Dateline: Beneath the English Channel

That’s right: I’m currently underwater AND underground. I’m aboard the Eurostar, the high-speed train from London to Paris, after a couple of days in the UK. I had originally planned to head to Scotland after my days on Polar Bear, but it turned out that my sister-in-law and two eldest nieces were going to Paris, so I figured I’d join them there for a bit. Since I was always planning on heading to France while over here in Europe, this development simply sped up the process.

The two-plus days in London were interesting. It’s been — gulp — 35 years since I was last in the city, and that visit was for about 24 hours or so, as best as I can recall. I remember playing rounders, a precursor to baseball, in a park with a bunch of locals who were the children of a friend of my mother’s, and I remember being the cliché boorish American — even at 10 years of age. I was yelling and screaming and win-win-win and…ugh. I recoil to this day at the image of my behavior.

This time, I was slightly more subdued. The emphasis on this visit, however, like the last one was sports: I caught two English Premier League matches in two days, and was thoroughly entranced by both.

In the first, a sunny afternoon at Craven Cottage saw Fulham host Blackburn. Craven Cottage is pastoral site for a football match, with swans and rowers passing alongside on the Thames making the scene all the more scenic. The match played out to a 1-1 draw; not surprising since neither team is exactly setting the Premiership on fire at the start of this season.

One other point worth mentioning about the match: the moment of silence observed before the opening kickoff to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 tourist attacks was without question the most sincere and deeply moving moment of silence I’ve ever experienced at a sporting event. Perhaps that was due to the fact that there was an American, Clint Dempsey, on the pitch, but whatever the reason, it moved me to tears. Indeed, the memory of the sincerity of the local fans in their gesture is getting me choked up now.

Last night, the 12th of September, I caught the Queens Park Rangers-versus-Newcastle United match at the former’s Loftus Road stadium. “Cozy” is putting it mildly: at Loftus Road I had neighbors’ elbows in both sides, knees in my back and head at my knees — and I had paid for good seats. And good seats they were: at midfield, about six such rows from the pitch, on which there was less than a meter to the touchline.

I’ve been a fan of the Premier League to varying degrees for a while now, but seeing the players this close made the game a whole new experience for me. Full disclosure: I was always a horrible soccer player. Truly awful. So I’m not trying to build the pros up because I fancy myself as being just a notch below them. But the fact remains: watching the skills of those players and the precision with which they played the game was hypnotic. The split-second timing and execution was magnificent — and we’re not talking about a lot of international-caliber players in this particular game. Color me way more impressed than I was before.

This match ended in a 0-0 draw, somewhat surprising since Newcastle is off to a great start this season and Queens Park featured five new signees playing their first match for the squad.

While both games ended up in kissing-your-sister outcomes, the experiences made the trip so worth the venture. The cozy parks where the games were played were like cleaned-up versions of the pitch where your kids play. Craven Cottage and Loftus Road are such intimate venues that they make Fenway Park seem like the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

Beyond the football, I cruised the underground (which is not, as Otto in “A Fish Called Wanda” believed, a terrorist organzation), drank Guinness on tap, wandered Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square and Covent Gardens and Trafalgar Square, and got the next stages of my European travels in order.

Which has led me here: racing across the French countryside at…how fast? Two hundred miles an hour? Whatever the speed, it was slightly unnerving as we stormed through southeastern England at that pace, the buildings and highways whirring by in a blur. Here in France, the farms and fields and villages — all with red, ceramic-roofed homes and a stone church with steeple — are more easily digested, visually, than the mayhem of urban and suburban England.

Which brings up another point I wanted to make: I rode a train into London on Sunday from Oxfordshire, northwest of London. I’d spent the night in a tiny little inn above a pub in a tiny little village out there in the English countryside. It was a wonderful place to stay and I felt oh-so-propah driving to the train station in the sun the next morning. All I needed was a tweed jacket, some leather driving gloves and a wool cap and I’d have made the very picture of a gent.

But what caught my attention was this: we were a brief, hour-long train ride from the heart of London, and yet this was full-on rural countryside. And that’s when it hit me: freeways are the scourge of the United States. If I’d been back in the U.S., that area would have been infested with subdivisions, strip malls and shopping centers, the farms and fields having long since been paved over. And why? Because we’d have built a couple of God-awful freeways enabling suburbia to sprawl out there, bedroom communities sprouting like mushrooms from a dung heap.

