#But there are no real ferries on that stretch of the River Forth any more

[the-busy-ghost]

That occasional urge to just quit your job, abandon your entire life for six months, and follow a literary character or historical figure’s journey across the country by the original roads they might have taken

[jeanjauthor]

(Made up bit heavily inspired by bit with much much better women’s rights) In England late mediveal or early renaissance time, how would I put a bridge on a very large and wide river that large ships like cogs and big carraks can get under? I’d like to keep to that time period as closely as possible (but with different women’s rights) but I realised I need big carraks and cogs to go up a river I need many bridges on. Would swing bridges do? What would those be made of in those times? Stone?Wood?

eGood to know! Presuming a world without magic...if it's late medieval / early renaissance, just use drawbridges.

Understand that your boats will have to be smaller than most seagoing vessels. However,that doesn't mean they cannot be quite useful, and it doesn't mean they cannot be sailboats; they can! They just need to be more slender and shorter--not just to navigate between the central support pillars for said drawbridges, but also simply to navigate the twists and turns of any river.

This particular scene from the BBC's Edwardian Farm series has an example of just such a boat: https://youtu.be/obIWqJlxniY?t=1030 You should watch it, even though they're actually just discussing using quicklime to neutralize the acidity of the local soils, and how they're importing coal for use in burning in the lime kilns.

The most important feature of the scene for our discussion is how it shows the size of cargo ship that would sail up a slow, calm river. The various boats that sailed up and down the Yangtze River, the Nile, Hudson River, the Mississippi, the gazillion waterways of the Amazon and more, all of these had a lot of river-based commerce. Even the canals of Angkor Wat had a great deal of commerce via boat.

In some cases, such as at Angkor Wat, they would have had stevedores (dockworkers) standing by at bridge causeways that boats couldn't cross. These workers would literally offload cargo from one canal boat, carry it a few yards across the street to the next canal's boat, load it there, and send it on its way along a different canal system. (You'd have to see how the roads and canals at Angkor Wat were built to understand this system.) In other locations, they would have boat-pontoons serving as a floating bridge that could be unlashed and moved out of the way so that cargo ships could cross, and there would often be regular times for these switchups to occur.

But if you're dealing with late medieval / renaissance levels of ingenuity, then winches, gears, capistans, etc, would all be a part of their canal system, with broad, stoutly made drawbridges being drawn up and lowered down at regular points in the day.

Some of these pulley systems could be animal-powered (horse, mule, oxen, whatever), or it could be a wheel that a man would walk along, kind of like a hamster wheel, such as the kind found here: https://youtu.be/s46qP1l39V8?t=628 Though it's a long zoom in, you can see toward the end there are actual humans inside thos wheels, walking slowly to raise and lower whatever needs to get up to the building site. A drawbridge system would be no different.

You can also use folding masts. Since you're not dealing with a specific real-world place-and-time, you can borrow from other eras and traditions, including ancient historical methods, such as the bipod mast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipod_mast These were used as far back as the 3rd millenium BCE to sail up and down the Nile...which admittedly didn't have bridges to sail under, but the stability of the bipod mast made it easy to lay it down without overbalancing the ship.

With some clever hinges and pulleys and gears, a Renaissance shipmaster could make a system that would allow the sails to be quickly brought down...though to maintain forward motion when going upstream, they'd probably have to pay a lining service a fee to line the ship upstream. Here's an example of how to line a canoe upstream along a river from Far North Bushcraft And Survival: https://youtu.be/ZQ7940-M5mM

This is literally the same system used to maneuver canal barges upstream (and down!), powered by horsepower, literal horses, donkeys, mules, oxen, etc. This particular scene from the Victorian Farm series shows one such canal barge being used to deliver a load of coal, as they would've done in the Victorian era: https://youtu.be/Ccjyt7BQEVU?t=1374 In the scene, they talk about how it's "...a fly boat, going day and night; they change out the horses..." to indicate that these were in constant use. You can see how there's a path built under the bridge for the horse to walk along.

The barge would be manned and steered in most cases, since that's easier than doing it manually by the two-line method, but they'd still probably have two lines on the boat in most instances, in case the helmsman fell asleep, or there was a change in the current, etc. There would also be strict "lanes" for upstream versus downstream traffic, ideally with walkways on each side so as to keep the lines from tangling--this would be in use in areas with really flat slow/sluggish water, not enough room to use galley oars, not enough room to set sails, yet you still want your cargo to head downstream at more than a snail's pace with the natural current (ideal for big cities).

Small barges could also be poled like the gondolae of Venice, but again, that's small barges, since there's only so much effort poling can manage before it becomes nigh impossible not only to get up to speed, but also to slow down to make a turn, to stop, etc. So consider if your river is slow, if it's a series of canals, how many bridges there are, what sort of workforce there might be for loading & unloading, and for portaging.

To portage is to go around an obstacle that a boat (of whatever size) cannot safely manage. The most famous portages were done by the voyageurs of the fur trade in Canada, where they'd come upon a stretch of rapids too dangerous to traverse or have to leave the river they're on to go in the direction they need to get to the next river or lake system, etc. At that point, the fur trappers/canoers would get out, offload their cargo, and carry it and their canoes--sometimes for miles!--to the next navigable stretch of water...and most cases they'd have to set up camp when they got there, then go back for everything that got left behind, and haul all of that to the new spot.

In many cases in the wilderness, they'd leave 1-2 behind to guard said provisions, etc, either at the offloading site or the final destination site. But if you're dealing with a civilized/settled area, they wouldn't necessarily have to do that, but might instead arrange passage with wagoners / caravaners, the people who got paid to transport river-shipped goods between two points overland.

