It's my fifth day on the Lynx and I'm settling in well. The first couple days were shaky - jet lag + long days + transit = metabolic suckerpunch. A twelve hour night of sleep cured that. Now I find myself deep in the business of learning a new boat. It's grand. There are a lot of challenges, usual and unusual. Spending months ashore between tours means rebuilding muscle every time, while working a new boat (and a schooner at at that) means having to constantly reevaluate the way I look at rigging, sailing, and seamanship.

My world is rapidly shrinking to the dimensions of the boat, plus whatever port we happen to be in. My attention focuses accordingly. In life on shore there is a great deal of wasted time and space. Driving, television, shopping, untended gardens, attics, basements. A lot is ignored. Not so on a boat. Every bit of space has a use, every moment of the working day is used. It makes for a fine environment in which to push oneself to learn rapidly, to put forth a great deal of useful effort and to overcome one's own foibles, shortcomings and blind spots. I'm not a terribly disciplined person in my daily life so I enjoy this opportunity to grow and improve myself in ways that I am not normally inclined.

I had missed the rhythm of the boats, the steady supporting schedule of day sails and maintenance and mealtimes that the crew comes to rest on like a well-laid keel. I had missed also the feeling of camaraderie, of coordination and mutual understanding that develops amongst a crew.

The trials and discoveries come fresh every day.



I will write more as I observe more.

[A lot has happened since I last wrote here. All the things in my last post have transpired and then some. I'm not given to broadcasting the minutae of my life, which is one reason I tell people I'm a terrible correspondant. For the past six months my life has not chrystalized in a way that allows me to say "this is where I am". A friend recently asked me what I was up to. My response formed the germ of this post.]



Mexico is warm, humid, and very tasty. I'm in a seaside town called Manzanillo where my grandma lives. I'm here for christmas, which is done differently in this part of the world. Christmas eve is the big day, with presents and fireworks and music and the midnight mass, while Christmas day is spent in a collecive hangover.

In a couple days I'll go to Guadalajara with my uncle. He's a schoolteacher there, the kind of man whose brain whirls with the effort of connecting everything he knows with everything else. He lives in a gorgeous house that may or may not be haunted.

On the 30th I fly back to Portland. The 31st will be spent unpacking, repacking, setting my affairs in order, saying goodbye to friends, and dancing until the small hours. Early on the morning of the first I'll catch a plane to San Diego and jump aboard the 1812 privateer schooner Lynx, at which point the real fun begins.

I've signed on as the education officer, which is equal parts deckhand, teacher and cat herder. I'll be on the boat as she slowly climbs the coast until until May; we'll be somewhere in the San Francisco bay by then.

I go to the boats to grow. It's a conscoius, daily process of improving every part of my thought and action as I work myself into exhaustion every single day for three to six months. What seems impossibly difficult one month becomes routine the next. Every challenge I overcome brings me to another. The brutal, exhilirating physicality of it makes the lessons solid and meaningful.

I go to the boats to teach. Most people hate my job. I introduce hundreds of schoolkids to the boat every day and I mediate their interaction with it. I work the necessary logistics, making sure every kid gets to spend time experiencing everything we're prepared to share with them. I teach the teachers, ensuring the consistent quality and richness of the educational program. I get to plant the idea in every kid's head that the world is much larger and more engaging than their classroom.

Our schools are filled with kids who can't sit still, who learn by doing, and who are highly incompatible with the office worker's metaskills that the school system is designed to impart. I don't just give them a field trip to make history class a little more relevant. I introduce them to a whole new method of learning and interacting with the outside world. Every idea I communicate has a physical analogue on the boat and they all get put in the kids' hands. You'd be surprised how many ADD kids get real sharp when abstract symbols are put away in favor of concrete reality.



And that's where I'm at right now; relaxing, memorizing the education program for the Lynx, and looking forward to four or five months of very difficult and rewarding work.

For anybody out there keeping track, I got off the boat in mid-May (there's a story there, but I'm not gonna tell it now). Upon arriving home in Portland, I jumped right into a sound and light board operator gig at the Artist's Repertory Theater, one of the more well-established houses in town. The show was Orson's Shadow, a historical piece about the time Orson Wells and Laurence Olivier collaborated on a production of Ianesco's Rhinocerous. They hated the play and each other. Hilarity ensued. Also in the play is Vivian Leigh, Olivier's manic depressive nymphomaniac of a wife who played Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the wind. She comes in at the end of each act, filps out and chews up scenery. Really, the whole thing is like a good episode of Frasier crossed with Inside The Actor's Studio with a side of Jerry Springer. It was a hoot.

That ended yesterday. Right now, I'm waiting for my ride to the fourth of July festivities on the playa. I'm going out there for ten days to party my ass off and do prefab for burning man. Then I'm heading out to central Oregon to work the Oregon Country Fair. Then it's back home to catch my breath for a couple of days before working SOAK, the Oregon burner regional. Then back home again for ten days and right back out to the desert on August 3rd to help build Black Rock City.

It's going to be an interesting month.