Posted by stoweaway on 08/27/2007 7:08 pm

Saturday August 25 Feeling melancholy this evening -- although whether from missing home or the sheer challenge of this trip and the desolate beauty of Alaska I don’t know-- I put my ipod on, troop up to the foredeck and dance around in front of the webcam as arranged for seven pm with my extended family.
I don’t know if they see me, but as I’m dancing, feeling sad and trying to look happy, I notice a small fat sparrow on the deck. I kneel down and it goes still and then we both start moving together down the deck, me walking, it hopping. It hops near the open door of a room where some ropes and other gear is hanging and, worried, it might hop inside and get trapped, I make big gestures to scare it away from there. Then I run to the sick bay.
Clive, our doctor and the most fervent birder on board, rushes out in his trademark leather boots, green pants and flannel shirt and as we step back on deck we discover the wee visitor sheltering under the boat cradle that holds one of our five zodiacs. I notice yellow feathers on it’s back and think oh, maybe it’s not a sparrow but it is, Clive says, it’s called "Savannah sparrow". It doesn’t look hurt or sick and the thinks it will be just fine.
After he goes inside I decide to dance around on the heli-deck at the stern of the boat, hoping a good long session may cure my blues. There’s no-one around and I let my body sway like seaweed with the rhythmn of the boat. Soon I’m tripping around this great big empty space, dancing in the middle of the Bering Sea to Van Morrison, the Beach Boys, Jann Arden and other sweet and melancholy singers.
At one point I look up and there, above the stern, are five birds, at least two of which have a larger wing-span than any bird I’d ever seen before today. Just hours ago George and I saw one of these dark birds, it's wings curved like a subtle scythe, from the bridge, and identified it…with Clive’s help…as likely an immature short-tailed Albatross. of which there happen to be only five hundred in the world.
"Clive!" I rush to the sick bay again, pound on the door. "Clive! Albatrosses, AlbaTROSSES!" (emphasis on the plural, we both know how rare it is to see even ONE) and he comes flying out, but by the time we race back to the helideck the birds are gone.
I wonder if maybe they saw me, dancing with my arms outstretched like wings, and flew over to see what this strange bird was doing.
The gift of the Albatrosses has lifted my spirits, but sadness surges back as Green Day starts singing Time of Your Life. "Another turning point a fork stuck in the road…time grabs you by the wrist directs you where to go…" I try to keep dancing, find myself stumbling forward instead, right to the edge of the deck, grabbing the net that surrounds the heli-pad, tears welling up in my eyes. "So make the best of this test and don’t ask why…its not a question but a lesson learned in time"…All the emotion I’ve been holding back in the past ten days of this emotional journey starts to tumble out of me in salty splashes. "Its something unpredictable but in the end there’s right… I hope you had the time of your life".
It’s been a long time since I’ve cried. The Savannah Sparrow, the albatrosses, the sheer privilege of having all this space to myself, the peace and quiet and the water dancing us about at every moment floods me with awe. My mind flashes through thoughts of the life I’ve left behind, the life I’m coming back to in ten days, no job, no routine, everything familiar overturned and a space opening up for something new to grow, all this rife with possibility but the chance of failure too…"It’s something unpredictable but in the end there’s right…I hope you had the time of your life".
No question, Green Day. We're sailing to a desolate and lovely wildlife refuge blasted by three nuclear bomb tests, tests that provoked the founding of Greenpeace and its first action. And as we sail I think of the sea otters washed up dead on the shores of Amchitka Island in the late sixties and early seventies, their eardrums split by the atomic blasts, and I wonder if there are any otters left, and whether we’ll see them, feasting and frolicking in the kelp beds that are said to be so thick around Amchitka Island.
And I think of my man at home, and all the people on the boat, and the people we’ve met, and the beauty of the green mountains rising out of the rolling quilted fog, and I sink onto the top step of the staircase leading down to the main deck and cry as hard as I ever have in my whole life..
So take the photographs and still frames in your mind…for what it’s worth it was worth all the while", and I give thanks for the trip of my life. NEXT: On a different note, what about my mother (a founder of Greenpeace) who I promised, in my bio, to tell you about? What about Chuck Berry and Pink Floyd? See what my mother, Chuck Berry, Pink Floyd and Bono all have in common.

