Even Further South in the Tasman Sea, New Zealand 13 Dec 2010 39.6933S 173.0504E
Happy Monday Morning, it’s almost 5 a.m. here, the sky has been working on a subtle predawn glow for the past half hour. You all are waking up to a nice Sunday morning, reading yesterday’s news, and sipping on some hot Java. Maybe setting aside coupons for Christmas shopping later today? I admit, I miss Sunday mornings, there’s nothing quite like them in our new life. But since it’s Monday morning here, I’m not missing much.
I did miss sending a Thanksgiving greeting, and I wanted to share some holiday thoughts my dogwatch has been dogging me with. Marc sent me a book called “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. The author, Mark Ridley, has his bias on the how, but convincingly shares his ideas on the value of encouraging human exchange. He points out that we all live like kings thanks to a vast history of human innovation, which only exists through a long historic string of idea exchange, and that by all of us specializing, we each benefit from thousands of hours of other people’s time. Usually when I look at the boat, I think of my father’s genius – well, truthfully I usually think of all the maintenance tasks that we need to tackle – but when I’m in a more appreciative mode, Gary’s ideas surround us. But reading Ridley, I look around and see, all the great minds that provided this amazing experience for us: Thomas Edison and the long line of researchers before him, who discovered, harnessed, and marketed electricity; The factory full of miners, steelworkers, supervisors, company presidents, lawyers, insurance agents, and marketing dudes, who dug up, smelted, and produced and sold the raw material for our hull; the entire history of inventing sails to harness wind as propulsion, the production of sail material, the invention of the synthetic UV resistent materials (well somewhat resistent…ours are fraying around the edges after a year in the tropics), the girls in China that worked in factories that wove the fabric, down to the cleaning ladies in the sail designer’s offices, who’s efforts freed designers from the task of cleaning heads, to allow them to focus on design; and former colleagues, friends, and family that have supported us for years, helping me to advance my education, my career, and now this cruising life. Millions of minds, skills, and hands have all been applied to create this moment for us. That’s worth being thankful for.
In a similar vein, we’ve been reading aloud from Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” in our cockpit school periods. Early in the book he mentions what an amazing feat it is that every single one of my ancestors, managed to survive to reproductive age, and have a healthy baby – surviving plague, famine, war, puberty – further, think all the way back to the first single cell thing that split and reproduced, then evolved. That’s all worth being thankful for.
We just finished the chapter on atoms. Somehow I didn’t realize (or managed to forget), that the number of atoms on the planet is constant. They just get recycled into new forms. There’s a passage where he tries to give you a sense of scale of the number of atoms that exist just in air. He starts with the number of molecules (something easier to count than atoms) in a sugar cube sized space of air (45 billion billion), then he asks you to “look out your window” and imagine what it would take to fill that view. The kids and I all looked up, looked out at the 360 degree x 180 degree dome of air surrounding us…window?! Visibility out here is about 2 miles to the horizon if your head is 10 feet above sea level (according to my onboard walking Google), farther as objects are taller, and millions of lightyears to the stars overhead. A staggering, if oddly shaped, column of atoms. He also says, a vast number of the atoms in our body, came from Shakespeare, Buddha AND Genghis Khan (apparently you have to pick a historic figure for the atoms to have been sufficiently redistributed). To heck with historic figures, I’m remembering those phosphorescent jellyfish I saw last night, closer at hand, sufficiently redistributed through our watermaker, I’m part jelly! Is that something to be thankful for? Maybe not, but it is miraculous.
If you’re at all in doubt right now that life is a miracle, I can recommend both books, although Bryson is hands down the more engaging storyteller. And in the spirit of the season, you can go ahead and buy a glass of wine and a fish taco for that guy on the corner who thinks he’s Jesus. At the atomic level, he is Jesus – partly anyway.
Our wind was short-lived, we did motorsail a little yesterday, but mostly motored all night. Frank’s now up has optimistically shut down the engine, and is coaxing the spinnaker into the sky. We’re still a day or more away from Nelson, unless the wind picks up. We just need the atoms to align properly, the ones in the spinnaker are not looking half bad.
xoxomo
P.S. I tried the “I’m feeling lucky” button on my onboard walking Google the other day, and I can confirm that the results are far superior to Google’s. I think I’ll keep that pack of atoms. Something else to be thankful for.