Wanderer-Into-Emancipator Updates, by John Siman

FROM THE SCHOONER WANDERER-INTO-EMANCIPATOR,
CURRENTLY DOCKED IN ST. MARYS, GEORGIA:
ECO-ANARCHISTS FORCED TO SHOP AT LOWE'S AND WAL-MART
(BUT WE ARE FORSAKING DIESEL AND PROPANE)

Sunday 4 February through Thursday 8 February 2007.   So Paul and I had
completed the twenty-six hour journey to St. Marys late Saturday
afternoon, and on Saturday night we had all-u-can eat shrimp at Lang’s
Seafood, owned by, we assumed, the same Mr. Lang who owned Lang’s Marina
and employed Mr. Nat Wilson. After we headed back to the dock, we
transferred most of our stuff over from the Fishers Progress onto the
schooner, and then Paul motored the Fishers Progress out from the marina a
little, anchored it (we didn’t want to have to pay two dock fees), and
motored back in the leaky plastic dingy.  He told me that he’d noticed on
the map of colonial North America (circa 1730) which hangs inside the
Fishers Progress that St. Marys shows up as San Matteo – apparently it was
once a part of old Spanish Florida – perhaps it was founded about the same
AS time St. Augustine?  Some of the architecture in St. Marys today does
look Spanish.

Sunday – what we did today was make new friends who would help us with the
refit, and these are Bob, a retired police officer from New York who is
living on a friend of a friend’s boat (the three of them plan to sail
around the world soon) -- Ken, a retired (though still in his forties)
computer software developer who is living on his own boat, and Euangelos,
the owner of a restaurant near the marina where we can pick up a wireless
signal.  Here is how we did it.  After I had sat down in the restaurant
and started checking e-mail and stuff, I got the feeling that the waitress
was uncomfortable with my having my laptop out -- then I noticed that
there were lots of Greek dishes on the menu, so I asked to talk to the
owner, figuring that he was Greek.  And he was Greek.  And since I’d been
to Greece three times and studied Ancient Greek in grad school (I’m the
sort of dude who likes to read Plato in the original), I started chatting
with him about Greece and it turned out that he was from Delphi and that
when I was visiting Delphi on the day Reagan was shot in 1981, I had
stayed at the hotel and restaurant which his brother then ran in Delphi
and still runs.  Also it didn’t hurt either that I’m also the sort of dude
who likes to read Rousseau in the original and that Euangelos’s wife
turned out to be French.  And so it ended up that Euangelos (call me
“Van”) showed me where his fuse box was so that even when his restaurant
is closed I can turn on the power for the front porch and plug  my laptop
in.  Meanwhile Paul was at the dock, schmoozing with other boaters.  And
he had especially interesting conversations with the aforementioned Bob
and Ken, who are both very adventurous and yet both prone to suddenly
speaking as if they were channeling FoxNews feeds.  Bob and Paul later
joined me at Euangelos’s restaurant, where we shared two bottles of
retsina and some feta salad.  Euangelos promised to score us some ouzo at
a later date.

Monday—in the morning Paul and I discussed food and the galley (which is
used properly as a nautical technical terms refers to the stove only).  He
has an idea that we ought to do, in the spirit of Food Not Bombs, Boats
Not Bombs.  I’m down with that, especially since I was impressed by the
Food Not Bombs work I saw done last fall by the Permaculture Army in
Berkeley.  More food theory: we are going to be discussing one of the
books which Paul brought over from the Fishers Progress – it’s called The
Care and Feeding of Sailing Crew.  We are already very deep into the topic
of how to eat well on a boat, especially in the context of post-petroleum
times.  We have already dispensed with refrigeration, and a lot of the
food which we have aboard the schooner now is cheese and beans and rice
which I bought in Tennessee at the Amish-Mennonite store near The Farm.
Paul and I agreed that we’d order a portable wood stove (with oven) for
the schooner and dispense with propane entirely.

Late in the  morning, Ken and Bob met us and gave us a ride out to Roger
Waskett’s boatyard.  Roger told us that he’d have room for the schooner in
the middle of March -- he’d charge us six-hundred fifty dollars to haul it
out of the water and relaunch it and two thousand dollars a month for each
month we were out of the water.  He said we could live aboard the schooner
with our volunteers while we worked on her.  He also offered me four
thousand dollars for the schooner’s diesel engine and said he’d haul it
out himself.  Paul said this was a great offer because if we had to take
care of  hauling out the engine, we’d have to hire a crane and that might
end up costing as much as eighteen hundred dollars. (Paul has suggested
that we also have the engine from his Fishers Progress removed and then
use it to power a yawl boat.)  We told Roger that we’d be rebuilding the
schooner’s cabin trunks in the weeks before he pulled the schooner out of
the water.  He  recommended that we buy the lumber from a man across the
border in Florida who runs his own sawmill.

