One of my favorite passages of Pam’s writing is the “The Dinghy Under the Bed.” Unlike her letters which were sometimes hastily written on a rocking boat, this was a polished piece, probably intended for publication. It is now included in Part 2: Between the Boats.
After listing the sailing paraphernalia stored in their South Dakota guest room closet Pam describes the inflatable dinghy that lives under the bed and is their most important purchase next to the “mother ship.”
My startled guests tell me it looks like the pale, flabby remains of some unidentifiable monster.
Although many readers feel that Pam reluctantly went along with Kent’s dream of returning to a life at sea, this passage expresses her longing, too. She was writing on a cold rainy day in October, not so different from early March, when winter seems to drag on forever, and we long to cast off on a new adventure as spring approaches.
After the mother ship herself, the dinghy, a lovely new roll-up, is our largest purchase and represents much more than a dollar value. Our future home, a 31-foot steel sloop pulled ignominiously out of the water in Duluth, Minnesota, is wrapped now in her winter cover. It would be a long seven-hour drive through uncertain midwestern weather to assure ourselves that our dream has some substance. But the dinghy is here, living quietly like a friendly, elderly dog beneath the bed. I sometimes think I can hear it sigh a little wistfully, just as I do, for the time we’ll both be at sea.
* * *
It’s a long and frustrating process to move from a landlocked South Dakota job and home to the sea. It’s also a lonely process, for none of our friends share or even understand our dream. But the dinghy, peacefully resting beneath the bed, silently encourages us to keep dreaming.
The goat has gone back to its original owner. As was evident to our neighbor and all the neighbors, the fencing around his property was inadequate. I admired his independent streak and was charmed by his fixation on our front door. Goodbye, goat! I hope you will find a more suitable new home. Anybody want a goat?
Our friend Jim decided his health wasn’t up to heading across the Pacific in a sailboat one more time. He was right, and shortly afterward ended up hospitalized in intensive care.
If you’d like to support Jim, look for three books: Windswept by his late wife Ginny Sollars, A Bachelor’s Paradise, and the Yamamoto Affair. The first is an account of the family’s years sailing the Pacific; the second is about Jim’s adventures in the Pacific as a bachelor; and the third is a gripping novel of suspense and intrigue inspired by his own diving experiences and the historical World War II Japanese admiral, Yamamoto.
As far as we know, the boat is still in San Carlos and for sale. Anybody want a boat?
The Book
I keep adjusting the ads on Amazon, and the book continues to sell an average of 20 books a month, not (yet) more than the cost of the ads. We’d like more readers to discover the book. It’s gotten more ratings on Good Reads and Amazon, but we haven’t had a new review in several months. Hint, hint! You don’t have to be a great writer; just share your honest reaction. Even star ratings help, but a few words are much more meaningful to us and readers trying to decide whether to read or buy the book.
The three copies at the Albuquerque Public Library continue to circulate.
Events
If you’re within hailing distance of Albuquerque, Kent will read at Books on the Bosque this coming Saturday, October 5. We hope to see some of you there. Books on the Bosque is a lovely, relatively new independent bookstore with many activities worth checking out.
Kent will also speak at the Tony Hillerman Branch of the Albuquerque Public Library on Saturday, October 26, at 1 pm., a shorter version of his illustrated January presentation at Oasis.
Book Awards
We Ran Away to Sea is a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award finalist. Winners will be announced sometime in October. We’ve also submitted the book for a few other awards
The most unusual is The Wishing Shelf. Based in England, the award is chosen by reading groups in London and Stockholm, Sweden. Unlike most awards, where you send in your application fee and wait for award announcements, this one asks for a book description before allowing you to submit a book for consideration. The invitation from the award administrator felt like a mini award.
He wrote: “Thanks very much for contacting us. I had a look at your book on Amazon, and I thought it looked very interesting. I very much liked the look of the cover and the blurb, and the Look Inside seems to flow well. I see you also have a number of reviews, which I read with interest. So, yes,please send me a PDF of the book plus a JPEG or PDF of the covers.”
Other Stuff
Since I didn’t get a newsletter out in August, I’m doing a lot of catching up here.
