes to hit your ship during World War II.. das is war, yeah.. sad.. and then there is Tiny Tim.. he’s not actually that small, he just looks small and young compared to the rest of them, even though he is in is at least in his late 20’s, with sea experience, and a pretty sardonic wit I can sometimes tell even though he looks like a 12 year old compared to the rest of them and speaks the least English.  HE looks tired and like he has a stone in his shoe every day, but is a prety tough cookie with a lot of sea experience already. They are like the giants in Where the Wild Things Are.. kind of philosopher welders.. the two who speak English especially are thoughtful gentlemen even though they almost make me look tame physically, and if you have ever seen me, you know that is saying something. One of the English speakers looks like Vin Diesel, only bigger, and could easily play a viking in a movie, or a shaven head Star Trek warrior bad guy or German machine gunner that the hero has to kill in some french back alley against all odds. Another actually reminds me of a Welshman for some reason, but from the days of kilts and broadswords.. if they ever did a Welsh Brave Heart (BraveSheep?) he would make a great supporting character if not lead, and his English/Welsh accent is already there. These guys give me an out sometimes, not that you completely need one, but when the Romanian Bitching seems to be more genuine than ironic, and when Karaoke and cheap Canadian Whiskey feel like a secret party at Filipino summer camp, these guys allow me to just be sarcastic and off enough to return to it all, and what they are up to will save the planet, and crap like that. My first class service follows me to their dining room, so when I join them, it’s always a bit awkward, especially when I get a plate of what they are just ladling out to themselves, just from a waiter, but also when my food is noticeably better, but I got to make it a joke. One time I was forced in with them while we waited to be checked by Russian customs, and as they rode me for it, stuck with the technicians, I said F you guys, I’m going to eat salmon! They roared…

You have the sea to watch, the boat to explore, the long list of what you wanted to read or watch but never had the time, that puzzle or model to make ( I made 6, one with the help of the whole crew, the skyline of Hong Kong in 3D.. seemed appropriate since they all see it for real about once a month. If I was ever doing puzzles on dry land, I would want you to shoot me…) and you can do nothing and not feel guilty, and the mom’s of the crew will still feed you three times a day, let you raid the fridge, poke into what they are doing, listen to big decisions being made without conspiratorial secrecy, and never judge… it’s teenage heaven!

