Underway!

We've finally cast off our lines and left New York! I write this from Atlantic Highlands, near Sandy Hook. It is a mere 18 miles away (the ferry makes our 3 hour trip in 35 minutes), but it is a first leg under our belt, and we wanted to wait out a spell of heavy wind that was predicted here, rather than going straight to Cape May. We motored the entire way to break in the new transmission, and the way was gray and choppy. Nothing bad, but enough to make me surprisingly seasick! I've only ever been seasick once, and it was in far more heaving rolling water than this. I tried fixing my gaze on the horizon, but that gave me heartburn. The fact that my seasickness felt like heartburn and not nausea distracted me from it for a moment--but only a moment. Talking made it worse. I felt like my eyesight was deteriorating from so much straining to see something fixed and clear. Finally, I gave up on looking far away and settled for middle distance, where the waves were building in quick succession against us. This helped, because at least there was a visual in advance of the pitching or rolling sensation. It also helped to suck gusts of wind.

But the best remedy was to sit facing backwards, alternately watching the waves speed away from us, their pointy crests darting like hungry sharks, and wrapping my eyes around each letter in the name of the dinghy engine. Relaxing my vision in the soft white of the quick release life preserver box was also soothing.

Some people cope by taking Dramamine beforehand. Others, like Evan, psych themselves out of it, convincing themselves that they are not feeling sick and focusing on steering or navigating. I stopped feeling seasick when I was reading: deciphering the waves as they approached or left, grabbing visual and mental hold of every letter of a word--symbolic rocks and trees on firm land--and relaxing in the stability of a light monochrome box.

We got to Atlantic Highlands and caught a mooring. That's a heavily anchored buoy, basically, with a big rope that you attach to your boat. That way, you can stay out on the water (as opposed to being tied to a dock). Not only is it cheaper than paying for a slip at a marina, but it's also much nicer. You don't hear footsteps on the dock or get rocked against the dock by every wake of a passing boat. You just float on the water, the wind turning you in a leisurely circle around the mooring ball like a handler does a show pony at the county fair. I waited for the wind to pick up and our turns around the mooring to speed up, like a tetherball that's been given a stronger whack around the pole. Fun!

But as it turns out, the bad spell of wind and rain came and went quickly enough. We missed it entirely while watching "Get Low" in the town cinema. When we got back to the boat, we checked to see if it had passed through, never materialized at all, or was just late in coming. As Descartes might have pondered had he been here, could the storm have happened when we weren't looking? According to the weather sites we checked (and photos on the NYT website), it had.

NJ foodstamps

No, I am not on them. But I feel for anyone who does, because yesterday I lived a day in their supermarket-shopping shoes and it wasn't pretty.

It was another round of provisioning, this time for fresh veggies and fruits and whatnot. The only supermarket in the walking vicinity was...PATHMARK at the Old Colony Shopping Center.

Now, Pathmark is the antithesis of Whole Foods. I don't know if I've ever seen one in Manhattan or the close borders of the outer boroughs; they seem to exist purely where other supermarkets dare not go. Anyway, I regretted not having a rental car anymore and not being spendthrifty enough (in my new incarnation as long-term sailor) to reserve a Zipcar that would whisk me away to Trader Joe's or Whole Foods in Hoboken/Edgewater. I would have to walk to Pathmark--a solid fifteen minute walk at that. Luckily, my best friend came to visit with her baby and said she would drive me to Pathmark and back with my groceries. Yay!

I was expecting the worst: nothing but imitation Twinkies, rotten cabbage, RC Cola, and USDA Grade D meat. And it didn't help when, a minute into the store, we heard a guy on his cell phone saying, "I can't believe I'm in this ghetto-ass Pathmark." (We turned around to see a nattily dressed black guy contemptuously rejecting an apple.) But we were wrong!!! Ok, the meat selection was still not very good--not an organic, grass-fed sticker in sight. And the lettuce was sad looking. Otherwise, there were very good heads of broccoli, ripe tomatoes, green-to-yellow bananas, Paul Newman salad dressing, Mrs. Meyer's handsoap (?!), Illy coffee, and tons of great ethnic ingredients like Jamaican curry powder, made in Kingston, and coconut milk--and loads of thick-hair-friendly hair products. I was in heaven, and my friend, her baby, and I wandered leisurely up and down every aisle,

"Can't believe this is Pathmark!"