Kent and I are editing stories we left out of WeRan Away to Sea, but work is going slowly because …
I’m finally working on my book, working title “Once a Pilgrim,” about the first half and maybe the second half of my first Camino.
Picture of Vézelay Courtesy of luctheo on Pixabay
We’re planning travels after being home all summer: next week to San Francisco to see family, and on October 28 to France, where we intend to walk the less traveled Voie de Vézelay, which begins at the Basilica of Mary Magdalene in Vézelay and eventually meets the Camino Frances in St. Jean Pied-de-Port at the Spanish border. We won’t manage more than one-third of the 900 kilometers in just over three weeks of walking. Weather will be unpredictable but probably not hot, and many pilgrim lodgings will have closed for the season. I’ll try to post on my blog, Caminobleu.com, or at least on Facebook because writing blogs on a cell phone after a day of walking is not easy. And there may be days with no internet.
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While we were in Indonesia in May, I saw a notice on my phone for a 36-foot sailboat for sale in Albuquerque for the ridiculously low asking price of $10,000. “Very odd to find an ocean-going sailboat in Albuquerque,” I thought, and out of curiosity, after we returned home, I wrote a note to the seller asking for more information. She told me that she had recently inherited the boat from her grandfather but not his sailing genes to go with it and wanted to sell it. It was an old boat built in Taiwan in 1977 and stored in San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico. She could tell me almost nothing about the boat and said to contact a fellow in San Carlos for more information. I did not know about his connection to the boat, but I wrote asking for more details. I got very little information in response, so I turned to Google and found an old for-sale notice for the boat. It had a few pictures and a partial equipment list. It had at one time been outfitted for blue-water cruising.
I began thinking I could afford it. Wouldn’t having a boat down on the Sea of Cortez, a body of water I had long dreamed of cruising, be fun? I imagined Linnea and I could make quick trips down to San Carlos, then gunk-hole up and down Baja and the mainland. We should not have to upgrade expensive equipment if we didn’t plan on extensive voyaging. So, we made a quick trip to San Carlos to take a look.
We spent a night on the way with our friend Jim in Green Valley, Arizona. Jim had a boat built in Taiwan in 1977 and sailed the Pacific for years before returning to Los Angeles and selling the boat. Then, about the time Pam, the boys, and I sailed through the Atlantic and the Caribbean, he took his wife and family on another voyage through the Pacific.
Jim and I grew up in Sheridan, Wyoming. His older brother was my high school classmate. Jim was interested in the boat, and because he was familiar with boats of that vintage built in Taiwan, I invited him to join us. He would know more about what we were looking at than I would. However, he declined because a back issue limited his walking.
After arriving in San Carlos, I investigated the cost of storing the boat and decided it was more than I wanted to pay. The whole trip had been a fool’s errand; nevertheless, I wanted to see the boat. It seemed to be in good shape for a vessel its age and would be a bargain for a younger person willing to put in a lot of labor (and some money) to bring it up to cruising condition.
On our return trip to Albuquerque, we spent the night with Jim again, and I filled him in on what I had found. Jim had just finished filling quart bottles of his homemade rum when we arrived late afternoon. We had a pizza for dinner and sampled his rum before and after.
“Two old men and a boat would make a good story!” Linnea said, going to bed and leaving us to our boat talk. We drank another glass of rum and imagined two old men getting an old boat and fixing it up. They wouldn’t just for gunk-hole around the sea of Cortez. Oh, no! They’d spend a year or two or three sailing the Pacific. My, that was good rum.
Our talk ignited a dream I thought I had put to rest 25 years ago when Pam and I left our boat for the last time. Our talk of the boat, or perhaps it was the rum, ignited something in Jim, as well, because, after a third glass, we were no longer imaging what a good story it would make; we were talking about how we should proceed to check out the boat more thoroughly and what it would take to prepare it for voyaging in the Pacific.
Hearing about our ideas in the morning, Linnea still thought “Two Old Men and a Boat” would make a great story. Maybe Jim and I could make it happen.
Back home in Albuquerque, all I could think about was the boat and the opportunity, even at my age, to fulfill my long-held dream of sailing the Pacific. I planned to return to the boat for a thorough inspection with my new partner, Jim, who had some medical appointments and a trip planned that would postpone our trip to Mexico for a month and a half.
