You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘personal’ category.
According to the calculations on my rusty cruncher . . .
this number has passed in the wee and dark and windy hours of Boxing Day.
A million . . . graphic ways of representing this would be . . . it would take 158 trips of Queen Sapphire, currently in the sixth boro, to deliver that many BMWs. Or the hold of a half-filled Bebedouro would contain enough Brazilian pulp for that much orange juice.
Wikipedia offers some other ways to represent a million.
Meanwhile, this is my next goal.
Here’s the proof.
I’m humbled and grateful. Thanks for reading, sharing, and commenting. And thanks for the emails and private messages. The green coming out of the rusty cruncher above is getting to know so many of you. Thanks and more thanks. I never dreamed this was possible when I started the blog just after Thanksgiving 2006.
Meanwhile, I’ll be in the wooded upland between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico til after New Years’ begin.
Peace!
I took all these fotos this morning. First, here’s the ashoremost portion of John B Caddell in the parking lot waterside of Edgewater Drive, roughly across from the Clifton*** Staten Island Railroad stop. After being delivered from RTC Shipbuilding in Camden, NJ in mid-December 1941, she has come to her end. Most of her life she delivered petroleum products, not water. Click here for a foto of her at work in the sixth boro six years ago.
Looking eastward, one might imagine a beautiful day under dramatic clouds, with the current pilot boat New York in the spotlight, in
an otherwise unusually empty Upper Bay.
An especially clean street here belies
debris left strewn on the street showing how high the surge rose and
leaving behind vile stuff like dozens (!) of vials of blood . . . with recognizable names on them!
Alice Austen house, about a mile farther south,
was spared, but just.
Neighbors on lower land began the cleanup.
And the Kills and Upper Bay, devoid of traffic, had a few vessels checking navigation channels.
Has anyone gotten “aftermath” fotos of Binghamton to share? Here, here, and here are my fotos of that vessel post-Irene.
To reiterate, I found the scattered vials with blood along Edgewater Drive very disturbing. I called 311.
From a mariner’s perspective whose truck got flooded while he was working afloat, click hawsepiper here.
For a report on the storm from a high-rise over the East River, click here for Vlad and Johna’s blog.
*** Six months ago another vessel washed up on another beach called Clifton here.
Late last week I alluded to an imminent gallivant. I imagined it’d be like this (truck’s not mine and I didn’t steal it), being transported away from all
thought of the sixth boro as I explored the bountiful interior on the first day of fall.
So down this valley about 300 miles upstate we traveled to see what would be around the next bend, and
the next.
Look at the terrain on this foto, left side. Notice anything? I’ll come back to it.
Who would imagine this is New York state?
And then the birds caught my attention:
buzzards and
and hawks of some sort.
Bird play was interrupted by the rumble of a train, and I’d imagined the bridge in the foto above was derelict! It was long.
Here’s the cropped version of the foto above I asked you to look at. Notice the horizontal break in the trees? I didn’t get to that side, but once there was a
canal there, the Genesee River Canal. Click here to see the same ridge from more or less the same vantage point about 150 years ago. And the tugs looked like this.
And that bridge . . here’s what it took to build its predecessor.
The beauty of the Genesee River convinced me to follow it up toward Lake Ontario. Here’s High Falls in Rochester . . . and another train crossing it, this one with containers ultimately bound for . . . China via the sixth boro, which
these reminders won’t let me escape, and that’s not a bad thing.
And this business has operated here since Prohibition.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp, who’s pictured in the gratuitous foto of the 1959 Chevy Apache pickup.
The race took place exactly 60 years ago today, and megathanks and superkudos to Harold Tartell for finding fotos of more than half of the boats involved in the race.
Top Class A (over 1250 hp) finisher was Reading Lines Shamokin.
Second was Barbara Moran.
No foto found yet of third place Socony 11, but fourth place was William J. Tracy of Tracy Towing Line.
Again, no foto of Dauntless #14, but here’s sixth place finisher Russell #17.
Number seven finisher was this Turecamo Girls, painted in “wood.”
And rounding out Class A, here’s Dalzelleader.
In the Class B division (850 to 1250 hp), top boat was Pauline L. Moran.
Number two finisher was Red Star Towing & Transportation‘s Huntington.
In Class C (less than 850 hp), the top finisher was steam vessel Latin American, operating for the Texas Company.
