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| Captain Knut Maurer. |
My father also went to sea as a young man, making a round trip from Norway to the USA and back on the school ship Christian Radich. The first movie I ever saw as a child was Windjammer, filmed on and around that ship.
All my own childhood transatlantic travels were by sea. When I'm not on the open ocean, I'm often dreaming about the next time it might happen. In the meantime, I love a well-told story about the adventures of others. And those stories don't get better than this ... Close to the Surface: A Family Journey at Sea, by Bethany Lee.
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| Source. |
December 2012. Bethany Lee gets a phone call from her husband Bryan at work:
"They want to renew my contract for eighteen months. If I sign, we'll be stuck here until Hannah's in high school. I may have just told my boss we're leaving this summer. Are we really ready to do this?"
What, exactly, was "this"? As departure day drew near, one friend asked Bethany what seemed like a very reasonable question: "What's your itinerary?"
"South," I said.
"That's not an itinerary," she said. 'That's just a direction!"
I explained that we didn't know how fast we'd end up traveling or how long our savings would last. We had no idea which ports we'd stop at or where we'd want to spend extra time exploring.
"Schedules kill sailors," I said, echoing wise advice we'd been given from more experienced mariners. "If we set a firm itinerary, we'll risk making bad decisions to follow it. We can't just go out in any weather. We have to adjust to conditions as they arise."
She shook her head. "I couldn't handle leaving without a plan."
"We're not unprepared," I said. We have charts stashed in the V-berth for the coastline from here to Panama, although we don't think we'll make it that far. And we're not sure what the return journey will look like.... Whatever we end up doing, we'll have to figure it out on the way."
These words are a wonderful preview of the riveting paradox that drives this book: careful planning, training, and stockpiling on the one hand, but also a readiness to shift to whatever the wind and waves and tides and underwater reefs require in the moment, sometimes with zero warning. Above all, what is required is constant alertness. Especially in the fog, especially in the busy shipping lanes, especially....
Bethany Lee's superb writing conveys this intensity. She knows just when to include log-worthy details and the specific features of their boat and the demands of weather and navigation, when to give us glimpses of family life in the confines of 150 square feet, and when to acknowledge inner moments of joy, crashing doubt, and sudden crisis. Among the most fascinating dimensions of their ten months at sea are the friendships the family developed with other sailors and with the people living in many of the communities they visited. Just as Judy and I found in Russia, there were angels among the people they encountered in those communities—in the USA and in Mexico. The map of their voyage turns out to be a trail of mutual goodwill.
I've known Bethany Lee for several years as a musician and a fellow Quaker minister. I've also been aware of her and her family as sailors, having followed her blog at the time of the voyage. What I'd like to say after reading her new book, Close to the Surface: A Family Journey at Sea, is that I now also know her as a master chronicler with a sure pen and an irresistible command of pacing. I hope you will get this book and enter the new spaces she opens for us, and be encouraged to dream courageously.
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| LiLo. (Source: Bethany Lee.) |
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| The sailors. (Source: Bethany Lee.) |
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| The voyage. (Source: Close to the Surface, pages 6-7. The book also includes helpful diagrams of the boat and a glossary of nautical terms. A reader's guide for the book is available here.) |
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| Visitor. (Source.) |
Sloop number two: Restauration (the Norwegian Mayflower) and the recreation of a historic voyage.
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| Map basis: Gunleif Seldal. Illustration: Jens Flesjå. (Source.) |
A 54-foot sloop (a bit larger than the LiLo, and with 52 souls on board) left Stavanger, Norway, on July 4, 1825, bound for New York. Many of the passengers were Quakers, and this little ship, the Restauration (Restoration) carried the beginning of the Quaker migration from Norway to the USA. In fact, it started an enormous stream of Norwegian immigration to the United States over the next decades, a stream that eventually included me.
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| My first passport. |
There's a lot of good background material on this 200th-anniversary event at restauration.no. Norwegian Quakers are very involved in this inspiring project. (Stavanger Friends met for worship aboard the ship on this past Pentecost.) I have no idea at the moment whether I will be able to witness either the departure or arrival of the new Restauration, but I can dream ... and mark my calendar!
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| Source. |
Henry J. Cadbury on the Norwegian Quakers of 1825.
Another recreated voyage I was following in the early years of this blog: In 2006, the Tangaroa followed the course of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki.
As long as we're considering the oceans, is the Atlantic Overturning Circulation approaching a tipping point? (Recommended by Katharine Hayhoe.)
For the AMOC [Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation] and other climate tipping points, the only action we can take to minimize the risk is to phase out fossil fuel use and stop deforestation as fast as possible. If we can reach zero emissions, further global warming will stop within years, and the sooner this happens the smaller the risk of passing devastating tipping points. It would also minimize many other losses, damages, and human suffering from “regular” global warming impacts (e.g., heatwaves, floods, droughts, harvest failures, wildfires, sea level rise), which are already happening all around us even without the passing of major climate tipping points.
Water, John Milton, and the life cycles of gardens: "Olivia Laing on the Care and Keeping of Gardens In an Era of Climate Emergency."
Eszter Kováts considers the cost of turning a blind eye and letting polarized categories do our thinking for us.
A Conversation with Joel Jackson of Kake, Alaska, and through him, with his community. (An interview by Judy Maurer in the Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends newsletter.)
Santa Claus or Grace: John Kinney speaks to Spokane Friends Meeting.
Bonnie Raitt receives Kennedy Center honors this year. Congratulations to a wonderful singer and guitarist! I used some of her songs in our classes in Elektrostal; for example, this song, with its gap-fill version on our Institute chalkboard, and (below) possibly one of the cheesiest videos ever.
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| We used exercises like these as a part of our listening comprehension lessons. |
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