A dear friend wrote to me:
I'm disappointed because I literally don't see or hear from any friends anymore. It seems life has swallowed everyone up. I don't think this is the way it is supposed to work. I think we are all missing the point. Isn't work supposed to afford us pleasant experiences with friends and family? It seems my kids and friends are so busy trying to stay afloat there's no time for anything.
This is serious business. Why have we become so alienated? How have our social networks collapsed?
I suspect that we’re all in a seething, quiet panic, circling up the wagons wherever we can, cutting out “extras” like fellowship and sharing in the same way schools are cutting out art and music. My friend is right: it's harder to connect than it was.
The reason for that panic may be that beneath the dollars-and-cents strain of life in a recession or depression we’re confronting an appalling knowledge we don’t wish to recognize. But it's the 500 pound gorilla in the room. We have more and more difficulty ignoring it, now.
The awful truth is that we know in our hearts that the machine is broken. It won’t get better. Obama or Nobama, we get the same corporate government the powerful few choose. Democrats, Republicans, it doesn’t matter – partisanship is a soap opera designed to give us the illusion of debate and struggle toward the right. We know that all our officials are cogs in the corporate juggernaut that dictates our lives.
Remember Jack Nicholson’s character in Easy Rider? He said something like, “It’s hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace. But if you tell people they aren’t free, they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove that they are.” This incipient panic is dangerous. We will furiously deny that we don’t have freedom and choice. We don’t want to acknowledge that we don’t live in a democracy, that our votes don’t count, and that everything George W. Bush did was backed up by the Democrats. If we admit to ourselves that we’re ants in a game, we won’t have the comfortable illusion of free will. We’re not in charge, not even as a nation of citizens. Our government doesn’t act in our best interests or respond to our needs. Our government has no moral code we can share. We’re ants.
Perhaps the scariest thing about this scenario is that the Corporate Government doesn’t seem to have a plan. It won’t make any steps ahead and insists that we’re jes’ fine as we are. Keep buying, keep driving, keep polluting! What’s good for US Steel is good for the country! The shadowy boardroom figures that run our country don’t seem to have any notion of change or adaptation. We’re past the Hubbard Peak, we’re running out of oil, the world is evolving into a dangerous global puzzle, but the boardroom is concerned only with next quarter’s profits.
The Last Honest Man to sit in the White House may have been Jimmy Carter, who was bold enough to ask citizens to conserve, change their habits, think about energy. He was a one-term president sandbagged by Congress and the Pentagon.
I believe the effort to deny this hidden certainty of disconnect with our institutions is poisoning us. And I believe it affects the way we shrink away from the world, laagered up in our homes, satisfying ourselves with National Idol and Runway Project as fairytale templates for real life. How many kids, 10 to 20, are obsessed by “second life” games in which dire forces can be defeated? How can they submerge themselves in artificial life and ignore real life? Perhaps because their parents haven’t demanded much of them as citizens-in-training. They haven’t been braced by the certainties of discipline, cultural continuity, family structure. They are the chauffeured generation – playdates, soccer, Little League – an entitled generation that realizes there is no up-side to becoming an adult. They know that entering the adult world is giving up on dreams and trekking across a wasteland.
So what can we do about it? We need our friends and we need our families.
I’m opposed to organized religion but I can now see the benefit of the Sabbath, when families presented themselves as a unit before God, the entire nutso, dysfunctional crew. The acceptance of humility and humanity before God is a connecting experience. Kids see their parents bowing to something much larger and mysterious. They feel the spiritual current of shared past, beyond distant ancestors. They confront the mysteries which, I believe, make life less mysterious. But will I hop down to the nearest Methodist Church or synagogue? I will not. Dogma and magic taint the Christian beliefs. The narcissistic buddying up to Jesus taints the Christiam evangelicals. Echoes anguished and embattled tribes in a distant, harsh land taint the cantor’s song.
