Lay Day
Gray low skies drop
Weekend rain, warmer
Than workday rain for
Construction trades,
Colder for desk trades.
It clings on the fall
To standing rigging,
Stainless cable tautly
Faithful, then rills
Down and down – what
Miniscule, complex
Currents hum in the
Descent along the
Spirals? – to spill
Across adamantine
Bronze and stainless
Fittings, flood the deck,
And exit scuppers,
Homecoming to the
Bay.
Abraxas fidgets at her
Docklines, nudges her
Pig-snout tough
Bumpers, pulls and
Relaxes forgiving
Nylon fibers, doing
Nothing more than
Enduring. Until
Her skipper arrives,
Unable to stay away
Too long, and clambers
Aboard, unbuttons her
Tenderly, enters.
Untouched rain-beaded
Sailcovers, untouched
Shroud still mourning the
Holy wheel and binnacle.
A lay day.
Nautical term: day
Without necessity to
Nose out through chop,
No gray heroics,
Weather-cancelled.
“It’s not dangerous
To sail,” the Prudent
Mariner insists,
“It’s dangerous to
Sail no matter what.”
So the skipper reminds
Himself that he could
Sail. He could. But
Prudence trumps
Possibility. And he
Lights the bulkhead
Stove to hiss and flame
Merrily behind its
Oven-glass firebox
Port, yellow dancing
Of diesel combustion
At a low order of
Utility but filling
The familiar saloon
With grateful warmth.
For projects, chores,
Repetitive, comforting
Checks, new catalogue
Schemes of stowage,
The dream of even
More miraculous
Software. Radar, GPS,
Sounder, chart display
Unawakened.
No sane, no bright,
Will grant kindness
To objects. Only
Romantics observe
That fidgeting has
Become rocking,
Enduring became
Protection, and
Abraxas could. It
Could. If the warmed
And occupied skipper
Breathed, thought,
Deemed an order.
Jan Adkins
6 March 2011
Novato, CA
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is grateful to Chris Northcutt for buying a splendid 37' cutter and encouraging him to crew often. It's not the Bay he knows but it's sailing, and Chris is a skillful skipper who questions everything. This questioning fascinates and nourishes an adventure side for Himself. He needs that adventure quotient in his life or he gets stale and cranky.
Showing posts with label low-tech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label low-tech. Show all posts
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
DR. GRAMMA
WE'RE ALL WORRIED about our health, and about our friends' health. We tell them to push fluids, sleep soundly, minimize stress, steam veggies. From a personal perspective we control only a few threads of our health. Ask a thoughtful, chess-playing, small town general practitioner who sees sickness played out on a small canvas over a few generations. He’ll agree that there’s not a lot we can do about sickness beyond a few things you heard from your gramma.
Like all grammas she droned on at length: wash your hands, get to bed, eat your vegetables, get out in the sun, stay out of the sun, shake a leg and get to work, wear clean underwear. It turns out that she was spot-on. The frustrating thing about old wives’ tales is that those wives got old by doing a few things right.
Wash your hands: plain soap and water turns out to be a powerful talisman against flus, coughs, and all communicable diseases. Lady MacBeth may have gone a little overboard but you should never pass up a chance to wash your hands.
Eat your vegetables: granted, your gramma probably underlined this as a matter of puritanical discipline but beneath the ugly-and-not-your-first-choice-so-it-must-be-good-for-you factor you’ve got the wealth of vitamins, way-high fiber and anti-oxidants in Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and oatmeal. Let’s not get carried away about about gramma’s laboratory virtues, however: she didn’t know beans (sic) about cooking veggies and probably stewed them into submission. Today we steam them lightly or, best (refer to The New York Times), microwave them briefly and with minimum vitamin loss.
Get out in the sun: important vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin” is near-impossible to synthesize and is internally produced by our bodies’ interaction with the sun’s ultraviolet light.
Stay out of the sun: antique ladies wore sunbonnets for their complexions, but also because a bushel of their sunned-on friends succumbed to skin cancer. Given our immigration patterns, the prairie sun was especially deadly to fair-skinned Nordic, Irish and British families. Highest incidence of sun cancer in the world: Australia, where white-skinned Celts meet merciless sun.
Shake a leg and get to work: gramma didn’t have a Pilates studio down the block but knew that exercise made a difference. Or she just worked her bustle off, anyway. And if she didn’t know that exercise is healthy, perennial puritanical sensibility suggested that it was hard and, therefore, virtuous.
Wear clean underwear: we might make a case for fungus suppression but this is not gramma's finest medical homily and a social observance more than a clinical desideratum.
We could feel a bit more progressive and smugly scientific if gramma were a total loon and recommended nutso nostrums like echinacea. Embarrassing as it is, these are our New Age superstitions, driven by the narcissistic belief that “those know-it-all doctors aren’t any smarter than me!” Clinically, demonstrably, they are. Whole Foods may sell cool little vials of “safe and gentle” homeopathic cures but in double-blind studies homeopathic quackery registers no more than a placebo effect. Echinacea has no greater basis in logical pharmacopoeia than turning around three times and spitting between your feet.
Modern medicine is largely crisis oriented. Though antibiotics are wonderful and comforting, the statistical successes of real lifesaving medicine can be attributed to a few broader, earlier advances, and not many of those. There may be only five statistically significant advances in medicine.
The first is sepsis, recognition of the ubiquitous existence of germs. Even before germs were specifically identified, physicians learned empirically to wash their hands. One of the most mortal medical crises in the first three-quarters of the 19th century was postpartum infection caused by doctors delivering babies with dirty hands, killing children and mothers at a shocking rate. Civil War surgeons stropped their scalpels on their boot soles and made battlefield wounds doubly or triply lethal. The dangers of sepsis were recognized by the healing pioneer Louis Pasteur, an early gramma with a sly little French beard who insisted that midwives and doctors wash their hands and instruments before birthing. He also saved vast numbers of kids and grownups when he found a way to purify milk (a seriously lethal cocktail in days gone by) with high heat just under the boiling point (Pasteurization, look on your milk carton).
Dr. Pasteur also advanced the practice of vaccination. With it, we’ve conquered desperately lethal diseases like smallpox and polio. The defunct Soviet Union awarded a great distinction to a very few: Hero of the People. Pasteur deserved this award from all of us.
Clean municipal water supply is one of the basic wonders of health. This is a very old advance. The Romans determined, empirically, that tainted water killed, and brought fresh water from enormous distances through buried and elevated aqueducts, the engineering high points of an age. Providing reliably pure “city water” has been a municipal responsibility for many generations. One of the earliest documented tales of empirical epidemiology was the use of medical geography in tracing the source of an epidemic cholera in London of 1854. When Dr. John Snow persuaded officials to refuse use of the public well on Broad Street (where a “cluster” of 127 cholera victims had died), the situation improved. It was later found that the Broad Street well had been dug only three feet from a leaking cess pit. Quid erat demonstrandum.
Another municipal improvement is the fourth statistical advance in medicine: trash pickup. We’re so accustomed to this process that we don’t credit it for saving lives. It does. During one of the Great Plagues of London in the 17th century, a few careful observers commented that the healthiest place to live was London Bridge. This wasn’t the contemporary structure, or the bridge transported stone-by-stone to span an artificial stream in Arizona. Old London bridge was a teeming human marvel carrying shops, apartment buildings and residences, as well as London Bridge Gate (where the heads of traitors were displayed on pike-ends) and London Municipal Waterworks, which the flow of the stream past waterwheels as power. The structures were cantilevered out above the Thames’ flow, leaving a narrow, dim bridge surface for wagons and pedestrians. Cantilevered outboard of these sometimes flimsy constructions were “jakes” or “necessaries” – simple outhouses. The London weather is always damp, above the river damper still, wood is a porous material, nails were precious, so having an out-hung outhouse shear away from the main structure and fall into the river was a common source of annoyance (and even more annoying if someone were in it at the time). This, in this way, London Bridge was continually falling down, my fair lady. But why was it so healthy? Because the residents availed themselves of river’s conveniences: they threw their trash out the windows and their poop dropped directly into the river. Disgusting. But healthy. No trash, no cesspit, no rats. No rats, no fleas. No fleas, no bubonic plague. When American cities began to pick up domestic trash the health of the cities improved enormously.
