Friday, June 5, 2015

Sailing in the wake of a personal hero

Photo from Alaska.org
The statue of Captain Cook overlooking Knik Arm, Resolution Park, Anchorage.



Bear with me on my rambling thought train today. Last night I fried my microwave. I thought I was
setting the timer and I hit the cook button instead and it ran for 20 minutes with nothing in it. A look at the book today informed me that more than a couple of minutes like that and it will shorten the unit's life.  I can confirm that now.

So, naturally the microwave was in mind today, especially as I went shopping for a new one. As might be deduced, I am not totally familiar with them. Years ago a friend and fellow sailor said he couldn't understand how Captain Cook got all the way around the world without a microwave. Now I understand.

It's a long drive to the store with plenty of time to think and I went with Captain Cook. While I don't claim to be a Cook historian, I did a lot of studying of him when I was working up a spiel for the tour boat I drove for six years. Cook and I had navigated the same waters and in fact he and some of his crew, including William Bligh and George Vancouver, who returned later named many of the geographical features that I pointed out to the tourists.

Prince William Sound where we operated (Cook named it Sandwich Sound after the earl who helped finance his expeditions) is noted for its relatively calm waters. There was only one spot on our trip that could storm up into any kind of rough. Leaving the Columbia Glacier we had to cross the southern end of Valdez Arm which is one of the few places in the Sound open to ocean waves.  At times we could hit five or six footers in there and as they were on the beam, it made the passengers very uncomfortable.

I had a scheme there. If it was calm I gave a short talk about Cook's explorations in the Sound. But if it was rough, I had a talk about Cook that could go on for an hour. I would give it in a low monotone thinking one of two things would happen.  Either people would listen intently taking their minds off the rough water, or it would put them to sleep.  Either way they could make the passage with the least discomfort. It usually worked.

I would go so far as to tell them the story of the sauerkraut where after learning from German sailors, Cook forced his officers to eat the foul stuff and forced them to like it in order to get the common sailors to eat it. This was part of the reason Cook or his crew made three circumnavigations losing only one person to scurvy, and that fellow likely already had it when he was impressed off another ship in the Indian Ocean.

With all of Cook's accomplishments, that little expanded vignette should give you an idea of how long and how dull that talk could be. Despite purposely making his story dull, I greatly admired all  that Cook managed to do over his lifetime, from guiding the British Navy up the St. Lawrence to attack Quebec to being the first to figure accurate longitude and to chart many parts of the world unknown at the time. Today Cook's charts still hold up for their accuracy. Mind you this was in the late 1700s.

I thought so much of him that when I attempted or raise the money for a boat I could single-hand on the big ocean I planned to name it the Captain James Cook. To me it sounded like a grand name to use on the radio when entering some harbor where he had been. In time I had to reduce my dream to a smaller boat which I intended to call Just Jimmy.


There is a statue of the Great Navigator hard by the shore of Knik Arm in Anchorage looking out over the water, sextant in hand, the way he must have stood on the deck of his ships exploring Alaska's coast so many years ago. One amazing man. But how he did it all without a microwave, well, who knows. Can you cook sauerkraut in a microwave?

This is my favorite biography of Cook: The Life of Captain James Cook by J.C. Beaglehole
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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.― Kurt Vonnegut

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”―Stephen King

The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

I realized today how many of my stories start out "years ago." What's next? Once upon a time?"

“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

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Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

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Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

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“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

You’re just a wanker whipping up fear —Irish President Michael D. Higgins to a tea party radio announcer

Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are—Michelle Obama

Sports malaprops

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"… there's a fearlessment about him …"

"He's got to have the lead if he's going to win this race." "

"Kansas has always had the ability to score with the basketball."

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This is why you get to hate sportscasters. Kansas beats Texas for the first time since 1938. So the pundits open their segment with the question "let's talk about what went wrong." Wrong? Kansas WON a football game! That's what went RIGHT!

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Cliches so embedded in sportscasters' minds they can't help themselves: "Minnesota fell from the ranks of the undefeated today." What ranks? They were the only undefeated team left.

A good one: A 5'10" player went up and caught a pass off a defensive back over six feet tall. The quote? "He's got some hops."

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"Somebody is going to be the quarterback or we're going to see a new quarterback."

"That was a playmaker making a play.”