Digesting Thanksgiving

Today will be my last full day in Pensacola and we started it as usual with Rusty leading the way around East Hill. The more I observe his behavior the more I see the predator in him. He already knows Therèse's home from several hurricane evacuations, when Layne brought him here to wait out any serious storm. Most recently that was Hurricane Irma which was a time of stress for families as the Keys were completely cut off for several days. It was none too pleasant for me either living without water, electricity, gas, or civilization in the minimally staffed police station!

Happy days, we are here by choice. And this is a pretty place. Rusty makes larger and larger circles each morning when we leave on patrol. My idea of a morning walk would be to get in the van and chase down some point of interest or to visit the rather pretty downtown and explore a new place. But my Carolina Dog lives by his wits and he likes to get to know who and what has been traveling past his lair while he was asleep. So we walk in apparently random circles around the block while he checks the ground for predators and likely dangers.  That such a wild thing cherishes my company never ceases to surprise me.

I have a few ideas why Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year and I know I'm not alone in this. The lack of commercialization makes this holiday special. As much as shopping and Black Friday intrude the holiday itself is somehow still as much about the basics as it ever was. Jews have a similar tradition I discovered after I married one - a choice as mysterious to me as Rusty's pleasure in my company. Passover is the meal that sees a place kept for Elijah the prophet who will one day show up, at every Seder simultaneously presumably to announce the arrival of the Messiah. Jews place Jesus as yet another prophet and they are still waiting for their savior to show up. I guess a few more centuries won't hurt because the Passover meal has for me an air of Thanksgiving about it and thus a welcome additional holiday.

I'm an outsider to both traditions so my family never sends me Thanksgiving greetings and I'm never huddled in a corner exchanging pleasantries with long distance relationships. In Europe among my nominally Christian family members Thanksgiving is just another Thursday. Which to me is tough luck because Thanksgiving is the best. Not only is there lots to be thankful for, it is also a holiday of pure sentiment, friendship, eating together, and open doors with no pressure to buy, exchange or pretend. Pass the sweet potato casserole and dig in. Simple joy. Some people then get ready to shop and others pull out their Christmas decorations.

Jews at Passover have a tradition of open doors to anyone who wants to sit with them. Its like Thanksgiving in that it's a meal shared, and even though there should be readings and questions and all the rest of the formula the nub of a Reform passover gets down to passing the plates with food. Europeans don't do this and they miss out. For centuries they persecuted Jews for hanging around waiting for a Messiah when one perfectly good one had already come and gone, and nowadays the concept of Thanksgiving seems permanently out of their grasp. Hollywood, McDonald's and I am told nowadays American pancakes are all the rage in Italy but Thanksgiving? That's weird. Not that, not in Italy.

We will be driving the next month, ambling our way to warmer climates and we hope we will be seeing "Feliz Navidad" lit up everywhere, as the western tradition of over the top commercialism has taken hold around the world. After my parents separated and my mother went to live full time in Italy after thirty years in post war Britain, I found myself celebrating Christmas in her tradition, where Italians had an old witch bring presents in January to mark the holiday (holy day) of La Befana on January 6th, Twelfth Night when the Three Kings arrived out of breath with gifts for the Messiah from eastern realms. The Epiphany, a forgotten holy day nowadays.

I was confused naturally but these days Italians have got with the program and Christmas trees and squealing infants gather on the morning of the 25th per the modern script and La Befana is an embarrassing relic of another time. But I remember Christmas in Italy as a time of eating and subtly giving thanks with not much emphasis on gifts and lights and stress. I'm doubly thankful I get to celebrate this holiday now in my old age in the New World. La Befana comes to America every Fall.

Thanksgiving reminds me of another brilliant Italian tradition that has been thrown to the ash heap of history which is the ponte or "bridge." For reasons too complicated to go into (look up Lateran Treaty 1929 on Google if you want) Italy was required to celebrate a number of religious holidays every year. August 15th for instance The Assumption of Our Lady was a day off, and still is in a national holiday month. Practically every month had a religious holiday and occasionally even two. Italy's neighbors dedicated to their Protestant work ethics made fun of Italian laziness with their unending series of holidays and days off and all the rest.

There was a brilliant twist to an already enjoyable religious holiday requirement with the possibility of making a bridge between the holiday in question and the weekend. If the holiday fell on a Thursday or a Tuesday, what was the point of going back to work for one day? We'll just make a bridge (a ponte) and stay away from work for four days. This all had to end with European rules imposing stricter work hours and uniformity, so it did end amid much national lamentation.