"I know, look, they have linden tree tea!"

We got to the register. Only one person ahead of us in our line. Good, because friend's baby needed a diaper change. We waited and chatted with the baby in a shopping cart that was left in our care while the mom went to get something she'd forgotten. And waited. And waited. What was going on? We glanced around. The other lines weren't moving either, and we were all checking each other out with the same purpose. (Every single person in line, apart from my friend, her baby, and me, was black, by the way. Jersey City clearly had a border, and we weren't on the historic downtown, white side.)

Half an hour crawled by with not a single item beeping across the red scanner. Computers were down. There was no answer as to when they would be back up. One Pathmark employee spoke anxiously into an ancient landline phone. Shoppers backed their carts out of line and into empty lanes in hopes that Pathmark would just open up new registers. The lady in front of me just packed up her stuff off the belt, into the cart, and pushed on out of there to where Duraflame logs usually sit. My friend and I looked at each other and thought "It seemed so different, but no, it really is Pathmark."

Finally, a cashier came over to my lane and asked if I could pay in cash. I said sure. She reopened the register and started scanning. So far, so good. A few people drifted back into my lane. Finally, as I handed the cashier my money and started bagging, someone yelled, "Credit cards are working. Cash is working. It's just New Jersey EBT that's down." Moments later, an official announcement was made: "NJ food stamp processing is down. If you are paying with NJ foodstamps, I repeat, the system is down." No word about when it would be back up, or apologies for the fact that a half-hour wait would stretch to who knows how long.

Three of the five lanes stayed blocked, with at least 4 carts in each, as people with food stamps settled in for a long wait. My friend and I wheeled my bags out in the shopping cart, only to be blocked by blue barricades just outside the automatic doors. You can't take Pathmark shopping carts to the parking lot. Because you might, what? Steal the cart? Shove the cart home because you don't have a car, and never return it? Either way, the store treats its customers like thieves and deadbeats. Glad I'm just passing through.

Happy dogs

Will Pflaum runs Glencadia, the country camp where Susie is staying while I'm gone. He films the doggies so that their owners can see that they're doing fine. Here's one where Susie gets some love and then proceeds to say hi to the camera. In the other, Susie romps around an open field with her new best friends.

Even if I didn't have a dog, I'd love these videos. Happy roaming dogs bring a smile to your face when endless document review or redlining cannot.


Untitled from glencadia on Vimeo.


Untitled from glencadia on Vimeo.

Call me Huck

Today was a beautiful day to stroll along this unexpected tiny strip of beach in Jersey City. I wore my wide-brim paper/polyester hat, which I will never be without from now on. After all, I don't want to end up like this: 

In other news, I've started cooking with a pressure cooker. It's fantastic! Perfectly steamed broccoli in ONE MINUTE. I'm looking forward to making a Korean kalbijim. My three attempts (pre-boat days) have been, at best, satisfactory. If anyone has good stew-type recipes--especially Caribbean ones--please share them!

Getting excited

A couple of seasoned cruisers, as people who live and travel on their sailboats are known, got towed into the marina a couple of days ago due to transmission failure. (Most sailboats have engines and transmissions, because it's a good backup in case the wind turns against you or just flat out dies. Also, it's easier to get in and out of docks, marinas, and harbors on low engine power than on sailpower.) Evan got to chatting with them a bit on their boat, and I eventually joined them. We told them we were hoping to leave the next morning for Cape May, NJ. When they asked me if I was excited, I couldn't lie. I paused and said "Not really."

