Running Away To Sea

This month I did one of the craziest things I’ve done in my adult life: I spent two weeks as a trainee crew member on a tall ship. If you don’t know what that is, think pirate ships: square-rigged, two masts, figurehead, the works. In fact, this ship, the Lady Washington, played the Interceptor in Pirates of the Caribbean, though the crew is quick to point out that she is a replica of a merchant vessel, NOT a pirate ship. 

The Lady Washington docked in Tacoma

I don’t know exactly what made me up and decide to spend two weeks learning how to sail an eighteenth-century brig. Maybe it was my love of Treasure Island, maybe it was the encouragement of a friend who went through the program before me. Partly it was immersion research for a creative writing project (yes, it’s about pirates, but don’t tell the Lady Washington crew). Maybe it was just a plain old desire for a spot of adventure. But they were two of the most challenging weeks in my life, and not just because sailing a tall ship demands every ounce of strength, agility, and focus a body and mind can give. 

A memento in the main hold of the ship's
role in Pirates of the Caribbean

What made it particularly challenging for me, a mid-career professional, is that I was completely new to it. In my job, I am confident and even reasonably competent. But stepping onto that boat two weeks ago, I didn’t know a sheet from a halyard. I was surrounded by younger people—some the age of my students—who not only knew infinitely more than me but who did everything with such ease that I had no idea how difficult it was until they told me to do it. If you’d seen the bosun make fast a dock line on a cleat—which was under the pin rail and behind a heavy coil of line, all while a hundred-ton ship was pulling on the other end—and then watched me do the same thing, you’d have a vivid demonstration of the difference between an old hand and a greenhorn. 

A line (not a dock line)

It was frustrating on some levels. It was frustrating to be the slowest at everything, to puzzle through the steps involved in carrying out the command, “Hands to set the fore topmast staysail” and then discover that the crew had already done it in the time it took you to figure out you needed to be in the bow of the ship. 

Main mast

But it was also rewarding to see myself get incrementally better. I stopped coiling lines the wrong direction after day one. By day seven, I knew where the gear and braces were and what they did. By day fourteen, I could sweat a line to tighten it without feeling like the skin was being flayed off my palms.

 

The fore course and fore topsail set

It made me think about how good it is, just every once in a while, to find oneself in a situation in which one knows absolutely nothing. It’s useful to be humbled by another’s knowledge in the face of your ignorance, productive to struggle and make mistakes, just to be reminded that it’s okay to do so. It’s good to remember that there is no such thing as unskilled labor; there’s a right (i.e. safe) way to haul on a line, and there’s a wrong (i.e. finger-breaking) way to do it too. It’s salubrious to remember that knowledge and education aren’t the same thing, and that someone who dropped out of high school may have something to teach you that you’d never figure out on your own despite the degrees you hold. It’s very good to be reminded that no matter how much you learn, there is always more to know. Even the senior crew were constantly learning new things as the situation changed.

 

One of the ship's two guns, which can be fired
but aren't anymore due to their age

I hope it will make me a more patient teacher, having returned after so many years to being on the receiving end of patience and forbearance as I struggled with things that felt to the other crew members as natural as walking, as I repeatedly forgot words that to them were as simple as “up” and “down.” Sometimes I need the reality check that the rules for commas, so ingrained in my own head, are not, in fact, a natural part of speech, and that words like “litotes” and “assonance” are as obscure to most people as “hawsehole” and “lazarette” were to me two weeks ago.

 

The topsail set, with the t'gallants ready to be set

I learned a great deal, and I’m proud of myself for managing as much as I did, even if others might have come further in the same amount of time. I am small, slightly built, and hesitant to jump into things I don’t fully understand. It slows me down. But these are some of the little things I'm proud to have managed, nonetheless: 

1) I went aloft to furl the topsails. (This involves climbing more or less upside down to get to the working top. It is not easy, physically or psychologically.) 

Me aloft on day two

2) I successfully threw dock lines onto the dock without dropping them in the water. Dock lines are over an inch thick and weigh a ton, especially when wet. 

On deck

3) I lugged Larry the inflatable fender from bow to stern. Larry is bigger than me and probably more than half my weight, and there are three steep steps to carry him up to the quarter deck. 

Ship's bell

4) I raised and lowered all three ship’s flags (right side up!) when I had boat duty and didn’t forget to check the bilges to make sure we weren’t sinking or on fire. 

Martha, the figurehead

5) I suppressed my natural obsession for cleanliness to go two full weeks without a proper shower, with tar under my nails and crusted salt and seafoam all over my pants. This was harder than most of the others.

The fore course, ready to be set

6) I didn’t give up, even though every fiber of my indoor-creature being screamed, “Have you lost your mind? Go back to your warm laptop and safe, dry books!” 

A neighboring schooner, the Zodiac, seen through our anchor hawsehole

These are small accomplishments in the big scheme of things, and I may never use them again. I hope, at any rate, to remain in close proximity to hot showers from here on. But the experience left me with a great love and respect for the sailors who make a living preserving these memories of the Great Age of Sail, and it gives me immense personal satisfaction to know that, just for a short time, I was one of them.