The fifth great advance in medicine came late: anesthesia. Before properly administered surgical “sleep,” a patient could die from the shock of pain. Untold numbers died because the thought of enduring the knife without a pain-killer was too horrible, so operations that might have saved the patient’s life (or might not if infection from the dirty scalpel settled in the wound), were put off. Queen Victoria was the first “public” woman to received anesthesia for the pain of childbirth. “Laughing gas,” nitrous oxide, revolutionized dentistry.
During London Bridge’s fashionable height, around the year 1600, and right on into our mid-19th century, a physician’s pharmacopoeia was essentially useless. Indeed, the attentions of a “doctor” were flatly dangerous. In the thousands of clinical substances available, there were only three or four that had real effect. One, and the most effective, was the placebo. Another was laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Then there were a few topical remedies, some unreliable folk remedies, and an overwhelming world of superstition.
Antibiotics also arrived late, well into the 20th century. Though antibiotics are a comfort to all of us (King Tutankhamen might still be around if his jaw abscess had been treated with penicillin) they aren’t statistically significant. They haven’t made a major difference in public health and mortality. Before antibiotics, many robust folks survived infections like pneumonia, cholera, typhoid fever and even smallpox. A surprising number of soldiers and sailors survived amputations with filthy surgical instruments.
Most of the advancements of science aren’t a drop in the bucket compared to the gargantuan face of humanity. But what your gramma told you, that counts.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has been tossed out of some tolerably high-toned California dinners for taking up the cudgel against New Age superstitions allotted a holy place in Marin folklore – healing touch, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbals, &c. In some ways, being asked to leave because you're insulting ignorant guests is a badge of honor. In most ways – and Himself is learning this slowly – it's boorish. He's a well-intentioned fellow with a persistent inability to identify what's appropriate behavior and discourse.
Like all grammas she droned on at length: wash your hands, get to bed, eat your vegetables, get out in the sun, stay out of the sun, shake a leg and get to work, wear clean underwear. It turns out that she was spot-on. The frustrating thing about old wives’ tales is that those wives got old by doing a few things right.
Wash your hands: plain soap and water turns out to be a powerful talisman against flus, coughs, and all communicable diseases. Lady MacBeth may have gone a little overboard but you should never pass up a chance to wash your hands.
Eat your vegetables: granted, your gramma probably underlined this as a matter of puritanical discipline but beneath the ugly-and-not-your-first-choice-so-it-must-be-good-for-you factor you’ve got the wealth of vitamins, way-high fiber and anti-oxidants in Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and oatmeal. Let’s not get carried away about about gramma’s laboratory virtues, however: she didn’t know beans (sic) about cooking veggies and probably stewed them into submission. Today we steam them lightly or, best (refer to The New York Times), microwave them briefly and with minimum vitamin loss.
Get out in the sun: important vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin” is near-impossible to synthesize and is internally produced by our bodies’ interaction with the sun’s ultraviolet light.
Stay out of the sun: antique ladies wore sunbonnets for their complexions, but also because a bushel of their sunned-on friends succumbed to skin cancer. Given our immigration patterns, the prairie sun was especially deadly to fair-skinned Nordic, Irish and British families. Highest incidence of sun cancer in the world: Australia, where white-skinned Celts meet merciless sun.
Shake a leg and get to work: gramma didn’t have a Pilates studio down the block but knew that exercise made a difference. Or she just worked her bustle off, anyway. And if she didn’t know that exercise is healthy, perennial puritanical sensibility suggested that it was hard and, therefore, virtuous.
Wear clean underwear: we might make a case for fungus suppression but this is not gramma's finest medical homily and a social observance more than a clinical desideratum.
We could feel a bit more progressive and smugly scientific if gramma were a total loon and recommended nutso nostrums like echinacea. Embarrassing as it is, these are our New Age superstitions, driven by the narcissistic belief that “those know-it-all doctors aren’t any smarter than me!” Clinically, demonstrably, they are. Whole Foods may sell cool little vials of “safe and gentle” homeopathic cures but in double-blind studies homeopathic quackery registers no more than a placebo effect. Echinacea has no greater basis in logical pharmacopoeia than turning around three times and spitting between your feet.
Modern medicine is largely crisis oriented. Though antibiotics are wonderful and comforting, the statistical successes of real lifesaving medicine can be attributed to a few broader, earlier advances, and not many of those. There may be only five statistically significant advances in medicine.
The first is sepsis, recognition of the ubiquitous existence of germs. Even before germs were specifically identified, physicians learned empirically to wash their hands. One of the most mortal medical crises in the first three-quarters of the 19th century was postpartum infection caused by doctors delivering babies with dirty hands, killing children and mothers at a shocking rate. Civil War surgeons stropped their scalpels on their boot soles and made battlefield wounds doubly or triply lethal. The dangers of sepsis were recognized by the healing pioneer Louis Pasteur, an early gramma with a sly little French beard who insisted that midwives and doctors wash their hands and instruments before birthing. He also saved vast numbers of kids and grownups when he found a way to purify milk (a seriously lethal cocktail in days gone by) with high heat just under the boiling point (Pasteurization, look on your milk carton).
Dr. Pasteur also advanced the practice of vaccination. With it, we’ve conquered desperately lethal diseases like smallpox and polio. The defunct Soviet Union awarded a great distinction to a very few: Hero of the People. Pasteur deserved this award from all of us.
Clean municipal water supply is one of the basic wonders of health. This is a very old advance. The Romans determined, empirically, that tainted water killed, and brought fresh water from enormous distances through buried and elevated aqueducts, the engineering high points of an age. Providing reliably pure “city water” has been a municipal responsibility for many generations. One of the earliest documented tales of empirical epidemiology was the use of medical geography in tracing the source of an epidemic cholera in London of 1854. When Dr. John Snow persuaded officials to refuse use of the public well on Broad Street (where a “cluster” of 127 cholera victims had died), the situation improved. It was later found that the Broad Street well had been dug only three feet from a leaking cess pit. Quid erat demonstrandum.
Another municipal improvement is the fourth statistical advance in medicine: trash pickup. We’re so accustomed to this process that we don’t credit it for saving lives. It does. During one of the Great Plagues of London in the 17th century, a few careful observers commented that the healthiest place to live was London Bridge. This wasn’t the contemporary structure, or the bridge transported stone-by-stone to span an artificial stream in Arizona. Old London bridge was a teeming human marvel carrying shops, apartment buildings and residences, as well as London Bridge Gate (where the heads of traitors were displayed on pike-ends) and London Municipal Waterworks, which the flow of the stream past waterwheels as power. The structures were cantilevered out above the Thames’ flow, leaving a narrow, dim bridge surface for wagons and pedestrians. Cantilevered outboard of these sometimes flimsy constructions were “jakes” or “necessaries” – simple outhouses. The London weather is always damp, above the river damper still, wood is a porous material, nails were precious, so having an out-hung outhouse shear away from the main structure and fall into the river was a common source of annoyance (and even more annoying if someone were in it at the time). This, in this way, London Bridge was continually falling down, my fair lady. But why was it so healthy? Because the residents availed themselves of river’s conveniences: they threw their trash out the windows and their poop dropped directly into the river. Disgusting. But healthy. No trash, no cesspit, no rats. No rats, no fleas. No fleas, no bubonic plague. When American cities began to pick up domestic trash the health of the cities improved enormously.
The fifth great advance in medicine came late: anesthesia. Before properly administered surgical “sleep,” a patient could die from the shock of pain. Untold numbers died because the thought of enduring the knife without a pain-killer was too horrible, so operations that might have saved the patient’s life (or might not if infection from the dirty scalpel settled in the wound), were put off. Queen Victoria was the first “public” woman to received anesthesia for the pain of childbirth. “Laughing gas,” nitrous oxide, revolutionized dentistry.
During London Bridge’s fashionable height, around the year 1600, and right on into our mid-19th century, a physician’s pharmacopoeia was essentially useless. Indeed, the attentions of a “doctor” were flatly dangerous. In the thousands of clinical substances available, there were only three or four that had real effect. One, and the most effective, was the placebo. Another was laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Then there were a few topical remedies, some unreliable folk remedies, and an overwhelming world of superstition.
