News From Home

Elyse Johnston, Stephanie Love and Jay Johnston were the last Kodiakers we saw as we were departing on our grand trip across the Pacific. Their motor boat, the Toni, accompanied Pelagic on the five mile passage to Long Island, our very first anchorage of the entire trip. We spent the night anchored next to each other, then had breakfast together the next day. When they headed back to town they took our garbage for us and gave us a half bottle of good gin and a melon. This established a benchmark of success for trading with the locals that we were never able to beat.

And so it was a fitting bit of symmetry that Elyse, Stephanie and Jay were also the first Kodiakers to visit us in the Antipodes. (If you are temporarily living in either Australia or New Zealand and doing a bit of writing, you cheat yourself if you don't use the word "Antipodes" as often as possible.)

Their visit to Iluka was much anticipated on board Pelagic. When the big day arrived, though, there was one problem. They brought awful Kodiak weather with them. Really. Check out this picture of Jay, Alisa and Little Salty on the beach at Woody Head:


A few minutes after that picture was taken, our beach barbecue ended with Jay and me snatching a platefull of lukewarm snags ("sausages" in the non-Antipodean English-speaking world) and making a dash for the cars through torrential rain. We ate the snags back at their holiday rental, where we had the leisure to reflect that a snag really is better when you eat it outside. It turned out that we spent most of the visit in their holiday rental. A couple times we thought of getting them out to Pelagic, and got as far as planning a dinner aboard with them once. But then we would ride out to the boat in our little dinghy and get soaked in salt water and decide that we didn't want to put them through that discomfort. We don't mind getting wet in our very wet little dinghy, nor do we mind making the leap from tossing dinghy to the decks of Pelagic, but for some reason we hesitate to include friends in that part of our daily lives, even if they're hardy Alaskans like these three. The weather got so bad that Alisa dug out Elias' raingear bibs, which I forgot he even owned:

From the look on his face it appears that Little Salty is not looking forward to the time when he will be asked to resume his Idyllic Alaskan Childhood.


Today the weather finally moderated and we had Jay, Stephanie and Elyse out to the boat for cards and lunch before they headed north for their flight out of Brisbane:

Our visitors brought letters from other Kodiak friends, and we engaged them in hours of conversation about Kodiak. They insist that things are pretty much the same there, but we suspect that we'll be surprised at the accumulation of little bits of change that people living there have absorbed and forgotten.

When we left the Rock, we wondered if we would ever come back to stay. I am now inclined to think we will, although I recognize all the uncertainty filling the years between now and then. The idea that I would like to return (and I think Alisa would, too) makes it so important to us to keep our Kodiak friendships as living things. This visit sure helped. And it got us ready for our visit to the Rock in June. Stephanie is already planning a party.

When we finished our cards and our lunch I shuttled our visitors to the beach in the dinghy. Alisa got a little choked up, as you might expect she would. But aside from the obvious distress over saying goodbye to friends, I think she was also realizing how much friendship we have given up to do this trip, how much she misses out on by not living within the embrace of a stable circle of mujeres simpáticas. She was crying when she remembered how important that is, and how much she misses it.

And (I think), she was recognizing that what we have going right now makes doing without that allright.

The Storyteller

Well, I guess this is what you would call a "grandma clip" - a bit of video of Little Salty being cute in a way that will be fascinating to his grandparents, then progressively less interesting as the viewer's degree of relatedness to the little bloke declines.

With that warning out of the way, I'll say that Elias is a consummate storyteller. He gets into his material. Here he is at lunch today, talking about whale meat.

What I Forgot

Here in Iluka we've settled into our version of the traditional "he commutes, she stays at home with the kid" lifestyle.

I commute from Pelagic to my rented office in downtown Iluka via inflatable kayak, then spend the morning laboring in the Creative Nonfiction saltmines and the afternoon working on a biology contract. Alisa and Elias meet me for a walk out to the beach after I'm through with work and Alisa tells me about their day. She usually ends by saying something like, "I cannot believe how much I'm enjoying this. This must absolutely be the best routine for a stay-at-home mom in the whole world."