Honestly, I’m confused. I do believe we should gather in fellowship and joy. We must share our lives so that none of us can feel like the Lone Ranger, which we ain’t. We should resist alienating ourselves (SO damn easy for me to do). In many ways, a lively and thoughtful social life is also a spiritual life, being human with others. Becoming part of the larger web. How do accomplish this in a corrosive time?
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has a talent for welcoming people to his table. He ignores it too much and at his peril. When he groundhogs up he becomes abstract, pedantic, often a ninnyhammer. He is at his best at a table of friends who are talking, arguing, laughing and sharing. What does a dinner cost? Not much compared to the benefits. Why don't more people share themselves? Alienation is the prime poison of our "interesting" time.
Showing posts with label conservation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservation. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
BIG OCEAN
When we taped the promo sequence of our Childrens Public Broadcasting hopeful, "Ahoy Archimedes," I signed off with an antique sailing farewell, "Fair winds, a flowing tide, and following seas". This is a farewell in the original sense of “fare thee well.”
Fair winds are those blowing in the direction you’re bound. A “flowing tide” is the fortunate opposite of a “foul tide” (current against you). Following seas lift and seem to carry you – anyone who has tried to make headway in a “head sea” (waves opposing your course) knows what a buffeting, frantic, frustrating experience it can be.
The tide might seem a mega-force acting over enormous areas that has little application to tiny boats on its surface. At sea, yes. Onshore, it is to larf. When enormous areas of water attempt to empty from or fill up smaller areas of water, the resulting water pressure and consequent current can be shocking. Tidal bores in France and in China regularly set up six-foot to eight-foot walls of water moving at the speed of a bus up tidal rivers. The wicked “holes” between Buzzards Bay and the Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds see current twice a day that challenges the bladder control of staunch, experienced skippers. In one of them, Woods Hole, steel ocean buoys six and eight feet in diameter, weighing several tons, whip back and forth in the full flow, appearing at the surface only at one limit of their heavy mooring chains, emerging in a boil of water like sportive dolphins, sucked down again to make the next circuit and rear up at the other chain-limit. Tidal current fills and empties the Bay of Fundy inside Nova Scotia, making a waterfall that reverses directions twice daily, and giving ports at the head of the Bay a tidefall of (a flabbergasting) forty-five feet. To put this in perspective, the tide there would cover and uncover a four-story building twice a day.
When the tidal current runs against the wind, it sets up an unholy chop. At the mouth of the Cape Cod Canal, where the six knot SW current meets a steady twenty knot “smoky sou’wester,” standing waves of eight and ten feet set up in the channel off the Canal’s protective breakwater into Buzzards Bay. Watching a fifty-foot yacht expose half of her bottom, from forefoot to keel, before she crashes into the trough is impressive from shore but truly breathtaking from the deck.
One of the explanations I was making to Kai, a delightful kid who was part of our taping, is that a wave isn't what it seems. A wave is an energy pulse that travels through the water, while any given molecule of water stays pretty much in the same area, moving up, forward and back in a circular or elliptic motion. The water stays put (except for current effects) while the physical disturbance of the water travels on. The wicked surf on many beaches is an amplification phenomenon – the energy of the pulse rebounding from the shallowing bottom when the depth is less than a certain proportion of the waves’ height and period (length or time between crests). The rebounding energy increases the height of the waves without affecting the period, so the amplitude (height) of the wave is multiplied and, eventually, can’t support itself structurally and “breaks” – surf. There are tremendous waves at sea that can be very impressive from a small boat. It's not uncommon in, say, the Roaring Forties (40° south latitude) for seas to reach a regular height of forty feet and their crests, blown by wind, break in “combers.” Breaking waves like this are called “graybeards” in respect and awe. But the period of these graybeards, the length between crests, is dictated by wave physics uncomplicated by bottom amplification and can be a quarter or even half a mile.
In the vast fetch of the sea (“fetch” is the distance over which waves travel and grow) the waves around you may be generated by more than one factor. A storm working up the sea a thousand miles away can send its waves to you, and this “train” of waves (a long set of energy peaks) meeting your local waves at an angle can amplify, diminish, or alter the frequency of your wave conditions. It can be tricky to steer in a “confused sea” like this because the pattern of amplifications and diminutions seems random (which it ain’t).
