Flicka Voyages 2.0 Defining Moments

Flicka Voyages 2.0

My last blog entry to flickavoyages.blogspot.com was on May 29, 2015, the day we docked Flicka, our 32 foot Allied Seawind ketch, into in the very same marina in Deltaville, VA from which we left on November 7, 2014 on our first trip down the Intracoastal Waterway. After our return, we lived on her for six weeks, attending to the myriad projects necessary to maintain a safe and serviceable boat. For the last half of August and all of September we were in Staunton for a dose of genteel southern living. We are preparing for another journey down the ICW, hopefully to include a run to the Bahamas and Cuba. Now that we have a rational leader in the white house, albeit a Kenyan born, and Muslim un-president, visiting Cuba is possible.

I am writing in a hotel in Bellingham, Washington where Emily and I are visiting our son Henry, who is working on a graduate degree in geology at Western Washington University. We visit him there occasionally, where the views to the west (Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands) and the east (Mount Baker and the Cascades) are stunning, the geology interesting and complicated, the coffee excellent and the weather spectacular.

Henry and his mom at the HomeSkillet in Belllingham

The average age in the state of Washington is 43, in Bellingham it’s 31. Young, creative, fit, energetic, progressive, latte laced thirty somethings bike to work, dance in the parks, walk the Pacific Crest Trail in the latest REI gear, make art, love, and somehow a living in the new ‘sharing economy’. Henry bikes around town as he has for the past three years, works on his bike fleet at a non-profit bike ‘hub’, shops at a cooperative food store, downs an occasional craft beer, exercises almost every day and works on his master’s thesis. A very admirable lifestyle indeed.

Flicka is on her own back on the East coast at the moment, tied to our dock in Deltaville, having been recently buffeted by thirty-five to forty knot winds, super high tides and heavy rains, compliments of Hurricane Joaquin.

Originally intended to serve as ship’s log, to record basic maritime information: weather, position, maintenance and daily occurrences, the blog morphed into descriptions of people we met and places we visited. Telling stories about those people and places became a rather enjoyable experience.  I plan to continue that and maybe do a little editorializing on subjects of interest to me as well. Blog entries will start on or about October 19.  I hope you will enjoy them and also hope you will comment on some of my editorializing. I do not presume that you will agree with my opinions, but the world would be so much better off if you did.

Living and traveling from place to place on a small boat really is about the journey, not just the destination, to employ an old cliché. It requires constant attention to detail, boat condition and upkeep, weather and water conditions, aids to navigation and other boats big and small traveling the same waters. On a trip like this the landscape, flora and fauna, coastal ecology, climate, weather and human culture change gradually from place to place. Traveling at four or five knots gives one time to notice and appreciate those changes. The people we meet along the way are independent, eccentric and iconoclastic, all with interesting stories, very worth telling.

We began the journey back from Florida in April 2015, retracing our original path except for a side trip across Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke Island and then northward, crossing into Croatan Sound at Manteo, NC, into Albemarle Sound and eventually rejoining the ICW at Elizabeth City, NC.

On the day we left Deltaville last November the temperature was 38 degrees F. By the time we got into the main stem of the Chesapeake the wind was gusting to 30 knots, making for a rather invigorating start. The weather was cold and wet all the way to north Florida. Notwithstanding that a good time was had by all. Adventure followed adventure. This year we have set our departure for October 19, three weeks earlier than last year, hoping that will give us time to make our way south into warmer weather.

October 19 just happens to be the anniversary of the surrender of British troops to the Americans after the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, a battle that essentially marked the end of the Revolutionary War for American Independence. Yorktown is on the south side of the York River across from Gloucester Point, about twenty-five miles northeast of Williamsburg. Today modern battleships and submarines pass by there on their way to and from the US Naval Weapons Station further up the river. But in October 1781 it was ships of the line from France’s West Indies fleet commanded by François-Joseph Paul, comte de Grasse (Count de Grasse). 

