Drink like a sailor

Posted by: stoweaway | 01 Sep 07 | Leave a comment

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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.
There is also something called "wine", but that is even a sadder tale. The really frightening aspect of all this is when admittedly, after consuming a liberal portion of dark chocolate, which seems to alter taste buds considerably…the Sh…I mean, the Hite, starts to taste not so bad. We may drink like Espy sailors, but we hope to soon drink like landlubbers.
There are other peculiarities on this boat. Why are there only butter knives in the mess? Is it dangerous to have a little serrated knife for cutting your apple, because if the sea takes a sudden notion to mess your boat around on the ocean, you might slice your neighbour’s eye out? Or is it because ALMOST everyone here has massive muscles and cutting slices of cheese for a snack or chicken for dinner is not exactly a problem for THEM? Why are everything from the mirrors in the cabins to the giant can of peanut butter in the mess placed at a height that, for those not over 5’4", necessitates toe-dancing? (Note to balletic niece Rachel: it will come in handy). Why are there only large plates, no small ones? Why does the toaster toast on one side only? What does the cryptic instruction in the mess to "clean the elephant skin on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays" mean? Why would a Greenpeace boat be carrying elephant skin? What does the scrawled note "Might as well jump" on the board the morning after the zombie party in the bar in Adak mean?
Despite these unanswered questions, newbies soon fit in around here. They swab decks, come to understand what bulkheads and bullards are. One day they realize they haven’t sat in a chair for days, only on the benches in the mess and (sprawled across) the cushioned benches in the lounge. They walk like Charlie Chaplin. As for swearing, some may never catch up with whoever has written on the Campaign Room blackboard: "Individually we are one small drop…Together, One Big F…ing Drop" (there was no "…" but my mother-in-law might be reading this). They smoke like sailors, i.e., whenever they want to enjoy the fresh air. And they miss the land when they’re at sea, and the sea when they’re on land.

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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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