For me Thanksgiving has the additional pleasure of falling on a Thursday and thus creating one last holiday bridge without fail every year. It connects me to that mythical past of young adulthood in Italy made up mostly of standing around with my friends in uncomfortable holiday clothes leaning against our cars (and my non conformist motorcycle) discussing how we were going to spend the day off. We spent them mostly standing around discussing what we were going to do. My suggestions to go exploring were met with disdain so I took to my motorcycle by myself. I made my own tradition on empty holiday back roads.

I suppose being retired makes a holiday seem a futile exercise but being retired is more than time away from work routines. It's time away from office drama, conflicting personalities and the useless rummaging around in your mind for strategies to survive another pay period. My private Thankfulness this year is that I got out before the new wave of anti-vaxxer trainees took hold at work.  Add being Covid free to the list of things to be thankful for.

I had two brilliant Thanksgivings this year which might have seemed over the top had I been in a mood to judge myself.  As we slide into Christmas I will hold on to the simplicity of the Thanksgiving message. Next year I plan to be back and give Thanks for the end of the plague, give thanks to my wife still alive for being steadfast in the face of personal peril and be glad everyone is still here including us.

I will be thankful Thanksgiving is a North American holiday reserved for Canadians in October and us in November. For me it's not a historical massacre or a reason to get up in arms about history. I know what we do isn't historically accurate, blah blah blah, but I've never sat down at a table and given thanks with anyone who might remotely resemble a genocidal maniac. People I share Thanksgiving with are glad to be at table with people they like. That other cultures and peoples don't do this gives Thanksgiving, the parade, the football and the gastronomic exhaustion a personal flavor I very much enjoy.

Now that we've done that, let's get on with our lives. They tell us the virus is coming back with a new variant but I'm figuring we will find a way forward, messy, costly, argumentative and at times silly. But compared to what the original settlers had to deal with  this should be a piece of cake.  Thanksgiving means trusting we shall find a way as we always have. I plan to stay curious and to poke around as far from home as I am allowed and able, and as close to the road as I like. To everyone facing work Monday morning, thank you, and I'll not take my freedom for granted.

Caribbean Panama 1999

Our journey through the Panama Canal was not a slam dunk as we crunched before we cleared the last lock. I lost control of Miki G our 34 foot light weight Gemini cruising catamaran and we spun round in the surge of a ship's wake and slammed our stern against a canal tug still tied to the seawall. It felt like death but after we regained control of the boat and our nerves there was just some nasty bending of the rail at the back of the boat (the quarter if you prefer). We met with an official investigator who established that the tug let go of us too soon but there was nothing to be done. We straightened the rail and got on with the trip. Just one more experience.

To deal with the rail and to get our exit paperwork from Panama we took a slip at the terminally decrepit Panama Canal Yacht Club in Colon. I don't think the city of Colon has improved much since those days but at the time the city was extremely dangerous. I don't like to exaggerate danger when I'm traveling but Colon was really dangerous. One cruiser at the club, not someone we had been introduced to, was shopping at a vegetable market outside the club and was stabbed to death in an encounter, a robbery perhaps? A moment of anger? Who knows. That incident sent a ripple through the cruising community. We stayed inside the club fences and kept the dogs close.

Luckily the grounds were relatively vast even if the club house itself was a damp moldy wreck. No one stayed there for fun but the trouble was Colon was the port through which we all had to pass. It was a pain in the ...colon. To go into the city to complete our paperwork or get cash from the bank we used cabs and the dogs stayed at the club. The cab drivers parked close by the entrance to the office were going to visit and an armed guard with a shot gun at the ready stood between us and the door. I couldn't make up my mind if we were royalty or prisoners in transit. It was awful and I like to think it was  a bad moment for the city and things have improved since then. We couldn't wait to get out.

In the days of the Canal Zone Colon was a city in the Republic of Panama surrounded by US territory. It has had a dismal reputation for the second part of the 20th century and over the last few years there has been a reported attempt to beautify what I remember as a crumbling wreck. The port city of Cristobal (Spanish for Christopher) was the Canal port for the US administration and the city of Aspinwall was renamed by Panama as Colon (Spanish for Columbus). Nowadays the port of Cristobal is a district of Colon and Christopher is reunited thus with Columbus.

In Central America traveling boats check into one country, then check out and check in to the next one. The idea is that you leave a country in good order and the zarpe (zar-pay - exit document) proves you didn't flee the last country leaving debts or unsolved crimes in your wake. From Colon we checked out and gave Porvenir as our next destination- which is an island in Panama. Weird. Actually it is the main administrative center of the Kuna Yala, an autonomous region along the Caribbean coast where the Kuna Indians live isolated pretty much from the rest of the country. It is a much prized destination among cruisers and we wanted to see for ourselves.

