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August 10th, 2009 - Pearce Point Harbor, Amundsen Gulf
by Herb McCormick
(August 10): Among the books in the vast library aboard Ocean Watch is a copy of Jon Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams, a collection of stories about mountain climbing that he wrote before the fabulous success of his next two efforts, Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. One of the chapters in Eiger Dreams is entitled “On Being Tentbound” – it’s a quite humorous essay ruminating on the sometimes tender psyche’s of adventurers, and what can happen to the vulnerable mindsets of adrenaline junkies when, due to weather, their expeditions come to a forced halt.
Krakauer writes, “If you’re ever seduced by the wilder and more dramatic charms of some remote, glaciated, major league range, you risk finding yourself incarcerated in a tent, a hostage of the elements, for days and perhaps weeks at a time.”
Aboard Ocean Watch today, the prevailing sentiment is: We can totally relate.
For the second straight day, our anchorage off the mainland of Canada’s Northwest Territories is being raked with northeasterly winds of 25-28 knots, which have sent wind-chill temperatures plunging into the single digits (Fahrenheit!). To the east, the “ice plug” in Amundsen Gulf is shrinking, but what still remains is blocking our way into Coronation Gulf and our next port-of-call at Cambridge Bay. (Just for clarification, Ocean Watch is by no means currently stuck in ice – Pearce Point Harbor is cold, but clear and ice-free.) However, between the blockade ahead of us, and the miserable weather that has stalled on top of us, there is nothing to be gained by forging ahead. For the time being, then, we’re as “tentbound” as a crew of sailors could be.
All things considered, of course, Ocean Watch is an exceedingly fine place to wait out the weather. We actually have moved twice in the last 48 hours, but just a mile or so, to less rolling, wavy, windswept corners of the harbor. And from our comfortable, enclosed cockpit, we had no worries about the big brown bear we saw ambling down the beach invading the thin walls of a tent.
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| Byran Reeves and Zeta Strickland have complelety catalogued the on-board library. |
There have been other highlights. We’ve watched an exceptional 40-year-old documentary on seal hunters on our flat-screen TV. Our junior crewmembers, Bryan Reeves and Zeta Strickland, have completely catalogued our on-board library. Just this morning, in the galley, veteran Arctic hand David Thoreson said, “You know you’re waiting on the ice when the flour comes out,” and an hour later, Zeta was setting a fresh, hot coffee cake on the saloon table. So when Thoreson popped his head outside, and a few moments later reported, “It just started sleeting,” we just yawned and flipped the pages of our books.
But, that yawning thing: This morning, Dave Logan asked me what I’d learned today, and when I blinked and shrugged, he said, “I’ve learned I can only sleep 12 hours a day. When I was younger, I was good for fourteen.”
Krakauer warns of the danger: “There can…be too much of a good thing. Even those with a gift for sloth must finally arrive at the point where sleeping further becomes impossible.” I was just about to read this passage to Logan, but he’s disappeared to his cabin for a nap.
So for now, ice isn’t the danger. Boredom is. And boredom, notes, Krakauer, “presents a very real, if insidious, peril. To quote Blaine Harden from the Washington Post, ‘Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid, and brooding. Examples abound… Rats kept in comfortable isolation quickly become jumpy, irritable, and aggressive. Their bodies twitch, their tails grow scaly.’ The backcountry traveler (or sailor!), then, in addition to developing such skills as the use of map and compass, or the prevention and treatment of blister, must prepare mentally and materially to cope with boredom, lest his tail grow scaly.”
I am happy to report that, thus far, both Logan’s and Thoreson’s respective tails appear scale-free.
Books, again, provide a happy escape, for as Krakauer points out, “books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.” He suggests the classics: “Ponderous tomes that you thought you should read but never quite managed.” In that regard, I’m happy to report I’ve just flipped page 451 of Moby-Dick: only a hundred more to go.
But even books can be hazardous. “As you sink into a morass of self-pity,” says Krakauer, “it might help you get a grip on yourself to read about the horrors endured by such early polar explorers as Nansen, Shackleton, and Scott. Your own difficulties will be put in perspective by accounts of expeditions that lasted three years, cold that actually shattered teeth, blizzards that raged at hurricane force for six weeks without letup, scurvy, starvation, and sea-leopard attack.”
Of course, such tales of derring-do can have an opposite effect, as well. As noted in this space earlier, skipper Mark Schrader blazed through his copy of Resolute, the story of Sir John Franklin’s tragic and deadly expedition in the mid-1800s, but the day after he finished, he moped into the main saloon looking haggard and forlorn, and said, “That Franklin book? I’m not sure reading that was such a good idea.”
And then, of course, there are the personalities involved in any expedition. Notes Krakauer: “Social creatures that
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| Dave Logan entertaining himself. |
we are, it is primarily to our tentmates (or crewmates) that we turn for relief from the dullness of the socked-in camp. It is impossible to use too much care in selecting your companions.” Though we’re lucky to all enjoy one another’s company on Ocean Watch, Logan makes a strong point when he says to the skipper, “You had a pretty small pool to select from.”
Finally, of course, there are dangers here, too. “Even more important than an ability to entertain is a personality that doesn’t annoy. Your buddy may do a great Frank Zappa rendition, but how is that Zappa going to move you after hearing it with infrequent letup for ninety-six hours?”
This one hit home. Before leaving Seattle, I purchased the boxed set of a TV show called The Wire, a gritty crime drama about urban drug dealers set in the mean streets of Baltimore. Now that we’re temporarily stopped, I’m halfway through Season 3, and have regaled my crewmates with impersonations of some of the rap artists and other assorted characters that make The Wire such a brilliant series. For a while, these taut portrayals elicited hearty laughs, but after a few days, for some reason I found my mates considerably less amused.
Have I become completely annoying? I suspect the truth can be gleaned from The Wire’s lethal, streetwise Omar, who might summarize the situation with his usual, pithy insight:
“True d’at, dog. You feelin’ me?”
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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