Book reviews

Nature is Your Guide by Harold Gatty – A Review

Editor’s note: Harold Gatty was born in Campbelltown, Tasmania in 1903. He went to school at the Royal Australian Naval College, and became one of the world’s great navigators. In 1931 he was placed in charge of Air Navigation Research and Training for the United States Army Air Corps. During World War II he served in the Royal Australian Air Force and his survival manual The Raft Book was standard equipment on U.S. Army Air Force life rafts and saved hundreds of lives. Subtitled How to Find Your Way on Land and Sea and originally published in 1958, Nature is Your Guide is a comprehensive expansion of the information in that manual, covering pathfinding in the wilderness, the desert, and in snow-covered areas as well as marine environments. Through years of research all over the world, Harold Gatty collected and tested the pathfinding techniques in this book.

“Even in these days of highly advanced technical aids, situations can arise when it is vital for us to be able to find our way by observing the signs of nature.” – Lieutenant General J. H. Doolittle, Nature is Your Guide, Forward, p.8.

When Gatty wrote this book he had 35 years of experience as an air and marine navigator. He even had his own Navigation School in Los Angeles for many years. He emphasized the importance of what he called “natural navigation” to show students they needed to use their eyes as well as their instruments. More, he showed how natural navigators, like people from ancient cultures, can use all 5 senses and even their inherent sense of time passing to find their way.

Moss doesn't always grow on the north side of trees, but observing what side it does grow on can help you find your wayAC — Moss doesn’t always grow on the north side of trees, but observing what side it does grow on can help you find your way

This is a great book, unusual, practical, and fascinating. One of the stories I find most powerful is that of Enos Mills, a mountain guide, who became snow blind and lost in the Rocky Mountains yet was able to find his way to safety by using nature as his guide. Enos was able to find the blaze marks he had made on the trees on his forward journey by feeling the tree bark with his fingers, as well as feeling where the moss grew on the trunks. Before he lost his sight he also had observed which type of tree grew on which side of the canyons in that area, and thus he was able to use trees as compass points in three different ways. He even used a form of echo location. Stories like this show how much information there is in nature. If we have eyes to see or even just ears to hear and hands to feel we need never be lost.

But Nature is Your Guide is more than stories. The book contains Sun Tables for telling directions by using the sun at all times of year and in most latitudes. There are also tables showing how to find indications of land by observing sea birds, and plates of the different birds encountered at sea. There’s an emphasis on staying relaxed and not being in a hurry. Needless to say, it’s hard to observe your environment whether walking, driving, or kayaking when you’re speeding along. “Everything becomes more meaningful to him who watches and listens without too much thought to the value of his time,” says Gatty (p. 17).

Nature is Your Guide shows how we can find our way in the natural world even in roadless areas by observing birds, animals, weather, plants, sand and snow, as well as sun, moon, and stars. The book is a natural for kayakers and anyone who spends time in the wilderness. Technology is great but it’s fragile and can be unreliable. Gatty uses years of travel, study, and observation as well as the methods used by early explorers and ancient cultures to give the reader invaluable information on how to use nature to guide us home.

Nature is Your Guide contains lots of practical advice anyone can use, for example, looking behind you on the outward journey to note landmarks along the way so the way can be followed in reverse. This is huge for hikers and kayakers. Last summer I had an experience on Mt. McLoughlin, a local volcano. Mt. McLoughlin tops out at 9,495 feet. My friends had gone on ahead because the altitude was causing my knees to ache and my lungs to catch fire. About half an hour from the summit the going gets really rough. The sketchy trail disappears and you only have two options: one which goes straight up the lava and one which goes straight up the ash. I sat down to rest. As soon as I did I felt fine. After thinking about it I decided I’d had enough and started back down. I’d been told how easy it was to lose the trail on the way back. There are “trails” all over the mountainside but all you have to do is follow the ridge down to get back safely. Still, after about 20 minutes I looked up and realized I couldn’t see the lakes that should have been off my left shoulder down below. Sure enough, I had got off the main trail and was wandering down into the big coulis which was most definitely not the place to go. I cut straight back to my left, traversing the steep slope and regaining the narrow ridge which was the correct path. I have a lot of experience hiking in the wilderness but because I didn’t look up and take my bearings often enough I got off track.

Mt. McLoughlin. August and September are the best months to hike when the snow has melted

Another great thing about Nature is Your Guide is that there’s a whole chapter on how early people found their way through the world. Of special interest to sea kayakers is the wealth of information on the Polynesians. For example the Polynesians had no word for distance. They thought of travel in terms of canoe days, canoe hours, even canoe minutes. Gatty also talks about the innate time sense common to most animals: birds, fish, ants, bees, even sea anemones, and how even though it has become dulled in modern humans as a result of our reliance on time pieces, with practice we can develop this time sense so valuable to early people. Eric and I used to play a game where we’d bet on who could guess the time more correctly. That little game honed our ability to judge time based on the position of the sun, the light, and our innate sense of time passed.