There are also the possibilities for canal locks (the ancient Romans had a precursor to the system we know of today) as well, but it honestly depends on how much that region has decided to put in the effort to dig and construct and manage them. If it's wealthy, has a history of innovation, and/or relies heavily upon river commerce, then it's quite possible. But most likely, drawbridges and folding masts are going to be ideal.

Just remember that those ships and masts are not going to be designed to withstand open-ocean travel or hurricane force winds, nor to carry hundreds of tons. River ships are not going to be the same as ocean or sea going vessels. For example:

"During the time of King Philip II's reign (1556-98), the Spanish galleon increased in size and capacity. For example, while the earlier galleons had capacities for 120 toneladas (Spanish tons), the post-1560 galleons tended to cross thresholds of 330 toneladas." (https://www.realmofhistory.com/2019/06/07/galleon-spanish-warship-facts/ )

Or: "...a typical American barge measures 195 by 35 feet (59.4 m × 10.7 m), and can carry up to about 1,500 short tons (1,400 t) of cargo." (from the entry on Barges, Wikipedia)

These might seem like good resources, but those galleons are oceanic vessels far too large and/or deeply drafted for river navigation, and those barges are modern ones meant for the lower Mississippi River. The latter are also powered by engines, not by wind, oar, or musclepower (animals or humans lining the boat along the riverbank).

Unless your river is huge--at which point ferries will be your ideal method of crossing, rather than bridges--your river-running ships will be small, sleek, relatively shallow drafted, will most likely have collapsing sails, oars for windless days, ropes for lining (even if their own crew has to do it), so on and so forth.

...You can still have bridges without drawbridges, if your river runs through a canyon deep enough that the bridge will clear the masts naturally, or your engineers invest in long, long, long ramps leading up to and over the central arch spanning the deepest part of the river...and invest in lots of riprap (rocks specifically placed for lining the banks of the river to prevent erosion, etc). Unfortunately, most rivers flowing through canyons flow too fast and hard to make good safe transportation routes...and really tall bridges exhaust humans and animals alike in passing over them, so...it's not very likely.

One last consideration: the river itself. Here is a snippet of a video I took when I had the opportunity to go on a Rhein River Cruise (Viking Cruiseline). The cruisehip is docked. It is not moving.

The Rhein really does flow this fast (up near Switzerland, iirc, but all throughout the trip as well), and it only slowed down somewhat at certain points. The banks in the city zones (and even much of the countryside) are lined with riprap (stones fitted and cemented into place to control the river flow and prevent erosion), and yes, there were a few canal locks along the route. A lot of that riprap was laid in earlier centuries, some of it late renaissance (and much of it repaired since then).

We were warned that if there was a lot of rain during our trip (this trip took place in May) causing a lot of runoff to flow into the river, there was a bridge downstream (near the Netherlands) where we might actually have to disembark from this ship literally cross the street for that bridge, and get onto another cruise ship on the downstream side of the bridge. Why? Because if the river level rose too much, this ship would not be able to cross under that bridge.

Now, the ship's top deck was disassembled to pass under other bridges. It literally had awnings and roofs on hinges that could be lowered to as flat as possible...and yet there was still a bridge they knew they couldn't pass under if the river level rose too high. Even with modern tech, etc, there will be obstacles like this.

So consider that for your rivers and your commerce. In spring and autumn, the water might run too high, perhaps even too wild, for safe & easy river travel. Portaging might be the answer. Or your characters might be crossing over the bridge which has an angry river crew arguing with the city guard about why they can't take their ship under the bridge (because it could damage the bridge, it's the wrong season, etc).

...You can also have droughts (oftentimes in high summer) which could cause the river to become too shallow for boats to pass in certain sections, or they'll have to lighten their cargo to avoid getting mired in the mud, etc.

And if your story is set in a region with cold winters, snow, ice, etc...the river might freeze. This poses a whole host of transportation problems, but then transport wasn't often done in the depths of winter, save maybe for foods brought from the storage barns of local farms. If the rivers don't freeze over, water travel is still possible, though hypothermia is still a danger.

If they freeze only a little bit, still possible...but once the ice gets thick along the edges, it becomes dangerous to try to "cut" through the ice with a boat of any size. This can include ice that is too thick to get the boat close enough to shore to exchange cargo and/or passengers, but also the possibility of ice actually damaging a ship's hull.

And of course merely walking on the ice is sheer danger, unless you know exactly what to look for, how deep it needs to be, etc, to be crossed safely--the idyllic picture of the Dutch ice skating along their canals doesn't cover the fact that many people fell through the ice because they hit a stretch that was too thin to support their weight. Certainly history doesn't tell us exactly how many perished, though logic assures us that many surely did--either idiots who didn't check the ice depth, or who were young and recklessly brave enough to be foolhardy, an unexpected warming of the water coming downstream thinning out the ice in a specific spot in the channel, etc, etc, etc.

River boat crews would be aware of such potential dangers, and would not want to travel in icy conditions if it was at all avoidable. Which brings us to living on a riverboat, and how to keep warm in winter when the hull is literally in constant contact with icy cold water...but that's another discussion entirely. If the canals are in constant use, the water "might not" freeze over because it'd be constantly disturbed by the passage of all those boats...but it also could, especially if a bad winter storm shut down travel for a few days.

Mostly, river boats would be lifted out of the water if at all possible before the river iced over (which the locals would know about). Why? Because ice expands, and it would expand horizontally into those hulls, cracking them. Water and ice are incredibly powerful forces that we often underestimate. This means that winter is the time when boats would be brought ashore, tipped onto their sides, the hulls scraped free of river mussels and barnacles and whatnot, sections would be repaired, the hulls re-tarred, and other maintenance issues tended to.