Instead, driving in the UK is a more genteel activity. Slower, to be sure, but less stressful than back home. Granted, it’s a much smaller country so taking your time still enables you to cover the length and breadth of the place fairly quickly. But lacking the sterile and utilitarian blacktop that we have in the U.S. has helped the UK retain its non-urban areas. I feel kinda sorry for us after having experienced what a viable rail system can do for a country.

Or countries, plural. This high-speed thing is awesome: comfortable, clean and without all the hassles of airports and snotty security people and indifferent airlines. I could get used to traveling like this.

And perhaps I shall. I’ll spend six days in Paris (where I rented a small house, a cheaper and better option than a hotel room) and then head on to Munich, where I’ve not been since I was playing hockey near there back, oh, 21 or 22 years ago. And I’ll be there for Oktoberfest, no less. Just a coincidence, I assure you. After that, we shall see.

But for now, my destination is the Gare du Nord in Paris in an hour-and-change, so to get in the spirit I’ve been enjoying a little vin rouge avec a croissant. Oh la la!

Travel, Uncategorized,

Just to Be Clear

So, I’ve been pretty hard hereabouts on Boy Wonder this summer. And not without cause. But I want to clear up a couple of things.

First off, he’s a really nice guy. And his persistent optimism is pretty amazing (to the point of making you wanna smack him now and then). He really does care about the northern part of the planet and he clearly loves exploring the area as much as possible. He seems to enjoy sailing though as I’ve pointed out before, it’s more the means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. But he cares about Polar Bear, the boat and the business.

What drives me nuts about Boy Wonder is how oblivious he is to reality. That may be an outgrowth of his infinite optimism but he’s become the living embodiment of the old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

He’s been fooled so many times by his father that it’s become ludicrous. At various times in Greenland, he was pontificating to the guests about what HE was going to do with Polar Bear in the off-season and what HE was going to do with the business and what HE was going to do next season. I kept wanting to scream at him, “Yo! Meathead! You don’t own the business, your father does. And your father has declared to all involved that he’s going to sell the boat come autumn. On top of that, why would anyone believe you when the stated plans for this season have already been scrapped?”

Never mind that he likely won’t sell the business — it’s already 80 percent sold-out for 2012 — but the fact of the matter is that Daddy Warbucks (or Alfred, as I called him earlier) calls the shots. He’s the one who cut short this season; he’s the one who lied about the plans for the year and if he doesn’t sell the boat he’ll be lying again to Boogie and Marlies about the long-term plans.

So basically, Boy Wonder, while a really good kid, is just plain clueless. And the only way he’s going to get a clue is by telling his father to piss off. Of course, that would involve standing on his own two feet which it’s unclear he’s ever done before — he’s 30-ish…it’s about time.

According to information gleaned from various channels, apparently Boy Wonder is going to do just that: grow a pair and call Daddy’s bluff. If that happens, Alfred will have to decide whether he wants to keep the boat/business and hire someone who’ll run it, because he won’t have Boy Wonder to do his bidding and it’s hard to believe that anyone would sign on for such incompentent meddling as we’ve seen this summer. I’ll be a million miles away from Polar Bear by then but I must confess: I’m really curious to learn how it turns out.

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Holding Patterns

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

We came on watch at 2pm, all rarin’ to go for a four-hour stint of actual, by God sailing — in the sunshine, no less. A mere hour and a quarter later, and the wind had dropped and moved right to our nose; attempts to pinch up still resulted in Polar Bear moving at an almost right angle to her desired course. Sigh. Away went the headsails, up went the engine and now we’re motorsailing yet again.

Truth be told, it’ll be interesting to see how this forecast nastiness a couple of days away actually shakes out. It may well be that we could have persisted on our off-course way and in a couple of days’ time had the forecasted tailwinds push us right where we wanted to go. But again, in a commercial venture, we have to play the odds.

So now, sitting in the sunny cockpit as the autopilot steers us along, is the perfect time to tackle a post I’ve been meaning to do for some time for my own sake. If you’re not into the navel-gazing stuff that appears here from time to time, this would be a good spot for you to head back to Facebook or wherever else on the Web you spend your time.

As I’ve been spending a good portion of this year so far, now almost three-quarters over, pondering over where I’ve been and where I’m going, it has occurred to me that I’ve been pretty much in a holding pattern ever since I moved to San Diego in January 2007.

