“Skyfall” 2012 (James Bond) Review — Does “eh” have a star rating?

I know this movie is 10 years old. I am behind the times. But I have COVID and I’ve caught up on Star Trek and figured I’d watch something mindless.

I’d say I’d gone to the right place but this movie isn’t really mindless. It’s more like it was written by someone with multiple personality disorder, one of which personalities is a dark and brooding teenager, and the other of which is a sophomore at a state school on adderall and cocaine.

This is the point where I warn you that there are spoilers coming. Sort of. I guess. There were some surprises, I guess, but they are less plot shockers than unexpected ways in which the writers took the wrong narrative fork in order to…disappoint our expectations?

Let’s start at the beginning. I’m not going to watch this movie again so pardon me if I don’t get all of the details exactly right. But we start with Bond, gun drawn, inside some building in the Middle East, and there are dead bodies on the ground with pools of blood. Then Bond finds an agent in a chair, with lots of blood on his chest and coming out of his mouth, still alive, but unable to talk. Someone talks to Bond over an earpiece as Bond explains that whatever MacGuffin it is he is looking for isn’t there. The voice says he’d better get after it. But Bond pauses, and puts towels on the dying agent’s chest. The voice yells at him to get going. “I’m stabilizing the agent!” He yells. “There’s no time!” The voice yells. Nonetheless, bond puts another towel on the agent’s chest, before leaving the room.

What??? I have no idea what that scene means and I am already jolted out of the movie. What could Bond possibly have done for the agent who is like seconds from death? And then he puts some towels on the guy’s wound and that counts as stabilizing the guy? I thought maybe there would be a quick cut to a helicopter with medical staff repelling down, and Bond’s towels saved the guy, but nope. He jumps into a car with a beautiful woman and chases the bad guy. Was there a joke that I missed? The writers can’t seriously expect that the audience thinks that putting some towels on a gunshot wound to the chest “stabilizes” somebody….could they?

Then we get the car chase-turned motor cycle chase on top of a bazaar through crowds and crashing through windows until Bond and the Bad Guy jump a bridge on their motorcycles onto a train. Now we’re talking! Meanwhile the beautiful woman follows in a Land Rover or something that can go fast but also go over rocks and uneven terrain.

Bond is at a tactical disadvantage because he is on a low part of the train with his hand gun while the bad guy is on top of the train with a machine gun that’s like a Tommy Gun except it has not one but two circle things that hold bullets. But Bond gets inside a digger bulldozer that’s on the train and uses the shovel to try to push the Bad Guy with the machine gun off. But oops! Bond gets shot through the chest! (Luckily the right side of the chest, which allows him to keep fighting, and not the left side of the chest, where the agent in the chair was shot a few minutes ago, which means Death!)

Its OK because Bond can fight through this chest wound. No problem climbing or punching. (Later on some forgettable character says that the bullet was a special bullet that “would have cut you in half” if it had hit him straight on. Good thing it hit him three inches to the right!) I forget how the Bad Guy loses his gun but, as expected, Bond and the Bad Guy end up on top of the train having to Quickly Duck because of Tunnels. At one point the Bad Guy is on his stomach and Bond is standing up, but the Bad Guy grabs a chain and then swings it at Bond. I literally laughed out loud and said to my cat, Jack, “Guess that chain wasn’t attached to anything…it was just sitting on the roof of the train for some reason.” I mean I really wanted to be into this movie but now I’ve been jolted out of the plot by crappy writing twice and the opening sequence isn’t even over.

The Beautiful Woman gets ahead of the train but warns the voice on the earpiece that she is Running Out of Road, whatever that means. So she has to get out and put her sniper rifle together really quick. The train comes out of a tunnel and Bond and the Bad Guy are fighting on top, and the the camera pans to the right and the train will enter another tunnel soon. The Voice tells her to shoot the bad guy but the Beautiful Woman says she can’t get a clear shot. But the MacGuffin is so important that the voice —its M!—tells her to take the shot even though she might hit Bond. She takes the shot and hits Bond who is thrown off the moving train, maybe 30 stories down into a river, and his unconscious body is even shown going over a maybe five story waterfall.