The Caribbean Coast of Central America was settled by the British who sort of spilled over in their Imperial way from their Islands across the Caribbean Sea. However the marshy insect riddled coast of the isthmus all the way to Mexico is pretty much economically useless so the British really had no reason to stay. They left behind a black African population of English speakers who ended up being attached to the Western (Pacific Coast) countries where they lived. Thus from the Canal to Belize (former British Honduras) the coastal populations of Central America are culturally ethnically and racially completely different from the Spanish speakers of the western and more prosperous parts of their countries.  If you look closely below in Colon you can see the church has an English language sign on it. This dichotomy was very striking in the second half of our cruise.

Meanwhile back in Panama we had a quick and unremarkable sail out of the canal area and into open water again. We were delighted to be away from that industrial nightmare. Necessary but what a pain! We stopped next in the bay at Portobello, a small coastal town founded as a port by the Spanish and now nicely forgotten and dilapidated. Portobello is noted for two things: it has the heaviest annual rainfall of any city anywhere in the Americas,  13 feet annually if I recall correctly with a rainy season lasting nine months! The other thing is that this scrubby little town was the shipping point for the precious metals mined in South America. The road to Portobello ("Beautiful Harbor" in Italian) is still visible as a rocky trail through the jungle. 

There is a fort overlooking the bay so we trudged up and had alook and it is a reminder of the breadth and power of the Spanish Empire as you can see these constructions everywhere, even in St Augustine and Puerto Rico and all around the world. The only other incident of moment in Portobello was our one and only dog fight of the two year trip. A scruffy mutt came out of a side street and attacked Debs. I had to get in and try to drag them apart which somehow I did and no one was the worse for the experience. That and the canal in the space of a few days! We needed a desert island in the famous Kuna Yala- the San Blas Islands of mythical story telling.

The harbor at Portobello is as perfect as you might expect to serve the silver and gold trade pouring out of the beautiful port into the coffers of the King of Spain. Its a broad fjord pointing northwest such that the prevailing coastal wind blowing from east doesn't get in among any anchored ships, but it does have one drawback. To get out and then turn right to run down the coast to the San Blas Islands there is a reef, unmarked, and a lot of wind at the mouth of the bay.  We motored out. with a reef in the mainsail as a precaution, but we could see the white caps at dusk and the seas looked enormous so caution was the order of the day. The fight t pull round the reef was annoying as we bounced around but a miracle occurred and the wind switched and blew out of Colon and started pushing our boat towards our destination.

I think it was among the most memorable sails I had in those two years. We had known a tropical depression near Trinidad was supposed to suck the winds out of our area and the fact that it came to pass exactly as we. hoped, added to my pleasure. Catamarans sail level in most seas especially downwind and Layne went below with Debs to make dinner while I sat in the cockpit with Emma, the Labrador impervious to rain or salt spray or motion, and watched the silver waves flash by. The moon was close to full and we. were sailing the Spanish Main, an area of myth and fable and for a romantic like me the history of the place just added to the delight of a really decent sail. I didn't have to touch a line or adjust the auto pilot and Miki G went downwind at eight or more knots while ate a quesadilla and beans and drank a cup of tea in the miracle of a level cockpit. The conditions went on all night and Layne enjoyed her watch later as much as I did mine. We arrived at Porvenir early but not too early and checked in to the San Blas islands for our cruising permit.

It would be wrong to describe the San Blas as deserted islands even though many of them look exactly as you would expect, a tuft of coconut palms on a circular path of sand surrounded by turquoise waters. The Kuna Yala as the province is called is an autonomous region of Panama and the Indians who live there use coconuts as a form of currency (in addition to dollars which Panama uses as currency) so touching a coconut is an absolute prohibition. On the other hand the Indians have their own courts and legal system based on there owns laws. One of our friends had some items stolen from his decks and Bill Gloege, being the bulldog he was took the suspect to court...and won! He told us all about the hearing and it was quite fascinating to hear how the local system of justice listened and pondered and acted. You can believe we never touched a coconut while we were there.

Another curiosity about the Kuna Yala is that the social system is based on a matriarchal line. Its a bit too complex for me to remember from a distance but even though men seem to be in charge of day to day operations when a couple gets married the groom goes to live in the bride's home and ancestry is measured through the women, not the men. As sailors we enjoyed the privilege of living among these people who lived a life that we in the First World often crave in our dreams. They were by no means backward or unintelligent or lacking in a broader understanding of the world outside, but like other groups you may be more familiar with they picked and chose which aspects they wanted in their world.

