Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

42 degrees 47 minutes S 56 degrees 8 minutes W 10:30 pm course 006

At last! A clear night. I went upstairs, first to the sky deck, the highest deck on the ship, trying to see the southern sky but the ship’s stacks were in the way. After some shielding with my arm, I could make out a few stars in the south, but only well above the horizon.

I did see Eriadnus, new to me, and Orion. It took me a bit of looking at Orion to notice that it was my old friend, but upside down. Yes, his sword pointed toward the celestial dome rather than the celestial equator. A strange and somewhat disorienting view of him, but also appropriate to the southern hemisphere.

I wandered toward the back of the ship, crossing the empty basketball court and pushing through netting at its rear. There was an area of the ship I had not explored on the next deck below, deck 11. It was an area called the Retreat where outdoor movies get shown on Thursday nights.

It’s big advantage in this instance was a rail at the stern beyond the light pollution of the ship and below and behind the stacks that were in the way up above on the sky deck.

Sure enough, right where my star map said it would be was the southern cross, hung upside down, looking more like a kite than a cross, but clearly there. It thrilled me to see it. This is one of those physical experiences you can have only in the Southern Hemisphere. I’ve read about the Southern Cross all my life and now I’ve seen it.

That was not the only unusual event tonight. Kate’s Uncle Ollie liked the occasional trip to the casino, so she gave me a $20 bill and told me to gamble it in Uncle Ollie’s memory. My thought was to go put it on red on the roulette wheel, one bet, then the ritual is over. But the roulette wheel had not yet started up, so I headed for a game I knew. Blackjack.

In the long ago far away I used to play blackjack every night, five nights a week while waiting to pick up my papers and deliver them on my route. This went on for 8 years. I’ve played a lot of blackjack.

Turns out the casino version is a little different, but not much. I sat down, passed the dealer my $20 and took four five dollar chips from him.

Uncle Ollie rode on my shoulder this evening. I long ago learned the basic rules of blackjack. First rule is, be the dealer. Well, the house has that covered and it’s a big advantage.

Second rule, 17 or more stay. 16 or less, take a hit.

Third rule. Follow rule 2.

If you’re a real whiz with memory and can count cards, you can always beat the house. I’m not a memory whiz, so I stuck to the basics.

About ten minutes into the play I had the guy next to me rubbing my shoulder for a little luck. Twenty minutes later I cashed, went to the pay window and collected $100. We’ll put the money toward some memorial for Uncle Ollie.

Winning at blackjack and seeing the southern cross, a good night.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

44 degrees 35 minutes S 56 degrees 24 minutes W heading 009

Back at our own latitude and beyond it a bit, perhaps down by the Iowa border, headed south toward warmer climes; though here, of course, instead we go north. This happened sometime around 3:30 pm Santiago time while Kate and I napped.

We went down close to 56 degrees south, the furthest point being Cape Horn, just 34 degrees from the South Pole. Now, oddly, I’ve been closer to the South Pole than the North.

About five weeks ago I observed that the world ocean is big. Turns out its bigger than that. It is huge and we will sail over a 1,000 nautical miles toward Buenos Aires with no sight of land whatever. No land.

We do this on a bit of artificial land. This ship. We need, absolutely have to have, something to stand on, a place to get upright, without it, we might swim a ways or hang from a long rope dangling, we might float in space, but we will not be human. We will be a weak fish or bird or sloth, not strong enough to save ourselves.

Sometimes, when you least expect it, your ship disappears and leaves you stranded in the deeper ocean of our short lives. That happened to Kate today. An e-mail reached out through satellite and digits, made its way on board here and informed that her Uncle Ollie had died. He was the last of her mother and father’s generation, his death a shock because his illness had come up suddenly.

Since my Aunt Roberta’s death some years ago, I, too, have stood as the older generation in my family and now she does, too. It’s a sobering place to be and takes some time to absorb.

This trip has become a marker not only of Kate’s retirement from medicine, but, too, as her change in the generational order. Eventful for either reason, for both, it becomes a true phase change, from gas to plasma, say.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

46 degrees 28 minutes S 56 degrees 42 minutes W course heading 004

Sun light on the ocean gives a brief brilliance to a bit of wave, water lifted up higher than the main body. Quick as a blink or quicker the dash of bright flares, then disappears as wave and ocean become one again.

This is life as I now understand it. We rise up for a moment, a second in the grand clock that ticks away in the heart of the universe, shine with the vitality of consciousness, then subside, absorbed back into the universe which accreted in that one instance to form our distinct, unique Self.

Does this have meaning? Damned if I know.

My guess is that it does, in one sense at least. Our moment affords the vast project that is the movement of matter from creation to eventual extinction or reprocessing (whatever cosmology soothes you most) a chance to reflect, to notice, to be aware of itself. Our brief sunlit moments then may be to the universe as mind is to our body, an epiphenomena unsuspected, unpredicted, but nonetheless appreciated. That may well be all ye need to know.

When we float on the vast world ocean between ports, over deep water, water now 13,500 feet deep, my Self dips down into the collective unconscious with great ease. It may be the womb like sloshing of the ship or it may be deep calling unto deep. Whatever it is, I dream and dream and remember.

Last night my dreams all had a common theme. There were three, one in which I was a new teacher, another in which I developed a vast foundation and a third with knowledge spread out in a quasi-religious setting. The common theme lay in crossing from one domain of knowledge to another, knitting disparate disciplines together, finding the filaments that underlay them all.