Antibiotics also arrived late, well into the 20th century. Though antibiotics are a comfort to all of us (King Tutankhamen might still be around if his jaw abscess had been treated with penicillin) they aren’t statistically significant. They haven’t made a major difference in public health and mortality. Before antibiotics, many robust folks survived infections like pneumonia, cholera, typhoid fever and even smallpox. A surprising number of soldiers and sailors survived amputations with filthy surgical instruments.
Most of the advancements of science aren’t a drop in the bucket compared to the gargantuan face of humanity. But what your gramma told you, that counts.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has been tossed out of some tolerably high-toned California dinners for taking up the cudgel against New Age superstitions allotted a holy place in Marin folklore – healing touch, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbals, &c. In some ways, being asked to leave because you're insulting ignorant guests is a badge of honor. In most ways – and Himself is learning this slowly – it's boorish. He's a well-intentioned fellow with a persistent inability to identify what's appropriate behavior and discourse.
Monday, February 22, 2010
HOPSCOTCH REMEMBERED
THE SUN CAME OUT this morning, so Laura and Hannah were out in the driveway. Hannah was drawing on the concrete with big chalk. I walked down and was drawn into the chalk drawing. Hannah lay down so I could trace her outline. This was so fine that Laura lay down and had hers done. I laid down but rather than flat-on-back, arms-outspread, I tried a lying-on-side profile. When I drew a cross for my eyes, the driveway became a crime scene. Naturally Laura insisted on her own crime-scene profile, which she got. I did two cross-eyes for this but it disturbed Laura considerably and she tried to wash out the "dead eyes" because, she said, "this is beginning to look sick."
She took the kabosh off our crime scene by drawing a familiar figure farther out in the driveway: a hopscotch matrix – one, two, three, double, six, double, nine, heaven. We showed Hannah how it was done. She refused to get into the racket but demanded that we continue.
I returned to my studio (proclaiming my intention to "use the potty," since Hannah is in the midst of intense potty training, big girl pants, &c) and looked down at the hopscotch matrix. What a familiar figure and how evocative! It was probably a game played when Gilgamesh was king. Of course it was a girls' game. I can't remember the play or the scoring and refused myself the time for Googling "hopscotch." It made me consider the flow of time, yet again this week.
When I began seriously fooling around with computers the industrial design studio with which I worked in Providence, RI, had a memory hard drive with a 2 GB capacity, a larger drive than I'd ever seen. We thought this amount of 0's and 1's was extraordinary, amazing, who could use so much? Sitting next to my keyboard presently is a SanDisk thumb-drive as big as a French fry with a memory storage capacity of 4 GB. I bought a pack of three at CostCo for under $30. Things change.
My first commercial flight was aboard a DC-4. The service of the “stewardess” was attentive and pleasant. We walked out onto the tarmac to board via a rolling set of steps. Our friends came to see us off (we were flying from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Tampa, Florida, by way of Atlanta, because Wheeling had no commercial airport). A 5’ chain-link fence separated the onlookers from the runway. In the air I got ear-popping gum as a matter of course. Later a meal was served handsomely with airline-monogrammed silverware. Each diner had tiny salt and pepper shakers. I was invited to look at the cockpit. It was more impressive than contemporary cockpits because radial engines need more complex monitoring than jets, require a "flight engineer" and have close to a hundred dials. The cockpit door was open most of the time. No one had highjacked an airplane. What a crazy idea. They'd know where you were going, right? You couldn't get away with it. What kind of a nut would highjack an airplane?
I'm proud to say that I received Flying Wings as a bona fide flight passenger when we reached Tampa.
I flew the week after 9-11 (I had lost a friend, Anne Judge, in the Pentagon crash that day) but haven’t flown since exploding underwear came into vogue, so I don’t know the drill of not covering one’s lap, drinking liquids or humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the last half hour of flight. One crazed Islamicist attempts to light his sneakers and millions of Americans take off their shoes. One supposes that next year we’ll be flying naked with a mood probe up our ass.
I’m one of those people who remembers early-childhood experiences, like the texture of the cast-iron crib at my grandparent’s summer place in the West Virginia mountains, or the sound of cars passing on the dirt road directly in front of that cottage, or the smell of the green, slightly translucent wallpaper cleaning dough my mother used at our house on Wheeling Island, or the smell of the pineapple-flavored rum my gramma and grampa brought back from Cuba. I remember the gritty feel and stony smell of Lava soap, always beside the sink because my grandfather, father and uncles worked in the shop. I liked the smell of Jergen’s Lotion, Lifebuoy soap, and my father’s green Mennen’s Aftershave. That was his smell. I loved spaghetti, partly because (in our Wonder Bread world) it was so exotic.
We sometimes took road trips with my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Mary. One of the trips brought us to Washington, DC. The Smithsonian was wonderful. I put my nose into the tiny porthole of the Explorer II high altitude gondola, a black and white sphere sent manned into the actual stratosphere by the National Geographic Society. The old, uncirculated air smelled musty and dry. There were two sets of drinking fountains; it was disappointing that the fountains under the “COLORED” sign offered plain, uncolored water. At the National Zoo the keeper at the primate house showed us that the monkeys ate well, breaking off a dense, sweet cornbread made with honey, bran, seeds and vitamins, fed to the chimps. When he took a bite my mother, who was definitely a delicate creature, almost fainted. When I took a bite from the keeper before she could stop me, she was forced to sit down and recover. It was delicious. I wish I had a piece right now.
Things change. My G-4 Mac computer is now, ahem, "old." The notion of air travel as an elegant way to go is antique. Presently it's a feedlot experience. I’m an old guy now. Thank God for stents, Zoloft and Viagra. And also, thank God for the beautiful sun that burned through the rain and fog at last. Maybe I'll Google "hopscotch" tomorrow.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Childhood memories are odd artifacts. One wonders if they're honest. Things Adkins' grandson Max has said seem to reflect the long labor of his birth as a memory of his mother "trying and trying to get me out." Still, I must be aware that Himself can grow morose with too many memories. Looking back too earnestly ensures a stumble in the present.
She took the kabosh off our crime scene by drawing a familiar figure farther out in the driveway: a hopscotch matrix – one, two, three, double, six, double, nine, heaven. We showed Hannah how it was done. She refused to get into the racket but demanded that we continue.
I returned to my studio (proclaiming my intention to "use the potty," since Hannah is in the midst of intense potty training, big girl pants, &c) and looked down at the hopscotch matrix. What a familiar figure and how evocative! It was probably a game played when Gilgamesh was king. Of course it was a girls' game. I can't remember the play or the scoring and refused myself the time for Googling "hopscotch." It made me consider the flow of time, yet again this week.
When I began seriously fooling around with computers the industrial design studio with which I worked in Providence, RI, had a memory hard drive with a 2 GB capacity, a larger drive than I'd ever seen. We thought this amount of 0's and 1's was extraordinary, amazing, who could use so much? Sitting next to my keyboard presently is a SanDisk thumb-drive as big as a French fry with a memory storage capacity of 4 GB. I bought a pack of three at CostCo for under $30. Things change.
My first commercial flight was aboard a DC-4. The service of the “stewardess” was attentive and pleasant. We walked out onto the tarmac to board via a rolling set of steps. Our friends came to see us off (we were flying from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Tampa, Florida, by way of Atlanta, because Wheeling had no commercial airport). A 5’ chain-link fence separated the onlookers from the runway. In the air I got ear-popping gum as a matter of course. Later a meal was served handsomely with airline-monogrammed silverware. Each diner had tiny salt and pepper shakers. I was invited to look at the cockpit. It was more impressive than contemporary cockpits because radial engines need more complex monitoring than jets, require a "flight engineer" and have close to a hundred dials. The cockpit door was open most of the time. No one had highjacked an airplane. What a crazy idea. They'd know where you were going, right? You couldn't get away with it. What kind of a nut would highjack an airplane?
I'm proud to say that I received Flying Wings as a bona fide flight passenger when we reached Tampa.
I flew the week after 9-11 (I had lost a friend, Anne Judge, in the Pentagon crash that day) but haven’t flown since exploding underwear came into vogue, so I don’t know the drill of not covering one’s lap, drinking liquids or humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the last half hour of flight. One crazed Islamicist attempts to light his sneakers and millions of Americans take off their shoes. One supposes that next year we’ll be flying naked with a mood probe up our ass.
