Home

We decided to spend another day in Phoenix, NY. The weather forecast for the day isn't bad, just rain showers and wind five to ten. But rumor has it that Oswego is pretty well packed with boats waiting for a weather window to take on Lake Ontario. Tomorrow's forecast is good. Hopefully some of the Oswego boats will head out on the lake. If we wait until tomorrow to move, there is a good chance that there will be room for one more 42' boat when we get there. It is a plan from which to deviate.

I am looking forward to being in Oswego. For me it will mark a turning point on this trip. This first phase has felt like an uphill battle, getting the boat ready to go in the water followed by the seemingly relentless list of mechanical problems made for a real grind. It helped that the crew at the Delaware City Marina and fellow loopers were among the most helpful and friendly folks we have run across in all of our years on a boat. But there were still days where we just fought our way through because we didn't really have any other choice.

I'm hoping the next phase, from Oswego and into the US and Canadian parts of the Thousand Island area will feel like an even keel cruise. Once we cross the border back into the US I will feel like we are on the downhill run to home.

Home.

“Home” is a fuzzy concept for me, a wanderer. I left home at 19, newly married and with a job nearly half way across the continent. It was further west than I had ever been. After that were homes in Washington, PA, Kingman AZ, and St. Louis MO. But even with those “homes” family lore has it that any time I was in the same time zone for more than a couple of days I would get a nosebleed. Sometimes Deb would ask me when my next trip was leaving after having me wandering around the house for too many days, trying to stay busy. Somehow she knew it wasn't that I wanted to get away from anything. I just needed to be on the move. On days when there were no trips pending she would suggest I get on the motorcycle and put in a few hundred miles. “Home”, regardless of what kind of wandering I was doing, was where she and the girls would be waiting for my return.

The girls grew up and headed out on their own adventures. Deb and I moved onto Kintala. Everything we owned was on the boat. Where ever it was, was “home”. It didn't matter the country, open water, on anchor or tied to a dock. Of course we visited the girls, usually returning for a visit during some holiday or the other, and certainly to greet each of the new grandkids as they arrived. But we were visiting their “homes” and were away from ours.

The years of Kintala being “home” passed. We needed to refill the cruising kitty and had a good job offer back in St. Louis. We ended up staying for nearly 6 years. Kintala went up for sale while funds got stashed away. We settled into a two-room apartment above the garage with family, including six of our grandkids, living about 25 feet away. We decided not to buy motorcycles again; we were getting too old and the St. Louis drivers had gotten too crazy. But the wanderer wasn't quite finished. We bought First Light and got it ready for this trip. But this boat has never been “home” in the same sense that Kintala was. No matter where we venture in First Light, the final destination will always be St. Louis. And that is true in more ways than one.

Deb and I recently made arrangements for our after life resting place. It is a huge and beautiful garden with our selected spot (really) directly under the departure and arrival paths for airplanes flying into and out of the St. Louis International airport.

There is a poem written by Robert Louis Stevenson that best describes my feelings about “home”. It is in the public domain now, so I can share it with you.

Under the wide and starry sky,
    Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
    And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
    Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill.

Changing Times and Unexpected Pleasures

After cruising on Kintala for six years, it's hard to overstate the difference in the lifestyle that being on a trawler as a Looper is, especially since we've entered the river system. On Kintala—mostly open ocean miles and the occasional ICW stint—life was pretty routine. Passages were long for the most part, and somewhat tedious, and on approaching land we almost never took a dock, choosing to anchor along the way, which was almost always a financially-based decision. On First Light, we've had to take a dock by mechanical necessity far more than we would have liked. But it must be said that the Looper lifestyle is much more about docks and much less about anchoring anyway.

Back when we were on Kintala, before Starlink, anchorages were pretty much a social affair. Dinghies zoomed back and forth between boats, a cooler of beverages and food to share stashed in the bottom. Sundowners lasted till the wee hours in whatever cockpit was large enough to handle whomever had been invited. The crowd was more diverse in age, with young people bringing the energy to the gathering that us older ones lacked. In recent months, we've been hearing reports from full-time cruisers from many different cruising grounds that with the advent of Starlink, those sundowners are rapidly disappearing. Cruisers are choosing to spend the time with a television instead of with each other, a trend that makes me glad that we retired early and got to experience the best of that community before it changed.

Whenever they happen (not often) in the Looper world, sundowners are classed as "docktails". Chairs are brought out to whatever dock happens to be the stop for the night and beverages of various types accompany the telling of stories. Sometimes there are picnic tables along a free wall that are utilized, and less often a trip to a local restaurant provides the venue. For the most part, the travel schedule is pretty relentless on The Loop, so the time after docking is sometimes filled with food shopping and dog walking instead of socializing. As a result, I often feel a bit unmoored and if it weren't for the fact that I'm traveling with my best friend of 52 years I would feel pretty isolated.

One thing that has really helped with the feeling of community has been Nebo, a tracking and chatting app that nearly all Loopers use. It provides incredibly detailed voyage logs so I don't have to do them anymore (They email it to you automatically at the end of every trip and a monthly summary to boot!), and has a chatting platform so you can converse with other Loopers near you. I will probably do a full review post later after we finish the trip but I have to say that it's probably the best $200 we spent in preparing for this trip.

This trip along the inland rivers has also highlighted the impact that climate change and the destruction of natural resources has had on the environment. We have seen much, much less wildlife of any kind on this trip than we did when cruising on Kintala.  Many less dolphins and birds on the ocean passage portion of the trip, and absolutely not a single evidence of wildlife along the Hudson and Mohawk rivers or the Erie Canal. I looked constantly along the shore at the trees that have fallen in the water and where one would expect there to be a line of turtles sunning on the log, there were none. No squirrels, no deer coming for a drink, and only two herons the whole way up the river. The only birds in proliferation were the Canada geese and I'm not entirely certain that there's anything that will kill those things.  To add to that, the history we've learned by stopping at museums along the way has us deeply concerned. There were two whole exhibits at the Hudson River Maritime museum just to address the pollution of the river from the PCBs that General Electric dumped into the river. There are huge signs in the museum warning that you cannot eat any fish you catch in the river. The beautiful Oneida Lake that we just crossed yesterday is the fifth most polluted lake in the United States.

People talk all the time about living in the moment, savoring each experience to the fullest, but after last year I believe we can claim to understand that philosophy in a manner better than most. So, in spite of all the changing times, the true joy for me in this adventure has been the unexpected pleasures we've encountered along the way. The scent of wet pine needles on the Erie Canal, the amazing walking trail in Little Falls, the mountains emerging from the fog, the stunning fireworks display in Amsterdam, the amazingly helpful, knowledgeable, and courteous people that we've met in businesses like Tim in Delaware City and JT in Kingston and Jamie at Lock 17 and Mike here in Phoenix, just to name a few. And the best of all was last night. A bit after six o'clock, a large group of folks started gathering under the pavilion in the park next to the boat carrying instruments of all sorts: wind instruments, brass instruments, percussion instruments...and as they set up an even larger group of town folk began to populate the park with lawn chairs and picnics and much laughter. We had the best seat in the house. Our boat is in the free wall not 50 feet from where the band was playing. I sat in the cockpit with a cold drink and my feet up and enjoyed the music for over two hours. What an absolutely delightful pleasure and so very unexpected. And that, my friends, is what living in the moment is all about.