Posted by stoweaway on 08/27/2007 6:45 pm

Saturday August 25 Feeling melancholy this evening -- although whether from missing home or the sheer challenge of this trip and the desolate beauty of Alaska I don’t know-- I put my ipod on, troop up to the foredeck and dance around in front of the webcam as arranged for seven pm with my extended family.
I don’t know if they see me, but as I’m dancing, feeling sad and trying to look happy, I notice a small fat sparrow on the deck. I kneel down and it goes still and then we both start moving together down the deck, me walking, it hopping. It hops near the open door of a room where some ropes and other gear is hanging and, worried, it might hop inside and get trapped, I make big gestures to scare it away from there. Then I run to the sick bay.
Clive, our doctor and the most fervent birder on board, rushes out in his trademark leather boots, green pants and flannel shirt and as we step back on deck we discover the wee visitor sheltering under the boat cradle that holds one of our five zodiacs. I hadn't noticed the yellow feathers on it’s back before and think oh, maybe it’s not a sparrow but it is, Clive says, it’s called "Savannah sparrow". It doesn’t look hurt or sick and he thinks it will be just fine.
After he goes inside I decide to dance around on the heli-deck at the stern of the boat, hoping a long sweaty session may cure my blues. There’s no-one around and I let my body sway like seaweed with the rhythmn of the boat. Soon I’m tripping all over this great big empty space, dancing in the middle of the Bering Sea to Van Morrison, the Beach Boys, Jann Arden and other sweet and melancholy singers.
At one point I happen to look up in the sky and there, above the stern, are five birds, at least two of which have a larger wing-span than any bird I’d ever seen before today. Just hours ago George and I saw one of these dark birds, its wings curved like a subtle scythe, from the bridge, and identified it…with Clive’s help…as likely an immature short-tailed Albatross. Of which there happen to be only five hundred in the world.
"Clive!" I run back to the sick bay, pound on the door. "Clive! Albatrosses, AlbaTROSSES!" (we both know how rare it is to see even ONE) and he comes flying out, but by the time we race back to the helideck the birds are gone.
I wonder if maybe they saw me, dancing with my arms outstretched like wings, and flew over to see what this strange bird was doing.
The gift of the Albatrosses has lifted my spirits, but sadness surges back as Green Day starts singing Time of Your Life. "Another turning point a fork stuck in the road…time grabs you by the wrist directs you where to go…" I try to keep dancing, find myself stumbling forward instead, right to the edge of the deck, grabbing the net that surrounds the heli-pad, tears welling up in my eyes. "So make the best of this test and don’t ask why…its not a question but a lesson learned in time"…All the emotion I’ve been holding back in the past ten days of this emotional journey starts to tumble out of me in salty splashes. "Its something unpredictable but in the end there’s right… I hope you had the time of your life".
It’s been a long time since I’ve cried. The Savannah Sparrow, the albatrosses, the sheer privilege of having all this space to myself, the peace and quiet and the water dancing us about at every moment all overwhelms me. My mind flashes through thoughts of the life I’ve left behind, the life I’m coming back to in ten days, no job, no routine, everything familiar overturned and a space opening up for something new to grow, all this rife with possibility but the chance of failure too…"It’s something unpredictable but in the end there’s right…I hope you had the time of your life".
No question, Green Day. Here we are, sailing to a desolate and lovely wildlife refuge blasted by three nuclear bomb tests, tests that provoked the founding of Greenpeace and its first action. And as we sail I think of the sea otters washed up dead on the shores of Amchitka Island in the late sixties and early seventies, their eardrums split by the atomic blasts, and I wonder if there are any otters left, and whether we’ll see them, feasting and frolicking in the kelp beds that are said to be so thick around Amchitka Island.
And I think of my man at home, and all the people on the boat, and the people we’ve met, and the beauty of the green mountains rising out of the rolling quilted fog, and I sink onto the top step of the staircase leading down to the main deck and cry as hard as I ever have in my whole life..
So take the photographs and still frames in your mind…for what it’s worth it was worth all the while", and I give thanks for the trip of my life.
NEXT: On a different note, what about my mother (a founder of Greenpeace) who I promised, in my bio, to tell you about? What about Chuck Berry and Pink Floyd? Soon you'll hear what these seemingly disparate elements all have in common.