What I meant, and explained, was that it is hard to maintain a constant level of anticipation and excitement about departure plans that are tentative to begin with and which keep getting pushed back by weather or mechanical problems. Not that I am down on our plans or situation. In fact, I am pretty content, enjoying the peaceful remoteness of boat-life and the occasional dip back into the roiling streams of activity in the city a short PATH or ferry ride away. But contentedness is very different from excitement. I am saving genuine excitement for when we are pushing off from dock, casting all lines off, and have passed the Statue of Liberty.

Which was yesterday, until we turned on the engine, put her into forward and started walking the lines off--and she wouldn't go forward. Instead of sailing through a perfect weather window to the southern tip of New Jersey, we spent the entire day with and without boatyard people, hovered over the transmission, which slips every time we put her into forward and rev her up. I learned how to change transmission fluid, which was fun. For a few hours, it seemed like we still had a chance at fixing it and getting out before the weather window closed, but things turned out otherwise. A new transmission is in the works, which has us staying in Jersey City for up to another week.

And that isn't so bad at all. If anything, these kinds of delays and unexpected developments are so commonplace with all cruisers that it isn't a big deal. But is that a good thing? Evan's friend was over at the boat yesterday when we discovered the transmission problem. When he saw our wild-haired, weather-beaten neighbors, he joked, "You don't want to turn into them. They've just let go, haven't they?" (To be fair, our neighbor was fixing something in his bilge, which is the whale's belly of a boat, where all nasty things dwell. Nobody looks good--nor should--when working on the bilge.)

Being able to go with the flow, having fluid plans, and not get bent out of shape about things that are out of your control is a positive thing. But the New Yorker in me is giving some resistance too, making me wonder whether there are also times when that attitude can slip into complacency, and things become "out of your control" by sheer virtue of your not exercising control when and where you can?

For example, we lost a few hours of our weather window while still indecisive about the transmission because the boat mechanic was MIA. The New Yorker in me wanted to go up to the marine services office and say, "Track this guy down! We can't make a decision about the transmission until he looks at it again, and we want to make the weather window!" The newbie sailor in me didn't do this, though, because every sailor and the few sailing books I've read all caution against that very "We've gotta make this weather window!" attitude. It was hard; at first, I placated myself by glaring up and down the dock, hand shielding my eyes in classic Lookout pose. Then I kept thinking that the transmission worked fine in lower revs, so why couldn't we just go? We'd be sailing most of the time anyway! Where was the boat mechanic to say that this would be an ok plan? Finally, I asked Evan why we couldn't just go with low revs. He pointed out that we might need high revs if we were going against a heavy current or drifting close to shallows or just generally needed to deal with some situation quickly.

Oh. Yup, we needed a new transmission then. That meant the weather window was no longer a viable consideration. And since the mechanic didn't have a new transmission lying around anyway, his MIA status had simply become irrelevant too. So ultimately, I had a better time squashing some tomatoes in hot oil than continuing the futile exercise of glaring the boatyard mechanic to our boat. The day's wave of excitement / frustration / desperation broke while we ate a yummy dinner, watched Ponyo, and, relaxing back into the small pleasures of living aboard, let go of our well-laid plans...this time.

The culprit transmission and coupler

Looking out of the companionway

More strange sounds

The final boat repair item before we leave this weekend is charging the refrigerator. This entails a vacuum generator, a vacuum gauge, pressure gauges, and a combination of low evacuation bursts, crackling static, and, as Evan just showed me (via the YouTube video below, not personally), Tuvan throat singing. I wish you could compare for yourself, but I can't get my video of the vacuum generator to upload on this spotty wifi connection. In the meantime, enjoy the throat singing.

Windy evening

It is an avant-garde music kind of night, what with fitful wallops of wind blowing through the boat and twanging the halyard (rope for raising/lowering a sail) against the shroud (wire cable stretched from the masthead to the sides of the boat to support the mast), producing metallic, space-like resonances. There is also the squeak of fenders against the dock. And, throughout everything, the creakings of a wooden Cape Dory boat.

