The Pulse Quickens

With the boat search getting longer and longer, we're digging our heels in, determined to find the boat - the one that will carry us all the way until Elias is ready for high school (inshallah!), and through the Northwest Passage as well (inshallah, inshallah!).

We don't want to go through a boat swap again.

Our internet search has lately taken us off the well-trod paths of the slick yacht broker websites and into the overgrown byways of Francophone for-sale-by-owner sites.  "Our boat's gotta be here somewhere," we mutter as we push the button on Google Translate for the 1,000th time...

And, then, a few days ago, we found our best candidate yet.  A fantastic design, a bit old but not geriatric, properly set up to sail great distances, and apparently well maintained.  And, conveniently enough, already in the southwest Pacific.

Our pulses quickened.  We made enquiries, and received satisfactory replies.  Figuring that Fortune favors the Bold, we prepared to make an offer.

But then we discovered that the boat is out cruising for the next three months or so, and the owners would rather not discuss a sale until the cruise is over.

Fair enough, we figured.  But it was a bit of a come-down from the plateau of excitement we had reached.

So we'll get in touch with the sellers in a few months.  And meanwhile the search continues.

The Backyard

The feeling of sustained uncertainty that has been the hallmark of our time in Oz continues.  When we arrived in October '08, a bunch of big questions were open before us.  Would I find work?  Would we have another child?  Would we decide to sell Pelagic?  For that matter, would we like Australia?

As it turns out, we came up with answers to all those questions.  In order, they were: yes, yes, yes and yes.

But of course those answers have lead to new questions: When will we find the new boat?  How closely will I end up working with the science community here in Hobart?  Should we buy a small place to be our home during our stay in Tasmania, or should we cast ourselves on the mercy of the very expensive rental market, or should we continue to put together a string of housesits to cover our time here?

The impending end of this delightful five-month housesit in Kingston is bringing all these questions to the fore.

But, on the bright side, we have recently become smitten with a used cruising boat that we found in internet-land.

We'll let you know how that goes.

~~

Meanwhile, we have of course not been spending all our time pondering questions about the organisation of our lives, but have mostly been getting through the hectic day-to-day of people with small children.  I've been keeping regular hours in the home office, laboring away, and taking the weekends off - it's a great indication of how non-overcrowded Hobart is that I'm not tempted to take my days off during the week, when parks and such are less crowded.

Lately we've been going for a family hike each weekend.  Normally I'm not so great at exploring my immediate backyard - I've always put my time and energy into exploring beyond the horizon.  But with an almost-four-year-old hiker in the family, and the goal of one family outing a week, we have a great setup for exploring our immediate environs.  It doesn't hurt that there are heaps of good trails around Hobart, and that the Tasmanian winter, which we were warned of at great length, turns out to be a complete and utter fiction.  Many a summer day on Kodiak is colder than what we've been having here.

We've decided to concentrate on the trails on Mt. Wellington, the backdrop for Hobart.  The mountain is a 20 minute drive from the housesit, it's covered with trails, there are no crowds, at least this time of year, and Charles Darwin hiked up the mountain when he visited Hobart, giving it a nice history-of-science touch.

This is what we saw on our hike on saturday:

Alisa and Elias looking down on the Derwent River and Hobart.

South towards Storm Bay and the Southern Ocean.

Lunch at the Junction Cabin.  Eric is the white lump beneath my chin!

Elias once again was a great little hiker, even though we had somewhat negligently put him in his new gumboots, which are a size or two too big, and therefore made for treacherous footing (read 'falls and tears') on the rockier sections of trail.  It was a four-hour outing.  Elias was very happy for the first three hours and forty minutes, and completely over it for the remainder - a good reminder to temper our ambitions! 

Spotlighting

One of the most fun things that Elias and I have found to do at this housesit is spotlighting - we take a big 6 v flashlight out to the neighborhood golf course just after dusk and look for marsupials, which are mostly nocturnal.  This picture was taken before we went out  last night, as Elias practiced his search image with 'possum', one of his many stuffed animals.

Every time we go spotlighting we see brushtail possums, which are big and impressive for arboreal animals, and also not very fleet, which makes them a great viewing species for an almost-four-year-old.  We also see pademelons every time - little kangaroos 70 cm tall or so.  One memorable time we saw a potoroo, an even smaller, and, at least for this individual, much more shy kangaroo - one flash and it was gone.

Alisa and Eric came along for the first time last night.  It was a brisk night, good for walking but after a while a little too cold for an almost-four-year-old.  At first we walked a little faster than normal, which is often the case when you go wildlife-viewing with a new group, and so we didn't see much.  At one point Alisa asked, "Do you normally see something by now?"