Yesterday morning, after a couple of weeks of not hearing from Jim, he called to tell me he could not proceed. The medical report on his back was discouraging, and while vacationing with his family, he realized he could no longer keep up.
I should not have been surprised that Jim was not up to it. Nevertheless, I was so gripped by the idea that I couldn’t drop it. Who else did I know who might be footloose and crazy enough to join me sailing the Pacific? Maybe my childhood friend, Dick, a passably healthy, active widower, might be tempted?
“Hi, Dick! Do you want to sail the Pacific with me in an old boat?” I ran out of minutes on my phone as I talked, but I could tell he was excited about getting out and doing something adventuresome. However, he’d never sailed, never had a dream of sailing, and this would probably not be an adventure he would have chosen. Nevertheless, after talking on the phone, I wrote a long e-mail laying out everything I thought would be involved and spelled out my dream.
Where was Linnea in all of this? I knew she would not, and I did not expect her to give up her active and engaged life in Albuquerque to live on a boat for a year or two. I imagined she would fly to places we visited, and we could tour them together. She might accompany us on some of the shorter passages from island to island. We’ve talked about visiting Australia together for years; that is where we’d wait out the typhoon season for several months.
I had not thought about the burden I would be dumping on her—the constant maintenance and repairs our property requires. Nor was I thinking about how my traipsing off to sail the Pacific without her would seem to her. Did I not care for her? Or for the life that we had made together? She knew that my earlier sailing dream had formed when I was anxious to escape the life I was living. Was I doing the same thing again? This morning, as we talked, I realized that I didn’t want to escape anything. I love the life I have now.
So, I wrote Dick to apologize for even bringing up my crazy idea with him—I knew this was not his thing. I was acting on the rebound from losing Jim’s partnership. I wrote to the boat owner and told her I was no longer interested in buying. As Linnea says, I don’t have to sail the Pacific to tell a story about two old men and an old boat. I could make up a good story. Maybe I will.
Below: Kent at home and scenes from San Carlos.
Postscript: I was about to post this when I got a call that there was a goat at our front door! I opened the door, and this is what I saw:
Goat at the door.
Kent says, “Dear, I said I want a BOAT, not a GOAT!
Rio Grande from Central Avenue Bridge, Albuquerque
If you have read We Ran Away to Sea, you know that Pam and Kent ran away partly because they were concerned about the environmental impact of America’s consumer-driven lifestyle.
Elder Activist Readers (EAR)
More recently, Kent and I have participated in book discussions in a small group we call EAR (Elder Activist Readers), spearheaded by Esther Jantzen, the author of the children’s novel Walk: Jamie Bacon’s Secret Mission on the Camino de Santiago. Esther, like me, was inspired by her experiences as a pilgrim. Over the past three years, our little reading group has read eighteen books and become more knowledgeable about the environmental threats to our planet. We’ve also studied the history of our current crisis and have taken small steps to support people and organizations working on solutions.
Geoff Boerne
Pam and Kent encountered Geoff Boerne’s Lo Entropy in Mexico in the 1990s. Sailed by two young Brits, Ian and Alan, the ship seemed to be in dire straits the last time Pam and Kent saw her. Kent concluded his Lo Entropy story, “I would like to think Alan made a go of his venture in the end, but it certainly looked like Lo Entropy had run out of energy.”
So, what did happen to her? I discovered a film on YouTube, The Cuba Connection by Claudio von Planta, telling the story of the ship before Pam and Kent met her. Lo Entropy was constructed mainly of recycled materials, although most of the steel had to be purchased new. Her first mission was a partly successful attempt to deliver donated supplies to Cuba, where people were suffering from the impact of the United States boycotts.
I discovered a website authored by Geoff Boerne, the majority shareholder and Managing Director of Celtic Cruises Ltd., whose only asset is Lo Entropy. Geoff and another unpaid director, Nick Rodgers, are endeavoring to keep Lo Entropy afloat as a wind and hydrogen-powered transport vessel.