Traditional oceanography was pleased with its wave theory until recently. Water is, after all, a relatively uniform fluid, so physical laws apply uniformly. Obedient wave equations had been built and confirmed. You seen one wave, you seen ‘em all. Professional bluewater sailors disagreed. Many have faced the phenomenon of “rogue waves,” which were considered folklore until sober reports from supertankers, research vessels, and sea-measuring radar satellites confirmed their existence. It’s now considered likely that, at any given moment, ten mountainous rogue waves are alive and rushing across the World Ocean for hours at a time, some in excess of a hundred feet. In 1943, for instance, the celebrated liner RMS Queen Mary had been pressed into service as a troop ship. She was capable of such extraordinary speed that she needed no conventional convoy escorts but she was sometimes accompanied by fast-moving, sub-killing Navy blimps. The Queen Mary met a a pair of rogue waves, startlingly larger than the “normal” storm waves around it. One wave was photographed from a blimp breaking OVER HER BRIDGE, ninety-three feet above her waterline. Bridge windows were stove in, the bridge flooded, and the Queen Mary, among the largest ships afloat, nearly went down in the battering. She listed 52° for several minutes before she righted herself and continued.
There are mysterious places – the Agulhaus Current off the Cape of Good Hope is one – that also produce rogue troughs, “holes in the sea.” A British warship encountered one in the 50’s, fell into the trough, and kept going down. Lost with all 600+ hands in a few moments.
A tsunami is not a rogue wave. Indeed, the energy pulse of a tsunami can pass under a ship without notice. It’s essentially a huge convex disturbance of the surface, of such a scale that a ship wouldn’t be able to detect it. When it reaches the continental shelf off the shore, however, bottom reflection of energy converts it to a giant, lethal wall of water.
The point is that our World Ocean is aqua incognita. It ain’t Kansas. It is an arena in which humanly unimaginable forces dwell daily. We don’t know a great deal about the ocean, so far, and haven’t devised a way to live securely on or in it. Bits and pieces of information drift in like flotsam to the shore. Space Travel? Captain Kirk and the Enterprise? Puh-lease. We’ve got places a few miles offshore where no man has gone before.
NOTE: SAILOR FOLKLORE
There is an ancient joke about sailors’ reportage: What’s the difference between a “sea story” and a “fairy story?”
A “fairy story” begins, “Once upon a time…” A “sea story” begins, “Now this ain’t no shit…”
Readers are assured that, within the limits of good-faith research and suppression of poetic license, the above ain't no shit.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
As Himself has often said, "No one can love the sea." It's too cold and cruel and unfeeling and dangerous. But it's difficult for a thinking person not to be fascinated or even obsessed by the sea. The cowboys say, "The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man," and the hayseeds may be right. But ocean fascination and being on the water is good for the heart and mind. Neither Adkins nor I have any pretensions of mastery or even professional knowledge of the ocean. We're shoreside dabblers, coastal sailors with occasional leaps across blue water. I'm glad that neither of us has false courage about the water. One is especially pleased that a romantic like Himself still has a healthy fear of setting out on the face of the mighty deep, even when it's shallow. Fear is a much-underrated virtue.
Fair winds are those blowing in the direction you’re bound. A “flowing tide” is the fortunate opposite of a “foul tide” (current against you). Following seas lift and seem to carry you – anyone who has tried to make headway in a “head sea” (waves opposing your course) knows what a buffeting, frantic, frustrating experience it can be.
