Here’s how I spend time at anchor on the long afternoons that follow our early  mornings.  Jack has the coffee ready by 5:00 am and we often haul the anchor by 6:00, earlier or later if tides and currents require.  Summer of 2019 has brought us blessed days of immersion in books, boat work, passage planning, cooking and all-encompassing Nature.

Become America by Eric Liu – my favorite book so far – is fortifying my mental state.  It’s a compendium of Civic Sermons on Love, Responsibility, and Democracy given at various public venues in Seattle and around the country. The idea was hatched on November 9, 2016 and launched mid-month. I can’t remember how I came across it, much less how I’d missed it. Blame the relentless distraction of the news.  I may have heard the author on a CBC interview as we crossed into Canada , after which I spent hours coaxing a download from Audible.  The 19 sermons – excerpts from great writers and historians followed by Liu’s strong sense of what is being lost, his incisive understanding of the U. S. Constitution and reflections on conversations with citizens across the political spectrum who share his disgust with Trump.  The sermons range from being an antidote to the morning news to a healthy replacement for it, at least on these waters where we go for blessed days without any news at all.  I listen to one every morning upon awakening.  (Among the writers, Liu quotes is Bryan Stevenson whose Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption was favorite book of 2017.)

Alaska’s Daughter is a superbly written and richly textured personal memoir by Elizabeth Bernhardt Pinson. This Inupiaq Eskimo woman born in 1912 draws on her meticulous journals to trace Alaska’s emergence into the modern era. The vivid accounts of the work required for a family to survive on the edge of the Arctic north of Nome includes detailed descriptions of material culture: hunting, trapping, fishing, food gathering and storage, preparation of hides and furs for clothing, and transportation by boat and dogsled. Of particular interest are the sections on the early introduction of reindeer herding for more reliable food sourcing and the advent of air travel which brought the modern era to the Seward Peninsula.

The cover photo of the author leaving home at age 18 to attend high school in Seward, Alaska is a portrait of human resilience. Dressed in clothing she has sewn herself, she stands tall and confident on wooden protheses, having lost her legs to frostbite at the age of six.

The King Island Journal also delves deep into the culture of a small traditional community in the far North. Artist Rie Munoz first came to Alaska with her husband, Juan, in 1951 to teach school on an island in the Bering Sea just south of the Arctic Circle. The book pairs excerpts from the couples’ journal with remarkable photographs of a disappearing way of life. This book reminds me of letters that my friend Mini Wansink would send from Papua New Guinea when she was living there in the late 1960s caring for a two year old whose anthropologist parents were working elsewhere. As the first white woman most islanders of the area had ever seen, she traded salt and matches for everything she needed. 

 A Taste of Haida Gawaii: Food Gathering and Feasting at the Edge of the World.  I always go to the wildly comprehensive bookstore in the lobby of the Northern British Columbia Museum. with high expectations.  I found Susan Musgrave’s lushly illustrated work shortly after visiting the largest Haida village in the United States. Just what I was looking for. Hundreds of color photos, well-documented botany and zoology, mouth watering recipes with weird ingredients, and intriguing tips on how to fish and forage. Sublime book design and winner of the 2016 BC Book Award, to boot!  What a surprise to discover that every page is also laugh-out-loud hilarity. Okay, so Musgrave is a much-published novelist and poet. Still, anyone who can mix humor and how to leaves me in awe and jealous. I just cannot write funny.  This book arrive on our coffee table at home unfinished and I am seriously rationing my daily consumption of its 373 pages. 

Baby’s First Felony Hilarious!  A must read for any visitor to Sitka, Alaska. Mixes good historical sleuthing and real people into wildly imaginative fiction.  Novelist John Strayley is the husband of renowned whale biologist Jan Strayley, who I hope to meet someday.  He’s a retired criminal defense investigator and former Writer Laureate of Alaska.

The Sea is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs went unread for two summers, after which it was stranded in Alaska for the winter of 2018-2019.  I probably heard author Joshua L Reid speak at a Port Townsend Marine Science Center event, for he has autographed it “To Carol, Jack and David, Enjoy the Inside Passage!”  (David is Jack’s roommate from Cal who joined us for the PT to Ketchikan leg of our 2016 cruise.)  The Sea is my Country” are the words of Makah Chief Tatoosh, who prevented the first non-Native captains from undertaking their searches for the Northwest Passage in the late 1770’s. The Makah are “indigenous borderlands people” who have defined their own sea space from the earliest days of Contact through the 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay to their successful grey whale hunt in 1999.  This summer I hope to attend their annual festival on the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula in August.