It's a good time to open up The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. I found mine in the used bookstore on Atlantic Avenue off Court Street. The edition dates from the seventies, and it's a great reference for all sorts of nautical things that a landlubber like me doesn't know. A random flip, and this catches my eye:

"EAGRE, see BORE."

-->

"BORE, or eagre, a sudden and rapid flow of tide in certain rivers and estuaries which rolls up in the form of a wave. Bores are caused either by the meeting of two tides, where the excess of water results in a rapid rise, or by a tide rushing up a narrowing estuary where the closeness of the banks or a shelving bottom encloses the tide so that it is forced to rise rapidly to accommodate the volume of water coming in.

The most impressive bore is probably that in the Hooghli River, known as bahu by the natives, which comes in with the sound of thunder. . ."

 Apparently, a bore can be surfed as well, as in England below.

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/45986-river-severn-is-a-surfers-paradise

I love when a word that is so thoroughly one thing in common usage is something completely else in another vocabulary.

Provisioning

I've been busy stocking up on non-perishables, especially Trader Joe's soups and chilis and Indian boil-the-packet meals. These are valuable because they will fill in on days when we're sailing offshore and can't find a floating grocery store in the ocean, as well as days when we just don't feel like cooking. They are, in other words, for times of fatigue or need. Regular foodstuffs, like things requiring refrigeration, we'll find easily enough in marina towns.

Also, I am spending most of my time now with close friends and family. It doesn't feel like I won't be seeing them for a long time, but I must be registering this fact nevertheless, because I have done more talking and eating over the past 96 hours with my favorite people than in whole weeks of regular life. I just can't seem to soak up enough of them. I'm sure that I will meet plenty of people on our sailing journey and, hopefully, make some interesting friendships and acquaintances. But it will be refreshing and comforting, too, at times, to have this great store of old laughs, stories and affection that I'm accumulating now.

New developments at the marina today: a crab leg on dock and a new kitty joins the marina cats.

Dockside amusement

The marina has two stray cats who like to hang out on this one grassy patch near the parking lot. Since Susie is at doggie camp and isn't home to greet me these days, I have latched onto these cats ever since they came out of hiding yesterday to watch Evan and me playing petanque. They go everywhere together, and they even move the same. We'll find out if that becomes the case with Evan and me after a few months...

Living aboard

I have been living on a boat now for two days. The best thing so far: I sleep like a baby after I stalk and smack dead the few stray mosquitos that make it past the screens. The worst: having to trek the two minute walk to the marina's public bathrooms. It's not far, but the minutes preceding any visit to a bathroom are precious--and one is vulnerable en route to and fro.

The kitchen is out of commission until the heat breaks a little bit, and the fridge is repaired, which is fine with me since it means more Tacqueria! Their pork tacos are the best I've had, and they carry apple soda..yumm.

Our departure is delayed until sometime next week, thanks to Hurricane Earl working its way up north this weekend, but I already feel miles away from NY. Our marina is just a short ferry ride (or a longer walk + PATH ride) to the city, but this scenery on our walk to anywhere other than the ferry makes me feel like we've already sailed and docked in the boonies.

Susie's first and last day on the boat

The Cowboy from Colorado

On my flight back from Florida (sister's fortieth birthday), I fell asleep while we sat delayed at the gate. It was the head-jerking kind of nap, and, when I woke up, I apologized to the man next to me if I'd been crashing into him. He said that was ok, he hadn't noticed anything. Anyway, we got to talking, and I learned that he was a former rodeo cowboy from Colorado. I'd never met a cowboy! He described his ex-wife, sincerely deadpan, as "an OK lady," his German-descent mother as a "cranky Kraut," and his Scottish-descent father as a "70-year old who dances on his knees at nightclubs." He used to listen to Kool and the Gang at rodeos instead of country, couldn't relate to his 20-yr old son's dating stories at all since he himself had gotten married at 19, and loved NY after he went into a deli, got a puzzled look when he asked for a bagel with strawberry cream cheese, but ended up with a bagel and cream cheese, sliced strawberries on the side.