De Grasse had sailed from the West Indies and arrived at the Chesapeake Bay at the end of August to establish a naval blockade, to cut off any escape attempt by British Lord and Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis, commander of the British Army in the American theater. When he got here, De Grasse delivered 500,000 silver pesos, freely donated by Cuban citizens, to General George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, monies intended to fund supplies and payroll for the American army. Good on those cheerful Cubans, what with their cigars, salsa music, cool guayaberas, rum, old cars and all!

On a broad, flat coastal plain high above the York River cliffs and what today is known as Fossil Beach, American and British forces gathered to settle their disagreements once and for all. Washington was joined by French troops under the command of Jean-Baptiste Donatien, Comte de Rochambeau. Cornwallis’ men endured withering artillery bombardment and frontal attacks from the Americans and French during the battle.

The British were overwhelmed, Cornwallis surrendered and the Treaty of Paris was signed a year later.  Just before he surrendered, Cornwallis is said to have asked, “What the heck just happened?” To which General Washington is said to have replied, “You just got your royal British butt stomped by a bunch of rag tag American colonists and their French comrades.” Cornwallis did not attend the October 19 surrender ceremony, claiming to be sick. I suspect he was!

The battle of Yorktown was a defining moment in the history of America. But for a nineteen year old soon to be graduate of the Virginia Military Institute in the spring of 1970, which I was then, defining moments are a matter of perspective. The sight of any young, pretty woman was a defining moment for me then.

In May of that year a few senior VMI biology majors visited the Yorktown area and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) at Gloucester Point just across the river. It was to be a time for us budding biologists to explore opportunities for careers and graduate training.  However, from the moment we arrived young, beautiful women were more on our minds. In those days women did not attend VMI and we rarely saw any except for those working in the mess hall or clutching onto Washington and Lee University students on weekends. But we had heard that some had been sighted in the vicinity of Yorktown. So in that spring we went there to begin to chart the course of our lives and, most importantly, to see as many members of the opposite sex as possible.

Our guide was a VIMS graduate student. He led us through research labs where really smart people were studying all kinds of neat stuff. From considerations of economically important Chesapeake Bay species like menhaden, oysters and blue crabs to in-depth studies of the most obscure blue green algae. More on those important animals in later blogs.

Today VIMS scientists conduct interdisciplinary research in coastal, ocean and estuarine science and, when asked, give expert advice to policy makers, industry, and the public. Providing expert science advice must be difficult and frustrating in today’s world where denying the conclusions of scientific inquiry and cherry picking scientific facts to support a particular ideology is common practice for many of our decision makers.

VIMS was a magic place to a young biology student from VMI in the spring of 1970, but an even more magical place to a bunch of young men attending a military school was Nick’s Seafood Pavilion in Yorktown. Our group went there to have lunch after tramping around on Fossil Beach one morning.

We piled into Nick’s; happy, sweaty, hungry and immediately spellbound by our particularly attractive waitress who was herself spellbound by one of our faculty chaperones, Colonel Oscar Gupton, one time concert pianist, former Army airborne ranger and, during our tenue at VMI, Professor of Botany and wrestling coach. Coach Gupton used to run a couple of miles barefooted around a cinder track before wrestling practice each day. I myself avoided such dangerous physical activity. After that he would convene practice, take on all comers and, as the story goes, had never been beaten. The stuff of legends.

Dr. Gupton was a ruggedly attractive man, not much older than our waitress. After some flirtatious banter, he exclaimed to her, “I bet you can’t guess my first name.” Without a moment’s hesitation she pronounced definitively, “it’s probably something like Oscar.” After a jaw-dropping pause, we brayed in unison like donkeys.

We came to believe we had been had, but never found out for sure. If it was a setup, Dr. Gupton wasn’t owning up.  Once the pretty waitress realized that Oscar was in fact an Oscar she was even more taken with him. Lunch went well, with pretty waitress seeing to Gupton’s every need and us cadets standing by in awe.