Alaska’s History: The People, Land and Events of the North County. This slim volume by Henry Ritter is a new addition to the ship’s library recommended by a helpful employee of Sitka’s Harbor Books.  Fifty-three illustrated two-page essays tell the story in easily readable form. 

With Vancouver in Alaska 1793-1794.  Since Vancouver’s own journals have failed to make it onto the boat, this day-by-day description of the persevering Captain’s two summers of exploration proved most helpful.  The 30 pages briefly cover itineraries, dates, places visited, and whom or what they were named for. 

Sea Trials: Around the World with Duct Tape and Bailing Wire. This true story of a California family’s 5-year circumnavigation in the 1970s is a page turner.  Shipwrecked on a reef in Fiji during their first year, the crew of 2 adults and children 11 and 13 spent 9 months rebuilding their wooden boat, though without all equipment with which they had started out. Seattle-based author Wendy Hinman based her account on careful research, including extensive interviews with her husband, Garth, and other members of the Wilcox family. The book allows contemporary mariners to appreciate the extreme challenges of blue water navigation using only a sextant and  wrist watch in the days before Loran, GPS, and contemporary communications.

The Coastal Companion: The Mile-By-Mile Guide to the True Magic of the North is a compendium of photos, maps and information that answers questions travelers are likely to ask and many more they should ask.  Fisherman-writer Joe Upton’s Alaska Blues is a must read for anyone exploring Southeast Alaska, but I’m thankful for this almost free find at the thrice annual book sale of the Friends of the Port Townsend Library which deserves to stay on board S/V Aurora.

Fragments of Paradise: British Columbia’s Wild and Wondrous Islands. This freebie, is a reject from an-end-of-the-day boxes left in front of William James in Port Townsend.  Writing in the mid-1990s, Paul and Audrey Grescoe talk about the isolated coastal communities in the Gulf, Discovery, and Queen Charlotte (now Haida Gwaii) Islands and the colorful flora, fauna and human beings who live there.  

Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean.  This is my third time reading this wondrous work by Orcas Island resident Jonathan White.  One of my favorite books of all time.

The Beachcomer’s Guide to Seashore Life in the Pacific Northwest.  This profusely illustrated, intelligently laid out, well-indexed handbook will become a permanent part of our onboard library but will shuttle seasonally from ship to shore and back again.  By J. Duane Sept, it’s yet another superb publication from British Columbia’s Harbour Publishing. Inlcudes best beachcoming beaches, including those in Washington and Oregon.

Nine Pints: A Journey through the Money, Medicine and Mysteries of Blood.  Of course Rose George is one of my favorite writers.  The Big Necessity was breakthrough journalism that made it okay for the rest of us to talk toilets.  Next came Ninety Percent of Everything, that is of all the stuff we have that much comes from afar on the huge ocean going vessels we watch pass our house every day on the way to Seattle and Tacoma.  Now a book that ranges widely uncovering more that most of us know nothing about.  I have a new hero in Janet Vaughn, who  mobilized a small band of game changers to bring blood banking to the world and demonstrated that unpaid volunteer donors are the secret to sound management. George digs into the loss of this ethic in the United States, where people – often the poorest and least healthy – are paid for their plasma.  And coming back to her profound understanding of toilets and hygiene, the author devotes a good part of the book to menstrual hygiene and the taboos surrounding it.

The Overstory.  Oh, my. Only two novels.  I’m afraid so. It’s great. Richard Powers writes all about trees and forests and the terrible things happening to them. There’s an unforgettable characters introduced in every chapter and then somehow they all come together in the end.  Good novels trouble me a bit.  How do novelists do it?

Haroun and the Sea Stories. Salman Rushdie’s book for children of all ages was also an Audible Daily Deal that I sequestered away for the trip and enjoyed with delight on our windless passage up Chatham Strait in May.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World. I heard Steve Brusatte interviewed on the radio, probably by Terry Gross, and Jack likes the book so when it showed yup as an audible.com Daily Deal, I bought it. Unfortunately it’s proved a bit hard going as an audio book so I’ll wait until I can couple it with a hard copy from the library to finish. 

Poetry

The source of supply and demand for what reads well on these coasts is FisherPoets.  At Astoria, Oregon’s annual gathering of fishermen who write, I stocked up on chapbooks.  