Also of interest are the wave and swell charts developed by the Micronesians of the Caroline and Marshall Islands. Other Polynesian navigators developed incredibly accurate mental charts that encompassed islands over 2,500 miles apart. The North Pacific Eskimos were able to create relief maps with sticks, sand and stones long before Europeans arrived in their lands. Memory of course plays a huge role in ancient peoples’ ability to navigate. I have read that the first Europeans to encounter island peoples couldn’t believe they could recite their ancestors going back multiple generations but in fact, geneaology was just one of the uses of memorization in these cultures. Practicing natural navigation can help us improve our minds as well as find our way.

Gatty offers the reader great examples of ways in which early people were able to avoid getting lost. Simple, logical, and obvious once you read about them, these techniques don’t occur to modern people because of our reliance on technology. All are based on highly developed powers of observation. Again and again while reading this book I was reminded of my own experiences on land and water. For example, the reliance on observation reminds me of the time I was paddling with Eric during one of his classes at Sniveler’s Row. Suddenly, as it is wont to do, the fog rolled in. We weren’t far out but we couldn’t see the coastline, so Eric chose to use the opportunity to teach natural navigation. First we paddled north back the way we’d come. We could tell north by the swell pattern and the sound of waves on the beach. Then Eric asked one of the students to figure out where we should start paddling in to shore at the Marine Reserve. The student underestimated the time we had to paddle north, possibly because you have to paddle past the take out and then turn back in through a break in the rocks to land safely. Because I’d been out there quite a few times and could tell by the sound of the waves, the lifting of the swell, and the white foam traces on the backs of the swells I knew we needed to go farther north and then turn in. Luckily the student figured it out before he wiped out on the rocks and we all managed to get back to the beach without incident.

Eric at Sniveler's Row — Eric at Sniveler’s Row

Another interesting thing about Nature is Your Guide is that the book answers some curious questions like why do lost people walk in circles? I know this is true but now I know why and what to do about it. Gatty also tells the reader how to read clouds and make use of their reflective qualities, and how to use wind to keep a straight line. There are also some fun experiments to help determine your dominant eye (this is related to why we walk in circles when lost). Gatty also talks about how to steer or sight on companions, whether human or canine as in the case of dog sleds. This too is related to deviation and keeping a straight line.

Also of special interest to kayakers are the chapters on finding your direction from waves and swells, the color of the sea, and the habits of sea birds. Gatty includes practical techniques like that used by the natives of British Columbia on fishing trips: dropping cedar chips from the boat to mark the route in fog. Another point of interest to kayakers is this: “Winds may suddenly change but the direction of the swells will not” (p. 162) because the momentum caused by prevailing winds is so strong that changes in weather will not affect them. Even when the wave action as influenced by weather acts in a different direction to that of the swell, Gatty says, “we can begin to detect the peculiar effect of wave motion working at an angle to the long fundamental chronic swell” (p. 162). He also talks about the usefulness of distance echo sounding because sound carries a long way over water. If you’re close to a high rocky coast in fog or at night you can judge offshore distance by firing a pistol, shouting, or blowing a whistle. The time between the initial sound and the echo is about 360 feet per second from the reflecting coastline. One last tidbit: Fiji Islanders can identify the sound of a shark swimming some distance away. Nice.

Great white - photo by Rob Cala — Shark! – photo by Rob Cala

Other things included in this book: an interesting bibliography, photos of wind swept trees, snow, and sand dunes to indicate the direction of prevailing winds, the migratory bird routes of the Pacific Ocean, and lots of cool drawings to illustrate the text. The Sun Tables mentioned above cover all times of the year from Latitude 60 degrees north of the equator to Latitude 50 degrees south. They are accurate to within 5 degrees and were developed by Gatty himself as being superior to azimuth tables used by navigators and surveyors in that Gatty’s tables are less bulky and complicated and much easier to use for the non-professional. Gatty includes a practical example to show how to use his tables. The star charts are of particular interest as well.

I highly recommend this book, especially if you are an expedition kayaker. However, even if you’re not a kayaker at all this book will help you find your bearings anywhere in almost all conditions, and the discussion of ancient human travelers and how they found their way with only their senses is worth the read alone.

“After all, the art of natural navigation often consists in receiving pieces of information from a number of sources, each of which by itself may well be unreliable, but the sum of which when taken together becomes a certain guide” (pp. 175 – 176).

Read this book! To buy, click on the link: https://www.alibris.com/Nature-Is-Your-Guide-Harold-Gatty/book/8429349

Questions and comments welcome! Please click below!

Waves and Beaches by Willard Bascom – A Review

Editor’s note: We decided to resurrect this best-selling classic because it’s just so damn good! A comprehensive description of how waves and beaches behave under all kinds of conditions, Waves and Beaches explains why ships sink, how rogue waves can split giant tankers in two, how surfers can ride waves with skill and dexterity and how we can harness the ocean’s energy, plus much, much more. If you haven’t read it, we hope you will. If you have, we hope you’ll enjoy our review and maybe be moved to reread this great contribution to the knowledge and science of the surf zone.