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The Run Up…

I had been dreaming of taking a freighter trip for years.. it was first suggested to me by a friend from College whom I spent a lot of time with in Nashville where he became a professional musician. Back in the day, when I was hitch hiking around America, there was this feeling that I would hop a freighter like the days of old.. I used to actively think about it, ways to flee CONUS (Continental United States) in my currently broke state.. it had all this vintage magic associated with it, time to think, the challenges of a salty adopted family to egg one into manhood, and the exotic.. sailors who lived by their own rules, who gave up conventional life for rewards unimagined… it’s a dream so often repeated in film and literature, but still not a cliché somehow, because really is out there, if we just know how to get to it, let ourselves get to it.. if Riding the rails, which I had tried, was the grand daddy of Vagabond Adventures… this is the Great Grandaddy…This is Lord Jim.. taka me to paradise or let me die…. In my hitching days I never was able to make it happen.. in my conversations, it became clear that a brave new world of regulations and security, heightened by September 11, had made things like that harder than ever.. it would make me a criminal, unless I joined some union and became a professional.. while you might be able to jump on with the boat people of Thailand, or Indonesia, or India, it’s not quite how it worked in the US. When I lived in Key West, among a group considered by many to possess these traits relative to American Culture, there was a lot of rule bending, but no breaking quite like that.. rarely did people just sail off to Cuba without checking out from customs first…  it’s just not how the world works anymore unless you are making a lot of money somehow, and people don’t talk about that. It’s sad how old dreams of adventure now fade to being on your face with flex cuffs on with some ICE agent who went to community college in Grand Rapids talking to you like you are a bad five year old who should be ashamed, and wait till Judge Daddy finds out… rebellions romance is somehow not the same in action in these days of the American Empire.. But there were these memories of my Nashville Buddy showing me these freighter travel web pages… it’s the kind of thing that ‘those Europeans and Australians’ do with their 6 week of vacation, whirl with our two, us Americans don’t waste time getting there.. we fly to the beach and Pedro hands us a Margarita within 45 minutes of arrival while we text back to our sister to remember to tun down the heat since we left so quick… it’s undignified, and it’s the American Way to Travel… we have an empire to build..we can’t just sit around. It’s why we never have context for where we go, because we get to just where we planed to be… he seemed to know that if he couldn’t do it, I needed to… I worked up to it in a way in my years of travel. I did long ferry trips up to Alaska, as far out as Dutch Harbor, I lived on a boat in the keys for months, I hung out with a friend who went to a Merchant Marine Academy, and tried to learn from him, I dreamed of being Commerce St. Croix, the ship Captain in the Lords of Discipline, and I finally even took the Queen Mary 2 across the Atlantic to see if I would get bored.. multi day trips on the Mekong and Magdalena would follow, and I had had my Captains Courageous trip, a wooden cargo ship had once taken me down the wild coast of Colombia, a trip that will live in my emotions for ever, as if I had discovered a lost place and time, gone in search of Captain Kurtz and found him. Nuqui to Buenaventura, with all the intrigues of Jungle and the Pacific, snakes and sharks, Guerilla armies and smugglers, Banana loads and buckets of fish, and people with time… it had been a magical trip… a freighter and some white mans regulations would not now be a let down.. I had seen the wild side. When I knew I had 3 months to get to a wedding in Thailand, and that there was the possibility of crossing the largest body of water on earth, the largest ‘Thing’ on earth, I jumped at it… I had been in Latin America for months, and was more than over the shifting morality of that place, cool jungle or not, and pining for Alaska, but it had to be done.. I parked myself in a buddies basement garage in Venice Beach and went to work, hoping he would give me enough time to make the plan happen without me having to shuffle around from hotel to hotel, which he thankfully did (just don’t spread your crap everywhere.. I gotta live here too!)… I had a million reasons to want to, which I will detail later.. one is Oedipal. My father had been commissioned a Naval Officer with orders that would likely take him to an Invasion of Japan just as the bomb dropped. HE spent the active portion of his service bringing ships home to america for Mothballing and repair, cleaning up the pacific from the 4 year conflagration… and he would talk endlessly about how good the time had been, just cruising back and forth to america, I’m not sure how many times, but over about a year and a half I was left with the impression.. reading books and interacting with the crew and the world, peeking at paradise and the results of such a complex set of acts of man. No son doesn’t want to equal or outdo the acts of their fathers, nor reap the same benefits of similar actions. Living in Alaska, and having loved the pacific for years, I wanted to see it through… I wanted to know what was south of Alaska, and out there from where America seems to end on Ocean Beach in San Francisco… what is past Seal Rock and where my buddies surf.. what is that space between… what defines it.. what is it? I jumped on the internet and tried