Only towards the end of the flight, after we'd been chatting and laughing, did he admit that yes, he had noticed my head snapping all over the place and that he'd wished there was something he could do cuz he'd felt bad for my neck.

Snowballs in August

I saw this license plate driving out of the city. A New York plate. Above the New York tag reads, "Choose Life," then the bottom, "God is Pro-Life." I always thought if I ever had a car, I would never put any bumper stickers or plates or anything that says anything about who I am. Who needs complete strangers to read into your life? (Oh wait, is a blog very different? Yes! I get to go on and on about what I think!)

Anyway, this month is full of big and small decisions, all of which are snowballing this week. Do I go sailing? (Yes) For how long? (Dunno) Do I keep my apartment or sublet it? (Neither) If I let the lease expire, where do I store my stuff? (Just picked the storage place today) How much of my stuff do I keep, throw away, and sell? (I won't bore you.) What movers do I use? (Same) Where do I board Susie? (Glencadia Dog Camp, NY) Do I keep my COBRA while I'm gone? (Dunno) Where do I have mail forwarded to? Should I switch phone plans? What do I take on the boat? AGH!

I go breathe now and attack another box.

The Critic and the Moth

I went to my first the Moth StorySLAMS tonight at Housing Works bookshop. The place was packed to capacity, and the theme was "Flight." Members of the audience who wanted to tell their 5-minute story on stage put their names on slips of paper in a bag and waited to see if their names were drawn.

Ten names were called over two hours. Of the ten stories, two were pretty tight and polished, two were highly entertaining, and the rest--save one--were okay. The stories told of suburban revenge by model plane in the Boy Scouts; hot air balloon catastrophe; the death of a much-loved cat finally setting its owner free to travel; the elation of getting fired from a hated job; attacks by Corsican birds; and scraping by to catch a flight with some dignity intact.

These storytellers were regular people (albeit trending towards the nerdy, neurotic, goofy, or eccentric), so I was really happy that everyone got genuine applause for, at the very least, their willingness to take such a public risk to hone their storytelling skills.

Here's a poem for them...

The Critic

I cannot possibly think of you 

other than you are: the assassin

of my orchards. You lurk there

in the shadows, meting out

conversation like Eve's first

confusion between penises and

snakes. Oh be droll, be jolly

and be temperate! Do not

frighten me more than you

have to! I must live forever.

--Frank O'Hara

Airing things out

Evan's boat is finally back in the water with a new rudder! We went out with a yellow bucket full of various cleaning products and rubber gloves, ready to tackle the cabin, which hasn't been cleaned in years.

And we inaugurated the boat with a first onboard fight.

The argument started in the marina, on the way to our dock. It continued once we were at the boat, sitting in the cockpit. Back and forth, heated conversation in the cockpit, until a neighbor appeared and said hi. The argument ground to a halt while we returned his greeting as if everything was just fine. Then we waited to resume until he was safely out of earshot. By then, though, another neighbor passed, and the waiting game continued.

Marinas are open spaces, but close. Boats are docked just a few feet away from each other, and sounds carry on the water. There is hardly any ambient urban noise to camouflage arguments or conversations or even snoring. So as our neighbors appeared and passed, and our retorts toed and bounced in their starting blocks, I thought, "Great, we're going to have no privacy on this trip." Because for the first month or so, as we crawl down the Intracoastal Waterway, we are going to be spending lots of time in marinas.

More scary, though, was the fear that, nevermind privacy from strangers, we might not even have much privacy from one another! On a 33-foot sailboat, where do you go when you just want the other person to disappear? I wound up going below deck. A door, I needed a door, something to block off access and sightlines. There was the bathroom (or the head, as it's called), which was as yet uncleaned and cramped and smelly. It had to be the bedroom then (forward berth). Unfortunately, I couldn't find the hook that would unlatch the door from the wall. Very frustrating. I nixed going back above and ashore, since that would require putting on a poker face in case I met a neighbor.  At last, the bedroom door unlatched, and I could sit by myself and pretend Evan wasn't less than 10 feet away.