Willard Bascom worked as a research engineer for the Waves Project at UC Berkeley. He managed the first deep ocean drilling for the National Academy of Sciences’ Mohole Project. In 1959 he invented dynamic positioning, a technique for holding ships in one position without anchors that made scientific deep ocean drilling possible. The list of his achievements goes on, but the one we’re particularly interested in is this, his classic text, Waves and Beaches.

This book was one of Eric’s faves and a cornerstone of his library regarding all things oceanic. Illustrated by the author, this edition was printed in 1980. Because beach physics and the principles that govern beaches are the same from beach to beach even though waves and beaches themselves change a lot, this book will always be relevant.

Throughout the text Bascom references his more than 30 years of research on waves and beaches all over the world, but for me one of the coolest things about this book is that much of the research occurred at beaches on the California/Oregon coast. Familiar names like Half Moon Bay, Trinidad, and Crescent City give life to the descriptions of waves and beaches and motivate me to return to these places with new eyes and new things to look for. Bascom refers to our pocket beaches: narrow beaches of limited extent on which the sand is a shallow veneer over a substratum of rock. These are the beaches the Tsunami Rangers love to discover because so often they are inaccessible to anyone who isn’t willing to run the gauntlet through the rocky boneyards and thumping surf that often guard these jewels. According to Bascom, these beaches are indicative of a geologically youthful shoreline. In the winter, storms strip the sand away, exposing the cobbles and underlying rocks. Softer summer waves may replace the sand, but not always as we have discovered to our chagrin when we realize a tried and true camp site is no more and we have to go to Plan B.

With regard to Half Moon Bay, locals will be interested to see the analysis of the effect of exposure to wave action on sand size and slope on the “continuous beach at Half Moon Bay”. In Figure 75 on P. 263 we are treated to a diagram of Pillar Point Harbor before it was a harbor. I know the jetties and breakwaters were necessary to protect the fishing fleet but it’s cool to see what it was like before these constructions were laid down. With regard to Crescent City and Trinidad, Bascom has some harrowing stories about their respective lighthouses in the section entitled “Waves Attack”. I’ll never look at those lighthouses the same.

Trinidad lighthouse - this light is set 195' above mean sea level. In 1913 the sesa shot up the face of the bluff and stopped the lens from revolving. — Trinidad lighthouse – this light is set 195′ above mean sea level. In 1913 the sea shot up the face of the bluff and stopped the lens from revolving.

In the big picture, Bascom describes the combination of the celestial mechanics of earth rotation and gravitation, the sun’s radiation, and the resultant action of wind on the surface of the earth’s oceans which in turn raises waves and drives the earth’s currents. Reading this section, I was reminded of both a vast mechanical system ticking over into eternity and a living breathing organism neither of which have anything to do with humankind. Species come and go, but the mechanism ticks over and over, the global heart beats on… Again and again Bascom’s stories reinforce the dynamic quality of beaches: they are always changing as long as there are waves.

On a purely practical note, reading this book helped me clear up some terms and definitions, for example a simple thing like bay head versus bay mouth. I knew about the mouth, but never considered what the other end should be called. On a more scientific note, I finally understand the difference between reflection, difflection and refraction. Some things we know intuitively from time spent on the water but we don’t always have a name for them. Now I’m clear on those terms.

A term new to me was seiche. To quote Bascom: “If the surface of an enclosed body of water such as a lake or bay is disturbed, long waves may be set up which will rhythmically slosh back and forth as they reflect off opposite ends. These waves, called seiches, have a period that depends on the size and depth of the basin” (pp. 104 – 105). In another local reference, Bascom refers to seiching in the Noyo River Harbor and its effect on moored boats. In one experiment, even though there was no discernible surging motion in the harbor and the boats appeared quiet, when their film was projected, the investigators found that a substantial surge could be seen as the boats strained on their lines in unison first in one direction and then in another. And that is a good reminder that while all may seem calm in a bay or harbor, it may not be, and outside it’s sometimes a whole other world.

Waves and Beaches is full of useful tables like Table II: Wind Scales and Sea Descriptions which compares the Beaufort scale (from 0 to 12), with a seaman’s description of wind (from calm to hurricane), wind velocity in knots, estimates of wind velocities on sea, the international scale sea description and wave heights (calm glassy at 0 to phenomenal over 45 feet), and the international code for the state of the sea (0 to 9). It’s great to have a table explaining all those terms and measurements in one place.

There’s also a great section on rogue waves with hair-raising descriptions of encounters with monster waves. More stuff I didn’t know: rogue waves aren’t just really, really big waves; they can also manifest as extra-deep troughs, or holes, into which a ship falls before being overwhelmed by the next crest. I thought super-crests were bad enough but super-troughs, the black holes of the sea, just sound terrible. Here’s a sample from an event off Pt. Conception, California that happened to the skipper, Alex Winton, of the Oceaneer, a 100-foot long survey ship: suddenly “the bow dropped away as the ship seemed to fall in a hole” and “the next wave came high over the bow, smashed out all the glass in the bridge windows, and threw the captain back against the bulkhead, waist deep in water. All this happened in total darkness… while he was still trying to figure out what had happened, the ship shook off its deckload of water and surfaced”. Brrrr… Bascom mentions the Statistics of a Stationary Random Process, a theory which states that one wave in 23 is over 2 times the height of an average wave, one in 1,175 is over 3 times the average height, and only one in 300,000 exceeds 4 times the average height. However rare they are, I still don’t want to be around when a rogue wave happens, and that first statistic should give us all pause.