If river commerce slows or stops in the winter due to ice issues, then you'll have wagons and/or sleighs, etc, bringing in the goods...but again, your horses or other draft animals will have a harder time working in cold weather. Your cities will therefore want most of their goods brought into the city's storehouses before winter falls, if it's an area with harsh winters.

If they're just rainy and wet and miserable for the most part (*cough* the greater Seattle region (*cough*)...then flooding will be your biggest concern. If it's a region with seasonal droughts & monsoons...you could have a whole host of problems, but you'd also probably want retention ponds and lakes to help keep the river flowing--fill them up in the stormy season and let out some of that water in the dry season to keep the river at a hopefully passable depth.

Bridges (and drawbridges), boats, and rivers are all part and parcel with the equation.

One more thing, if your local region is building a bridge in the story (a common occurrence in the renaissance in many towns), it doesn't have to be a part of the story directly, but can be mentioned second-hand, like one of your characters can say, "avoid the Baker's Bridge--remember, they're doing repairwork on it."

If this is a thing you want to toss into the story (it makes your town feel alive, a growing and changing thing, without having to go into exhaustive detail), then remember that the architects will have hopefully taken all the shipping and transportation needs into account...but that section of the river or canal will be blocked by scaffolding, requiring everyone to portage around it. If it is a river split in two by an island, or it's a canal shooting off from or paralleling the main river, you'll still be able to have commerce up and down the river, but it will cause that river travel to be thicker and more prone to clogs, blockages, accidents, arguments, etc.

These are little details you can put into your story to give your world more depth without having to go into exhaustive detail.

Good luck, and I hope at least some of that helped!

[ruminativerabbi]

9/11 Twenty Years On

There are days that come to serve as historical pivot-points to the extent that it feels reasonable to refer to divide the history of the nation with respect to them into time-before and time-after. April 15, 1865, the day Abraham Lincoln died, feels that way to me. So does December 7, 1941, the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And so too does November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. Others, I’m sure, will have their own dates to add. (What is true on the national level is also true on the personal, of course: which of us would not add in his or her wedding date as one of those pivot-point dates or the date on which any of us became parents for the first time? But I speak here of the nation, not of its individual citizens.) And I think most Americans would agree that September 11, 2001, is in that category as well—and not just because something horrific occurred on that date, but because it has transcended its own news cycle and become part of our national culture. There are no college students (except maybe older, “returning” students) who remember 9/11 personally: the freshman and sophomores were born after that awful day and the juniors and seniors were babies or toddlers in 2001. And yet there is no newspaper or website in the nation that feels obliged to explain what it means when it references 9/11 without mentioning the year or the events of that day. Everybody just knows. That is, I suppose, what it means for a day to serve as a pivot-point in history: everybody, including people born after the fact, know precisely what is being referenced without any further explanation needed.

This Shabbat marks the twentieth anniversary of that horrific day. Like all of you, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that an airplane had crashed into the North Tower. (It was a quarter to six in the morning in California, but I’m an early riser and always check a few news websites before I get down to my day’s work.) And I remember too that stomach-turning moment just twenty minutes later when the second airplane crashed into the South Tower and it suddenly became obvious that we were dealing not with a single tragic aviation accident that had just happened, but rather with a fully intentional act of violent barbarism intended to kill as many random Americans as possible at once as a way of making some sort of perverse political statement. By the time most Californians were waking up, the third plane had crashed into the Pentagon and no one knew what might not happen next. In retrospect, it seems odd that we took our kids to school that morning as though it were a normal school day—but we did and then we went right back home to watch CNN and try to understand what was going on.

So much has been written about that day and its aftermath that I won’t attempt to say something new or to share some insight that no one but myself has had over these last two decades. Instead, and with the full understanding that this Saturday is the yahrtzeit of almost three thousand innocents whose lives were cut short by an act of insane savagery, I would like to offer an image from the past that has comforted me over these years…and particularly once we moved from California to New York just a year after 9/11 and settled into our new home not twenty-five miles from the ruins of the World Trade Center buildings in lower Manhattan.

The image derives from one of Walt Whitman’s most famous poems. The poet, originally from Huntington but by 1883 a veteran Brooklynite, is looking out at Lower Manhattan from his perch in Brooklyn Heights. He takes note of the ongoing effort to build the Brooklyn Bridge (which was completed later that same year, the year of my maternal grandmother’s birth), then shifts his gaze and focuses instead on the ferry boats that in his day brought commuters back and forth from Manhattan to Brooklyn all day long for all the years before any bridge linked Long Island to Manhattan. (And there were a lot of them, too: the first grant for a commercial ferry linking Brooklyn and Manhattan was issued by the New Amsterdam authorities to one Cornelis Dircksen in 1642, a cool 241 years before the Brooklyn Bridge was built. For more details, click here.) But this is a nineteenth-century image I’m trying to conjure up, not a seventeenth-century one. And by Whitman’s day the ferry is a real thing, a regular part of New York life, something ordinary and banal. Yet, as the poet looks out at the harbor, he is struck by the timelessness of the scene before his eyes, by the simultaneous in-history and outside-of-history aspects to the scene before his eyes, by the ability of the city to transcend the life of its own citizens. The poem is wistful and sober; for me, it as if the poet had some sort of preternatural ability to see the Towers absent, then present, then absent again as he somehow understood something of what would one day happen to the vista stretched out before his eyes as he gazed across New York Harbor on a sunny day in the 1880s.