Sweet privacy: space (albeit small) to hear my thoughts, to let out a few rhetorical, obscenity-laced questions, and to generally calm down. The boat rocked gently. Evan became a muffled presence, reduced to footsteps above deck. A puff of a breeze felt like cool water on my head. My anger dissipated.

Evan and I didn't spend the rest of the day holding hands and looking into each other's eyes, but we did manage not to throw the other overboard. In fact, we aired out the cabin and got rid of some mold, as well as tackled the removal of too-old blue protective tape (picture above). More significantly, though, it was nice to learn that even though such a small space might make it a little harder to take private, I-need-to-cool-off time, it also makes coming back together that much easier.

Geeking out at the NYPL

I am not usually very civic-minded, but last month I wrote a letter to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn against the proposed budget cuts to the NYPL because, in short, I am a big book nerd.

(In full...1. Access to books and learning and imagination should not be the sole privilege of people with money!--And I don't think that just because I'm currently unemployed! 2. I love that libraries are agnostic about book sales and popularity, and a little-known book can sit right next to a Nobel authored book when the alphabet works out just so. 3. Crinkling plastic book jackets, Gumby-bendy paperbacks, and knuckle knock knock rebindings.)

Today, I lost a few happy hours at The Performing Arts branch of the NYPL. Besides musical scores and dance recordings and theatre archives, you can borrow screenplays!

I brought home THE PIANO (Jane Campion), SECRETARY (Erin Cressida Wilson), JULES AND JIM (Francois Truffaut), and THE ICE STORM (James Schamus). I've started the Jules and Jim screenplay, and there are certain scenes already that I've mentally flagged to watch with the screenplay in hand. These are the scenes where I don't really get the technical stuff. The words are pretty self-explanatory--dissolve, close-up, pan, fade--but I have to admit that I can't really visualize, "The camera pans after her in close-up as she puffs rapidly round the room. . ." We'll see.

For those of you who are employed and perhaps too busy to go to the library, you can find the screenplays (or DVD, for Jules and Jim) through the Amazon links below.

Good afternoon

Susie, in her Gentle Leader headcollar (NOT a muzzle), lying on the August toasted grass in the park.

Good morning

Boat stuff

Evan's boat is still "on the hard," propped up on bony metal stilts and delaying the big trip by another few weeks. On the plus side, it is the first time I've seen the actual hull of the boat, and I am surprised by its beautiful desert colors.

The cause?  A corroded rudder post, eaten away by stray electrical currents in Evan's marina. The entire rudder has had to come off and be replaced. Sigh.

Ireland

Did you know that wild sheep molt?

Walking around the remote island of Achill, in County Mayo, I discovered this thing on the side of the dirt road that resembled a giant, half-torn cotton candy cone. Part of a wild sheep's discarded winter coat, with that good warm wool smell! It had never occurred to me that this is of course what all sheep would do if there were no shears around.

Of course, I can't talk about Ireland without mentioning its pubs. But the first pub we went to upon recovering enough from jet lag was a bit different from what you would expect.

It was the middle of World Cup fever at the Shakespeare on Parnell Street, and the bar was crammed with hundreds of red shirted KOREAN soccer fanatics. There are Koreans in Dublin! (In fact, the city has not one, but three Asian supermarkets!) The average age was 19 or 20--international students mostly--and the adjoining restaurant sent steaming plates of bulgogi and japchae to whoever was lucky enough to nab a table.

We also went to plenty of traditional pubs in the rural countryside. Morrissey, in a tumbleweed-worthy town called Abbeleix, was my favorite:

Finally, endless green. I love peat and bog and all the wild things that grow in there. My favorites: purple moor grass, ling heather, sphagnum moss, bog cotton (or what I like to call feather flower), bell heather, and fuschia.

Here is a slideshow of some photos of the trip. Double-click on the small picasa logo in the bottom right corner to get it going (NOT the big green play button, which just throws you into the first photo on Picasaweb):