Bascom also goes into how submarine topography can affect waves which come from far away as well as close to shore. He cites the case of the Long Beach, California, breakwater which was damaged in 1930 by waves which were concentrated by a hump on the sea floor 10 miles out. The hump, which was at a depth of from 180 to 600 feet deep, acted as a lens to focus the waves coming from a certain direction right onto the tip of the breakwater. Waves only 2 feet high in deep water had been concentrated in a narrow zone as breakers over 12 feet high, enough to cause severe damage.

Damage to the breakwater caused by continuous wave action presents ongoing challenges to the Long Beach breakwater — Damage to the breakwater caused by continuous wave action presents ongoing challenges to the Long Beach maintenance crews

I thought I knew a fair amount about waves and beaches, so in a sense, this book reassured me. Much of what I read was familiar and reinforced knowledge I already possess. But a lot of it was new. For example, in a college oceanography class I learned that the particles in a wave orbit so that it appears that the water in the wave returns to its original position after each wave passes while the energy that creates the wave moves through the water creating an illusion of forward movement. But I don’t remember learning about the phenomenon of mass transport, which Bascom elucidates. In mass transport, the water moves forward slightly as the wave passes, causing a very small return flow of water along the bottom in the opposite direction to compensate for the surface transport by the waves. This phenomenon might not seem like a big deal until you think about undertows and longshore currents. There were lots of places in the book that rounded out my knowledge of the surf zone and helped me understand why, when and where waves break and what happens when they do.

Wave curl dynamics - Mavericks 2010 — Wave curl dynamics – Mavericks 2010

Speaking of undertows, I also didn’t know that such things don’t actually exist. According to Bascom, “One of the most ubiquitous myths of the seashore is that of undertow” (p. 225). Here’s his description of what happens to a swimmer in surf: “A swimmer in waves performs these circles as the water does; half the time these move him down to seaward, the other half up to landward. After each wave passes he is about where he started. If he gets in the trough of a breaker he will indeed be sucked under it, and as it breaks he will be upended and propelled landward, possibly to be cast up on the sand” (p. 225). Not to worry, though, because in most circumstances “a swimmer could stand on the bottom and, even if knocked down by the water moving landward, he certainly would not be carried out to sea along the bottom by the relatively small return current” (pp. 225 – 226). This is true, but as a matter of practical experience, I can say that if there’s a strong longshore current a swimmer may maintain position perpendicular to the shore and still be pulled up or down the beach parallel to it depending on the direction of the current.

Swimming in surf at Crescent City. While we stayed about 30 yard out, we were steadily pulled south by the longshore current. — Swimming in surf at Crescent City. While we stayed about 30 yards out, we were steadily pulled south by the longshore current.

In addition, I learned lots of snippets of information such as that the tides are actually long waves, having a period of 43,000 seconds (12 hours and 25 minutes) and a wave length half the circumference of the earth (p. 93). I did not know that, but I like to think about it. Another factoid I enjoy thinking about is that the solid earth turns inside the tidal bulge and independently of it. I’ve always thought of the globe of earth and water turning as a unit, but it doesn’t. The solid core of earth turns inside the ocean. It reminds me of when my massage therapist holds my thigh muscles in place and tells me to turn the thigh bone inside the “meat sock” as he calls it. Who knew? These bits of info aren’t going to change my life but they enlarge my understanding of the world and how it works and for that I’m grateful.

Although Bascom doesn’t mention climate change, when discussing waves in shallow water and their potential for destruction, he cites the event in Galveston, Texas in 1900 when the city was flooded by storm surge from a hurricane with winds of 120 mph which raised the water level along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico 15 feet above the usual 2 foot tidal range. Some 5,000 people drowned and the city was demolished. Bascom says, “Such surges remind us of how quietly the ocean usually lies in its basin and how damaging a small change in sea level can be” (p. 88). The shape of things to come…

Besides his comprehensive descriptions of wave action and beach formation and degradation, Waves and Beaches contains some great photos. For example, to demonstrate the power of big waves, there’s one of an aircraft carrier returning from a typhoon with part of its flight deck folded down over the bow. The steel deck is 54 feet above the water line but it’s bent over like a sheet of tin. There are some good aerial photos of the California and Oregon coastlines which are interesting and there are some remarkable ones like Bascom surfing his Dukw on a 12-foot plunging breaker and the before and after shots of the Scotch Cap, Alaska lighthouse which was swept away in April, 1946 in a massive tsunami.