The poem is called “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and is about the strange way people live within time and outside it, each of us living a life bounded by the dates of fortunate birth and inexorable death but also living in a world in which life transcends the lives of the living, thus making each living soul part of a grand scheme of history that exists independently of the details of their own lives. And then the poet looks (at least in my mind’s eye) directly at the patch of ground on which the World Trade Center will one day rise and somehow sees growth and loss, tragedy and rebirth, a city that both is its inhabitants but which also exists independently of them:

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,

Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

And in that idea—that the city, and by extension the nation, somehow both exist anchored in time but also fully capable of transcending time, and thus capable also of surviving even the most horrific disasters and tragedies because those events are by definition time-bound whereas the nation is specifically not—within that single idea lies, at least for me, some comfort as I think back to that September two decades ago and seek some kind of context for thinking about our terrible losses on that terrible day.

Sitting in the warm sunlight, Whitman saw darkness in Lower Manhattan across the bay and felt a prophetic frisson of looming disaster:

           It is not you alone the dark patches fall,

           The dark threw its dark patches down upon me also,

           The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious.

           My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

           Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil.

The man was a poet, not a prophet. He certainly couldn’t have imagined the World Trade Center buildings. (The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, the nation’s first “skyscraper,” opened just three years before Whitman wrote “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and was all of ten stories tall.) Yet the evil that would befall so many in that spot was somehow palpable to the poet as he sat in the warm light of a Brooklyn afternoon and gazed out at the site on which one day the WTC would stand, developing his sense that cities and nations truly do exist outside of time and can therefore flourish and grow even despite the evil that befalls them. In that thought, lie the seeds of comfort for a stricken city and a stricken nation.

There’s also something deeply Jewish about this line of thinking. The eternal people isn’t eternal, after all, because individual men and women live forever, but because they live their lives as individuals but also as part of a collective whole that transcends the details of their lives: that is what the prophet meant when he used the phrase am olam to describe the Jewish people and it’s what we mean today when we talk about the weird paradox that, despite everything, the most powerful of our enemies (the Romans, the Crusaders, the Inquisitors, the Cossacks, the Nazis, the Soviets) have vanished from the stage of world history and the Jewish people has somehow remained. And the same is true of our American nation, that it exists independent of its citizens and that it endures regardless of what happens to any of us. The thousands who died in Iraq and Afghanistan are certainly in that category, but so are the dead of 9/11: individuals whose lives were cruelly cut short, but who live on in the idea of a nation that transcends the life stories of its citizens and exists in its own right. May their memory be a blessing for us all! And may they all—the dead in the airplanes and on the ground in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania—may they all rest in peace.

[waywardsparrownz]

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER ~

Feb 13, 2018: Wellington New Zealand

  Two years is a long time, but the details remain fresh in my mind as if it were yesterday. Emma and I were waiting for the ferry to the South Island. The 2 AM ferry, to be more precise. You see, after a crazy week in Wellington, we’d gotten ourselves in a bit of a pickle. The bus we had been traveling on for the past several weeks was leaving and we hadn’t booked any seats. Our friends were happily bussing their way along the west coast, while we were about to be left behind! So Emma and I did the perfectly logical thing and booked ourselves tickets for the next leg of the journey (down the South Island’s West coast), venturing forth in the dead of night - planning to take the late ferry ahead of our bus. Once across we would hitchhike over to Able Tasman, where the bus would be stopping (and where there were somehow available seats) for a few days before continuing down the West coast. What could possibly go wrong? Well, a lot of things as it turns out.

  Not wanting to pay for another night in a bed we wouldn’t be sleeping in, Emma and had relocated from Nomads Hostel, to the nearby YHA in which our friend Gina was residing. The change was a pleasant one. After all Nomads sucked (See prior entry “Aukland… Again” for in depth rant about Nomads*), and the YHA common room was unsupervised. Ergo - no one would be around to kick us out should we fall asleep awaiting aforementioned ferry. Alas sleep was to elude us that evening. An annoying kiwi fellow approached as I reorganized my pack for the umpteenth time. “Where ya from? Where ya goin’? How long will you be there? What do you think of Wellington?” Every backpacker’s favorite questions no one’s ever heard before. Finchly snored in a corner, completely oblivious, while Emma and I offered short answers without asking the fellow any questions about his own story. While traveling is “supposed” to be about meeting new people and opening yourself to new ideas, sometimes one just is just a little cranky from sleep deprivation and not in the mood. However, opportunity can be persistent bastard.

“So you just hiked Tongariro eh? Such a wild landscape, but rather crowded these days.”

“Yup.”

“Where next? Oh Invercargill eh? I’ve been all round there. Not much to see that far south.”

  “Is that so.” It wasn’t intended as a question.

  “If you wanna to see the real New Zealand you to oughta hike the Kepler Track. One of the Great Walks. I was just there on holiday.”

  “Never heard of it…” Emma’s interest perked up. I continued shuffling thru my pack. If we were hitchhiking I’d have to leave some of these books and rice with Gina. Kepler huh… Tongariro had been breathtaking, but sadly crowded. I wanted to go somewhere unknown and off the map. Where there were no people and plenty of wide open wilderness.

  “Most people haven’t. Only saw two people the whole way.” That piqued my interest. “Lets see… On my phone somewhere… Aha!” He pulled up an edit of raging rivers and windy ridge-lines, narrating as the strange scenes flickered by. “Almost got blown off the mountainside here; had to pitch our tents under this outcropping. This one’s the remnants of an old landslide that near tore that mountain in half. The water on these falls came from a spring right up there: so pure you could drink it unfiltered!”