So, something happened this morning that brought home how relaxed this routine is.

I finished my morning commute and tied the kayak to a tree. I realized that I had left my flip-flops at the boat. No drama! I'm just doing the day barefoot.

So, to all our North American friends and family: when is the last time that you forgot to put shoes on when you went to work?

***

Regular life is going on here, and in much of Oz. Australia played New Zealand at the SCG last night and ended their streak of 5 consecutive losses in one-day international cricket.

In Victoria, 108 bodies have been recovered from the bush fires that still burn. In bush fires people are burned to death by radiant heat, rather than being killed by smoke as in house fires.

And far north Queensland is suffering under devastating floods.

Australia Day

Ozzie! Ozzie! Ozzie!

Oi! Oi! Oi!

***

That's the cheer that you hear whenever the Australian team is competing. Whatever else you can say for it, it's definitely an improvement over the traditional cheer of University School, the private boys' high school I attended, team mascot (and I am absolutely not making this up): The Fighting Preppers. Our school cheer ran, "That's allright, that's ok, you're going to work for us some day." To understand its full charm, imagine that little gem of Prepper spirit being chanted by a bunch of spotty 16 year olds who already drive sporty little cars and who cannot wait to turn 18 so that they can join the Young Republicans.

Anyway, cheers come up because Australia Day, which was one week ago today, caps a sports-mad weekend down here in Oz. Australia Day is the big summer holiday, sort of like our Independence Day, except that the Australians haven't actually taken care of that pesky detail of declaring their independence from the British crown. "Independence Day", if you need a translation, is what non-U.S. English speakers mistakenly call the Fourth of July.

The Australia Open is going over Australia Day weekend. "The tennis" is passionately followed by Australians of all walks of life, particularly those Australians of Serb and Croat descent, who traditionally hold brawls in Melbourne to celebrate the result of any match between a Serbian and Croatian tennis player.

Cricket is also a big part of Australia Day, though this Australia Day was just another chance for the South African team to beat the living shit out of the Australian team one more time...if you can use the phrase "beat the living shit" to describe the outcome of something as non-confrontational as a cricket match.

Anyway, we spent the Australia Day weekend touring around and visiting family. We got as far north as Bundaberg, where Alisa saw leatherback turtles hatching out of the sand and scampering down to the beach at Mon Repos turtle sanctuary. Elias narrowly missed the same moving sight, haven fallen asleep in the baby backpack on Alisa's back 15 minutes earlier. I was back in the motel room, working on a proposal.

So, here are some pics of some of the good fun that visiting the family entails. We'll concentrate once again, and only because they provide such good visuals, on the harness racing branch of the family.

Danielle introducing Elias to Vanilla.

"Fancy Little Salty!" says Uncle Darryll. "Surrounded by five sheilas!"

The junior trots are incredibly smile-provoking to casual spectators. Check out Jade driving - how could you not smile?

The kids, though, take it deadly serious and their game faces show that. No smiles.

Here's Jade returning to a bushel of cheering cousins after a race. There's a smile in there, but it's not getting out.

When Danielle finishes in the money and drives up in front of the grandstand for her prize, a smile finally breaks free...

...but it goes back into the smile closet when she recieves congratulations from her uncle and grandad.

The adults are a little more relaxed about it. Here's Lola Weidemann before a race, clearly smiling.

I'm told that Lola is a good driver - all I know is that her face is very photogenic.

The races end with fierce intensity. Nobody smiles.

Afterwards we went to Darryll and Lynn's for a barbecue.

Alisa and my cousin Debbie.

Elias got to ride in the ute while Uncle Darryll worked the horses.

The only time Darryll will tolerate a camera is when he is around the horses.

The horses, on the other hand, can be downright terrified of a camera.

The kids finished the day watching...harness racing on TV.

Keepin' Up

Excitement for the inaugural was high aboard Pelagic. We talked about renting a motel room to watch the ceremony on TV, but ended up watching on the Times website. Woke up at 3:15 am to catch it live from the boat, which is still anchored in Iluka. Quality was very good, the connection only crashed a handful of times. Elias woke up after the oath of office and I missed watching Obama's speech because I was getting the little fellow back to sleep.