The Land of Old Empires

After two and a half years of sticking within the bounds of this (admittedly very large) nation, I’ve finally set foot on foreign soil again. Back before the world changed, a friend and I had booked a trip to Central Europe, and this year, we actually made it. I don’t really know how to blog about a twelve-day trip to five different countries, but here goes nothing.

The Rathaus on Marienplatz, Munich

Czech Republic

Although the trip started in Munich, we only spent one very jet-lagged night there before our tour took us to Prague. The city set a rather high bar for the rest of the trip, as Prague is every bit as charming and beautiful as everyone says. The narrow streets lined with elegant facades, the exuberant jumble of red-roofed buildings, the cathedral and palace grounds overlooking the Old City, I fell in love with everything about Prague except its currency. No mental contortions ever succeeded in allowing me to convert the Koruna to the dollar. I never had any notion of what I was paying for things, but honestly, I didn’t even care, I enjoyed Praha that much.

Karlova Street leading to the Old Town Bridge Tower

Our Lady Before Tyn overlooking the Old Town Square

The Astronomical Clock, installed in 1410 and still going strong

Prague as seen from the top of the Lesser Town Bridge Tower

St. Vitus Cathedral

Slovakia

Our stay in Bratislava lasted approximately two hours; it was really nothing more than a glorified lunch break. However, the old town area was bright and welcoming, and even the parts that hadn’t yet been renovated had a certain medieval charm to them. Plus, I was able to pay Euros for my soup, which came in an edible cup like an ice cream cone!

Old Town Hall on the Main Square

An unrenovated side street

Winner for most innovative food presentation on this trip

Hungary 

My first impression of Budapest was that the Pest side of the city feels very much like every other modern city I’ve been in: it’s a bit sooty, it roars with the sound of traffic, and it smells like dirt and motor oil. However, I quickly learned to appreciate the consistent nineteenth-century architectural style (consistent because Pest was destroyed when the Danube flooded in 1838), the cultural gems hidden around practically every corner, and of course the beauty of the Old City of Buda.

My favorite building in Pest

The Parliament Building by night

Fisherman's Bastion

Matthias Church

Inside Matthias Church, which preserves Muslim decoration
from when it was a mosque under Turkish rule

Dohany Street Synagogue

Heroes Square

Austria

It's probably completely unnecessary to say that we could have spent months in Vienna and not seen everything that beautiful city has to offer. We gave it our best shot in the two days we had there, though! 

St. Stephen's Cathedral

Just a bishop contemplating divinity in St. Stephens'

Graben Street

Yes, we saw the Lipizzaners at the Spanish Riding School

And yes, I died.

It was a perfectly acceptable summer day when we set out from Budapest for Salzburg, but by the time we paused for a rest stop at Mondsee, the temperature had dropped into the forties and stayed quite chilly for the rest of the trip. In a way it was all the better for us, because on the day we visited Berchtesgaden, snow had fallen in the Alps overnight! Besides that, it was practically impossible to turn around without stumbling on a filming location for The Sound of Music, so naturally there was an impromptu sing-along on the tour bus, which fortunately no one filmed.

Mondsee

Salzburg, with the fortress overlooking the town

Getreidegasse

A shop advertising that it sells lederhosen

The Alps

With snow--in June!

An Alpine meadow

You may recognize these steps in the Mirabell Gardens
from the "Do Re Mi" scene in Sound of Music

Germany

The heart of the whole tour was a visit to Oberammergau, the very small town famous for a very big production of the Passion Play every ten years since the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take pictures during the five-hour extravaganza, which involved hundreds of cast members, live horses and camels, a full choir and orchestra, and was done entirely in German. But I found the town itself just as picture-worthy as the play. It was everything I imagined an Alpine village would be, with the added bonus of being famous for something other than the Passion Play: wood carving. We were fortunate to have only an hour or two for shopping, because if we’d had more, I probably wouldn’t have been able to buy food for the rest of the trip!

The view from our hotel room.
The churchbells rang every 15 minutes 24 hours a day

Lüftlmalerei, the art of mural painting

The Passion features prominently throughout the town

My friend and I stayed behind one extra day after our official tour concluded in Munich because we wanted to see one more major attraction: Neuschwanstein, the building that inspired Disney’s iconic Sleeping Beauty castle. As usual, no pictures were allowed inside, but the outside was plenty photogenic, as were the horse-drawn carriages that ferried people up and down the mountain.

Neuschwanstein

Horses!

Carriage rides cost twice as much going up
the mountain as going back down

In a lot of ways, this trip was like drinking from a firehose: so many cities, so many stories, so much history my poor beleaguered high school teachers never had time to teach us. We talked to people who had grown up under Communist rule, who had watched revolutions unfold, who knew the stories of the Hapsburgs and the Wittelsbachs better than I know the stories of my own immediate family. It’s a very big world out there, and I was so fortunate to have this chance to get out there once again and explore it.

The hills are alive!