I’m one of those people who remembers early-childhood experiences, like the texture of the cast-iron crib at my grandparent’s summer place in the West Virginia mountains, or the sound of cars passing on the dirt road directly in front of that cottage, or the smell of the green, slightly translucent wallpaper cleaning dough my mother used at our house on Wheeling Island, or the smell of the pineapple-flavored rum my gramma and grampa brought back from Cuba. I remember the gritty feel and stony smell of Lava soap, always beside the sink because my grandfather, father and uncles worked in the shop. I liked the smell of Jergen’s Lotion, Lifebuoy soap, and my father’s green Mennen’s Aftershave. That was his smell. I loved spaghetti, partly because (in our Wonder Bread world) it was so exotic.
We sometimes took road trips with my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Mary. One of the trips brought us to Washington, DC. The Smithsonian was wonderful. I put my nose into the tiny porthole of the Explorer II high altitude gondola, a black and white sphere sent manned into the actual stratosphere by the National Geographic Society. The old, uncirculated air smelled musty and dry. There were two sets of drinking fountains; it was disappointing that the fountains under the “COLORED” sign offered plain, uncolored water. At the National Zoo the keeper at the primate house showed us that the monkeys ate well, breaking off a dense, sweet cornbread made with honey, bran, seeds and vitamins, fed to the chimps. When he took a bite my mother, who was definitely a delicate creature, almost fainted. When I took a bite from the keeper before she could stop me, she was forced to sit down and recover. It was delicious. I wish I had a piece right now.
Things change. My G-4 Mac computer is now, ahem, "old." The notion of air travel as an elegant way to go is antique. Presently it's a feedlot experience. I’m an old guy now. Thank God for stents, Zoloft and Viagra. And also, thank God for the beautiful sun that burned through the rain and fog at last. Maybe I'll Google "hopscotch" tomorrow.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Childhood memories are odd artifacts. One wonders if they're honest. Things Adkins' grandson Max has said seem to reflect the long labor of his birth as a memory of his mother "trying and trying to get me out." Still, I must be aware that Himself can grow morose with too many memories. Looking back too earnestly ensures a stumble in the present.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
CLINKER-BUILT
Every Tuesday evening at the Dolphin Club we give the pulling boats some care – repairing, sanding, varnishing, rebuilding. After we work three hours or so, we all eat together in the boat house at long tables.
A big crowd tonight, but not because it's Fat Tuesday and one of the members has made jambalaya. Big doings in the shop. Word has gone out that the Club's boatwright, Jon Belinski, is installing five new ribs in one of the older pulling boats. This is a rare demonstration of antique skills and methods, requiring teamwork, timing, speed and finesse. It's more than woodworking.
The ribs begin as tough locust staves. To bend this adamant wood into the fair curve of a rib, it must be cut to its cross-section and steamed in a long, closed, hissing iron pipe for half an hour. The locust ribs emerge at 200°F+ as limp as noodles. Limp for only moments. We will pluck ribs out one at a time with thick gloves and push them into the boat's inner shape, working feverishly before the inner heat dissipates and the locust stubbornness revives.
Contemporary sport boats are, in the old Massachusetts boatyard phrase, "built by the mile and cut off to suit." They're mass produced. You won't see ribs being steamed unless you haunt a cranky New England shipwright's shop peopled with wood-heads devoted to traditional (read "lavishly expensive") wooden boats built more carefully than a Hermann Miller coffee table.
We walk through the steps we will take in dumb-show first, noting where our feet will go, what will be in the way, who must step back, who must come forward. Everyone must work fast and in close concert, because the locust will be flexible from the steam box for less than a minute.
We take special care of these exquisite craft but they endure. Some are older than any of the people who work on them. And because why, mate? Because these 'ere boats is clinker-built, as light as eggshells but tough as pigs' noses. They are San Francisco variations on the Whitehall model. This means that they are rowing boats with a distinct and delicately cupped shaped, a "wineglass" transom (aft end), and that they're very light for their size, built in the ancient "clinker" construction.
"Clinker" is an Old English cognate of "clencher," which indicates that the boat is constructed of thin, overlapping planks of a light, flexible wood (in this case, white cedar) "clenched" to thin ribs with copper rivets. This fastening mode is a very old usage that binds more tightly than nails and more securely than screws. Indeed, nails and screws wouldn't have much to "grab" because the stock is so thin. The soft-as-cheese cedar is milled thin, not much thicker than 1/4" and about three inches wide. The ribs are only 5/8" wide and about 1/2" thick. While they're still whippy and hot, we will drill through and secure a rib, the lower part of an overlapping cedar strake (one of the curving horizontal planks) and the upper part of the next strake.
Now. A rib is whisked out of the steam pipe, slammed into the boat, bent against the soft interior curve of the strakes and forced under some of the boat's inner structure. Held hard, holes are immediately drilled, time management and tool quickness.
As soon as the holes are made a copper riveting nail is tapped through them. The "nail" is square in section to grip the wood more tightly. A round copper washer – called a "burr" – is forced over the square nail with a special riveting tool; it's like a chisel with a flat, blunt end drilled with a hole for the nail to occuply, so that whacking the burr down onto the nail forces the rib and strakes together. When the riveting tool is taken away, the nail is snipped off just above the burr and, while one partner "bucks" (holds a heavy iron on the nailhead end to prevent it from being driven away), the other shapes the soft copper with a small ball-peen hammer. This is the hammer with one flat head and one round head, made specifically for work like this – shaping the "mushroom" with the round head is called "peening". The copper is so malleable that it mushrooms over the burr and each stroke of the shaping ball-peen tightens the assembly.
It seems like intolerably fussy and unnecessary complication but it's the only thing that will bind these whisper-thin planks and light ribs into a remarkably rigid, nearly monocoque hull. It's historic, it's ancient methodology, very cool to watch and do.
Jay and I work as a team. Half the time I'm above the boat, tapping the rivets home, shaping the mushroomed-over heads in the soft copper. Half the time I'm under the boat, lying on the shop floor, holding the heavy bucking iron against the nail head. The shaping is a more focused task, it requires more care, but holding the bucking iron is heavier work.
There are compensations for that heavy work. Lying beneath the boat's lyric curves I see each strake describing a separate curved plane with a strake-thickness separating it from the next plane – graceful lines paralleling and harmonizing, the color of the varnished white cedar glowing golden and varying with the glare from every work light, shading from dark umber in the shadows to chrome yellow in the light. Beautiful.
The locust wood ribs emerging from the steam box smell bitter and damp. The drilled cedar smells like incense. The tapping and the calling between three or four sets of partners – two sets riveting, two sets placing new ribs – has a discernible rhythm and order.
The work had a sensible urgency and a splendid, strong outcome. What do we do in our lives that gives us much of that?
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself needs more physical work and more contact with working people. The abstract life of a writer and illustrator can be barren, like a room decorated with B&W print-outs of reports. A room and a life need color and a bit of mayhem.
A big crowd tonight, but not because it's Fat Tuesday and one of the members has made jambalaya. Big doings in the shop. Word has gone out that the Club's boatwright, Jon Belinski, is installing five new ribs in one of the older pulling boats. This is a rare demonstration of antique skills and methods, requiring teamwork, timing, speed and finesse. It's more than woodworking.
The ribs begin as tough locust staves. To bend this adamant wood into the fair curve of a rib, it must be cut to its cross-section and steamed in a long, closed, hissing iron pipe for half an hour. The locust ribs emerge at 200°F+ as limp as noodles. Limp for only moments. We will pluck ribs out one at a time with thick gloves and push them into the boat's inner shape, working feverishly before the inner heat dissipates and the locust stubbornness revives.
Contemporary sport boats are, in the old Massachusetts boatyard phrase, "built by the mile and cut off to suit." They're mass produced. You won't see ribs being steamed unless you haunt a cranky New England shipwright's shop peopled with wood-heads devoted to traditional (read "lavishly expensive") wooden boats built more carefully than a Hermann Miller coffee table.