to find a booking agent.. the fist 4 I tried, and the only I could find, literally never returned my calls nor emails.. New York, London, I talked to someone in Brooklyn, thickening my old accent to get respect,and they had a guy, but never heard back from him despite my full old school voice cred…. it stared to feel like some sort of secret society.. I had time, hadn’t given up yet, but I was definitely frustrated.. I asked a friend to help me, and after a couple of days, with me growing more accepted that I would sit around LA for a bit, maybe do another improv class of finally get some hot model/actress girlfriend to show me the sites, then just jump on a lane from nearby LAX, disappointed but accepting, my buddy came through, some guy in New Zealand, and he is communicating.. His name was Hamish, and like most Kiwis he was a straightforward gentleman with a kind but keen sense of humor. I had been near his hometown about 7 yeas before, and we joked rugby for a bit, since his local team is one of the best in the world. The rest of the conversation went something like this: me: I want to cross the pacific… do I need to rush to book, will it sell out? Hamish: laughter… Me: not that popular of a run? Hamish: you’ll be the first one in a few years… me:umm… sweet, so no problem picking my room Hamish: shouldn’t be an issue! he was right.. when I got on board, a few of the guys could remember every passenger they had met on two hands, over long careers.. they tended to be former sailors who missed the sea… old German guys who want to solve engineering puzzles and be alone, occasionally an adventuresome European couple doing the ‘around the world without a plane’ challenge… maybe crossing the Atlantic, Germans off to see New York, might actually book up during the good months, but not this… it’s one of the longest single hauls possible, and most people are intimidated.. I am too dumb for that.. The paperwork came in, and I went at it.. I hate paperwork.. it’s all built on distrust, and who wants to hang out in situations predicated on distrust, but I wanted this trip.. my buddy knew a doctor in the valley for my physical.. lot’s of rings.. Persian.. cash on the barrel head.. get me an appointment! Multiple entry visa to China.. 160 bucks.. fucking crooks… alright.. I fond some cool expiditers on Wilshire.. one had grown up in NYC, and we hung out during his smoke break and talked about life in the Big Apple while we enjoyed the LA sunshine.. they were cool and made me feel like i was getting this lined up right… health form, identity sheet, application, copies of passport, contract, travelers insurance, long cruise survival guide.. statement that I know there is no internet, yellow fever vaccination card… lot’s of Xeroxing and scanning, all at Paul’s office, me making some pretty offensive & loud comments before I realize that someone else was working on a Sunday besides Paul, but it’s LA, and it’s showbiz, no one takes offense.. When I finally get my paperwork in, somehwat down to the wire (backups at the Chinese Mission!), Hamish sends me the all important Voucher.. it’s my golden ticket… estimates are that I have about a week before I have to be in Oakland.. Oakland baby… I had just been visiting a buddy from Alaska who has found sanctuary from a pretty funny social faux paux in Alaska by cooking at an old Hotel in Berkeley.. he bought a sailboat, he’s got balls, and he has been showing me Oakland… I know just where I need to get to, and I got people to say hi to while I wait.. A last 2 nights at the Andaz on the sunset strip to say bye to some east side friends, and experience the former Riot House, the rock and roll hotel that birthed Golden Gods and broken TV sets (the windows no longer open wide enough to get a TV out, although we thought of taking one up to the pool), and Bobby Felckman, the hostess with the mostess… and I was on Amtrak for Jack London Square. Once up there, I was to go stay with a cousin in law of a buddy who I had been put together with by serendipity over a small town theater in the midwest, and headed for his pretty nice digs on the legendary Asbury Street in SF. Some Luxury while I wait. I started calling my shore agent.. wrong number.. he quit a year ago.. calls to the agents in Long Beach… are you in Long Beach, the boat leaves in a day? Holy Crap, do I need to be in Long beach, I’m in Oakland.. oh, no worries, (after a long agonizing tense wait) the boat will be up there in 2 days.. you have like 3 days to go.. 3 became 4, but  I still had time to play with… My Alaskan buddy picked me up next to Fisherman Warf and sailed me back to Emeryville…. couldn’t have been a cooler way to get me ready, on a 26 footer.. we dodged ships like I was going to be getting onto.. we stared at the harbor trying to figure out what it would be like… I checked back into a hotel on Jack London square and waited out my last night.. made a mad dash to Whole Foods Oakland (somehow Oaktown keeps it real, even Whole Foods was cheaper than in LA or SF) to fill up the fridge I had just learned I would have (Cheese and Simple Green Vitamin Juice.. the two things I knew I would want on board… the cab driver wanted to get lunch there, so it worked out perfectly… I’ll get you back to the hotel no problem sir!) . I had all I needed.. a stack of books on everything from Burma to the History of the FBI, and a pair of Flashmans, every 5 dollar movie worth a crap I could get my hands on in the Santa Monica Barnes and Nobles, two pairs of Ray Bans, some puzzles and origami from a games store in Berkley, and three packs of ear plugs… Hopped a cab with an ancient old brother cab driver, probably thought the panthers had been young punks, and even he had never been in the Harbor.. this was gonna be interesting…