The tide might seem a mega-force acting over enormous areas that has little application to tiny boats on its surface. At sea, yes. Onshore, it is to larf. When enormous areas of water attempt to empty from or fill up smaller areas of water, the resulting water pressure and consequent current can be shocking. Tidal bores in France and in China regularly set up six-foot to eight-foot walls of water moving at the speed of a bus up tidal rivers. The wicked “holes” between Buzzards Bay and the Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds see current twice a day that challenges the bladder control of staunch, experienced skippers. In one of them, Woods Hole, steel ocean buoys six and eight feet in diameter, weighing several tons, whip back and forth in the full flow, appearing at the surface only at one limit of their heavy mooring chains, emerging in a boil of water like sportive dolphins, sucked down again to make the next circuit and rear up at the other chain-limit. Tidal current fills and empties the Bay of Fundy inside Nova Scotia, making a waterfall that reverses directions twice daily, and giving ports at the head of the Bay a tidefall of (a flabbergasting) forty-five feet. To put this in perspective, the tide there would cover and uncover a four-story building twice a day.
When the tidal current runs against the wind, it sets up an unholy chop. At the mouth of the Cape Cod Canal, where the six knot SW current meets a steady twenty knot “smoky sou’wester,” standing waves of eight and ten feet set up in the channel off the Canal’s protective breakwater into Buzzards Bay. Watching a fifty-foot yacht expose half of her bottom, from forefoot to keel, before she crashes into the trough is impressive from shore but truly breathtaking from the deck.
One of the explanations I was making to Kai, a delightful kid who was part of our taping, is that a wave isn't what it seems. A wave is an energy pulse that travels through the water, while any given molecule of water stays pretty much in the same area, moving up, forward and back in a circular or elliptic motion. The water stays put (except for current effects) while the physical disturbance of the water travels on. The wicked surf on many beaches is an amplification phenomenon – the energy of the pulse rebounding from the shallowing bottom when the depth is less than a certain proportion of the waves’ height and period (length or time between crests). The rebounding energy increases the height of the waves without affecting the period, so the amplitude (height) of the wave is multiplied and, eventually, can’t support itself structurally and “breaks” – surf. There are tremendous waves at sea that can be very impressive from a small boat. It's not uncommon in, say, the Roaring Forties (40° south latitude) for seas to reach a regular height of forty feet and their crests, blown by wind, break in “combers.” Breaking waves like this are called “graybeards” in respect and awe. But the period of these graybeards, the length between crests, is dictated by wave physics uncomplicated by bottom amplification and can be a quarter or even half a mile.
In the vast fetch of the sea (“fetch” is the distance over which waves travel and grow) the waves around you may be generated by more than one factor. A storm working up the sea a thousand miles away can send its waves to you, and this “train” of waves (a long set of energy peaks) meeting your local waves at an angle can amplify, diminish, or alter the frequency of your wave conditions. It can be tricky to steer in a “confused sea” like this because the pattern of amplifications and diminutions seems random (which it ain’t).
Traditional oceanography was pleased with its wave theory until recently. Water is, after all, a relatively uniform fluid, so physical laws apply uniformly. Obedient wave equations had been built and confirmed. You seen one wave, you seen ‘em all. Professional bluewater sailors disagreed. Many have faced the phenomenon of “rogue waves,” which were considered folklore until sober reports from supertankers, research vessels, and sea-measuring radar satellites confirmed their existence. It’s now considered likely that, at any given moment, ten mountainous rogue waves are alive and rushing across the World Ocean for hours at a time, some in excess of a hundred feet. In 1943, for instance, the celebrated liner RMS Queen Mary had been pressed into service as a troop ship. She was capable of such extraordinary speed that she needed no conventional convoy escorts but she was sometimes accompanied by fast-moving, sub-killing Navy blimps. The Queen Mary met a a pair of rogue waves, startlingly larger than the “normal” storm waves around it. One wave was photographed from a blimp breaking OVER HER BRIDGE, ninety-three feet above her waterline. Bridge windows were stove in, the bridge flooded, and the Queen Mary, among the largest ships afloat, nearly went down in the battering. She listed 52° for several minutes before she righted herself and continued.
There are mysterious places – the Agulhaus Current off the Cape of Good Hope is one – that also produce rogue troughs, “holes in the sea.” A British warship encountered one in the 50’s, fell into the trough, and kept going down. Lost with all 600+ hands in a few moments.