Posted by kieran_mulvaney on 08/27/2007 5:46 pm

So this is what the edge of the world feels like.

Adak is the most westerly town in the United States. It is 1,300 miles southwest of Anchorage and 350 miles west of Dutch Harbor, the final redoubt before the Aleutians devolve into a broken necklace of isolated volcanic pearls.

And it is empty. Or so, at least, it seems.

According to the State of Alaska, there are just 146 people living here, and even that seems generous. A little over ten years ago, Adak was bustling, home to at least 6,000 US Navy personnel and civilian contractors, and boasting an infrastructure that would have been the envy of any small town, let alone one nestled in a harbor overlooked by mountains covered in lush maritime tundra and surrounded by the hostile Bering Sea.

There was a movie theater, a roller skating rink, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a ski lodge, a bowling alley. There were racquetball and tennis courts. There was a skeet range. And, of course, there was a McDonald’s.

All of this was a consequence of World War II and the Japanese invasion of Attu and Kiska, the most westerly of the Aleutians. Adak, like Amchitka to its west, became a military stronghold from which the campaign to recover the two islands could be launched; unlike on Amchitka, when the war ended, the military personnel stayed, and Adak became a Cold War submarine surveillance center that marked the American military’s western outlier.

But on March 31, 1997, the base closed. When it was open, Adak must have been an incongruous site, a slice of Americana in the Aleutians; now it is closed, it feels, frankly, unsettling.

In a way, it is because the incongruity remains. The housing that was built was entirely in the style of any suburban subdivision: identical cookie-cutter houses, painted in bright, cheery shades of (as best as my colorblind eyes can tell) blues and yellows and, oh I don’t know, let’s say reds, each with its own driveway, garage, and patch of front lawn.

Now they are empty, street upon street of them, as if the island’s entire human population had just packed up, locked the doors, and left in the space of five minutes. The houses look in pretty good shape for having been left empty for a decade; here and there, a garage window is cracked or smashed or a door buckled, but by and large the houses look almost ready for new residents. But the yards are overgrown, the foliage overwhelming the swing sets, the basketball hoops rusting and fading, mosses taking over the sidewalks.

And so it is with much of the rest of the town. The shopping mall: abandoned. The McDonald’s: abandoned. The skating rink, the swimming pool, the movie theater: all empty, awaiting customers that are no longer around.

But then you turn a corner and, suddenly, one particular cul-de-sac of houses, otherwise identical to the others, boasts pickup trucks in the driveways and recently-mown front yards dotted here and there with daisies. A young child waves hello and his father looks up from washing his car and nods in greeting as if it were the most normal thing in the world to see a stranger walking through his otherwise seemingly deserted town.

For Adak, initial appearances notwithstanding, is not deserted. Indeed, there is a serious effort underway to maintain and rebuild the community. There is expected to be at least a temporary influx of people—perhaps, according to rumors, as many as 400—and an associated boost to the economy with the arrival of a cleanup crew next year, equipped with a mandate to do address the ordnance and other remnants of the military’s rapid departure. (There are signs across the island, for example, prohibiting the digging of holes more than two feet deep; and the high school displays cheery cartoon posters warning children not to touch unexploded bombs). There is fishing here, too, with Pacific cod particularly important, and a processing plant on shore. Times here are tough, but in the western Aleutians, so far at least, the situation is far less grim than in some of the communities farther east. Even so, there is an acute awareness of the importance of protecting the marine ecosystem, and there was an attentive and involved gathering at a community meeting in which George explained the concept of Cultural Marine Heritage Zones.

It also doesn’t hurt the local economy when the occasional Greenpeace ship comes into port, either. For a lot of the folks on board, it’s been a long expedition that is nearing its end, and while your faithful correspondent remained on board, there was no shortage of crew making friends and letting their hair down at the local bar. During the stagger home, suddenly Adak didn’t seem like such a bad place to be.

But now we have left and are heading west. The sea is flat calm, and the Esperanza just steamed slowly through the narrow and stunningly beautiful Kagalaska Strait. We put the African Queen, one of our rigid-hulled inflatables, in the water to film our passage through the verdant green volcanic hills, and as we made our way, a minke whale appeared off the bow, swam lazily past us, and then surfaced just feet away from the inflatable, diving slowly beneath and turning sideways to watch the strange visitors as it disappeared beneath the waves.