Drink like a sailor
After seeing Amchitka, one really wants to drink like a sailor. A bottle of rum would come in handy around now. But no. On this ship, we drink only wine and a brand of beer from Korea which promises "Fresh Taste Brewing System". If this is fresh, we would hate to see stale.
The Korean beverage is a brand called "Hite". We only need to add the 19th letter of the alphabet before "Hite" to title it even more appropriately. No doubt this extraordinary drink was scientifically concocted to function for drinkers just as the nicotine patch functions for smokers.
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About Me
stoweaway
USA
Hi, I'm Barbara, aka "Stoweaway", because my last name is Stowe and you get the rest. My last name wasn't always Stowe though. My father changed it from "Strasmich" (our ancestry is Russian) when I was five. I remember coming home from pre-school and hearing: "I've changed our family name" and me spittting back, "How dare you!" My father did a lot of things that pissed me off. In 1971, when our house was the (only) Greenpeace office in the world, and our home number was the only number, and I was fourteen years old, he tried to get me to go on Greenpeace's first boat, the Phyllis Cormack, which was sailing to Amchitka Island. That's because he couldn't. His eardrums were wrecked flying a tiny plane with the Civil Air Patrol in World War II, looking for German subs, and being on a boat made him violently ill. As getting a ship to Amchitka was his raison d'etre in life in '71 (our spiritual guru and alround wiseman, Bob Hunter, was grumbling "How can we go without our leader?) he was determined that one Stowe would get onboard. Family honour was as stake. "You should get on that boat," he'd mutter. "It's going to make history." Yeah, right. Like I'd jump on an eighty-foot fishing boat with eleven men and sail up to Alaska to try to stop a nuclear bomb test. Not. Furthermore, the captain wouldn't even let a female on board. He said they were bad luck. (Yeah, we've come a long way, and we're not babies). But a part of me that wasn't full of fear ached to try. After all, I'd been selling Greenpeace buttons, making Greenpeace T-shirts, and passing petitions around in school for a year trying to raise money for the voyage. The word "Amchitka" had a hell of a lot of resonance for me. So when Captain Pete and the Espy crew came to dinner at our house a few months ago and he said "We're going to Amchitka", I knew I had to go. For family honour. For my Greenpeace aunts and uncles, Bob and Zoe Hunter and the Bohlens and Bill Darnell and all the other sages who taught me so much and who never got to Amchitka, because neither the Phyllis Cormack nor the other boat we ended up sending ever made it. I'm a ghost from Greenpeace past, the first of that original wave who will finally sail into the Amchitka harbour on a Greenpeace boat. But I also represent Greenpeace present, the generation my father and the others were fighting for, who didn't want their children to grow up in a nuclear world. And now at age fifty I feel like a Greenpeace aunt to all the amazing new generations of Greenpeace who are changing the world. And for that I have my father, who had the confidence in me to believe I could get on that boat, to thank. Not to mention my mother...but you'll hear about her, and a lot of other people, in my blog.
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