In the first, as a new teacher, my principle, an African American woman, looked me over and put me in a building devoted to concrete teaching. Students learned gardening by building tools, sowing and harvesting. They learned mathematics and science by building machines, language by engaging in trade with others who spoke a different language.

In the second I had convinced Mark Dayton to put together a foundation that knitted together philosophy, literature, politics, science and painting, all represented by different patterns of tile on the floor of its huge lobby.

Finally, in the third, Glass Bead Game-like, I was part of a group that had assembled various distinct disciplines in different liturgical styles. One had an emphasis on textiles, colorful and large, hanging from stone walls. Another had altars of stone. Yet another gathered its disciplines and represented them through music. Another through painting.

In this last dream a fire caught the textile chapel on fire and threatened the whole cathedral though it eventually burned itself out since the whole structure was stone.

Today we’re between the Falklands and Buenos Aires, Atlantic as far as the eye can register light on any side, the water deep and the sunlight bright. A good day to relax and read.

We will pass the 45^th degree of longitude today, headed to Buenos Aires’s 38^th. That means we will move out of the Canadian equivalent longitudes and into our own. From that point on we will be heading into warmer and warmer climes.

On Thanksgiving eve we will board a plane in Rio headed for Atlanta, Georgia, then the cold, cold grass of home.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

51 degrees 00 minutes S 57 degrees 27 minutes W course 000 degrees, due north

The Falklands are in our rearview and we’re headed due north to Buenos Aires. The next two days are at sea.

Have you ever seen a rockhopper penguin? They’re pretty damned cute. Long feathers, light colored, jut out from over their bright red eyes and, darned if they don’t, they hop from rock to rock. They’re shorter than the Magellanic penguins we saw in Otway Bay, Chile, but their markings are black and white, too.

When they move between rocks in rockhopper mode, they hunch their shoulders forward and look like Dickensian accountants, shoulders stooped by many years working for Scrooge and wild eyebrows to shield their eyes from candle flame too close. Their manner as they hop seems very serious, as if hopping required all their avian skill, as it well might for all I know.

Getting to see them found Kate and me in a Land Rover, well used, with the exhaust pipe up and curved away from the driver’s side window, accompanied by two Albertans and driven by Rod, a twenty-five year resident of the islands.

Rod has done a lot of tour guide type work, but has a certain flexibility that accounts for his residence in these islands. He spent several years in Cairo where he said, “The working Egyptian is just like anybody else. And, if they have just enough money in their pocket for a Coke, they’ll give it you.”

A twelve month contract brought him to the Falklands and he’s never left.

He did clean up work following the Falklands war and, demonstrating flexibility again, met a guy in the Globe Tavern, the local pub, on his way to Antarctica. “I need somebody to cook for my crew,” the guy told Rod. “What kind of cooking?” “Regular stuff.” “I can do that.” Rod ended up in Antarctica for 8 weeks, paid to be there as a cook. When he got back, the guy put a 10,000 pound check in his hand.

Rod drives for Murrell Farms, the owner of the land on which the rockhopper’s nest. A small farm by Falkland standards Rod estimated it at 9,000 acres. They raise sheep for the most part though they have a few head of cattle, too.

The sheepherding occurs on motorbike or 4X4. On the latter they have a small shelf on which sit two cattle dogs. They drive out to the herd, let the dogs out and the dogs return the herd to the shearing spot. “This is,” Rod said, “A lot less work for the dogs than when they used horses. Then, the dogs had to run out and back.”

As you might imagine, a sheep farm does not have well traveled roads, especially since they use 4X4’s and motorbikes, so the one hour ride back to the rookery took us over up and down terrain, some muddy spots and a land filled with small holes and sudden drop offs. Rod and the others in our little safari, three LandRovers, a Mitsubishi SUV and a Ford pickup with the large cab, knew the trail well and we had as comfortable a ride as the conditions permitted.

The rockhopper location itself was not very large, perhaps 300 feet long and thirty feet wide on top of a rocky promontory that overlooked the Atlantic below where the penguin’s mortal enemies, the sealions, live.

Digital cameras along as many photos as you want, so I took a lot. Penguins on eggs. Penguins hugging. Penguins directing traffic. Penguins hunched over, rockhopping. Penguins crying in alarm as juveniles prowled around looking for mates. Penguins standing alone looking out to sea. Penguins watching us watch them.

Oh, and a local note. When I visited the port-a-potty for a quick break, I proudly noted the Made in Minneapolis, Minnesota stamp on it. As it happens, Jon (stepson) went to school at Breck with the folks who have made millions selling just these units. And here they were in the Falklands.

Port Stanley could be in the English countryside. It has the telly booths, public houses, a Thatcher Drive, their own pound notes, a proud post office making a big deal out of Falkland stamps. They drive on the left side of the road and have an English school system with small classes which includes college at Winchester College in England at age 16 and, if the kids do well, university after that. The schools are modern and well maintained.

This is a place it would be fun to come to for vacation, if it weren’t so far from home. In fact, Kate and I have liked Ushuaia and the Falklands well enough to live in either place, although they have the same problem as our third favorite, Hawai’i. Too expensive for travel to see the kids or for the kids to come see us.

The trip after Valparaiso, which began in Puerto Montt, included the Chilean fjords and several glaciers, went on to Punta Areanas, then Tierra del Fuego and Ushuaia, finishing here in the Falklands has been by far my favorite part of the trip. Cooler, for one thing, but also terrain and wildlife that was both exotic, yet somewhat familiar, and an isolation that appeals to both Kate and me.

The next few days return us to Latin America, Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Rio, then home.