Introducing his poems and stories in The Big Set, Jeff Stonehill writes “..there is nothing quite like the feeling when the Wet Dog or Voodoo lounge crowd smiles, laughs, or nods knowingly at one of them.  It’s a lot like the feeling of dropping the hatch cover onto a full fish hold.”  “Pounding the Docks” is the story of an aspiring deck hand escaping the cannery for his first boat.  “Two Men and a Boy” honors a 13-year-old while showing that a crew of two is too few while three is too many.  The title poem is about “Saint Peter and the apostle boys our seining in the Sea of Galilee.” 

Patrick Dixon’s Arc of Visibility is an award-winning collection of poems by a mature creative.  Dixon has helped organize the Astoria event for 18 years and has edited seven anthologies.  His nineteen poems in this chapbook run the gamut: the bigness, largesse and perils of the sea from nautical history to love poems, incident descriptions, and eulogies. Available at www.PatrickDixon.net  

Patrick Dixon’s 2013 Swimming with Fish and Other Animals has a few of the poems that are also in the 2017 Arc of Visibility. It will be interesting to compare for changes introduced.  Swimming is poetry with deep respect for the gillnetter.

Broken Water features poems of harvest and heritage in the Alaskan commercial fishing industry. FisherPoet Maggie Bursch operates a commercial drift boat in Bristol Bay, where wher grew up in her family’s set net camp.

Joe Broderick’s Tossed in the Skiff at HIgh Tide is pocketable like Dot’s Fishing Guide and has as its cover the 2006 June tide table for Nushagak.

Riding Thermals to Winter Grounds is an unread leftover from last summer. Jack met Algeria-born journalist Djelloul Marbrook when we lived in Washington DC in the late 80s and I met him when he and his wife Marilyn invited us for a day of sailing on the Potomac.  I bought his latest  book when he noted its release on Twitter.  So far it’s been a little hard going.  I never know whether a collection should be read start to finish, of dipped into.

Other Stuff

Site Unseen: Gitga’at and West Vancouver Youth Mural of Merging Voices.  This 32-page publication in the bookshop of the Museum of Northern British Columbia stands on the strength of a simple idea: a cultural exchange between high schoolers in two very different coastal communities. The home of the Gitga’at First Nation is in the remote village of Hartley Bay and the hearts of its 200 residents.  West Vancouver is an affluent urban community.  Teacher Jackie Wong appears to be the link, having gone to Hartley Bay in 1995 to teach the previous generation and now a teacher as West Vancouver Secondary School on Howe Sound. 

Conceived as an art project growing from the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, it benefited from federal and local community funding.  Among the highlights were time at Kiel, Hartley Bay’s seaweed harvesting camp.  While the United States seems decades away from a nationalTruth and Reconciliation exercise regarding slavery, Canada is living theirs regarding treatment of their Native peoples.  Site Unseen quotes the Commission report:  All Canadians, as Treaty peoples, share responsibility for establishing and maintaining mutually respectful relationships. Supporting Aboriginal people’a cultural revitalization and integrating Indigenous knowledge systems, oral histories, laws, protocols, and connections to the land into the reconciliation process is essential.

Dictionary of Alaska Place Names.  All one thousand pages of Donald J. Orth’s Geological Survey Professional Paper of No. 567 issued by the US department of the Interior in 1967 is available online here.   https://ia802304.us.archive.org/28/items/bub_gb_0y48AQAAMAAJ/bub_gb_0y48AQAAMAAJ.pdf

Selected Invasive Plants of Alaska.  This 50 cent guide from the  US Forest Service is a terrifying reminder of the tactics of invaders.  Oxeye Daisy has arrived in a packet of mixed wildflower seed. Spotted Knapweed hitchikes on wildlife, people, vehicles, in soil, in crop seed and in hay. Bluebur has prickles which hook into fur or clothing.  Canada Thistle colonizes though a horizontal root system that can cover acres and also lets loose seeds in the wind.  Orange hawkweed – “a favorite of unwary gardeners” – spreads by stolons, rhizomes and seed.  Tansy’s toxicity to grazing animals helps its invasion.  The awns of Downy Brome and Foxtail Barley cause sores around the eyes, ears and mouths of wild and domestic grazers. European Bird Cherry invades river banks thanks to moose who refuse to eat it. Japanese Knotweed spreads though broken bits of stem.  Bird Vetch simply climbs, monopolizing sunlight, space and moisture.  Ornamental Jewelweed is a prolific seed producer and Scotchbroom seeds remain viable for 80 years.  Reed Canarygrass stands its ground most anywhere with dense, monospecific mats that push everything else out. 

Federal Requirements for Commercial Fishing Industry Vessels.   As if catching fish isn’t hard enough, this pamphlet summarizes all the regs, quoting chapters and verses from volume 46 of the Code of Federal Regulations.  Yikes!