Interesting how election night was so much more electric, how there was a sense of lightning caught in a bottle that night that was missing from the more anticipated ritual of inauguration.

I'll let others plow the ground of how Obama has arrived in office at such an opportune moment, and how, at least for now, we can see a new picture of American discourse, free from the poison of Rovian cynicism.

For now, I'll just ask, re. Roberts' swearing-in gaffe: is he still miffed because Barack voted against his confirmation?

Macy

Had our friends Dave and Julia, from the boat Macy, on board Pelagic for a few days' visit last week. They sailed to New Zealand for the cyclone season, but were in Oz to visit her uncle for Christmas. We met these guys in Nuku Hiva, when I rowed over to say hello at an anchorage we shared. I've rowed over to say hi to a lot of different boats, and this was the best outcome yet - they've become good friends. Good for Elias to see them again, too - there was a time, somewhere between French Polynesia and Tonga, when he used to pretend to call Macy on the radio every day.

We got out the sailing rig for the dinghy and held time trials around a set course. Dave and Julia are both one-design racers, and they had the poor grace to clean our clocks. We noticed the difference in posture between us and them when we looked at our pictures of the event - notice how Alisa is just sitting on the seat, while Dave and Julia are crouching or kneeling in the center of the boat, optimizing the dinger's balance.

***

Meanwhile, we've been discovering Iluka, piece by piece, and settling into a travel-free life here. We've been doing yoga on the beach at the end of the day, and going for long walks in the rainforest, and generally becoming more and more impressed with this place. Alisa has swimming lessons lined out for Elias, and we're waiting for the weekly story hour at the library to resume in February - the sorts of things we were looking forward to when we imagined finding some nice place to take a break from traveling for a few months...

End of the Noughties

At the start of this decade, I wondered what we would call it. We had a nice thing going in the twentieth century. The "fifties", the "sixties", the "seventies", etc., etc. Progressive and orderly. But then we hit 2000, and where were we? The year zero? Would the following decade be the "oughts", as in "ought-two, ought-three"? If we were going to follow this logic, why not use "nought" instead of "ought" and just call the decade the "noughties"?

And now, seemingly overnight, we're in the last of this string of zero years. Soon we'll settle on some name for this decade, as we'll need a shorthand reference for the past. And the question of what these years might have been called will seem, to Elias, when he reaches his maturity, like so many other questions that occupied his parents, a quaint concern of people long ago.

So, of course Alisa and I looked back on 2008 on New Year's Eve. And of course we were pretty satisfied with the way we spent that year, and very hopeful for the year to come. It is, as I noted on the very first post ever on this blog, much later than any of us think. And the years go by, whether we will them or no. Sailboats move so slowly, and people who travel the world under sail are forced to think in such big chunks of time - this season to cross an ocean, this year to make it across a hemisphere - that plotting out the trips that you might hope to do quickly forces you to contemplate the endgame of living the life you want to live. And so we'll hope, and plan, to continue living that life for this one more year.


***

For our New Year's Day we went walking in a remnant of coastal rainforest next to Iluka. Along the way we got a neat introduction to the ying and yang of Australian wildlife: super-tough Alisa was brought nearly to tears by the pain of two ant bites (ying), she picked up a paralysis tick (ying, don't even ask why they call it that) and we saw two lifer birds, Eastern Rosella and Rufous Fantail (yang). We followed the coastal route to get home, and had the real pleasure of watching a group of dolphins surfing just off the beach. They were probably common bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus, although very similar Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops aduncus, also occur here. Difficult stuff to photograph, as the action happens so quickly. Check out this series. There's a lot of glare off the water, but you can make out a group of dolphins swimming inside the wave, then peeling off to the left as the wave curls over and breaks:

The dolphins sometimes jumped off the back side of the wave they had just been riding. These two jumped one after the other:

So. Not a bad way to begin our year.