A tsunami is not a rogue wave. Indeed, the energy pulse of a tsunami can pass under a ship without notice. It’s essentially a huge convex disturbance of the surface, of such a scale that a ship wouldn’t be able to detect it. When it reaches the continental shelf off the shore, however, bottom reflection of energy converts it to a giant, lethal wall of water.
The point is that our World Ocean is aqua incognita. It ain’t Kansas. It is an arena in which humanly unimaginable forces dwell daily. We don’t know a great deal about the ocean, so far, and haven’t devised a way to live securely on or in it. Bits and pieces of information drift in like flotsam to the shore. Space Travel? Captain Kirk and the Enterprise? Puh-lease. We’ve got places a few miles offshore where no man has gone before.
NOTE: SAILOR FOLKLORE
There is an ancient joke about sailors’ reportage: What’s the difference between a “sea story” and a “fairy story?”
A “fairy story” begins, “Once upon a time…” A “sea story” begins, “Now this ain’t no shit…”
Readers are assured that, within the limits of good-faith research and suppression of poetic license, the above ain't no shit.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
As Himself has often said, "No one can love the sea." It's too cold and cruel and unfeeling and dangerous. But it's difficult for a thinking person not to be fascinated or even obsessed by the sea. The cowboys say, "The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man," and the hayseeds may be right. But ocean fascination and being on the water is good for the heart and mind. Neither Adkins nor I have any pretensions of mastery or even professional knowledge of the ocean. We're shoreside dabblers, coastal sailors with occasional leaps across blue water. I'm glad that neither of us has false courage about the water. One is especially pleased that a romantic like Himself still has a healthy fear of setting out on the face of the mighty deep, even when it's shallow. Fear is a much-underrated virtue.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
GREEN BOATING
A discussion in today's "Marina, Boatingbuilding and Dealer Professionals" forum asked if "Green Marinas" were viable. This is a charged debate because the "professionals" depend on big boats for their profits, and the big powerboats get about half a mile to the gallon, if that.
But being on the water is so important, so precious. Watching from shore just isn't a substitute. You see the ocean and its life only beyond the surf. My contribution to the subject was:
The Green Marina is a goal. Even faltering steps toward energy savings and zero-added-pollution should be encouraged. Should Green Marinas harbor sailing craft only? Not necessarily; some motor yachts designed for modest speeds are fuel-efficient. And some small, economically disenfranchised boaters are zero-polluters. How many marinas welcome small scale sailors – kayaks, pulling boats and daysailers?
It's surprising to most wind-sailors how much fuel fast-moving demands. It's a guilty fact that we motor through calms, light winds and even headwinds. We might return to the slip after a trip out to the Farralones and back, motoring for a good part of the day, and use, perhaps, 7 gallons of diesel. The sport-fisherman across the dock has made the same trip at a higher speed, has admittedly covered more bottom by setting and pulling crab pots and trolling for stripers, but has burned more than ten times the fuel. Things change. Oil is no longer a negligible component of boating's future.
Being on the water is a rare privilege most landlocked souls aren't offered. The prime benefit of access to the water life is witnessing and being part of its powerful but delicate ecology. A responsibility comes with the privilege: we're obligated to do as little harm to the water we love as possible.
A Green Marina, even one with some contradictions and drawbacks, is a good start and a good example. Any Green Marina would remind its skippers to think more clearly about how they affect the water. If we saw more Green Marinas, the industry would inevitably push technology (still grounded in its high-ticket, twin-Chrysler, go-fast stage) toward efficiency and sensible conservation. It may not be too early to accept the logical expression of our privileged closeness to the world ocean: reducing fuel consumption at LEAST in proportion to reduction in automobile standards.
We don't want to lose marinas! They're critical portals to the water world, and they're a happy, colorful component of shore life. Marinas can't survive if they can't make money. Big boats make big profits. Fuel markups aren't what they were but they're part of the profit margin. What's the responsible, proactive, progressive, foresighted path? Green Marinas are one part of the answer: they're an institutional commitment to positive change.