At that time, I left Alaska, a place I loved and still love, for a couple of reasons. One, I’d been recruited by an old boss for a job. It was a job that excited me: back in the dot-com world with an opportunity to help shape the next wave of online media (or so I thought). And given the way my job in Alaska was going it seemed the perfect time to make a leap: the company that owned the magazine I worked for continued to make ill-advised (read: really stupid) moves on the business side of things that had me worried for the very future of the long-lived publication. In the time since I left, the concerns I had have been borne out: the magazine survives, but barely, and the last vestige of the staff that I worked with quit just last week.

The other reason I moved south in 2007 was because I was involved with a woman who lived in the Bay Area. No, San Diego is not in the Bay Area but it was just a short Southwest Airlines flight away rather than two long, redeye flights away, as was Anchorage. And with the job in San Diego being in the dot-com world, it seemed a better opportunity to get me to the Bay Area for good sooner.

Sadly, the relationship went belly-up not long after my move south and the job, after three years, went with it.

But it occurs to me now that I never fully embraced San Diego — the job or the (still long-distance) relationship. I was, as I say, in a holding pattern, waiting for something else to happen rather than living in the moment.

For instance, I had a notion that I could do the job in San Diego for a year or so and then make the move to a telecommuting role, preferably from the Bay Area but maybe even from back home in Alaska. Yes, I got into the local scene: I made a couple of great friends, I surfed a lot and I took up (and enjoyed) endurance sports. But looking back, I realize that San Diego remained a way station.

I never sold my home in Anchorage. I never bought the sailboat I was going to live on in San Diego Bay. I never bought the small home in one of the beach communities of north San Diego County as I’d have liked to (not that I could afford it, but you get the idea). The bottom line is: I lived in San Diego but I never really LIVED there.

I was on hold for something else. What, I have no idea. Well, that’s not true; I have some idea: I mentioned a couple of them earlier in this post.

Anyway, I left the San Diego job with no real idea of where to go or what to do next. I didn’t even race back to Alaska as you might have expected, simply because there wasn’t any work for me there.

But return to Alaska I did (after doing some fun things such as sailing from the Caribbean to New England and getting my scuba certification), where I put my trashed-by-renters home back into shape. However, again with the benefit of hindsight I realize that I didn’t really hustle while doing the job. I took my time, played a bunch (fishing!), interviewed for jobs (in AK and out) and again, bided my time as I circled in a holding pattern.

A return in the fall to California was ostensibly to make the job search easier but the economy’s woes kept that a pipe dream. And still I circled…

I moved all my stuff back to Alaska right after the new year. I was on the inside track for a job in Anchorage and my house was now in great shape. And in the spring, I went from a holding pattern to an expedited approach to land (to force the metaphor more than a bit).

On the very same day that I got the written offer for the job in Anchorage I also got a good offer on the house. And while I loved my house and neighborhood, and Anchorage and Alaska, the job wasn’t a perfect fit. I also had an offer to join my Dutch friends on a sailboat going to Norway, Iceland and Greenland for the summer, and then across the Atlantic to the Caribbean in the fall, and the image of being at my first day of work knowing that the sailboat was somewhere out there seeing God knows what was simply too strong. I went back into the holding pattern: I turned down the job and took the offer on the house.

The holding pattern continues to this day as I sit here and ponder next steps, steps that will — no matter where they lead — have to be taken in the next week or so. Continue the vagabond/adventure life over here in Europe? Continue the vagabond/adventure life aboard a sailboat of my own? Continue the vagabond/adventure life back in the States?

Or do I finally stop circling and come in for a landing somewhere? If so, where? Places I know and have tentative bases such as Alaska, California or New England? Or wherever there’s a career opportunity that interests and challenges me?

The sale of my home has left me debt-free and with the ability to continue being a vagabond. But I have to confess to an urge gnawing at my insides to get back in the game. There’s also the trepidation that by circling as I have for now a year and a half, no one will let me back in the game — and then what? And lastly, I have to confess to a powerful urge to stay out of the fray completely and live the creative life I’ve long sought but, to be honest, been too chickenshit to pursue. I’ve returned to the page — putting words on it rather than just reading them — this summer and I have to say that it’s been like a homecoming, a return of the prodigal son.

Do I have any answers yet? No. But I’ve been whittling down the list and there is progress being made. When we hit shore in a few days, I’ll talk to some friends back Stateside who have opportunities they want to discuss, and I’ll go from there. And in the meantime, I keep on creating as best I can…and putting my thoughts down on this (electronic) page as part of the whittling process.

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