We walk through the steps we will take in dumb-show first, noting where our feet will go, what will be in the way, who must step back, who must come forward. Everyone must work fast and in close concert, because the locust will be flexible from the steam box for less than a minute.
We take special care of these exquisite craft but they endure. Some are older than any of the people who work on them. And because why, mate? Because these 'ere boats is clinker-built, as light as eggshells but tough as pigs' noses. They are San Francisco variations on the Whitehall model. This means that they are rowing boats with a distinct and delicately cupped shaped, a "wineglass" transom (aft end), and that they're very light for their size, built in the ancient "clinker" construction.
"Clinker" is an Old English cognate of "clencher," which indicates that the boat is constructed of thin, overlapping planks of a light, flexible wood (in this case, white cedar) "clenched" to thin ribs with copper rivets. This fastening mode is a very old usage that binds more tightly than nails and more securely than screws. Indeed, nails and screws wouldn't have much to "grab" because the stock is so thin. The soft-as-cheese cedar is milled thin, not much thicker than 1/4" and about three inches wide. The ribs are only 5/8" wide and about 1/2" thick. While they're still whippy and hot, we will drill through and secure a rib, the lower part of an overlapping cedar strake (one of the curving horizontal planks) and the upper part of the next strake.
Now. A rib is whisked out of the steam pipe, slammed into the boat, bent against the soft interior curve of the strakes and forced under some of the boat's inner structure. Held hard, holes are immediately drilled, time management and tool quickness.
As soon as the holes are made a copper riveting nail is tapped through them. The "nail" is square in section to grip the wood more tightly. A round copper washer – called a "burr" – is forced over the square nail with a special riveting tool; it's like a chisel with a flat, blunt end drilled with a hole for the nail to occuply, so that whacking the burr down onto the nail forces the rib and strakes together. When the riveting tool is taken away, the nail is snipped off just above the burr and, while one partner "bucks" (holds a heavy iron on the nailhead end to prevent it from being driven away), the other shapes the soft copper with a small ball-peen hammer. This is the hammer with one flat head and one round head, made specifically for work like this – shaping the "mushroom" with the round head is called "peening". The copper is so malleable that it mushrooms over the burr and each stroke of the shaping ball-peen tightens the assembly.
It seems like intolerably fussy and unnecessary complication but it's the only thing that will bind these whisper-thin planks and light ribs into a remarkably rigid, nearly monocoque hull. It's historic, it's ancient methodology, very cool to watch and do.
Jay and I work as a team. Half the time I'm above the boat, tapping the rivets home, shaping the mushroomed-over heads in the soft copper. Half the time I'm under the boat, lying on the shop floor, holding the heavy bucking iron against the nail head. The shaping is a more focused task, it requires more care, but holding the bucking iron is heavier work.
There are compensations for that heavy work. Lying beneath the boat's lyric curves I see each strake describing a separate curved plane with a strake-thickness separating it from the next plane – graceful lines paralleling and harmonizing, the color of the varnished white cedar glowing golden and varying with the glare from every work light, shading from dark umber in the shadows to chrome yellow in the light. Beautiful.
The locust wood ribs emerging from the steam box smell bitter and damp. The drilled cedar smells like incense. The tapping and the calling between three or four sets of partners – two sets riveting, two sets placing new ribs – has a discernible rhythm and order.
The work had a sensible urgency and a splendid, strong outcome. What do we do in our lives that gives us much of that?
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself needs more physical work and more contact with working people. The abstract life of a writer and illustrator can be barren, like a room decorated with B&W print-outs of reports. A room and a life need color and a bit of mayhem.
Friday, February 12, 2010
MINE CANARIES
CREATIVE PEOPLE have always lived in the thin ends of the bell curve, out on the fringe, scuttling about and picking at the table scraps of big money. The exhibits I've had a hand in designing, the books I've created, the articles I've written, the films with which I've worked – they've all been secondary fruits of "loose money" freed up for social projects by embarrassingly large profits. When profits dip, artists are the mine canaries of capital flow: we fall dead off our perches before the big guys can feel the pinch. Looking around me I see a lot of empty perches. And there's a bit of a rasp in my throat, as well.
What follows is part of a reply to the director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum, a lovely place for little guys. I proposed we collaborate on some exhibits and he, graciously and reluctantly, confessed that the BADM didn't have the funding to pursue anything new in this crunch. I replied:
Yes, the economy is harsh, but I can’t imagine any other result from our global adventuring. As Shackleton said, “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” We don’t seem to manufacture anything in the hardware store, now. Many of our best young men and women are scattered across the world fighting and dying for folks who don’t want us there. We’re fouling our nest but can’t seem to stop. The rolling juggernaut of corporate America more or less ignores all our objections and cries. Yet we DO live in a favored land, and our culture IS strong, has a work ethic, and has good roots. The problem could be that our leaders don’t demand much of us, or much more than merely spending. The children you and I try to encourage will reap the whirlwind, and that right soon.
My current book project is Black Bonfire, about the end of cheap oil. It’s inevitable, calamitous, and much, much closer than I imagined when I began the book. The book is directed at young adults, giving them an overview of energy as they enter adulthood, as they become citizens. When you want to do an exhibit on just how deeply oil has become the warp and woof of life, give a shout. If you’re sitting inside, everything you see – from wood paneling to steel shelves to plastic pens – is or was put together by oil. Oil that we won’t have.
So how do we, as creative workers, survive the present economy? Dunno. We’ve always been on the fringe, depending on an upstream flow from the largesse of wealthy patrons, not too far removed from Cosimo de Medici. I suppose we can hope that the wealthy will always be wealthy. I’m not sure that will be borne out in the cultural upheaval. I don’t want to sound apocalyptic but major institutions will change. The hoary dictum, “What good for USSteel is good for the country” isn’t quite so true.
Perhaps we’ll survive like that marvelous soul William Kamkwamba, who built a windmill in his yard from junk and electrified his African village. What do we need with the Incredible Hulk and Batman when we have Kamkwamba? Perhaps we’ll build our exhibits out of local junk, building from the midden pile of Marin society. Our work could come to resemble the ancient trade of the storytellers who traveled from village to village, sitting under trees and eaves to spin out tales that amazed and informed.
[Jon Steward interviews Kamkwamba at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba]
Artists. We're all canaries trying to survive this oppressive atmosphere, clinging to our wobbly little perches with our feeble claws, and still singing brightly. How many friends do you have who are paralyzed by dread and frustration? On the other side, how many artists do you know who are doing jes' fine? If it weren't for Zoloft, we'd have a mass suicide of artists (something like M. Night Shyamalian's The Happening) and the balance of the population would say, "Whatinhell have they got to complain about? All they do is sing and swing."
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
What Himself neglects to acknowledge is that living on the fringes is a choice, not a profession. I could be demonizing the victim by bracing him thusly, but living on the fringes is inherently dangerous and unstable. The deep, strong current is where the action is, not the back eddies in the reeds. It's artistic hubris to assume the world will pull you triumphant from the edges and proclaim you its darling. Himself has a task: get into the mainstream or perish. This is harsh advice but so is the economy.
What follows is part of a reply to the director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum, a lovely place for little guys. I proposed we collaborate on some exhibits and he, graciously and reluctantly, confessed that the BADM didn't have the funding to pursue anything new in this crunch. I replied:
Yes, the economy is harsh, but I can’t imagine any other result from our global adventuring. As Shackleton said, “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” We don’t seem to manufacture anything in the hardware store, now. Many of our best young men and women are scattered across the world fighting and dying for folks who don’t want us there. We’re fouling our nest but can’t seem to stop. The rolling juggernaut of corporate America more or less ignores all our objections and cries. Yet we DO live in a favored land, and our culture IS strong, has a work ethic, and has good roots. The problem could be that our leaders don’t demand much of us, or much more than merely spending. The children you and I try to encourage will reap the whirlwind, and that right soon.
My current book project is Black Bonfire, about the end of cheap oil. It’s inevitable, calamitous, and much, much closer than I imagined when I began the book. The book is directed at young adults, giving them an overview of energy as they enter adulthood, as they become citizens. When you want to do an exhibit on just how deeply oil has become the warp and woof of life, give a shout. If you’re sitting inside, everything you see – from wood paneling to steel shelves to plastic pens – is or was put together by oil. Oil that we won’t have.