Tragically many years later, in his retirement, Oscar Gupton was killed instantly by a fast moving car as he walked across a busy Las Vegas street. Some years before that his son had been killed in a motor cycle accident. It is said by some that Dr. Gupton never got over that. So it goes.

That astonishing name guess was for me the most memorable thing about our field trip to Yorktown, except of course for Fossil Beach, a window in time that shows just how far nature had to go to prepare the battlefield for those poor American, French and British soldiers, VIMS and Nick’s Seafood Pavilion. The story begins when a very large meteor hit the Earth in either the late Eocene or early Oligocene epoch in the vicinity of what today is the lower eastern shore of Virginia. That would put it at about thirty to thirty-five million years ago.

Epochs (along with eons, eras, periods and ages) are geologic descriptions of long, really long, segments of time. Each segment has a beginning and end, each more or less defined by natural phenomena like land mass movement, mountain building and destruction, earth quakes, meteor strikes and other weird stuff.

Scientists describe these natural phenomena, so many of which have happened in the very distant past and that today for the most part continue so very slowly, by observing all kinds of evidence preserved in the landscape and the very rock itself. They combine physical data, fossil observations and sophisticated chemical and radiological dating methods to paint a grand picture of Earth as being very old and very dynamic. Continents move around and bump into one another in response to internal convective forces and the Earth’s rotation, sea floor spreading creates more crust, volcanoes, meteors and tsunamis impose instantaneous change, ice ages come and go, and the Grateful Dead plays on.

Scientists look at how rock has been broken, smashed, twisted, stretched, bowed, uplifted, thrust, faulted, cracked, melted, solidified, re-melted, re-solidified, oriented and reoriented, pushed, shoved, uplifted and subducted in response to this dynamism. They collect, debate, interpret and reinterpret data from experiments and repeated experiments. They use that data to state, restate, test, retest, evaluate and reevaluate hypotheses (guesses) about how this all happens.

They publish papers in respected journals which are critically reviewed by their peers. They repeat experiments and design and conduct new ones to further clarify observations and conclusions. These new efforts are peer reviewed in a continuing, dynamic process. This is called science, the most organized, systematic, rational thought process ever, so to speak, thought of, for getting at the nature of nature. Science is what will save us from ourselves. Embracing it will move humanity forward. Denying it will create a new “dark age”.

When mountains of data collected over time and tons of experiments point to an apparent universal truth   scientists’ state that apparent truth as a theory or universal law. These are well substantiated statements about some aspect of the natural world: like the universal law of gravitation or the laws of thermodynamics or plate tectonic theory or the theory of evolution or the theory of ice cream is good anytime or that Donald Trump is an alien from Pluto. A theory is not simply a hunch or an opinion, as the word is used commonly and improperly.

Theories are modified or ‘overturned’ as new data reveals more revelations. They either become stronger or weaker over time. They are never final, never definitively complete and always potentially falsifiable. They are truly works in progress, kind of like us human beings. Scientific theories taken together are the grand pinnacle of our knowledge about the universe. Along with art, literature, music and religion they define our humanity.

The place that meteor hit the Earth at that time was covered for the most part by shallow coastal seas teaming with a rich with a variety of marine organisms. The impact, needless to say, kind of ruined their day. This meteor was a special kind of meteor, a “fireball” that some scientists say was probably as bright as a full moon, and it was traveling fast, very fast when it exploded, filling the air with steam and burning rock. Was this fireball, bursting over the future battlefield of the final battle of the Revolutionary War, God’s way of telling us that bursting and burning fireballs and light displays was how we should celebrate our independence 30 million years later?

The impact region was instantaneously changed. A fifty mile wide crater was not there and then it was there. An enormous tsunami formed and pushed outward. The returning tsunami carrying unimaginable quantities of rubble washed back in.