Rio Diablo was our supply point, a couple fo hours sail from our anchorage in the uninhabited East Hollandes Cays (pronounced "keys") and we bopped over once a week to make a satellite phone call or to buy food and drink and as you can see they had electricity by generator and shops and fishermen sailing pirogues with great skill. A Portion of the Kuna Yala includes a long strip of land on the mainland of Panama where the Indians keep fields and cultivate food but they prefer olive in the sandy, and cooled islands just offshore. This area is below the hurricane belt adding to the paradisiacal quality of life here.

Bob and Barb on Freya, a Tayana 42 first met the traveling saleswoman known as Liza another unusual feature of life on the hook among the San Blas islands. I photographed the sales event before she came over to our boat and showed samples of her stitching. Molas are the first thing anyone will mention if you say you are going to the San Blas (and they do have primitive hotels accessible by small plane if you don't have a boat). Liza was a master mola maker and we were her  customers. Having been forewarned we brought t-shirts for her to embroider and when our turn came we handed over a picture of Miki G and a few days later she came back with our shirts covered an an absolutely glorious design of our boat. Unfortunately we carefully packed them before I remember dot take a picture and they re secure deep in our Miami storage locker.

Liza isn't a woman. It is a tradition among the Kuna Yala for some of the young men who feel so inclined to live as women and she is one of them. It's not discussed obviously but the lore is passed among sailors. She seemed happy and she is certainly talented and in 1999 she had a great thing going. 

Living at anchor inside the reef we had the pleasure of watching the waves build outside and Kuna Yala fishing inside, in the flat calm waters. We went to the movies which was what we called snorkeling among the most colorful undisturbed reefs we have seen. If you have snorkeled the Florida Keys you have no idea what a rich colorful living reef looks like and we had the privilege for several weeks in Panama. I got pretty good at holding my breath and with one gulp I could go straight down twenty feet and slowly angle up looking into layer upon layer of coral built like a skyscraper above deep canyons and fissures in the rock. 

Giorgio and Pinella from Italy became our neighbors and we sailed with them on and off along this stretch of the coast. Later we met them in Maryland and slept onboard their boat on the dark muddy waters that looked nothing like this. Pinella died a couple of years ago and we ask ourselves how we never got to see them back in Cagliari. It was here that Layne started to learn to speak Italian listening to me chat with them. Pinella loved to cook and she taught Layne a bunch of Italian cooking tricks while Giorgio lectured me on unionism and capitalism in the United States, a country he viewed as rather lame and anti-worker. He got an entirely different view of the country after they bought a small RV and drove across the US and he saw up close life as it was lived and all the kindness and easy going world that was the United States before 9/11. He was man born to travel and learn new things through his open mind. Meanwhile I had to get lectured on the evils of unfettered capitalism and could he pass me another spoonful of his excellent Sardinian fish paste (bottarga). I sold out easily for good food!

Tomoe was made of steel and was the complete opposite of our lightweight open plan catamaran but we had lots of fun together swimming and talking and drinking and walking our dogs together.

Then cam Thanksgiving. Our little community of boats anchored in this lagoon surrounded by empty islands decided we were going to celebrate this most American of holidays with English, Australian, French and Italian sailors not to mention a couple of Canadian boats who already grasped the concept of course.  We made a plan and it went like this. A shortwave radio message was sent to a ships agent in Panama who bought $600 worth of foods and each boat put in its own order. We added M and M's, Layne's favorite candy as well as a plentiful supply fo fresh fruits and vegetables and all the stuff we couldn't get in Rio Diablo. The. four of us loaded with cash to pay the bills of the several boats took a dinghy ride to the airstrip to meet the four seater plane which unloaded a bunch of styrofoam containers filled with our supplies. We hurried back to the anchorage to get the food in the fridges and operation Thanksgiving was well underway. Thats how you do it without Internet.

It was a great day of course when a bunch of strangers came together to celebrate on an actual desert island. The dogs go theirs and they lived an unfettered life among people used to seeing them around. Emma was always checking out what the people were doing.

Debs the hunter  spent his days chasing lizards among the palms while Emma the lazy Labrador sat in the water up to her chest cooling off and waiting for him to reappear from time to time to fall in the water and cool off. The only fly in the ointment was we were running to of money and thus time and we had to plan our escape from the paradise islands and go north. What a drag.