Number two Class C boat was Providence, of the Red Star Towing & Transportation.
Third place Class C finisher was Ticeline, of Tice Towing Line, Inc.
Unranked Class B boats include Fred B. Dalzell here and
here, as well as
Anne Carrol, a 1910 steamer of Carroll Towing Line also ran.
I’m reposting this image, made available by Paul Strubeck and posted yesterday. 1952 is especially significant for me because it was the year I was born. It was also the year that
Queen Elizabeth was crowned, nuclear sub Nautilus keel was laid, a B-52 first flew, SS United States first crossed the Atlantic, Ike became President, the word “smog” was coined in reference to London weather, Albert Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace Prize, lots of UFOs buzzed Washington DC airport, and Werner von Braun published Man Will Conquer Space Soon.
This last entry reminds me of the Mr Armstrong that died a few days ago. I’ll never forget the July night in 1969 that I, age 17 then, stayed up all night even though it was haying season; I’d worked in the hay all day July 20, and stayed up much of the night before working again all day on the 21st. My father thought I was crazy but my mother came downstairs to watch with me a few times during the night. ”What will it change?” she asked in different ways, and I surely had no answer, as excited as I was.
A few days later a farmer nearby told me it was all a hoax. ”Nobody really walked on the moon,” Elmer said. ”It’s all just a movie they made in Hollywood.”
43 years and a month later . . . well, maybe it didn’t change anything related to our travel destinations, but the some of the technology we live with on earth stems from those efforts.
A final thought: I recently read a statement by Robert Ballard saying that the NASA budget (I’m not sure which year he was talking about.) for ONE year equals the NOAA budget for 18 years. As much admiration as I have for Neil Armstrong, maybe the next heroic explorations should involve walking along the bottoms of the oceans.
Harold . . . I hope your family illness will subside so that you can attend the tugboat race this coming weekend. Thanks again for these archival fotos.
I have always loved maps, as far back as elementary school. The internet and satellites have changed maps; sometimes I still prefer old-fashioned paper ones. This post shows five “grabs” from on-line maps. What they have in common is that in each an inch is equivalent to about two miles and that all show places in the Americas. This is my last regular post for about two weeks because it is time to hit the airport, then the road. This road will take me through three of the five grabs here. I’ll identify the places along the way.
1.
At this link there are 24 quotes about maps . .. like this one by Abulrazak Gurnah: “I speak to maps. And sometimes they something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable.”
2.
Herman Melville said that true places are not found on maps. Here’s an interesting article that quotes him and talk about a place (not in the Americas) I’ll likely never visit, never have to navigate myself around with or without a map or chart.
3.
On travel . . . aka gallivanting, Robert Louis Stevenson said, “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”
4.
I airbrushed some names out of this map grab . . . lest you figure the location out too easily. And if you don’t figure it out, no matter . . . see this LandSat fotos or play with google for a while if you think these satellite images are beautiful, as I do. I didn’t change any of the colors, but some satellites use filters to capture invisible but significant detail.
5.
But as much as I enjoy looking at maps and charts, there is a time to get out, feel the wind on your face, and let yourself be surprised. Doubleclick this one; these two watchstanders on MSC Federica last weekend seem the ultimate gallivanters. They could even be time travelers.
I’ll try to write from the road, something I last did just a month ago here. Any guesses about the geography captured by those fotos?
Related: Here and here are some airplane seat art sites. Here are more examples of “land art” visible from google earth.
. . . astrotisements for everything imaginable.
If you live near NYC , a great way to mark Memorial Day aka Decoration Day, visit any of the open piers. Check out the “early history” in this wikipedia link. I seized the morning out here, on DDG 57 USS Mitscher.
Here’s the view forward from the starboard bridge wing,
to port were CG-56 USS San Jacinto and DDG-56 USS Donald Cook.
and starboard aft toward DDG-66 USS Gonzalez. On the tour I saw a wide range of specialists.
I had been assigned to Dewaruci, and went incognito, wanting to check some rumors . . . like . . as the US Navy has SEALS, but the Indonesians have
walruses!! And it turns out they do! Although, seriously, masks of different sorts are worn in traditional dances–reorgs–and the walrus represents strength.