Scotch Cap, Alaska in 1946, where the lighthouse used to be

Of particular interest to kayakers, there is a method Bascom uses to decide whether or not to go out in a boat in surf: “This is easily done, even if the line of breakers is well offshore. Simply stand on the beach face at such a level that the top of the breaker is exactly in line between your eye and the horizon. Then, as shown in Figure 66, the vertical distance between eye and backrush curl (which is about the same level as the average sea surface) is equal to the height of the breaker” (p. 230). As Bascom says, “You may be surprised how large the breakers really are, but it is a lot better to be surprised on the beach than in their midst” (p. 230). I’ve often noticed that waves that appear benign from the bluff can appear pretty gnarly when seen from the beach. Next time I’m considering entering the surf zone, I’m trying this exercise.

So much great stuff: the history of great seismic sea waves, the means to set up your own experiments, understanding wave curl dynamics, the role of rip currents, the best features of a good surf area (lots of good things for surfers), this book has it all. There are a lot of equations and tables and technical jargon and this book could have been horribly dense, especially to someone who isn’t big on math and science. But Willard Bascom is a man with a sense of humor as well as an ability to write in such a way that any layman can understand what he’s talking about. Anyone who loves beaches and the sea, and wants to understand them better will enjoy this book. And don’t miss Bascom’s adventures in the Dukw, a land/sea vehicle used to do research in surf. Dukws are 6-wheel drive amphibious modifications of the 2.5 ton CCKW trucks used by the U.S. military during World War II and the Korean War. I had no idea such vehicles existed and how they are used.

A Dukw boat. Imagine surfing one of these babies in 30-foot breakers! And there’s a photo of Bascom surfing his.

I wish I had read this book sooner, but now that I have I can refer to it again and again as I continue to learn about the ocean. And speaking of learning more, since Waves and Beaches was first published, much more has been learned about the subject, and it would be interesting to go back with modern knowledge to see how much has been added to our collective knowledge of the surf zone and how many questions raised in the book have been answered, if any. Still, although each wave is different and every beach is in a constant state of change, beach physics and the fundamental principles that govern waves and beaches remain the same and there is a ton of good information here. Plus it’s a tremendously entertaining read!

To add your two cents to this review or to share your knowledge of waves and beaches, please comment below. And if you haven’t already, Read This Book! To buy Waves and Beaches, go to https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/waves-and-beaches_willard-bascom/263100/?

Inside: One Woman’s Journey Through the Inside Passage by Susan Marie Conrad – A Review

Review by Nancy Soares

Editor’s note: Susan is an adventurer, writer, educator, and speaker. Her tenacious exploration by sea kayak has fueled her stories and images of the natural world for decades. Her articles and photographs have appeared in Sea Kayaker, Canoe and Kayak, Adventures Northwest, and Figure magazines.

Magic and gratitude. That’s what comes through in Susan Marie Conrad’s sea tale of her solo kayak adventure through the Inside Passage from Anacortes, Washington to Juneau, Alaska. For people like me who love adventure and kayaking but will probably never undertake such a major endeavor, it’s wonderful to read stories like Susan’s. For one thing, there’s the mental eye candy: the beauty and mystery of the Tongass, the fjords, the wildlife, the ice. There’s the excitement: the bears, the unruly weather, the people, “learning experiences”. Susan’s book is an entertaining, enjoyable read.

But wait, there’s more! Like many who travel solo, Susan was looking for something. In a way, in all great journeys from myths and legends (think Jason and Odysseus), to modern times (think Cheryl Strayed), when people sojourn in the wilderness the outward journey inevitably parallels the inward one. This is especially true for solo journeys because the first thing such journeys do is challenge you so you get to find out what you’re really made of.

When we encounter Nature in its original state on an extended solo trip like Susan’s, we allow Nature to envelop us; we live by her rhythms and suffer pain and pleasure at her behest. We get about as close as we can get to who we are and what life is about. Susan isn’t the first person to turn to the wilderness to seek understanding and healing, but her story is unique. Two major themes that weave in and out of her narrative are magic and gratitude. Guided by the nonverbal coaching of the great teacher Nature herself, Susan learns how to take the path of least resistance:

Dealing with challenges on the water, I had learned, is about approach and perspective. Finesse and strategy, more so than brute strength and power, are the keys to managing spirited water. It’s about finding the path of least resistance, much like water itself does. – p. 108

Later she connects that lesson learned from the paddling life to the default world of modern society.

When she embarks she tells us, “If a crystal ball had appeared on the beach that day, foretelling my feelings, along with the adversity and hardship I would be encountering I would have smashed it to smithereens. Uncertainty was part of the adventure and I wasn’t about to water down the magic of it all.” Often when we seek wilderness adventure we want to shuffle off the coils of “civilization” and surrender to uncertainty because in doing so we sense we’ll find Magic. Going out becomes a form of going in, to our heritage as humans who evolved on this planet and to Mother Nature whose womb is still our home. The world becomes alive and magical. We are transformed. Susan notes that when we are solitary we don’t have to protect ourselves. This allows us to experience our true selves, if we’re willing, and thereby experience wholeness and bliss.