That afternoon, while I was at Euangelos’s restaurant, Paul was down at
the docks, where he met a reporter from the local newspaper, The St. Marys
Tribune & Georgian.  She was taking photos of abandoned boats for a story
she was writing on the topic.  Paul offered to help her with the story and
to tell her about refit of the schooner.  She invited him to come to the
newspaper office the next morning.  Her name was Emily.

Tuesday—We both went to meet with Emily from the newspaper – she’s fresh
out of some college in Texas and is very friendly and enthusiastic but
doesn’t really understand why we’d want to refit a schooner (i.e., she
doesn’t have a clue about Global Peak Oil, but then again, neither did the
N.P.R. reporter I met at a Grist fundraiser in San Francisco last fall).
In any event, Emily promised to talk us up at the next editorial meeting
and see if she could write a story about the schooner.  I’m not sure
whether we told her about the story that Erik Baard is writing about us
for the business section of The New York Times.

We then  met up with Ken the software wizard, and he agreed to drive us
down to Florida, to the sawmill which Roger had recommended.  Ken bragged
about his flawless memory for direction, but after we’d missed our
Interstate exit and started to run low on gas on some back Florida
highway, we chickened out and retraced our steps until we found a gas
station.  It would turn out later that we were on the right road when we
turned around -- we were basically driving in circles for a couple of
hours, but we all were in high spirits.  At one point in our seemingly
pointless errand, we pulled into an old man’s driveway to ask for
directions, and we mentioned the name of the sawmill owner whom Roger had
recommended, and we were told, rather bluntly, that the man was dishonest
and that we best conduct our business with the owner of another sawmill.
So we drove out to this other sawmill, and there the owner told us that he
did not have any lumber big enough for our project – that we needed to go
to the supposedly dishonest man’s sawmill.  And so off we went.  And the
supposedly dishonest man turned out to be actually dishonest: he said that
he could provide us with the lumber for the cabin trunks for some hideous
amount over four thousand dollars – and that I’d have to return the next
day with eighty percent of that amount in cash for him to start the work.
This freaked us out.  We got back into Ken’s S.U.V., and he drove us to
the Lowe’s in St. Marys.  There we saw that we could get the same wood for
about one-tenth of the price which the dishonest sawmill operator would
have charged us.  But since we’d been lecturing Ken all day about the
evils of petroleum and interstate trucking and large corporations (and
Ken, chain-smoking filterless Camels and channeling FoxNews, had responded
by praising Wal-Mart at length for its high wages and generous health
insurance plans), I was still too into eco-cred overdrive to buy anything
at Lowe’s.  But Ken knew that he pretty much had us by the balls at this
point, so he loaded us back into his S.U.V. and drove us over to the brand
spanking new Wal-Mart SuperCenter.  At the entrance, a female police
officer was threatening two teenagers with a stay at the juvenile
detention center.  We assumed that they’d been caught shoplifting.  A bad
omen.  And as soon as I set foot in the SuperCenter,  all of my remaining
mojo evaporated in a little poof.  I ended up buying a really cool wok and
a stock pot with vegetable-steamer and colander attachments and a
non-breakable glass-like top for like a really great knock-you-on-your-ass
price.  I also got some organic peanut butter.  (We’d do some Thai
stir-fry in the wok later.)  And a can of Bugler tobacco for Paul.  Ken
drove us back to the boat.

Wednesday—we spent the morning with our laptops out on the front porch of
Euangelos’s restaurant – we were procrastinating our trip to Lowe’s to buy
the lumber for the cabin trunks, but we knew in our hearts that we were,
soon enough, going to lose this battle in the war against corporate evil.
It was Bob who ended up driving us.  We got the lumber we needed (though
we had to pick through every darn sixteen-foot-long two by twelve in stock
to find the eleven straight ones we needed) plus a brand new saw, plus a
speed square, plus a plane for under five hundred bucks.  So it really did
end up costing us about one-tenth of what the dishonest sawmill dude in
Florida would have charged us.  Plus, for an extra fifty-nine bucks, the
nice Lowe’s checkout lady promised to have it all delivered to our
schooner the next day.

Thursday—a guy from Lowe’s showed up at Lang’s Marina in a flatbed
eighteen-wheeler with our lumber on it and nothing else.  He got the
lumber onto a forklift and got it as close to the dock as he could, which
turned out to be not very close.  But Bob and Ken both helped us carry the
lumber the hundred yards or so the rest of the way out to the schooner,
much of it piece by piece (don’t forget that we had those eleven
sixteen-foot-long two by fours).  Bob chain-smoked Marlboro UltraLites and
Ken his filterless Camels while Paul chain-rolled from his stash of
Bugler. And the day ended with Ken driving me down to the bus station in
Jacksonville – I caught an overnight Greyhound to Nashville so I could
visit Betsy on The Farm (see my article “Relearning How to Be a Voluntary
Peasant”) for my birthday and Valentine’s Day.  And so I’ve turned it
everything over to Paul until I return.
-- john s.