So how do we, as creative workers, survive the present economy? Dunno. We’ve always been on the fringe, depending on an upstream flow from the largesse of wealthy patrons, not too far removed from Cosimo de Medici. I suppose we can hope that the wealthy will always be wealthy. I’m not sure that will be borne out in the cultural upheaval. I don’t want to sound apocalyptic but major institutions will change. The hoary dictum, “What good for USSteel is good for the country” isn’t quite so true.
Perhaps we’ll survive like that marvelous soul William Kamkwamba, who built a windmill in his yard from junk and electrified his African village. What do we need with the Incredible Hulk and Batman when we have Kamkwamba? Perhaps we’ll build our exhibits out of local junk, building from the midden pile of Marin society. Our work could come to resemble the ancient trade of the storytellers who traveled from village to village, sitting under trees and eaves to spin out tales that amazed and informed.
[Jon Steward interviews Kamkwamba at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba]
Artists. We're all canaries trying to survive this oppressive atmosphere, clinging to our wobbly little perches with our feeble claws, and still singing brightly. How many friends do you have who are paralyzed by dread and frustration? On the other side, how many artists do you know who are doing jes' fine? If it weren't for Zoloft, we'd have a mass suicide of artists (something like M. Night Shyamalian's The Happening) and the balance of the population would say, "Whatinhell have they got to complain about? All they do is sing and swing."
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
What Himself neglects to acknowledge is that living on the fringes is a choice, not a profession. I could be demonizing the victim by bracing him thusly, but living on the fringes is inherently dangerous and unstable. The deep, strong current is where the action is, not the back eddies in the reeds. It's artistic hubris to assume the world will pull you triumphant from the edges and proclaim you its darling. Himself has a task: get into the mainstream or perish. This is harsh advice but so is the economy.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
MORE SMALL BOAT TALK
I REMEMBER a daysail with the Traditional Small Craft Association up in the Sacramento Delta. I had an idyllic morning and afternoon aboard a Redwing 18, a home-built plywood skiff with a big cockpit and a cuddy. WoodenBoat sells the plans for about $100, and I'm wondering how many Redwings there are, carrying couples and families over small waters.
I'm accustomed to big, powerful sloops and ketches in the 36' to 65' range – OPB's, other people's boats – but that odd little outboard in the complex little sloughs of the Delta offered a scaled-down, wholly delightful adventure.
The four-stroke, ten horsepower engine was quiet at the pokey rate of travel the slough mandated, perhaps 5.5 knots. Conversation was easy, the banks were lovely and the birds were plentiful and varied – egrets, green herons, great blue herons, redwing blackbirds, crows (my favorites), wrens, robins, mockingbirds . . . Some spoke of seeing otters in less-traveled sloughs. The cooler with sodas and lunch was in the shade of the cuddy cabin. The day was fine though I could see that a canvas Bimini cockpit cover would be a blessing in the depth of summer.
An oddly pleasing part of the voyage was the wheel, itself. It was a small galvanized workboat wheel, with its six teak hand-spokes extending the cast galvanized spokes, mounted on the starboard face of the coach house. The little engine swung to it, and the engine controls were mounted to the right of the wheel. Perhaps the comfortingly elderly wheel made it feel more like a sea boat. We're all suggestible, subject to delusions, me more than most. I remember it as one of my favorite little passages.
I love big boats, long may they wave, but I'm speculating that the marine industry must expand the base of small boaters. Small experiences may lead to big-boat purchases in time. Even an 18-footer consumes an appreciable amount of marine equipment, year by year.
I could be way wrong about this. If I were a businessperson I wouldn't be a writer. For boatbuilders already set up to produce grand vessels the only course is to winkle out high-ticket owners from the Fortune 500. One thinks of steep oil price increases, however, and wonders what big breweries were thinking just before Prohibition. Some actually went into the root beer business.
Welcoming a wider public to life on the water is good sense and good seed. By and by most dinghy sailors want a bigger boat for longer voyages, and for learning new things. Young people who play on the water with their families are more likely to invest in a big boat when they have families of their own. Should boatbuilders and chandleries be thinking about what Stewart Brand calls "the Long Now?"
I find such peace and a settling of the soul on the water. I can't imagine not getting onto the water – on a big boat, a Redwing 18, or an innertube. Water is the only magic I know. So I'm an advocate, and were I the Pied Piper the trail of my tiny-footed band would lead to the shore. I want kids to see the grace of the water, and to see the shore from the ocean perspective – both useful visions.
Adkins
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
It's true that Himself is calmer and more lucid, less flighty and anxious, when he returns from a trip around the Bay. Perhaps other men center themselves in the woodshop or on their bicycles or hunting moose. Himself is a Water Healer; get him off the shore for a few hours and he's nearly tolerable. He says that the problems of the land diminish in proportion to the height of the trees as he sails away from the dock. Is it merely one form of temporary nepenthe, or is it like the old Norton Utilities program that rearranged your hard drive storage into logical, faster segments? Either way it's better than vodka.
Adkins
I'm accustomed to big, powerful sloops and ketches in the 36' to 65' range – OPB's, other people's boats – but that odd little outboard in the complex little sloughs of the Delta offered a scaled-down, wholly delightful adventure.
The four-stroke, ten horsepower engine was quiet at the pokey rate of travel the slough mandated, perhaps 5.5 knots. Conversation was easy, the banks were lovely and the birds were plentiful and varied – egrets, green herons, great blue herons, redwing blackbirds, crows (my favorites), wrens, robins, mockingbirds . . . Some spoke of seeing otters in less-traveled sloughs. The cooler with sodas and lunch was in the shade of the cuddy cabin. The day was fine though I could see that a canvas Bimini cockpit cover would be a blessing in the depth of summer.
An oddly pleasing part of the voyage was the wheel, itself. It was a small galvanized workboat wheel, with its six teak hand-spokes extending the cast galvanized spokes, mounted on the starboard face of the coach house. The little engine swung to it, and the engine controls were mounted to the right of the wheel. Perhaps the comfortingly elderly wheel made it feel more like a sea boat. We're all suggestible, subject to delusions, me more than most. I remember it as one of my favorite little passages.
I love big boats, long may they wave, but I'm speculating that the marine industry must expand the base of small boaters. Small experiences may lead to big-boat purchases in time. Even an 18-footer consumes an appreciable amount of marine equipment, year by year.
I could be way wrong about this. If I were a businessperson I wouldn't be a writer. For boatbuilders already set up to produce grand vessels the only course is to winkle out high-ticket owners from the Fortune 500. One thinks of steep oil price increases, however, and wonders what big breweries were thinking just before Prohibition. Some actually went into the root beer business.
Welcoming a wider public to life on the water is good sense and good seed. By and by most dinghy sailors want a bigger boat for longer voyages, and for learning new things. Young people who play on the water with their families are more likely to invest in a big boat when they have families of their own. Should boatbuilders and chandleries be thinking about what Stewart Brand calls "the Long Now?"
I find such peace and a settling of the soul on the water. I can't imagine not getting onto the water – on a big boat, a Redwing 18, or an innertube. Water is the only magic I know. So I'm an advocate, and were I the Pied Piper the trail of my tiny-footed band would lead to the shore. I want kids to see the grace of the water, and to see the shore from the ocean perspective – both useful visions.
Adkins
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
It's true that Himself is calmer and more lucid, less flighty and anxious, when he returns from a trip around the Bay. Perhaps other men center themselves in the woodshop or on their bicycles or hunting moose. Himself is a Water Healer; get him off the shore for a few hours and he's nearly tolerable. He says that the problems of the land diminish in proportion to the height of the trees as he sails away from the dock. Is it merely one form of temporary nepenthe, or is it like the old Norton Utilities program that rearranged your hard drive storage into logical, faster segments? Either way it's better than vodka.
Adkins
Monday, February 18, 2008
Taking the Serum to Nome
The push and the glide, the rhythmic hiss of displaced snow, the push of cold air against your cheeks, the near-supernatural brightness of sunlight on white snow, and the balanced beat of legs and arms, legs and arms. When it’s going well and the day is kind, cross-country skiing can be as uplifting as a Billy Graham Revival with cocktails.