For example, Susan learns about pushing versus letting go. Impatient to clock some miles, she makes a judgment call to keep paddling in deteriorating conditions. Luckily she gets off the water before the shit hits the fan. But the incident engenders some soul-searching:

Why was I taking such risks and pushing so hard? If you’re trying to prove something, Susan, the only thing you’ll fucking prove is that you know how to kill yourself. I berated myself, both fearful and infuriated. Fearful that my inability to listen to my voice of reason and to relax would render me dead. Infuriated because I didn’t know why I did this, why I always felt time was of the essence and that I must always be on the go.

The sea was teaching me patience – and I still had much to learn. – pp. 116 – 117

Over and over the theme of gratitude punctuates the narrative: to friends and well-wishers, to the sea and to Nature for the support and the lessons, and for a sense of budding faith in herself and in something else out there. After her close shave, gratitude and magic come together in a moment of transformation on the water:

I began to have strange sensations in my body, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I choked back tears that came out of nowhere. I thought about the extreme fortune I’d had over the two-week journey thus far, and how I had come to an uneasy truce with these waters.

Suddenly I felt that I was part of a much bigger thing; that this unfolding trip was a part of a much bigger thing. Perhaps more expansive than just myself in a kayak on the Inside Passage, I sensed a timelessness about it, an internal feeling of free-floating like something magical was carrying me through on this adventure, a feeling that I thought I could ride into eternity. I felt profoundly protected, as if angels were watching over me. Tears slid down my face and mixed with the sea water on my cheeks. Layers of selfishness were washed away and replaced with a heightened sense of gratitude, humility, and awe. – p. 118

That’s pretty big stuff. But even catharsis is just part of this book. It’s also interesting to read about Susan’s prep work for the expedition: how she puts together her food, how she trains, what she uses for gear. She had the great good fortune to be coached by her mentor Jim Chester, and to be able to use Jim’s charts, annotated by himself as well as Audrey Sutherland over previous journeys. The campground chores and the navigation requirements provide a structure, an anchor that grounds Susan in the mechanical universe as she explores her inner world.

After reading Susan’s story, I hiked up the mountain behind my house. As I walked it began to rain. Hard. My socks were too thick for my shoes and I thought I might feel the pain shortly. Then I thought about Susan putting one paddle blade in front of the other kind of like my feet pacing one in front of the other. Even though my little two-hour hike was nothing compared to just one day of her trip I thought, I’m not turning around. I’m going to finish this hike no matter how hard it rains, because it’s what I set out to do. I need this hike. I’m not cold, I don’t mind getting wet, and if my foot hurts I’ll turn around. Lo and behold, my sock didn’t bother me and even though I got wet through, my house was nice and warm when I came home and I was happy. That very day some of the lessons from Susan’s experience applied to my everyday life. Courage. Determination. Commitment. And yes, you’ll be protected and it will be all right. We can dance in the rain.

In the end, Susan rises to what she calls the “biggest challenge for all humans”, that of becoming comfortable with the conditions of the mind in the face of unfolding reality. On the sea, as she points out, this could mean the difference between life and death. In fact, this could mean the difference between life and death on land as well. Regardless, we all know how unfolding reality throws nasty curve balls. The layers of civilization and technology belonging to the 21^st century make us feel safe, although we’re really not any safer in the urban jungle, perhaps even less so. When we peel those layers away to where there’s no interface between us and Nature, we can start reconnecting with our sanity, and with the world, our true mother, which is immeasurably comforting. So I like the way Susan’s story takes her individual journey and makes it relevant to the reader on many levels. I think Inside is magic, and I’m no end grateful I got to read and review it. Check it out!

You can purchase Inside by Susan Marie Conrad by going to https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Womans-Journey-Through-Passage/dp/1935347578/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1479492233&sr=8-1&keywords=Inside+by+susan+marie+conrad

CROCODILES AND ICE by Jon Turk – A Review

To me, it’s all about connection and compassion…Once we lose one or the other, or both, the world becomes a much less pleasant place, and a more dangerous place, to live in. – Jon Turk

After reading this book the first thing I thought was Wow. This book should be read.

Why? For one thing, it’s a really good read. But as I started to write this review I looked at my notes and then at the blurb on the back of the book. One word caught my eye: sanity.

I’ve thought I was crazy. I’ve thought the world was crazy and the only sane one was me. Crocodiles and Ice made me realize that yes, I’m crazy, and so are we all. But Nature, or the Universe if you will, is eminently sane, and if sanity is to be found anywhere it is in the few remaining wild places of the earth. When wilderness is gone, then we will truly be mad. There is nothing more insane than an entire species in collusion, destroying the very thing that gives it life.

Paddling in croc-infested waters is risky business, but not if you propitiate them.

Crocodiles and Ice is a sane book. It’s about what we can do to recapture our collective sanity. Crocodiles and Ice is the story of how Jon Turk came to understand what it is to be sane through travel and adventure, loss and healing, and the guides and sign posts along the way that pointed him toward the goal. Civilization is like a cocoon that protects us from the Outside. For Turk, it was necessary to strip off nearly everything about that cocoon in order to connect intimately with Deep Wild. Outside, about as far away from civilization as you can get these days, he received a gift. And that’s what this book is about.