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An Opening Vignette: Ronald’s Birthday Party

We are a few hundred miles south east of Kamchatka, headed for the Tsugaru Strait, 9 days from Oakland, it’s Ronald the Able Seaman’s birthday, and this boat has finally broken me down enough to try Karaoke.. how great of a feat that is I will explain later.

Today had been an annoying day for me.. I mean, I don’t have much to complain about.. I am seeing a part of the world very few people see, I am literally in one of those places on the map you don’t even contemplate, the kind of place I dedicate my life to getting to, and I feel alive every time I feel the boat move, but today, and it was a kind of passive move, and only the second time there have been any restrictions placed on me, I was barred from going on deck because of 36 knot winds and some crazy waves.. might not seem like a big deal.. sounds dangerous in fact.. we are a thousand miles from nowhere, in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean, a floating island loaded with industrial exports, and likely some empty containers headed back to the world’s greatest industrial mecca, the Pearl River Delta of China, but I woke up this morning dreaming of roaming the decks on what to me seemed like one more Alaskan day, but the Romanian Officer on Watch had other plan for me. My frustration was compounded by the gym being a construction site when I woke up.. the grapevine told me that some leaky sewage pipe had been discovered when they were moving the punching bag the other day, so I was kind of pent up, and of all things, after we passed a frontal boundary that had scared the shit out of the crew on the weather report, the day broke beautiful and sunny, if a bit windy, and I was left to roam the ‘accommodation’ the super structure of the ship that is like a condo complex, after three days of hibernating in the gray and ticking off the stack of old movies I had brought with me and scrounged.

Ronald was one of the more irony blessed of the Philippians, meaning one of the most easy to talk to. If you have spent a lot of time in the third world, you lean that abstract thought is not a given for huge swaths of the world, and conversations often never get past exchanges of well published facts, lot’s of awkward nodding, something I am well familiar with by now. I had had high hopes for him until some lunch banter turned into his explaining that the Philippians was being hit by so many natural disasters because they worshiped too many god’s. Alright, so too much for hoping Ronald and I might get sarcastic together, a pent up need of mine that had been growing for the last few days, a need to vent my sarcasm that builds up, to purge it somehow, a natural need for the New Yorker in me like bathroom breaks and the occasional sexual act not with a computer screen in front of me for my general humanity. Anyhow, Ronald still was nice enough, fun enough, and I had noticed during our hilarious emergency drill a few days before that he had suited up as one of the 4 firemen, meaning that he had some experience on the high seas that was noticed. So I had decided I liked the guy, so when he invited me to his birthday party in the crew club, literally 4 feet from the crew mess I had taken to eating in to escape the endless pseudo dramatic banter of the Romanian officers I am supposed to eat with, I consented, although I planed to stay about two second flat.

You see, I know what a Filipino party means.. I had been listening to them for days on the ship, and I had been avoiding them in various forms for the last ten years as I roamed the earth.. drunk and geeked out coke smugglers on the coast of Colombia, morose Chinese tobacco workers in southern Yunnan, Mozambiquan Yuppies trying to forget that they are too educated to be in such a backwards place by singing Tupac, all fucking karaoke parties are the same.. it’s dudes singing bad music off pitch acting sad about things that I would likely not think more than a second about in the course of my life…the room always smells of smoke, and especially in Latin America, it usually lulls people drunk and sad enough to come out of the closet to me in ways that are as horrifying as my mom telling me my cat was dead for the 6th time by the time I was 10.