The sensible path surely depends on reading the future as wisely as we check the weather forecasts: can go-fast powerboating continue as a highly visible symbol of boating's lack of concern for conservation? Will every big, creamy wake, so visible scarring the Bay, encourage legislators to make the boating industry a sop to Cerberus? Will legislation crack down on boating as a smoke screen for allowing trucking and auto manufacturers to ignore fuel reduction guidelines?
You know that I'm merely a gadfly in this discussion. My dog in this fight is a Chihuahua. But from a journalist's perspective, the boating industry might serve itself best by getting on the Green Barge and making its own changes.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself can offer himself to ridicule pitifully eagerly. One speculates that marine businessmen, boat manufacturers and even small-boat builders would prefer that amateurs simply shut up. But ridicule can be an honorable state for journalists, whose business demands that they step out onto the balcony of palaces and observe aloud that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Ridicule doesn't do journalists much lasting harm, and we suppose they must accustom themselves to the sting of cold water in their faces in order to say the critically important thing when it is, by common consent, ridiculous.
But being on the water is so important, so precious. Watching from shore just isn't a substitute. You see the ocean and its life only beyond the surf. My contribution to the subject was:
The Green Marina is a goal. Even faltering steps toward energy savings and zero-added-pollution should be encouraged. Should Green Marinas harbor sailing craft only? Not necessarily; some motor yachts designed for modest speeds are fuel-efficient. And some small, economically disenfranchised boaters are zero-polluters. How many marinas welcome small scale sailors – kayaks, pulling boats and daysailers?
It's surprising to most wind-sailors how much fuel fast-moving demands. It's a guilty fact that we motor through calms, light winds and even headwinds. We might return to the slip after a trip out to the Farralones and back, motoring for a good part of the day, and use, perhaps, 7 gallons of diesel. The sport-fisherman across the dock has made the same trip at a higher speed, has admittedly covered more bottom by setting and pulling crab pots and trolling for stripers, but has burned more than ten times the fuel. Things change. Oil is no longer a negligible component of boating's future.
Being on the water is a rare privilege most landlocked souls aren't offered. The prime benefit of access to the water life is witnessing and being part of its powerful but delicate ecology. A responsibility comes with the privilege: we're obligated to do as little harm to the water we love as possible.
A Green Marina, even one with some contradictions and drawbacks, is a good start and a good example. Any Green Marina would remind its skippers to think more clearly about how they affect the water. If we saw more Green Marinas, the industry would inevitably push technology (still grounded in its high-ticket, twin-Chrysler, go-fast stage) toward efficiency and sensible conservation. It may not be too early to accept the logical expression of our privileged closeness to the world ocean: reducing fuel consumption at LEAST in proportion to reduction in automobile standards.
We don't want to lose marinas! They're critical portals to the water world, and they're a happy, colorful component of shore life. Marinas can't survive if they can't make money. Big boats make big profits. Fuel markups aren't what they were but they're part of the profit margin. What's the responsible, proactive, progressive, foresighted path? Green Marinas are one part of the answer: they're an institutional commitment to positive change.
The sensible path surely depends on reading the future as wisely as we check the weather forecasts: can go-fast powerboating continue as a highly visible symbol of boating's lack of concern for conservation? Will every big, creamy wake, so visible scarring the Bay, encourage legislators to make the boating industry a sop to Cerberus? Will legislation crack down on boating as a smoke screen for allowing trucking and auto manufacturers to ignore fuel reduction guidelines?
You know that I'm merely a gadfly in this discussion. My dog in this fight is a Chihuahua. But from a journalist's perspective, the boating industry might serve itself best by getting on the Green Barge and making its own changes.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself can offer himself to ridicule pitifully eagerly. One speculates that marine businessmen, boat manufacturers and even small-boat builders would prefer that amateurs simply shut up. But ridicule can be an honorable state for journalists, whose business demands that they step out onto the balcony of palaces and observe aloud that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Ridicule doesn't do journalists much lasting harm, and we suppose they must accustom themselves to the sting of cold water in their faces in order to say the critically important thing when it is, by common consent, ridiculous.
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