In Crocodiles and Ice Turk talks about what happened when people started farming. I’ve always heard this was like the greatest moment in human history because agriculture allowed humans to build cities, protect themselves, and have leisure to develop art, music, and everything we think is good about civilization. But Turk quotes Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote an essay entitled “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”. Modern hunter-gatherers don’t work that hard. For example, African Bushmen devote only 12 to 19 hours a week to gathering food. Compare that to the normal modern work week. Skeletal remains from Greece and Turkey show that people were taller, and healthier, before they started farming: “The combination of hard work, reliance on a few starchy crops, risk or starvation when these crops failed, and concentration of pathogens caused by the aggregation of people into crowded societies all combined to cause skyrocketing prevalence of tooth decay, malnutrition, iron-deficiency anemia, infectious disease and degenerative conditions of the spine” (p. 122). Even today, in those Mediterranean countries people have not regained their previous stature.

This is a paradox: though farming brought on all these bad things, the non-nomadic lifestyle was conducive to producing lots of babies. Sounds like a good thing, right? But it seems we can thank the development of agriculture for over-population, for plagues (remember the Bible?), and for war as farmers organized armies to conquer nomadic people in order to take their land. I think most people would agree that if anything is going to take us out as a species, overpopulation with its attendant plague, war, and starvation, will do it. We could avoid this madness if we reclaim our sanity and begin to live in harmony with our environment.

You can't do this kind of shit if you're not in harmony with your environment. — You can’t do this kind of shit if you’re not in harmony with your environment.

What does all this have to do with reptiles and frozen water? The crocodiles and the ice helped Jon Turk find sanity. This book is the story of one man’s awakening consciousness, of a scientist’s introduction to magic, of the ecstasy that can be found in the Deep Wild and how it can connect us with God, or Nature, or what you will – that which gave us birth and to which we return when we die. It’s a series of adventures as Turk travels to the Solomon Islands, to Ellesmere Island, to China and to British Colombia. It’s about a crocodile, a bear, a wolf, and a whole lot of ice, and the wildness and sanity they represent. It’s about the connection that’s possible between us and our environment when we drop our arrogance and our fear and see ourselves as one with instead of separate from Planet Earth. It’s about finding a place in our hearts where even death becomes harmonious and proper; where there is no fear, only the ecstasy of being alive.

We can’t return to our hunting-gathering past. We need farms to feed the burgeoning population. But we can heal our self-inflicted wounds and live with compassion for ourselves, for others, for our home planet and all the wild things, crocodiles, bears, wolves, and ice included, that form the web of Life. When we connect with Nature we connect with our deeper selves and thus find meaning and healing.

We all want happiness. What we are not told by our schools, our religions, or our governments is what Turk discovered: “the search for ecstasy is the only sane, valid, career choice” (p. 289). We seek happiness from the most ridiculous things: money, cars, clothes, houses, furniture, drugs, alcohol, relationships. Nothing lasts. But the happiness we gain from experiencing connection with the Universe comes from within, and is eternal. And it is in connection that we find sanity.

To purchase Crocodiles and Ice, go to https://www.amazon.com/Crocodiles-Ice-Journey-into-Deep/dp/0889823235/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1475164479&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=crocodiles+and+ice+by+jon+turk

Sea Kayakers, We Are “Seekers of the Horizon” – A Review

Editor’s note: Will Nordby, the author of Seekers of the Horizon, began sea kayaking in 1971. He has written for Oceans, Explore, Canoe, Sea Kayaker, River Runner, Small Boat Journal, and Ocean Sports International. He was also the originator of the Sea Trek Paddle Float, a sea kayaking self-rescue device. He worked for KRON-TV in San Francisco as a videotape editor and cameraman and he served as the safety chairman for the Bay Area Sea Kayakers Club (BASK). He died on July 9, 2014.

I’ve been catching up on my reading lately, and what a great book! Every sea kayaker will love it – why wouldn’t you? Editor Will Nordby compiled ten stories by ten sea kayakers and added a story of his own, and they are fabulous. Why fabulous? I looked up the word to see why I was moved to use it to describe Nordby’s book. It’s from the Latin fabulosus, “celebrated in fable”. That certainly describes the adventures in this book. But it can also mean legendary, or exceedingly great. These kayakers’ experiences definitely qualify. This is the stuff of legend.

This is actually the second time I read Seekers of the Horizon. I remembered thinking it was a super fun read and wanted to share it with readers, so I read it again. Maybe too I’m thinking a little about Will because he died recently and he was an important part of the Tsunami Ranger video editing team. Without Will, many of our videos may never have seen the light of day.

In Seekers of the Horizon there are excerpts from other sea kayaking books, such as Paul Kaufmann’s Paddling the Gate, a lyrical description of paddling in the San Francisco Bay and out the Golden Gate bridge. Paul was one of the first. Also, Hannes Lindemann’s “An Impossible Voyage” is from his book Alone at Sea, in which he describes his crossing from the Canaries to the Virgin Islands. Wow! If you want to know what it’s like out in the middle of the Atlantic in a folding kayak in an epic storm that lasts for days, you’ve got to read that one.