  We drew closer to the tiny screen with dying battery as he continued his tale with building enthusiasm. What the heck was this place? How could it be, such a magical hike was still undiscovered? And let me tell you: the visions fluttering past truly seemed out of this world. Steep cliffs and long ridge-lines, crystal clear pools and roaring waterfalls beside impossibly steep switchbacks. Little mountain huts for stranded campers surrounded by snowcapped peaks stretching to the horizon’s edge. Lush jungle, then temperate forest. Strange birds with iridescent plumage and sweet songs! How could this much be contained in a 4 day trek?

  The birdsong woke Finchly. He fluttered sleepily onto Emma’s shoulder, squinting into the screen with a faraway dreamy look in his eye’s “Bellbirds…” He muttered aloud.

  “Chur bro, that’s right!” Our kiwi storyteller winked at him. “Such beauties. So anyway, yah - you’re s’ppossed to take 4 days and hike it from the south, but we did it in the opposite direction. Way more fun! Oh yeah, and we hiked it in 2 days.” He puffed out his chest proudly.

  “Bellbirds.” Chirped Finchly dreamily. He seemed to like the very sound of their name. “Pro’lly  oughta go there.” He tucked his head back under his wing.

  Before the interruption, Emma and I had been on the verge of nodding  off too, but we were wide awake now. How do we get there? Is there a bus? Would we need climbing gear? Is the water really that fresh? How are there so many different landscapes? is this really only one hike? Our new friend had quickly transformed from minor nuisance to happy bard with eager audience. Delighted to have listeners - he regaled us with tales of adventure from Kepler and other faraway places well into the night. Needless to say we were entranced. Then as quickly as he’d appeared, he was gone. His travel buddy showed up, and they were off into the Wellington night scene. He was on holiday after all.

  Emma and I looked at each other, perplexed and excited. “We’re hiking that.” She said matter-of-factly.

  “Yes we are.” I was in total agreement. “To think, we almost told him to bug off…”

  “Bellbirds.” Said Finchly.

  I couldn’t sleep, but  Emma managed a short nap. We planned to walk, but got lazy and took an Uber instead. The Ferry was massive, and rather uninhabited. A vessel the size of a small cruise liner (perhaps not so tall) with scarcely 150 passengers on board. Who embarks across a wide strait on a far flung island of the South Pacific at 2 AM? Emma and I asked each other. Probably interesting people, with good stories, we decided. I would’ve asked a few of them, but no one around us looked particularly talkative as most of our compatriots donned eye-masks and earphones. Alas.

  There were no sleeping cabins. After all, this journey was only meant to take 4-6 hours max. We did a quick exploratory loop before settling on a cushioned bench by one of the doors. Our luggage had been stowed in a separate cabin, but we’d hung onto some jackets and our passports. Tucking the passports into a zippered pocket Emma used hers as a pillow. No one really stole passports in New Zealand, but one just feels better having their most important lifeline tucked safely under their head. Scarcely slept a wink that night: the door beside our bench turned out to be a minor thoroughfare. That was ok, I told myself. We were on an adventure, and I didn’t want to miss a minute of it! Even if I was shivering a little, and a constantly slamming door brought rushes of chilly air and kept me up all night.

[soclosewiz]

Proper Nowhere

El Salto was the place where everything changed for me on my first trip south of the American border. One year ago I traveled here expecting the unexpected, but I never could have guessed how much it would change my life. Before that trip, I had been living my life in a very predictable way: work during the week, climb during the weekends, and plan semi-annual trips with a few close friends. After a particularly successful vacation to the Red River Gorge in November of 2016, I came back to Seattle knowing I needed to get away again as soon as possible. Somehow that led to me planning a trip to Mexico with two people I barely knew that December.  

That trip changed me forever. Even a year later it’s no exaggeration to say I fell in love. Every day, in every moment, I was consciously aware that I had somehow unlocked a level of happiness I had never felt before. It lit a fire inside me for not just climbing itself, but travelling, meeting new people, experiencing new things, and all that the dirtbag lifestyle encompasses. I could feel that my life was about to change, as long as I was willing to let it; something that doesn’t come easy to me, yet I felt like I’d subconsciously been waiting for it for a long time. I eased into it over some long and influential spring travels until I was ready to fully move into my car and let the road lead wherever it did at the end of summer.

Deciding where to go on my travels came easy for a while, until suddenly it wasn’t. Cold weather and the winter holidays loomed on the horizon, and I was faced with a decision: to return to Mexico, or to attempt to find psyche in places where I either had no partners, or no desire to climb in the States. All along I knew there was only one answer, but I felt a strange reluctance to return to the place where it all started. I was afraid of what I would find upon returning to a place that had changed my life in such a big way—what if it wasn’t the same? What if it was? Christmas came and went and I still couldn’t commit to going farther south than Arizona, until finally one day I learned all my partners had cleaned out the gear we had stashed at the crag and were leaving within 48 hours to a place I knew I didn’t belong. It was time to face the music.

On December 26th as I walked out the door of the Chipotle in Sedona to knock a few hours off the drive, I got a message from a friend overseas asking if I would be in El Paso the next day and if I could help out his stranded friend. I had my doubts about picking up a hitchhiker, especially when I learned it was actually two of them plus a dog. Nonetheless I discarded my inhibitions and allowed the pair to curl up on my bed as I ferried them across the entire state of Texas. I got them through two border patrol checkpoints and a whole lot of what we called “Proper Nowhere” until we parted ways in Laredo. I thought it fitting, that my return to Mexico would start with an experience so far outside my usual status quo. I took it as a good omen of things to come, because Mexico was always about learning how much better life can be outside my comfort zone.  

