I.
Thursday, 8:30 a.m.. I'm in the office, surrounded by files, computer screens, the smell of paper and books. The drenching outside is of no concern. The office is dry and well protected from the elements. The same insulation from the forces of nature that will be driving me batshite next March is just fine right now.
But...My pants are quite dirty. This doesn't fit with the rest of the professional picture one should present to clients.
24 hours earlier, I had a front row seat to the nature show. My hair peeled back, eyes watering, standing while also swinging through many degrees off vertical on the deck of Compass Rose. Taking lobstering gear up for the season is always a tough part of a tough work cycle. Traps get untied and the rope coiled and bound up. Traps get cleaned of sea life, stacked on the boat, stacked on the wharf, stacked on the truck and then stacked in the yard. The process is often done in less than benign weather and less than ideal timing of tides.
Wednesday, the forecast was for 10-15 knots gusting to 20 out of the northwest. Not fun, but with a few strings of gear to the southeast of the island, I should've been sheltered enough to haul, coil, clean, stack and head for the Steamboat Wharf.
The 'should've' turned out to be 'wasn't.' Wind was ripping straight down from the northeast against an incoming tide, creating steep choppy whitecaps. They were not quite greybeards, but whitecaps.
By the time I'd wrestled one pair aboard, I'd slid so far downwind that the next dayglo orange and blue buoy was barely visible in the distance. Trying to haul the next pair, the rope was nearly horizontal, with the boat being dragged downwind sideways, so I also had to start running the boat in and out of gear to stay on top of the pair while running the hydraulic hauler and coiling the incoming rope. I was about 4 arms shy of being able to do this effectively.
Finishing one string out of the 3 I'd planned to take up seemed like plenty. It felt unsafe and irresponsible to continue. So I did. What made it ok was that the next string was just enough out of the rapid tide flow that the wind didn't kick up the waves quite so much, and slacked up just slightly. That second string was just work, just a matter of doing my job, which was baffling given how close the sets were to each other. The final string was a mix of the first two, but I just hauled the last couple of pairs aboard and headed for a sheltered spot to clean them up and coil the rope.
During all of the 'what the F am I doing in this shit?!' I noted a most unwelcome rainbow slick from the bilge spreading on the water. After all the fun of taking up the load of gear and getting it onto the wharf, I wound up cramming myself into the space below deck to try and locate the source of the petroleum spooge on the water. That space is small and one cannot come out without having picked up a good slug of slimy under the deck water/grease/algae. I was a few pounds heavy after that, and didn't really find anything.
When I flew off Matinicus that Wednesday afternoon, it was sunny with a very gentle breeze. I was taking off a batch of lobsters for Joe in my building, which explains my dirty pants the next morning.
Since Joe couldn't take the lobsters until Friday, I needed to find a place to float a crate so they stayed perky. This ended up being Round Pond harbor where I lugged the crate to the public float and tied it off out of the way before heading to the office. My attire was not really suited to such tasks, so the dirty pants happened.
This is my life in September. It is one of high contrast. Getting spanked by the elements one day 25 miles offshore, working with transactions and taxes in a comfy office the next. I'm looking forward to a little less contrast. It's emotionally jet-lagging to switch back and forth from one day to the next.
II.
Listen to Jud Caswell's The Great Divide. It's a fantastic song about our domestic political culture. The tune also resonates in the larger context of how we interact around war, climate change, health, inequality and justice.
In this area of life, I find myself- like many I expect - troubled by what seem like irrational divisions and cultural combativeness. I'm leaving aside the batshite crazy stuff for the moment (Joe Biden died years ago and was replaced by an animatronic or CG animation facsimile, 5G vegan space lasers, bloodthirsty reptiles in D.C. (oh, wait.hmmm)).
I'm fixated on the apparent need to find the dumbest, most one-sided way of looking at everything. This goes for left and right in my observation.
The Ukraine war is complicated, and comes pretty much straight out of the post-Soviet morass of financial corruption, political manipulation, brutality and sham elections. People seem to see the war (speshil meelitary celebration) in black hat/white hat terms. I'm particularly troubled by my brothers and sisters on the left who wholeheartedly justify Putin's leveling of cities, trenches full of civilian corpses and nuclear blackmail by pointing to nationalists in Ukraine and attributing all of this horror to U.S. meddling and NATO expansion. One can read up on the Orange and Euromaidan Revolutions and see the connection to hardcore nationalists committing atrocities and to U.S. interference and gaming of foreign elections. My armchair colleagues don't seem to have the scope of imagination to see the genuine hopes of millions of Ukrainians to engage with Europe and to have the right to exist free from Russian intimidation and election tampering. It's all one way or the other.
Pick your issue. Race, gender, climate change, economic justice, war. It's hard to find someone with which to have a meaningful conversation or free exploration of tough problems. With leaders playing to the Great Divide, there will be no solutions to great problems.