According to the Transport Environment website, shipping produces at least three percent of the transport industry’s carbon. Googling “sailing and hydrogen” reveals numerous websites and articles about recent efforts to create “zero energy” shipping. In 2022, Geoff Boerne published “A Milestone for Sail Cargo Pilot Project: Goal and Hydrogen Concept.” Cruise and transport companies such as Norway’s Hurtigruten (which plans to launch an energy-efficient cruise ship by 2030) are looking into zero-energy transport. A return to sailing ships, assisted by green technology, is a promising alternative to diesel fuels. Maybe in the future, we will all, like Greta Thunberg, be crossing the oceans under wind power.
Geoff wrote to me, “Lo Entropy’s sails are currently assisted by an electric motor that doubles as a powerful generator when the propeller is free-spinning or driven by the diesel engine. We hope to replace the diesel engine with a hydrogen-fueled (ICE) internal combustion engine. Times are changing. Toyota has now produced a hydrogen combustion engine, so we are considering eliminating the expensive fuel cell and using hydrogen to fuel a hydrogen combustion engine.”
A hydrogen system combined with wind and solar will produce energy for a two-hour capacity battery bank that will convert the excess energy to hydrogen and store it for propulsion when needed. Geoff is seeking investors to help refit the vessel. He now lives in Denmark and can be contacted through his website https://www.greenseatransport.com/ or his email address, Loentropy@gmail.com)
Lo Entropy, 2024
Peter Roberts
Peter met with EAR on February 29, 2024, to tell us about his work and its place in the future of green building. Peter has two web pages, and some wonderful videos have been made about his work. He recently completed his model masonry house, which is now available to rent through VRBO and Airbnb. Peter also holds several patents.
Peter Roberts’ house in Alfred, New York
He gave a fascinating overview of what he sees as problems and possible solutions to the considerable amount of carbon produced by the construction industry. He told us that cement is one of the most commonly used materials on earth. Second only to water. The construction industry, which amounts to about four trillion dollars worldwide, is conservative and slow to change. However, there are new ways of making cement, using materials other than the traditional limestone and clay that are mined, ground to a fine powder, and then heated at very high temperatures. Peter explained many of the new techniques, including using volcanic material as the ancient Romans did to make constructions that are still standing after two thousand years. I confess that until I listened to Peter, I didn’t know that cement and concrete were two different things, even though we often use them interchangeably in everyday language. Cement is the binding ingredient that is essential in making concrete. There is much information available on all of this. A good starting place might be:
Learning about the work of Geoff Boerne and Peter Roberts gives me hope for a more sustainable future for our planet. Please contact either of them if you would like more information or are interested in helping with their endeavors. Perhaps one day we’ll have zero carbon emission and create concrete boats propelled by wind and hydrogen?
18) Thomas Hübl, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World, pub 2023 (read Feb-Mar 2024)
17) Deb Chachra: How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World, pub 2023 (read Jan 2024)
16) Edward Struzik, Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat, pub 2021 (read Oct 2023)
15) Joy Harjo, Poet Warrior: A Memoir(poet laureate) read ???
14) Sarah Augustine, The Land Is Not Empty, pub 2021 (read Jun 2023)
13) Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse, pub 2022 (read Mar 2023)
12) E.F. Schumaker, Small Is Beautiful, pub 1973 (read Dec 2022)
11) Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, pub 2021 (read Oct 22)
10) Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were, pub 2021 (read Aug 2022)
9) Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass,pub 2013 (June 2022)
8) Kristen Olsen, The Soil Will Save Us, pub 2014 (read Apr/May 2022)
7) Paul Hawken, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation,pub 2021 (read Feb/Mar 2022)
6) Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible, pub 2020—a novel (read Jan 2022)
5) asknature.org website —created by Janine Benyus, Biomimicry Institute (studied Oct 2021)
4) Kate Haworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, pub 2017 (read Jul/Aug 2021)
3) Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, pub 2016 (read June 2021)
2) Shalanda H. Baker’s Revolutionary Power: An Activist’s Guide to the Energy Transition,pub 2021 (read Mar-Apr 2021)
1) Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K Wilkerson (eds), All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, pub 2020 (read Jan 2021)
Also, we’ve reviewed some articles and digital resources, including:
Jeremy Lent—Patterns of Meaning (Mar 2022) blog piece on climate change and capitalism NMHealthySoil.org New York Times article on chicken Kiss the Ground (video)
Jacana Press 