Waiting for me in Mexico was a diverse blend of the usual suspects from last year, plus many of the people with whom I’d been climbing over the last few months. Both groups were people who had gone from complete strangers to like family in just the few weeks I’d known them. I guess that’s what happens when you spend almost all of your time with people, camping, eating, climbing, relaxing, even working—friendships get fast tracked. I had come to El Salto for two main reasons: to party with these friends, and to try and send a specific route: El Infierno de Dante.

I had tried the route before and walked away uninspired: long runouts at the cruxes make it hard to work the moves when you are just beginning the process and the route is at your (my) limit, plus something about it just didn’t light that fire in me to make me want to really sink my teeth in. At the same time it’s hard for me to ever really let a route go, and it had been sitting in the back of my mind for the last twelve months as reminder of a time that I had given up. Unlike other climbs of the upper 5.13/lower 5.14 range I’d done, this one I knew was within my ability if I embraced the projecting process and approached it with commitment and patience.

I find in my climbing that I go back and forth between two different phases—mainly what I consider to be project mode and vacation mode. In vacation mode I am out climbing purely for the love of the sport and all it entails. Failure or success, at the end of the day I’m still having a big dinner with my friends, drinking beer, and focusing on enjoying every moment of this beautiful life. In project mode I am an athlete, disciplined and focused, willingly sacrificing all indulgences in pursuit of whatever climb has become my latest obsession. The tricky thing about these two modes is that they both make me feel really good in very different ways, and I often wonder if I’m focusing on the right thing. When I’m relaxing, I miss feeling strong and in shape, having big successes in my climbing and feeling confident about myself. When I’m dedicated and honed in on an objective, I wonder if my sacrifices are worth missing the fun nights of drinking, staying up late, and eating excessive amounts of chocolate.

Perhaps the fiddliest part of the split-climbing-personality conundrum is that I can’t just choose to flip the switch between the two modes on a whim. Vacation mode is easy, but entering project mode requires a goal, and it has to be one that really inspires me. There’s a certain feeling I’ve found about my proudest sends during the process that made me really truly care, and it doesn’t come around all that often. I may decide to work a certain route, but at the end of the day if I don’t want it bad enough that I fall asleep thinking about it, doodle its name in the margins of a notebook, and feel my face light up whenever someone asks how it’s going, the relationship is doomed to fail.

The last spark I’d chased before Mexico was Rude Boys (which was perhaps a bit forced), and before that City Park. I’d done a few low 5.13s here and there, but nothing had really struck me on that level in many months. I did want to go out there and see just what I was made of, test my limits and try and be my best self as a climber, but I had to wait for the calling. Finally it came, and I was ready and eager to answer when it did. Day two in Mexico I quested up Dante’s Inferno and felt the stirrings of that feeling I had been so long without. I was inspired.

Dante’s Inferno is perhaps the most well-known hard climb in El Salto, which adds a certain aura of history that always draws me to a climb. It consists of 40 meters of resistance climbing, passing through two very sustained cruxes to the mid-way anchor, and then one last sting in the tail a few bolts from the top. The moves are hard, not getting too pumped is even harder, but simply keeping your mind engaged for that much climbing is perhaps the hardest part.

After a week or so of effort I slowly built up enough endurance to know I had a shot, yet I battled with bad skin that didn’t seem to recover on my rest days. After a long mid-day nap one day, I tied in with fingertips so raw it hurt to take my jacket off for one last fitness burn (aka an attempt with low hopes of success but done anyway for the training benefit). My friend Tanager had just told me that all of her best sends had been after a nap, and another friend who had just sent the route said he had done it with terrible skin as well, so I decided to go ‘a muerte’ even though it was my fifth attempt in two days and I was exhausted.

Screaming on every move, I managed to battle to the first anchors for the first time and partway to the second. By the time that I fell, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t even get through the final crux to work out beta for any redpoint attempts on the extension. It was success nevertheless, resulting in much celebration after a local adventure movie led to a wild dance party lasting late into the night.

One extremely hungover rest day and a mini break climbing on other routes later, I knew it was time to go back for the extension. The weather had gotten hot, and many people were losing psyche for Las Animas, the wall on which Dante’s is located. I had a few partners still interested, but as the morning stretched on they remained at camp, going about their day in leisurely style while I paced around in agitation. I watched minutes tick by as calculations ran through my mind—if we leave right now, there will still be time to warm up and have an attempt before the wall goes into the sun.

When it became clear that things were not happening, I left for the crag by myself, hoping to beg a belay off someone already there. Up until then it had been so crowded that you could barely weasel your way in line for a warmup, but suddenly there was no one at the wall when I arrived. I sat around for a while before deciding I was wasting my time, letting toxic thoughts flood my brain as I began hiking out in defeat.

Just then, two friends rounded the corner and called out a greeting and that they were there to belay and support. Having stopped by our camp that morning and heard of my tragic plight, they were happy to help. The sun was already creeping across the wall towards Dante’s, so I decided to forego a warmup and just go for it. I needed to work out that upper crux, so it wasn’t a send go anyway. It wasn’t a send go, except the higher I got the more it felt like maybe it could be. The rock was cool but not cold, I was fresh but not shaky, and moves that had felt desperate felt completely controlled. Before I knew it, I was staring down the upper crux with no choice but to wing it—no real beta, but I wasn’t that pumped and the sun still hadn’t made the route too hot to climb.