But then we got a real treat - an eastern barred bandicoot, which we normally see only about every third time we go.  They're not at all shy, and this one hopped along the fairway right towards us, getting within 7 or 8 meters or so.  We even got a picture.

Bandicoots are delightful little marsupials that, in our experience of them, bound frantically from one spot to another on the golf course, nosing around for worms and other invertebrates.  It's amazing how easy it is to see these little critters right on the edge of Kingston.  

There's a poignant twist, though.  Eastern barred bandicoots are common in Tassie, but they're on the verge of extirpation from the mainland, with the population estimated at 200 individuals.  The main cause of their demise has been introduced European foxes.

Pademelons are already extinct from the mainland, due to...foxes.

Ditto bettongs, another kangaroo species still common in Tasmania.

And now foxes have reached Tassie, either as deliberate introductions, or as stowaways on ships from Melbourne.  Since 2002, 56 scats from the island have been genetically confirmed as fox scat.  There's an effort to eradicate them, but Tasmania is a very big island, with lots of places to hide, and foxes are incredibly wary.  If the fox population becomes established here, the bandicoots and pademelons and bettongs and a heap of other species are looking at the abyss.

Australia is the global capital for historical vertebrate extinctions - according to Wikipedia, if you count both species and sub-species, 23 birds, four frogs and 27 mammals have gone extinct here since 1788.  Although millions of dollars are being spent on fox eradication in Tassie, it's hard to look at the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on extending the highway south of Hobart without seeing where true priorities lie.

A big theme of our trip across the Pacific was enjoying the world as we found it, and not getting stuck on always bemoaning the changes that have inevitably come along to this place or that.  I guess that's what Elias and I are doing when we go spotlighting - we're delighting in how easy it is for us to see animals that remain very exotic to my eyes.  Hopefully an adult Elias won't look back in wonder - did it really happen? - at a time when he and his dad could go out with a flashlight and look at bandicoots and pademelons, just like that. 

Square One

"I guess it couldn't hurt to ask?" I said to Alisa.  The boys were asleep, we were in bed, and I had the laptop balanced on my knees.  Before we started looking for our next boat, I never took the laptop to bed.

"No, it couldn't hurt," she answered.

So I left a message on the webpage of the builder of the hottest thing on the seven seas - the Boreal 44.  This is a new production yacht designed specifically for high latitude sailing and, significantly, the company was started by two long-term cruisers.  So there is a lot that we like about the design.  But the company hasn't been around long enough for used versions to be on the market, and we knew that a new boat would be way outside our budget.  But still, it couldn't hurt to ask.

The next day a very nice note from one of the company's founders arrived, along with the answer to my question - base price 308,000 euros, without even getting into necessities like a windvane.

"Ooof," I said to Alisa.  "We were wrong.  That did kind of hurt."

~~~

Now, I know that in the range of possible problems to have in life, the travails involved in finding your next yacht don't count for much, might in fact be the kind of problem that about 99.5% of the world's population would dearly love to have.

It's just that I'm realising that we really are going back to square one - searching out a reasonable boat on a tight budget, getting her ready to the point where chronic-worrier me feels ready to take her to sea with All I Hold Dear In the World on board.  Meanwhile, Pelagic is apparently setting a modern-era record for being stuck in customs limbo (more than five months!) as we try to import her to Australia, and so is still not on the market, and until we sell one boat and buy another we are looking at dragging our kids through a period of short-term housing gigs.  (I can already hear Elias trying to exploit the nurturing side of girls at college with the stories of how he never had a permanent home when he was growing up.)

In other words, the process of switching boats is turning out to be slower, and harder, than we had hoped, and land life is turning out to be as sticky as we had feared.

But we are, of course, holding onto the long view.  Eric is only 2 months old.  We'll be patient in our boat search, and choose wisely, so that we don't have to go through another boat swap any time soon.

And, meanwhile, we can easily lose ourselves in the quotidian delights of family life - like setting Elias loose on the bike that his grandparents bought him, and watching the purest state of joy that results.  If only the next boat would make us so happy!

The Circle, Unbroken

This shot was taken on board Pelagic, way back in our home port of Kodiak.  That's my grandfather on the left.  He and my parents and sister were in Kodiak to meet Elias.

My grandfather and I were close from the moment we met in the Detroit airport, when I was an infant on my first trip to the U.S.  An established bit of family lore has to do with the way I immediately took to him in the airport, and how my grandmother had to drive home while my grandfather held me, since I cried in anyone else's lap.  A complementary bit of family lore was established in our old house in Kodiak (above) when Elias cooed and smiled at my granddad with a display of obvious affection that seemed improbable from a six-week old.


Three months ago my granddad asked me on the phone what we were planning on naming the new baby.


-I've got an idea, he said.  Why don't you name him after your grandfather Elmer?  He paused a second before he answered his own question - I wouldn't name a dog Elmer!  He laughed and laughed at the joke, then dissolved into a coughing fit that had me fearing for his 94-year-old heart.


There was a story that we always told each other about the time that he gave twenty-year-old me a ride out to the highway in Colorado.  I was excited at the hitchhike to Alaska ahead of me, and just barely aware of how tough it was for my grandpa to drop me off on the side of the road.  Before he drove away he said, hey, you don't have a hat!   And then he gave me the one he was wearing.  I wore that hat for years, until it was in ribbons, and I still have the remains of it in storage back in the States.

And there's the more recent story about the time Alisa and I were eating dinner with my grandparents.  Alisa, making conversation, asked Elmer what sort of gun would make a good deer rifle for her.  He didn't answer, just excused himself from the table and came back a few minutes later with a rifle.  To people who get into that sort of thing, it was a very special gun: a pre-'64 Winchester Model 70 6.5x55mm.  More important, it was a rifle that was light to carry, didn't kick much, and could shoot accurately over the long distances that you want to shoot if you hunt deer in the mountains of Kodiak.  In other words, the perfect deer gun for Alisa.  He handed it to her, to keep, and it was her deer rifle from that moment until we went sailing.