Although Dewaruci was built at Stulken Sohn in Hamburg, begun in 1932 (pre-WW2 and therefore commssioned by the Dutch??) , it was completed in 1953, year four of Indonesian independence from the Dutch. The design, then, dates from a time that commercial sail still existed. But the detail on this vessel, currently on its last voyage, is phenomenal. I haven’t seen so much wood carving on a vessel since I visited the schooner Anne.
Here’s the namesake hero aft
and forward. The rest of the weekend I will be figurehead comparing, but this is hard to top.
Three main islands of Indonesia west to east are Sumatra, Java, and Irian Jaya; so the three masts–fore to mizzen–of the vessel are decorated in those styles. Here’s Sumatran.
and Javanese
with Garuda and
Irian Jayan, actually the western end of the island of New Guinea.
Here’s the wheel and
and the engine order telegraph.
A poster onboard shows the itinerary for this last voyage. A replacement vessel is on order; I’m curious whether it will
carry the same figurehead and wood carving.
An intriguing poster on deck also shows all the commanding officers from 1953 to present, from Majoor A. F. H. Rosenow to Haris Bima B. Letkol Laut.
Meanwhile, I have confirmed that the Indonsian Navy has walruses, which I was unable to interview, and
flies the jolly roger.
Tomorrow I head over to Brooklyn.
All fotos and story by Will Van Dorp.
I needed smiles so bad that I went through the past few months of fotos looking for cheeriness. And as I put these up, the sun broke through what feels like two weeks of mostly clouds. A sea lion, and
a close up of a sea lion,
a deck seal,
lots of fish, and my pole-vaulting
amazon.
Yeah, and this goes out to Paul . . . I don’t know how you manage all those weeks on the job! Tomorrow I have got to get some R & R.
Meanwhile the clouds are back and Willie is in my ear.
This isn’t the first tugster post with a single foto . . . and I’m not going to research among the 1762 previous posts how many more there’ve been.
Here and here are two previous figureheads posts, and come later this month, I expect another such post. Here’s a first image that would NEVER pass muster as a figurehead concept.
And here’s a question . . . can you identify the vessel that follows wherever this sea bull leads?
That’s it. Answer identifying the figurehead may be tomorrow.
Don’t forget to make your daily “partners in preservation” vote. Click on the image of the “rapid-aging-software-altered foto of tugster below, register, scroll thru to find “Tug Pegasus and Waterfront Museum Barge,” and vote once a day through May 21. Ask your friends to vote too.
And this software says this is what I’ll look like in 10 years!!!! yikes.
Dawn yesterday Rowan approaches the McAllister dock after a + 1500-mile tow of Patrice from Lake Ontario. I suspect that even if you didn’t know Patrice‘ story, you’d feel the pain. In many places and times, white is/has been the color of mourning and
rebirth. The colors and light here evoked thoughts of resurrection . . . as I stood in a little cove yesterday; structures in the background are in Port Elizabeth.
I offer these fotos of Patrice out of respect for the loss.
Meanwhile, the foto from yesterday shows unnamed vessels lying in the port of Ushuaia (end of the world, beginning of everything), over 6500 miles south of the sixth boro. Latitude number for Ushuaia is 54 degrees south; Copenhagen is 55 degrees north.
Distance from Ushuaia to Cape Horn is less than 100 miles. Again, thanks to Ben Orlove who took this foto from Le Boreal.
Cormorant and I sometimes chat down by the water. Like we did this morning down where Arthur Kill meets Newark Bay. We differ on some things, but usually it’s . . . laissez faire, live and let live.
And then this came by. It’s Discovery Coast, the brand spanking new tugboat I’ve seen twice before. The first I was driving and traffic precluded pulling off for a foto and the second time was too dark. This time I could have gotten it in the still golden light of 9:30 a.m. But I averted my eyes. . . it was too much to bear. I watched from the corners of my eyes until it passed . . .
Its silhouette suggests . . . pagoda. Just count the decks . . . if they be called that . . . six of them. Discovery Coast just came out of the Main Iron works in Houma, LA. Here’s the proud new owner answering questions about the vessel’s features. From the interview, I can appreciate the vessel meeting all the latest guidelines. And I’d love a tour of the living quarters. But
if this is the look of the future, then what associations I have with that is . . . so at one time was the Edsel! And cormorant, well he took one look and
got outa there!
I wish fair winds, happy voyaging, and successful & profitable service to Discovery Coast and Chesapeake Coast . . . but with all due respect . . . I’m with cormorant on this one.
Recent Comments