I pulled into the final hard moves of the boulder problem, toeing down on glassy pebbles so carefully that I knew I’d never let a fall happen because of slipping. Suddenly it was all over and I called out to my friends in excitement that “It’s going down right now!” even though I still had a few bolts of easy climbing to the top. I knew wouldn’t fall there.

Afterwards as I traded my climbing shoes for a belay device to support another no-warmup send by a friend, I couldn’t help but stare at Dante’s and feel a strange sense of melancholy. I felt like I had only just started to get to know the climb and it was already over. I was beyond proud of how quickly I’d done it; five or six days of work to clip the chains on my second 5.14 is pretty exciting, but I wasn’t ready to let go of that powerful inspiration I had finally managed to track down. I had been mentally prepared for a brutal battle, in which I fell at the upper crux dozens of times, went home in tears day after day, and questioned the meaning of life as I fought highs and lows of self-doubt. You know, the usual projecting M.O.

Ever since last year, a part of me knew that Dante’s was one of those routes that I just had to come back for. Who can say why, but there are certain climbs that sit at the back of my mind, waiting for the day when I’m ready to lay it all on the line and go to war. Luckily I still have a few weeks here to see if the next inspiration lies somewhere between these limestone tufas and calcified stalactites, and if not, to simply bask in the warm Mexican sun eating Elotes and being grateful to not be freezing in the Seattle winter rain. I had my doubts about returning to Mexico, but in the end and as always, the Wash provides.

[avanneman]

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk: Too cute!

Okay, we have changed the name of this website to “Snark R Us”, but bear with me. This is snark, but snark with a thesis.

Is Dunkirk an extraordinary visual spectacle? Well, duh. Yeah. I saw it at the Lockheed IMAX in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, one of the biggest screens in the area, and it was terrific.1 In fact, for the first hour or so, the film seems to be all spectacle, though entirely solemn—the opposite of the standard “spectacle” film—striving to dispense with any narrative whatsoever, one enormous scene after another, dealt out to us like great playing cards, without explanation or, seemingly, direction, except that we are told, explicitly, that the film will deal with three “elements”: Land, Sea, and Air.

For the first hour or so, Nolan presents the events in each element with "artless art". We can presume that “stories” will emerge, that they will fit together somehow, but nothing that we see seems to be prompting us to expect a particular conclusion. The cross-cutting between the elements don't comment on one another, and the intensely dramatic events that we see--planes being shot down, ships being torpedoed--are presented in a "things just happen" manner. A Spitfire disappears when no one was looking and our two "Land heroes" survive their numerous disasters through blind luck rather than quick-wittedness or bravery.

However, there is always a lot of "on the nose" dialogue—both because we need a fair amount of information to understand what’s going on and because Nolan has trimmed out all “nonessential” dialogue—and the further the film progresses the more conventional, and on the nose, this dialogue becomes. Finally, as the three narratives finally are drawn together, despite all of the ingenuity that Nolan has expended in creating a non-spectacular spectacular—the opposite of the sort of "Land of Hope and Glory" patriotic chest-thumping that is, of course, entirely out of favor these days, and has been so for decades—we get a veritable orgy of understated, indeed camouflaged, British stiff upper lip, which is hardly less objectionable than the old, adulterated as it is with the base alloy of hypocrisy.

A particular issue is the degree to which the film departs from "fact". Significant departures from the historical record, if they become frequent enough, are sufficient to sabotage any "historical film", but what is particularly objectionable with Nolan's treatment is that all the departures have the same purpose--to sentimentalize the events of Dunkirk and show that the British saved themselves entirely on their own.

The film begins on an almost predictably "surreal" note--British soldiers patrolling a "charming", seemingly deserted, European town when suddenly a whispering snowstorm of leaflets--leaflets urging surrender--descend from the skies above. Of course, the "real" Dunkirk had been subject to both artillery fire and aerial bombing, so that the quaint street scene we see wouldn't have been so charming, and, since airplanes back in the day flew much lower than they do today, the leaflets' descent wouldn't have been quite so mysterious, but directors do like to catch us by surprise.

The Tommies are soon caught by surprise as well, death coming, as it so often does in war, from a hidden enemy. Only one man, "Tommy" (Fionn Whitehead), survives, and he is clearly to be our Everyman. We follow him to the beach, where massive lines of passive, helpless British soldiers stretch across the sands, as though they were on the shore, not of the Channel but the River Styx, with Charon as their only escort. Tommy encounters another solitary, "Gibson" (Aneurin Barnard), and they pair, as orphans in the storm.

The film cuts away from these two to give us a refresher course in the harshness of war. Desperate French soldiers struggle to get in line for embarkation, but they're rudely pushed back. "Shove off, mon frère! These boats are for Brits only!" And what's the point of filling these boats up with wounded on stretchers? All they do is take up room! What do you want, an army of invalids or an army of soldiers?

Then Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) and Colonel Winnant (James D'Arcy) have a little officers' only chat about how bad the situation really is.2 Yes, we've got over 300,000 here on the beach but high command doesn't expect to rescue more than about 30,000. The Battle of France is over, more or less. Britain has to get ready for its own Battle and there's no point wasting good ships and planes on a lost cause. Bad show and all that, but we’re pretty much on our own.3

On the other side of the Channel, "Mr. Dawson" (Mark Rylance), skipper of a small craft, decides he's going to be one of the fellows who helps out, regardless of what the big shots think. He knows how to handle a boat, and he'll do his bit for Britain. And he takes along his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney), who looks awfully pretty, and "George" (Barry Keoghan), a shy little kid looking to grow up. (Guess what happens to him?)