Between the puffing and gasping.
No sport commonly practiced by homo suburbia demands as much sweat and toil, but few offer such gleaming rewards.
It had been a full twenty years since I’d skied on the skinny boards. I’d kept my form (I told myself) by occasionally working out on the NordicTrak, whoosh, whoosh. For years I’d lunged along on the Trak, picturing myself taking the critical serum to afflicted Nome, pursued by the evil Count Kamarov and his Hired Thugs. Whoosh, whoosh. I always made it.
Swan and I presented ourselves at the Tahoe Nordic Track Center, near the Lake. My cherished and carefully preserved cross-country skis and boots were, alas, laid aside at my daughter’s home in Florida. I must remember to pick them up on the way to my next X-country adventure. So the rental desk asked the usual questions: weight, height, age. Normal “senior” status is over sixty-five. For cross-country “senior” is over sixty, and there are murmurs of lowering it to forty. We get a price break. I was asked whether I wished to “stride” or “skate.” This went over my tonsured head.
Apparently there are X-C Jocks who sneer at the antique notion of kick-and-glide, favoring a wide-stance, out-angled skating stroke, like roller-skating with your shoes epoxyed to twin skateboards. This requires the energy normally necessary to push the Sausalito Ferry through the water. I saw some of these showboats pass. No envy.
With only a hint of sneer the bearded athlete-in-bondage at the rental racks gave me a pair of stride skis. Itty-bitty things. About as wide as a table knife and ridiculously short. Worse, they didn’t have the proper elfin turned-up end with the signature point, that baroque mark of the true Nordic skier. These were as blunt as a toenail and curved up about half an inch.
Good news: boot technology caught up with human feet. The lovely cross-country boots issued were snug but comfy, not at all like the tight leather dungeons that made my feet feel as if they had been renditioned to Dubai.
But once attached to the sweet boots, the stride skis looked like toys. It was obvious the ski tops – the decorative lamination with the logo – had lost the real ski bottoms. But I checked: fish-scales firmly on the bottom. Theoretically, they should work. To some extent.
Cross country skiing was the holdout of the traditionalist. It was a minimalist sport for low-tech jocks. Our skis were still made from wood – hickory and ash with harder “lignostone” or even metal edges. The glide and kick of cross-country is an exaggerated Groucho walk, with alternate heel lifting, so boots were flexibly bound to boards with ancient “bear trap” spring-and-cable bindings or with three-pin clamps that fit holes in the lengthened boot toes.
We were all engrossed in wax theory, because an arcane scale of colored waxes made the skis work. Wax made the skis slippery but it also responded to pressure and “gripped” the snow for the brief moment of our “kick,” the propelling lunge down and back that set us gliding on the snow. Different wax consistencies for different temperatures, some for special snow-types. A perfect cross-country day was a Blue Day; it blissfully required only blue wax. Bitter cold called for green, bitterer cold wanted special-green. Warm spring days brought out the hated klisters, unspeakably messy goo in tubes that got on everything. We carried thermometers and tried wax combinations like “blue with a red kicker” under the heel.
I learned to ski on antique wooden skis with a strange mark: each ski was burned with the letters "BAE." I asked my Yankee friend what the letters meant. "Oh, that. It means 'Byrd Antarctic Expedition.' One of my husband's great uncles was with him. They were way too wide for anything but slogging along so we ran them through the table saw to slim them down."
"But these are artifacts, museum pieces!"
"Well, they were just lying around. No one was using them."
That was part of cross-country. It was a practical sport. Scandahoovians and Yankees understood the heart of it.
Quite early, alternates to wax appeared: plastic fish scales and mohair. The back-angled scales and fibers were mechanical methods for gripping the snow. High-tech methods didn't seem right, then.
X-C wasn’t high-tech stuff but a counter-culture sport, shunning Bogner and Bally stretch-fabric downhill fashions, preferring wool and corduroy. We wore knickers with knee-socks. No, really, we did! Some wore Andean or Tibetan knitted caps with earflaps and dangly tassels. It was a fol-der-ri-fol-der-ra crowd for sure.
So there I stood outside the lodge on high-tech, blunt toy skis, holding day-glo poles, wearing my downhill bib-front pants and a baseball cap. Would the magic work?
Whoosh. A hesitant glide. Whoosh, a dare of balance. Whoosh, a kick. Then an unsuccessful slide-back kick, then a series of productive, snow-grabbing propulsions. The rhythm fell into place: left pole-hand and right foot-kick, glide, right pole and left kick, glide, kick-pole, glide, kick-pole, glide. A springy dip with each kick, a striving pause with the glide. Whoosh, whoosh. Now an unfamiliar burr, like the buzzing of a sweat-bee as the fish-scales chattered over the snow. But the rhythm held and I was on my way again, taking the serum to Nome.
It was a lovely feeling.
Until the first downhill path. With the wisdom of a wimp I angled my skis into a snow-plow V, guaranteed to slow the snow. Nope. The miraculously slippery synthetic, even with its fishscales, continued its headlong slide unabated. More aggressive snowplowing. Nope. Gravity prevailed, redwood trunks blurred past. I heard a silly “whoop, whoop” noise and it was me. The last refuge of a cowardly skier is the Italian brake: I sat down. My ass is not synthetic or hydrodynamic. I stopped. Don’t knock it; it works.
The new skis don’t have edges. I asked the athlete-in-bondage about it later. He shrugged and told me that good skis aren’t made to slow you down. I pointed out that tree trunks did that just fine. He only nodded in agreement. Yes, some skis still had edges; you could get them. “But they’re dog-slow compared to good skis.”
By and by I discovered a working “stop me, control me, save me” configuration: a radical knees-together pinch that angled the skis in both the short and the long axis. It wasn’t entirely comfortable as a steering or stopping method but, according to the ski-rental guy, these skis weren’t made to slow down or, presumably, turn aside. I’ll look into this.
No one would have mistaken me for a Norwegian. Knut Haukelid, the resistance leader who helped destroy the German heavy water plant in World War II, skied a hundred miles cross-country to reach his objective. One of his band was pursued for dozens of miles by German ski troops who dropped away, one after the other, as he continued to whoosh, whoosh. He outdistanced all of them but in the dark he skied over a cliff and broke his arm. Then whooshed another 40 miles to a warm room.
I'm not Knut. On her mother’s properly turned-up skis slim, fit Swan glided sedately on like her namesake, past me on my toy skis. I stood periodically immobile, leaning with my poles jammed in my armpits, puffing and wheezing until my heart rate returned to a sensible rhumba beat. Uphill climbs, when I concentrated on weighting my heels for grip and balance, were trials. At one point I realized that I’d left my nitroglycerine vial in my pants at the condo. The idea of mortality in the woods occurred to me. But even my gasping pauses were delights, offering rare interior views of fir and redwood forest in snow and total silence.
It’s not like downhill skiing. No snowboarders, no tumbling stream of adolescent hotshots, no lift-lines, no collisions or flurry wipeouts. No noise.
The following day we set out again, Swan carrying 17 week-old grandson Kent in a front-pack, his mother Jennifer skiing with us. The motion lulled Kent. I caught a glance at his face occasionally under the hood, serene and pleased, and later peacefully asleep. True, as Swan made downhill schusses shouting “Wheeee!” his face was less composed. Terrified, really. But he enjoyed the rhythm and the lilt of motion as much I did.
So Count Kamarov was foiled yet again, and Nome was delivered.
The test of any sport is whether it takes you to the right place at the right time. The cold air and the evergreen scent and the coordination of balance and beat was a tonic. Those pauses on the silent trail were worth the sweat. It was, even on fish scales, a Blue Day.
He recalls antediluvian days with more fondness than reality. He was never really in shape for real skiing, never excelled at it, and never truly enjoyed the cold. Which was sometimes bitter and painful. Moist breath made his mustache freeze, indistinguishable from simple snot. It's possible he's more adapted to it now than he was, and that the synthetic, improved skis work far better than his waxed hickory boards. Still, there are long-ago moments from individual runs, certain afternoons or mornings, that glisten like gems in memory. Perhaps now we can capture more of them. Anything that pushes us out of our deepening rut is commendable, and anything that lures us to the wilder places is a blessing.
