A long-standing genre, so to speak, within ship modeling is ships in bottles. Friends in Massachusetts sell their bottle craft for over $1000 each. Since I was a child, I wondered how they got the ship inside the bottle. Was the bottle cut open and then invisibly reglued after the ship was inside? This was a version–at a certain age–of my wondering how babies got in “there,” a puzzle solved long before the ship-in-bottle one. Finally, in my 30’s I grew aware, fondly listening to these modelers’ descriptions of the meticulous technique involved in inserting the vessel inside the vessel, stepping the sail rig with thread then cut.
Lacking the patience for this fine craft, I hereby launch a sub-genre of blogging ship fotos: ships on walls. If you’re wondering . . . No, I was not driving while fotografing, DWF.
Wall vessel exhibit A might be Al-Hofuf, named for the Saudi oasis town home to star-crossed lovers Laila and Majnoon, unrequited love like a certain blogger and a certain Alice. That’s the Layla Eric Clapton alluded to, but I digress.
Here’s another, although this tug, Barents Sea, to be profiled later, on a wall next to a graving dock. I love these obscure bodies of water K-Sea calls up in their fleet names, but again I digress.
So I’ll digress one last time: these fotos remind me of stories I heard from my father. A herdsman/dairy farmer all his life, he spent his adolescence in wartime Netherlands milking cows in a pasture beside a canal. Sitting on a one-leg stool beside the cow, he looked upward to see canal traffic pass as he mindlessly handmilked the small herd that was his charge. Oh the weirdness of living in the low country: looking up–skyward–to see a ship pass. Hmm: shades of Chris van Allsburg‘s Wreck of the Zephyr, one of the best kids’ books ever, Zephyr being a sailboat named for a wind. Buy the book for someone–maybe yourself–this season.
Oh, and send me your “wall vessel” shots so that we can develop the range of this foto-subgenre.
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December 13, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Mage
Fascinating. Both George and I enjoyed learning about the North Sea. We also like the new genre of ship photos. 🙂
December 16, 2007 at 10:16 am
Biffle French
When I was in the Army in 1968 and 1969 I was stationed at Fort Clayton, Canal Zone. We were just across the road from one of the major locks for the Panama Canal. I used to watch every day when the big ships were being raised above the road as they continued their trek toward Gatún. It was always exciting to see the opposing lines of ships – one lifted up for the voyage northwest from Balboa to Colón and the Atlantic, then the next lowered down and headed southeast to the Pacific. Look at a map of Panamá to see the geography.
The American-built canal is still there, and the big ships still pass through, but now this American Dardanelles, the most strategic location in the Western Hemisphere, is controlled by the Chinese. These days it is Chinese, not American, (and not Panamanian) engineers who decide which ships shall pass and how much they will pay, and profits from the canal (if there are any) now flow to China. The Chinese are now acquiring former U.S. military bases there as well (for what?), and have constantly moved to consolidate their position in Latin America since taking control of the canal in 1999. China is also a major trading partner with Brazil, where they not only sell into that market, but also purchase huge amounts of commodities including iron ore for steelmaking, and running the canal gives them a big boost for that trade.
By the way, the currency in Panamá is the U.S. Dollar. They never felt the need to create their own, and that choice has saved them all the terrible troubles of hyper-inflation that caused violent revolutions throughout the rest of Latin America. A recent example of that point is November’s comeuppance of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, who lost his last vote to increase his power due to widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s high inflation. People who can not afford bread anymore will not vote for you, no matter what you promise them. Folks on Wall Street who whine about the Fed’s parsimony should take that to heart.