I had decided to join the German Technicians for dinner hoping they could help me vent some of my vitriol for the night… one of them actually speaks English like a thoughtful Welshman (due to his favorite band, The Streets I learned, an interesting white hip hop crew from Brixton and Birmingham), even though he and his crew are 6 huge  former merchant mariners turned welders and electricians who picked up a gig installing a 7000 volt shore service plug, the first they have ever done, as part f the fight against global warming.. it’s gunna take them 17 days, about the time it will take us to get to out first port in china, to basically wire a plug, turning this 360 m vessel into some weird massive version of a Prius plug in. I had been avoiding eating with them until recently, knowing they needed to bond, plan, and decompress after their shifts working in the ear splitting noise of the gear box room on the tail of the ship, but I figured by now they had their shit together and could handle me the interloper. As we were casually joking about my lack of German Language Skills, and Viking sacks of Rotberg, all of them but one the size of Refrigerator Perry and looking like a Norwegian Death Metal Band, Ronald showed up at our table and made the invite..

I decided if they were actually going to go, it wouldn’t be so painful, and we had been on this boat long enough there was no way out of me hanging with the Philippine portion of the crew this way.. anything else would be like kicking a puppy. Painful as it would be, there was no way to politely get out of it.

After all of us peeking in, the Germans made the excuse of needing to shower.. it was obvious to everyone I didn’t need to shower.. I sit around al day, and the nearest female is a whale, make that I didn’t shower, so that excuse was gone, and I found my way to a seat and worked up the courage to embarrass myself with a little Karaoke, figuring that if I could do an Eric Burden song, We Gotto Get Out of Here by the Animals, it might kick the party into another zone with me the crazy white guy passenger making an ass of himself for the hope of the team. My biggest fear was drunken puppy sadness for round after round of Filipino equivalents of Celine Dion songs until I could crawl out. As I came into the lounge, half the guys, about 6, were playing cards and the birthday boy and a few of the others were around the couches and the bar manning the machine. There was the regular endless supply of Milwaukee’s best which they delighted in me calling ‘The Beast’, which must have been the cheapest beer they could buy through the supply services in Long Beach or Oakland, but there was the additional wild card of a 50 dollar bottle ( the label was still on it, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the foggiest) of Ketel Vodka that made me realize this party might go someplace.

Somehow as much as I might cringe I this situation under normal circumstances, my social isolation, our collective isolation from all humanity ( I can calculate that the one building air base on Adak in the Aleutians might be the closest collection of humanity, 1000 miles away, and likely in a similar state, as I had read that the whole base lives in one large building that they only rarely leave during winter. That or Kirabati or Midway.. someplace like that..) made this mission to Mars a good time to perhaps get over my fears of Karaoke, just give in to the lowest common denominator, before I travel once again through the wilds of Asia where it will be frankly fucking everywhere. I can’t beat them, so I am joining them.

I’m on the couch with Ronald, belting out sad sad songs.. about girlfriend leaving for Manila, and rice farmers with broken hearts… and I uncharacteristically volunteer for the book, more as a way to stop the bleeding of whatever song he’s is singing in the dim light of our plastic wood lined parlor. My plan comes to fruition when I find We Gotto Get Out of This Place is in the system.. I can lead a little self righteous baby boomer rebellion of my own after months of rejecting their arrogance from one end of California to another, thankfully with Eric Burden being the least affected of all of those 60’s voices. The crowd goes wild… Tom the Passenger can sing a little Karaoke, in English of all things!.. he can lower his guard… he can be goofy… he’s one of us now…

The Germans make good on their promise to actually show up a few minutes later, (yah… why not.. where else could we go?) and it’s on… a thousand miles from nowhere and we roar.. toasts and cheers and jeers… and lot’s of yuk yuk yuks…

I conclude my night a half hour later with New York, New York, to round applause… for some reason I can’t sing it without doing a Sinatra immigration, or Piscapo from the 80’s ding Sinatra (the only thing he did well on Saturday Night live if I remember).. it’s in my blood from seeing too man Yankees games to the final out, and make my leave… the Filipinos go back to chocking cats sadly and calling it music, and the Germans tap along with a wry smile, and I understand now the wisdom of the Romanians never to come to the crew lounge… but I’m almost half way to Hong Kong and I can’t help but admit I am having fun…