After that one catastrophic event, unseen by human eyes, that one instantaneous, apocalyptic explosion that altered the Eocene landscape of the proto Chesapeake Bay in unimaginable ways, an event that happened in the course of less than the time it takes to say, “OK Google”, after that, the slow work of grooming the Yorktown field of battle for those 17^th century American French and British warriors began. During the next thirty million years the crater filled in with sedimentary material containing remains of all manner of organisms living in those times in that place and other materials transported from as far away as the Blue Ridge Mountains. Don’t ask me how one discovers a fifty mile wide lost crater buried under hundreds of feet of sediment. Go ask a geologist.

Rivers and tidal currents shaped the shores of the Chesapeake Bay during those 30 million years including those of Fossil Beach where one can see remains of sponges, corals, bryozoans, gastropods, clams, scallops, oysters, barnacles, fish, rays, sharks, porpoises and whales. The fossils are there, right now, for anyone to see, feel and touch and wonder about.

They date from about five to fifteen million years ago. Concurrent with the laying down of all this fossiliferous rock, plants moved in as soils developed and before you know it a climax coastal forest appeared, with trees and shrubs to hide behind, the makings of a fine battlefield, the Yorktown battlefield.

In time that battlefield, along with what humans have built on the east coast, will disappear, or at least be transformed, maybe by sea level rise and land subsidence, maybe by a mountain building event, maybe by another tsunami or errant meteor, or earthquake, or volcanic eruption, or thermonuclear explosion or random Mily Cyrus twerks. So it goes.

The trip to Fossil Beach was a most memorable part of my visit to Yorktown in 1970 because it helped open my young eyes to the scope of the Earth’s physical and biological history and for me it was a defining moment. I have always remembered it and since then have tried in my amateurish way to learn more about the natural history of this mysterious and amazing planet on which we live. Funny how simple things can sometimes chart the course of one’s life. And of course I will always remember the pretty waitress who correctly guessed Oscar Gupton’s name, not so much because of the guess, but more she was so darn pretty.

Soon we will board Flicka and head south for more fun and adventure and we will sail right by the entrance to Yorktown, maybe even anchor in sight of Fossil Beach and VIMS, and I will be thinking about Cornwallis, fossils, meteors and a very pretty woman who is now my wife, love of my life and constant companion.

Right now, South Carolina is being ravished by a thousand year flood, a blip on the screen compared to the vast sweep of geological time but certainly catastrophic by our standards today. It could be that the ICW is filled with trees, cars, commodes, batteries, lawn chairs, coolers, fence posts, tires, old army ordnance, i-phones, tablets, laptops, notebooks, old Roy Orbison records, fifty-five gallon drums, big mac wrappers, plastic bags, raw sewage and every other imaginable thing discarded and left unattended by millions of people. (Why would anyone leave Roy Orbison unattended?)

It could be that the ICW doesn’t even exist now, as a navigable channel. We shall soon see. I am looking forward to finding out and I’ll keep you posted. So, look out for flickavoyages.blogspot.com. I hope you enjoy it. When you visit the link you can enter your e-mail address to get automatic notifications of new entries.

For now I’ll just say,

Hoy’kwche si’am langnexw-sen se, which is

Native American Salish for

“Goodbye I will see you again.”

Salish is the language once spoken by a number of indigenous Pacific Northwest tribes including the Lummi Nation. About 2,500 tribal members reside on the 20 square mile Lummi Reservation, northwest of Bellingham and a little south of the Canadian border. Some still speak the language. The reservation is a very small space compared to the much larger region where these people once roamed, which included much of the lowlands and islands in Puget Sound. We were very happy to have visited the reservation during our recent stay in Washington.

A particularly interesting and beautiful place was the Lummi Nation cemetery where the graves of the ancestors of these proud people are marked by colorful wooden totems and engraved stones. Each grave is covered with all manner of common everyday items that, taken together, seemed to tell a story about the deceased. 

 Scenes from the Lummi Nation Graveyard

Lummi totems