What’s so good about this book is the variety. A circumnavigation of Iceland by John Bauman, a quickie expedition to the Molokai cliffs by Audrey Sutherland that turns gnarly, and the rounding of Cape Horn by Frank Goodman are just some of the cool adventures you get to experience through the eyes of the authors. I also really enjoyed reading about Susan Meredith’s introduction to sea kayaking as a result of her two years aboard the health-ship Hygeine which brought medical care to coastal villages in Alaska.

Here are two of the vicarious adventures you get to experience: John Bauman visits Surtsey, an island in the Westmann archipelago, which erupted from the sea in 1963 and is now a unique laboratory for geologists and biologists. Will Nordby visits Glacier Bay, where inclement weather and the presence of tourist boats triggers a psychological study: imagining the tourists being warm and drinking coffee versus welcoming the challenge of the environment because of its testing of Will’s commitment to the trip and his self-discovery.

Along the way you get to be inside of these people’s heads – why do they do what they do? They ask themselves that same question, and so often it boils down to “What the fuck am I doing out here?” I’m sure we can all relate. They all answer that question differently. For example, Chris Duff writes that he came to kayaking from a “point of need rather than recreational desire”. Oppressed by his successful yet stressful military career he sought and found a life of deeper meaning and value in an 8,000 mile solo journey from the Hudson River to Florida and back up the Mississippi to the Illinois, the Great Lakes, and back down the Eastern seaboard to New York which took him a year and a half. That’s a long way to go to get away but it’s worth it for he rekindles his life: “The changes in me, and the experiences I had encountered were too awesome to comprehend. I was very different from the individual who had left that promising military career not so very long ago.”

“Why am I here?” muses Greg Blanchette as he begins his paddle around Hawaii. He points out that offshore paddling is very different from inshore paddling, with all the activity of waves and rock gardens, the “ready-made entertainment…the continuous procession of things to watch”. It’s on those long slogs that one can find philosophizing a useful time filler: ” ‘Why do I exist?’ ‘What is the purpose of the cosmos?’… My inquiries are conducted in a wondering, as opposed to analytical, frame of mind. My brain is off the hook – not actively searching for answers but considering them one by one as they percolate up through my consciousness.” Eric used to call this “deep philosophizing”, and he meant it both seriously and ironically. Is it really deep? Yes and no. When you put your brain on autopilot you allow all the random thoughts about life and the universe to well up from your mind and I think it’s a little like emptying the recycle bin on the laptop. It’s a form of cleaning out your mental closets, and you never know what treasure you might find. In fact, I’ve heard that all knowledge is actually within each one of us but it’s only available when you can deconstruct your mind by giving it space and time to open.

It was also fascinating to read about Hannes Lindemann’s preparation for his crossing of the Atlantic, how he relied heavily on prayer. Prayer had a profound influence in Lindemann’s life and on his kayaking: “My first step was prayer, the invisible weapon of man, which brings him healing power and relaxation, recovery and renewed energy. True prayer penetrates the unconscious, bringing peace to the individual and thereby helping him to overcome disturbing traits in his character. Without self-mastery, achieved through prayer, and through concentration, I knew my voyage would fail.” That’s one of the most interesting and useful descriptions of prayer I have ever encountered. He also utilized a system of self-hypnosis called autogenic training to allow him to survive on very little sleep without compromising his physical and emotional strength.

Frank Goodman offers seven vignettes of sea kayaking, which give the reader a beautiful menu of some of the many different ways one can experience paddling: working with troubled youth; a sweet, fun little picnic on a local river; a meditation on courage when someone bags out of a trip due to fear; not to mention the epic paddle around the Horn. And in Larry Rice’s Rocks, Ice, and White Whales you get to follow his and Judy’s discovery of the Thule people on Baffin Island, predecessors of the modern Inuit. Looking at a grave site and peering through a chink in a grave they see a section of skull with braided golden hair, giving rise to speculation about blonde-haired Vikings discovering a country west of Greenland long ago.

Speaking of long ago, one of the nice things about this book is that the authors are all pioneers of sorts. Paul Kaufmann, Will Norby, Audrey Sutherland, Christopher Cunningham, and Frank Goodman were kayaking in the 60’s and ’70’s. Susan Meredith was born in 1918 and started kayaking in the ’40’s. Hannes Lindemann made his legendary Atlantic crossings (yes he did two, one in a dugout canoe) in the ’50’s. All of these journeys took place at a time that may seem like ancient history to today’s kayakers. But this is our history, the history of modern kayaking. This is where we came from. Everything we do rests on the backs of these people and others like them who broke new kayaking ground with their dreams, their plans, and their adventures. These are our ancestors, and they did some really cool stuff.

You can buy Seekers of the Horizon on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Seekers-Horizon-Kayaking-Voyages-Around/dp/0871066343/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1446056377&sr=1-3&keywords=seekers+of+the+horizon