Braxinoso
Between the puffing and gasping.
No sport commonly practiced by homo suburbia demands as much sweat and toil, but few offer such gleaming rewards.
It had been a full twenty years since I’d skied on the skinny boards. I’d kept my form (I told myself) by occasionally working out on the NordicTrak, whoosh, whoosh. For years I’d lunged along on the Trak, picturing myself taking the critical serum to afflicted Nome, pursued by the evil Count Kamarov and his Hired Thugs. Whoosh, whoosh. I always made it.
Swan and I presented ourselves at the Tahoe Nordic Track Center, near the Lake. My cherished and carefully preserved cross-country skis and boots were, alas, laid aside at my daughter’s home in Florida. I must remember to pick them up on the way to my next X-country adventure. So the rental desk asked the usual questions: weight, height, age. Normal “senior” status is over sixty-five. For cross-country “senior” is over sixty, and there are murmurs of lowering it to forty. We get a price break. I was asked whether I wished to “stride” or “skate.” This went over my tonsured head.
Apparently there are X-C Jocks who sneer at the antique notion of kick-and-glide, favoring a wide-stance, out-angled skating stroke, like roller-skating with your shoes epoxyed to twin skateboards. This requires the energy normally necessary to push the Sausalito Ferry through the water. I saw some of these showboats pass. No envy.
With only a hint of sneer the bearded athlete-in-bondage at the rental racks gave me a pair of stride skis. Itty-bitty things. About as wide as a table knife and ridiculously short. Worse, they didn’t have the proper elfin turned-up end with the signature point, that baroque mark of the true Nordic skier. These were as blunt as a toenail and curved up about half an inch.
Good news: boot technology caught up with human feet. The lovely cross-country boots issued were snug but comfy, not at all like the tight leather dungeons that made my feet feel as if they had been renditioned to Dubai.
But once attached to the sweet boots, the stride skis looked like toys. It was obvious the ski tops – the decorative lamination with the logo – had lost the real ski bottoms. But I checked: fish-scales firmly on the bottom. Theoretically, they should work. To some extent.
Cross country skiing was the holdout of the traditionalist. It was a minimalist sport for low-tech jocks. Our skis were still made from wood – hickory and ash with harder “lignostone” or even metal edges. The glide and kick of cross-country is an exaggerated Groucho walk, with alternate heel lifting, so boots were flexibly bound to boards with ancient “bear trap” spring-and-cable bindings or with three-pin clamps that fit holes in the lengthened boot toes.
We were all engrossed in wax theory, because an arcane scale of colored waxes made the skis work. Wax made the skis slippery but it also responded to pressure and “gripped” the snow for the brief moment of our “kick,” the propelling lunge down and back that set us gliding on the snow. Different wax consistencies for different temperatures, some for special snow-types. A perfect cross-country day was a Blue Day; it blissfully required only blue wax. Bitter cold called for green, bitterer cold wanted special-green. Warm spring days brought out the hated klisters, unspeakably messy goo in tubes that got on everything. We carried thermometers and tried wax combinations like “blue with a red kicker” under the heel.
I learned to ski on antique wooden skis with a strange mark: each ski was burned with the letters "BAE." I asked my Yankee friend what the letters meant. "Oh, that. It means 'Byrd Antarctic Expedition.' One of my husband's great uncles was with him. They were way too wide for anything but slogging along so we ran them through the table saw to slim them down."
"But these are artifacts, museum pieces!"
"Well, they were just lying around. No one was using them."
That was part of cross-country. It was a practical sport. Scandahoovians and Yankees understood the heart of it.
Quite early, alternates to wax appeared: plastic fish scales and mohair. The back-angled scales and fibers were mechanical methods for gripping the snow. High-tech methods didn't seem right, then.
X-C wasn’t high-tech stuff but a counter-culture sport, shunning Bogner and Bally stretch-fabric downhill fashions, preferring wool and corduroy. We wore knickers with knee-socks. No, really, we did! Some wore Andean or Tibetan knitted caps with earflaps and dangly tassels. It was a fol-der-ri-fol-der-ra crowd for sure.
So there I stood outside the lodge on high-tech, blunt toy skis, holding day-glo poles, wearing my downhill bib-front pants and a baseball cap. Would the magic work?
Whoosh. A hesitant glide. Whoosh, a dare of balance. Whoosh, a kick. Then an unsuccessful slide-back kick, then a series of productive, snow-grabbing propulsions. The rhythm fell into place: left pole-hand and right foot-kick, glide, right pole and left kick, glide, kick-pole, glide, kick-pole, glide. A springy dip with each kick, a striving pause with the glide. Whoosh, whoosh. Now an unfamiliar burr, like the buzzing of a sweat-bee as the fish-scales chattered over the snow. But the rhythm held and I was on my way again, taking the serum to Nome.
It was a lovely feeling.
Until the first downhill path. With the wisdom of a wimp I angled my skis into a snow-plow V, guaranteed to slow the snow. Nope. The miraculously slippery synthetic, even with its fishscales, continued its headlong slide unabated. More aggressive snowplowing. Nope. Gravity prevailed, redwood trunks blurred past. I heard a silly “whoop, whoop” noise and it was me. The last refuge of a cowardly skier is the Italian brake: I sat down. My ass is not synthetic or hydrodynamic. I stopped. Don’t knock it; it works.
The new skis don’t have edges. I asked the athlete-in-bondage about it later. He shrugged and told me that good skis aren’t made to slow you down. I pointed out that tree trunks did that just fine. He only nodded in agreement. Yes, some skis still had edges; you could get them. “But they’re dog-slow compared to good skis.”
By and by I discovered a working “stop me, control me, save me” configuration: a radical knees-together pinch that angled the skis in both the short and the long axis. It wasn’t entirely comfortable as a steering or stopping method but, according to the ski-rental guy, these skis weren’t made to slow down or, presumably, turn aside. I’ll look into this.
No one would have mistaken me for a Norwegian. Knut Haukelid, the resistance leader who helped destroy the German heavy water plant in World War II, skied a hundred miles cross-country to reach his objective. One of his band was pursued for dozens of miles by German ski troops who dropped away, one after the other, as he continued to whoosh, whoosh. He outdistanced all of them but in the dark he skied over a cliff and broke his arm. Then whooshed another 40 miles to a warm room.
I'm not Knut. On her mother’s properly turned-up skis slim, fit Swan glided sedately on like her namesake, past me on my toy skis. I stood periodically immobile, leaning with my poles jammed in my armpits, puffing and wheezing until my heart rate returned to a sensible rhumba beat. Uphill climbs, when I concentrated on weighting my heels for grip and balance, were trials. At one point I realized that I’d left my nitroglycerine vial in my pants at the condo. The idea of mortality in the woods occurred to me. But even my gasping pauses were delights, offering rare interior views of fir and redwood forest in snow and total silence.
It’s not like downhill skiing. No snowboarders, no tumbling stream of adolescent hotshots, no lift-lines, no collisions or flurry wipeouts. No noise.
The following day we set out again, Swan carrying 17 week-old grandson Kent in a front-pack, his mother Jennifer skiing with us. The motion lulled Kent. I caught a glance at his face occasionally under the hood, serene and pleased, and later peacefully asleep. True, as Swan made downhill schusses shouting “Wheeee!” his face was less composed. Terrified, really. But he enjoyed the rhythm and the lilt of motion as much I did.
So Count Kamarov was foiled yet again, and Nome was delivered.
The test of any sport is whether it takes you to the right place at the right time. The cold air and the evergreen scent and the coordination of balance and beat was a tonic. Those pauses on the silent trail were worth the sweat. It was, even on fish scales, a Blue Day.
He recalls antediluvian days with more fondness than reality. He was never really in shape for real skiing, never excelled at it, and never truly enjoyed the cold. Which was sometimes bitter and painful. Moist breath made his mustache freeze, indistinguishable from simple snot. It's possible he's more adapted to it now than he was, and that the synthetic, improved skis work far better than his waxed hickory boards. Still, there are long-ago moments from individual runs, certain afternoons or mornings, that glisten like gems in memory. Perhaps now we can capture more of them. Anything that pushes us out of our deepening rut is commendable, and anything that lures us to the wilder places is a blessing.
Braxinoso
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