Boondocking Holiday

I admit I am strangely in love with the Florida countryside. It's easy to be astonished by extra long sand beaches, if you like that sort of thing, and the tropical islands of the Keys hold their own obvious fascination if you are into the tropics and not everyone is. I like it, all of it, the cattle country in the center of the state, horse ranches and white post-and-rail fencing around Ocala, the huge live oak trees Up North and the Alabama back country along the panhandle. To me the sandy trails and scrubby pine forests of the national forests are as much worth exploring as the dreary mangrove flats in my own backyard. Rusty? He has mixed feelings, fear of the unknown mixed  with the pleasure he gets at being outdoors on a. sixty degree day.

Florida has 175 state parks ranging from Fort Taylor in Key West to every kind of historic site, forested backwater, canoe trails and alligator ponds up and down this most varied and under appreciated of states. Frankly I like living in the state that has given the nation and possibly the world the "Florida Man" memes. If you haven't had the good luck to laugh at Florida Man let me explain a bit. The Internet has given rise to reports of people in Florida doing stupid, preventable, harmful things in ways that are absurd and slapstick. Harold Lloyd made a very good living acting like Florida man in early films. Nowadays it is fashionable to deplore the antics of Florida Man but I enjoy slapstick and eccentricity writ large. Florida is a terrible place to be bored or to be a bore, and my fear for Key West while Layne Rusty and I go traveling for a few years, is that the bores will take over. Already Florida Man is extinct in the Keys. Especially in relation to Key West. So Florida is far from boring and to back that up the State of Florida is doing a surprising job of actually preserving the unique pieces of wilderness it can for future generations. Here Florida people can hunt and screw around in the wilderness. Me with a camera, them with guns. 

Sand and mud and water are the obstacles to a deep woods retreat in Florida. Dispersed camping as the National Forest Service describes it allows for lonely campers to hang in the woods for up to two weeks and this form of van life is known as boondocking, ie: parking without outside facilities, a form of vacationing most often enjoyed in the western States, places with scenic vistas, majestic grandeur and fewer people over a larger area.  In those places dusty trails are filled with rocks and slopes and the sort of landscape most often shown in 20th century cowboy flicks. Florida is to all intents and purposes a sandpit with high heat and humidity, insects and great swimming beaches. The bits in the middle belong to people who live here and can't take the time to go rock hopping in Utah but limit themselves to sand spinning on their ATVs in these more modest backwoods.

Layne and I did briefly think about buying a four wheel truck and putting a camper shell on the back but several features of such a vehicle dissuaded us. The cab has no pass through from the truck requiring the campers to walk outside to switch between driving and living. Plus access to the rear always requires several steps as the camper is set high on the truck bed. Against all this you get off road capability. Let's face it: we aren't on going on the road to do deep off-road exploration and we know it. We wanted comfort and simplicity and ultimately we will equip ourselves to risk our home on deserted sandy beaches in remote places but not to drive up cliffs or to ford jungle rivers. I like asphalt roads to be honest. A two wheel drive van works just fine for us.

We don't have hot running water in our bathroom and surprisingly my wife was agreeable with this eccentricity of mine as she found it unnecessary on our boat where we used solar showers. So I designed an outdoor shower with a blanket a couple of clips and the solar shower we carry on the van. We could use it inside but we'd rather be traveling in a climate that allows for outdoor showers.  Two kettles of hot water added to the shower give enough heat to make the shower comfortable we find. All this to not be parked in a campground with electrical outlets and shower blocks and toilets. Worth it? 

In a time of pandemic the isolation of boondocking in a warm winter climate is a great thing. For us a crowded campground is outside our comfort zone at the moment and though we look forward to a vaccinated future we are unwilling to compromise months of isolation and hand wringing by being impatient at this rather unpleasant stage of the pandemic. I am learning to enjoy gravel roads and the van handles them very well. We usually roll around 20 miles an hour and so far we haven't caused furniture to shift at these modest speeds or to spill anything from our locking drawers. 

Thanksgiving should be a time to gather but this year it simply isn't. It is weird parked out in the woods like this but Layne is cooking steak and stuffing and Trader Joe's sold us a pecan pie and Rusty gets his share of protein. 80 degrees, the sounds of the forest and a rising moon.  Not bad.

Testing our MoonShade portable awning...weird fun isn't it?

Happy Thanksgiving wherever you are and stay safe this holiday.

Thanksgiving

Some Florida Thanksgiving humor:

 Thankful to live and work in the Lower Keys, where things are far from perfect...

 ....but with a good job and a decent home and mild weather and a few friends...

 ...you can live a moderately unconventional life and not take slack for it. Thankful not to have to deal with Christmas:

 Thankful to live where nutritious coconuts can be tossed out as garbage, not prized a s food:

Thankful Rusty has worked out so perfectly with minimal fuss.