~~~

My granddad died last week.  

My parents, who spent a good bit of their time in recent years looking after him, found themselves in the strange position of being here in Tasmania, half a world away, when his end came.

~~~

If you make up stories to answer unanswerable questions, or if you accept answers to unanswerable questions from your own tradition, or from other peoples' traditions, then you are religious.  If you don't do those things, then you are not religious, and you're left to live with the unanswerables and imponderables.

My granddad's death came less than two months after Eric was born.  The day that Elias was born, Alisa's wonderful uncle Ray died.  

These sorts of matched events don't answer the unanswerable.  But I do suspect that tell us a fair bit of what we need to know.

Adrift

This is the state of Pelagic's interior lately - complete disarray as I pursue the much-anticipated day when she will be on the market, with all trace of our family life removed, anonymous and sparkling.

This scene is weirdly similar to the disorder that attended various stages of preparation for our trip across the Pacific.  The days are short this time of year in Hobart.  When it's getting dark at five o'clock my memories of all the work that went into preparing to live on Pelagic blend with the present work of preparing to leave Pelagic, and I find myself brooding on the futility of things...

In the light of day, though, Alisa and I are cheered by one thought: it's time to find the next boat!

Our very wonderful housesit overlooking Kingston Beach ends in two and a half months, and we're starting to feel the pressure to find new accommodation for our young family.

-Without a boat, says Alisa, we're just homeless.

Elmer Mallon

My mother’s father was born in 1915.  This picture of him was taken some time in the 1930s.  It’s a hand-tinted black and white print.  And this is him last week: 

A week before this picture was taken he came very close to dying.

-Just think about whether you want to see him again, Alisa said.  I’ll be fine here.

For a few days I called back to the States to get updates on his condition and then I booked a ticket from Hobart to Cleveland with 20 hours advance notice.  I chopped enough kindling to last for a week and I left Alisa to look after Elias and Eric.

Once I was back in the States I spent most of my time in the nursing home, giving a short break to my parents who have been providing end of life care to my mom's parents for years. 

My grandfather was very tired.  But he talked for hours.  I let the conversation build and drift at his pace.  He was very sharp, very much the same person who I've known for my whole life.  I enjoyed the easy companionship of this man who I know as well I possibly could, someone who is mysterious to me in very few ways.

-It’s a good life, he told me.  And I say it is a good life, not it has been a good life.  Even with my troubles in the last few years, it’s a good life.

-And later: I want to live life.  I want to go right up to life and touch it and see it.  And I don’t want these people [at the nursing home] telling me don’t do this and you have to do that.

He told me the hunting stories that I have known all my life, stories that have grown comfortable through repeated retelling, like old leather gloves that have molded to the shape of your hands.  For hours he told me stories about people in our family who I never knew.  One night my sister and I drank beers in his room and he told us stories all the way until eleven o’clock. 

-You can ask me anything you want, he said.  I’ll try to answer you.

The next day I asked his advice about raising children and he told me what he knew.  He told me about the mistakes that he still bitterly regretted, a half century after the fact.

After a week I said goodbye.  When someone is 94 years old you have already gotten used to the idea that their life is nearly over.  So saying goodbye this time was not overwhelming in the 'I'll never see you again' sort of way.  But the chance to stand in the courtyard of the nursing home and hug him and to look in his eyes while he was completely coherent and present and very much still himself was a pleasure that I will remember for a very long time.