After all this downbeat helplessness of land and sea, we get away to the air, where at least something can be done. A trio of Spitfires head out in search of German bombers, which turn out to be suspiciously easy to shoot down, largely because, one suspects, there is nothing cooler than watching a bad guy get shot down--though, to be fair, two of the Spitfires bite the dust as well.

It's when the three stories begin to intersect that Dunkirk begins to lose its godlike "indifference". When the Spitfires pass overhead, Mr. Dawson cries "Spitfires! Greatest plane ever made!" Well, maybe, but do we have to know that it has a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine? And so what if it does?

Later, things get considerably more conventional when one of the Spits has to ditch. As the plane fills with water, the pilot "Collins" (Jack Lowden) faces drowning because his canopy is stuck.4 At the very last second, crack!, an oar smashes open the canopy and Collins is saved! Old man Dawson somehow maneuvered his boat right next to the sinking Spitfire and cracked it open. And so a film that had deliberately avoided the heroic cliché of the standard war film embraces the cliché when the going gets tough.

Throughout the film, at Dunkirk itself, Tommy and Gibson have been functioning as a pair of Typhoid Maries. Every boat they board is torpedoed, mined, or bombed. Over and over again, sanctuaries become death traps, very much in the tradition of Steven Spielberg's Jaws and Jurassic Park. Finally, the two screw up so badly, trapped by a sea of burning oil, that only Mr. Dawson can save them, which he does.

Once Nolan starts getting maudlin, he just can't stop. We get a shot of the sea off Dunkirk, dotted with dozens and dozens of doughty small vessels—hundreds, even—as far as the eye can see, all to bring their Tommies home, even though, in fact, the non-naval vessels involved were largely ferries and other commercial craft, and almost all the auxiliary boats, of every type, were operated by naval personnel, because how can you rely on people you can't court martial?

Well, things are looking great when, all of a sudden, yet another menace! A German bomber comes swooping down for the kill on the hapless boats when, out of nowhere, yes!, the last Spitfire, out of fuel yet magically ghosting forward in majestic silence like an angel of mercy, comes to shoot down the German, though how an unpowered plane could maneuver effectively enough to engage a powered one strains the old suspension of disbelief just a little.

But in the film, Nolan pulls out all the stops. An enormous cheer swells up across the entire beach, although from our “god’s eye” perspective, it would scarcely be audible. And the soundtrack, which has been stringently and resolutely “ambient” up until this point, bursts forth with shamelessly manipulative “Hollywood” tones of triumph and release.

In the aftermath, the boys come home to rapturous crowds, live (most of them) to read about their heroism in the newspapers, and, in the voiceover, Tommy reads us Churchill’s words to the House of Commons, words that subsequent events were to make glorious rather than hollow, because in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, did step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Yes, the British saved the day, though Nolan might have mentioned that it was the French who prevented the Germans from taking Dunkirk while the evacuation took place over a space of twelve days. According to Wikipedia, about 3,500 British soldiers died in the battle of Dunkirk, compared to 18,000 French. Instead, he wants to show us that the British Army was saved by the RAF and its civilian sailors, the “little boats”, the same story British kids were told back in the fifties.5

It’s also notable, I think, that, despite the horrors Nolan depicts—helpless soldiers strafed by fighters, men drowning in seas covered with burning oil—he keeps the worst from us. There’s remarkably little blood in this film. We see men die, but the camera never lingers. We don’t see limbs being blown off, or men burned alive, as we did in the famous opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan.6 The honored dead are never degraded by death.

Afterwords For my generation, growing up in the aftermath of World War II, Dunkirk was a living legend, and I certainly did not need to be told that the Spitfire carried a Rolls-Royce Merlin. The audience I saw the film with were almost entirely young people. It’s “interesting” to think that their major acquaintance with horrors of the Twentieth Century (European edition), comes largely through works of British fantasy—Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, based heavily on Tolkien’s personal experience in World War I, and Rowling’s Harry Potter series, based on the stories she heard growing up about World War II.

Bonus Afterwords: What did the Dunkirk "miracle" accomplish? At the very least, it saved several hundred thousand British soldiers from a brutal five years (if they lasted that long) as German POWs. Arguably, it discouraged defeatist talk within Britain, although the real proof of the pudding was the RAF's victory over the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. But, ultimately, Hitler defeated himself first by declaring war on the Soviet Union and then by piggybacking on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and declaring war on the U.S.

The Smithsonian has three IMAX screens. They don’t show many general release films, but when they do it’s a great venue. No previews, no pre-previews, no coy reminders or come-ons, just the damn movie. Plus, you get to check out contemporary tourists. ↩︎

For some reason, Nolan pretends that Bolton and Winnant were the only two officers at Dunkirk. In addition, there are virtually no NCOs (army sergeants and naval "petty officers"). Film directors very often effectively dispense with the military chain of command both because they don't understand it and because they think civilian audiences would think it oppressive and undemocratic—all that yelling and saluting. ↩︎

Bolton and Winnant engage in what is to me a particularly “cute” exchange: Bolton: “You can almost see it from here.” Winnant: “What?” Bolton: [brief, pregnant pause] “Home.” Hey, Colonel, you’re a pair of Brits in France looking across the, you know, English Channel. What would you fucking expect to see? ↩︎

In war, things very often don't work the way they are supposed to. ↩︎

After World War I, there was a similar story, claiming that the French had stopped the initial German advance in the Battle of the Marne thanks to reserves rushed to the front in Parisian taxicabs. ↩︎

Ultimately, Saving Private Ryan becomes far more Hollywood than Dunkirk. ↩︎