Roll Intro Music by Adele!

Can we pause here for a second? Because right now I am thinking there are a couple of OK plot threads already established. M told the Beautiful Woman to shoot even though she might hit Bond — that’s gotta put a big rift between them. The Good Looking Agent just messed up the whole mission and shot the best spy ever—that’s gotta lead to some narrative issues later in the movie. This Bad Guy shot Bond in the chest and got away with something really important. Surely there is going to be a climactic fight scene between the two of them near the end of the film. And Bond has now been shot—at least once in the chest—and fallen off a moving train into a river where he is unconsciously washed over a waterfall. Boy, how is he going to get out of that one?

OK, unpause, and for brevity’s sake, let me summarize how those plot threads are resolved.

There is a scene where Bond says to M “you told her to shoot” and M says something like “that’s what you signed up for.” And this is never discussed again.

The Good Looking Agent shows up like three scenes later, shaves Bond with a straight razor, and they have sex. Not even angry sex or anything. Neither character seems to care that one sexual partner shot the other, like a month ago or something.

Bond finds the Bad Guy and follows him into a building maybe 10 scenes later. Very much in the first third of the movie. They are in Shanghai or some city that has lots of moving neon lights and glass-front sky scrapers. The Bad guy sets up a sniper rifle and aims it at some people in another building across the street. Bond sneaks up behind the guy and points the gun at him but inexplicably doesn’t shoot him while the guy assassinates someone across the way and then they both lose their guns. Then, even more amazingly, the two men fight in silhouette near the broken window until one falls down, and its the Bad Guy and Bond is holding him, but he can’t because of the gunshot from before, remember (I guess it didn’t heal good or something) and the Bad Guy Falls To His Death. And a beautiful woman who was in the room next to the assassinated guy looks across the way and sees Bond and there is Attraction. Bond takes his sweet time rummaging through the Bad Guys bag (don’t worry about police coming or anything) and finds a poker chip.

Oh and the plot point about Bond getting shot in the chest and then shot again and flying off the train into the river and over a water fall. He just lived. That’s it. That’s it! Like, after the credits, the movie starts, and Bond is in a hut shooting his pants pistol into a woman, and they lie there together. And in the next scene he is drinking shots, I guess because he is angry? No explanation for how he got out of the water. How long was he in the water? Did the water pressure stop the gunshot wounds from bleeding or something? Did he wash up somewhere and someone found him and helped him? No clue! Oh well, I guess nothing in this movie has any repercussions.

There is a reason I like Science Fiction, and action, and don’t enjoy fantasy. When John MacClane looks down and sees he has only two bullets and three bad guys, he has to figure out how to use what the plot has established is at hand to win the day. That’s good storytelling. Watching the character use their character traits to solve a problem is good story telling. Some deus ex machina where a wizard is about to be trampled by a giant chipmunk and uses a magic acorn to conjure a giant squirrel to fight the giant chipmunk is fantasy and it is poor story telling. I want characters to save themselves. I don’t want the writers to use the opening credits to save the main character from the hopeless situation they put the character in during the opening sequence. I feel like Kathy Bates in Misery. “This isn’t what happened last week. Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! HE DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE COCKADOODIE CAR!!!”

Let’s speed this up a little because the rest of the movie is basically a rehash of the same problems.

Bond goes to a casino or something on a gondola. No explanation to the audience of how he knows how to get there or get on the gondola. But he gets there and cashes in the poker chip which gets him a suitcase full of a trillion dollars. In retrospect, maybe that was supposed to be payment for the Bad Guy sniping the other guy in the building, but if so it’s not explained. And the Bad Guy had the poker chip before he sniped the other guy. (There is never an explanation of who the guy was that got sniped. In this movie characters just move around like cardboard cutouts where the plot needs them to go). And in this day in age the Bad Guy could more easily have been wired the money rather than given a poker chip to cash in at a casino you need a gondola to get to. Or maybe the poker chip is not the payment for the Bad Guy. I have no idea. I’m starting to think maybe I am an idiot because this movie has a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. All those people must have been able to follow the plot, right?

Lo and behold, who is at the casino, but the Beautiful Woman who was in the room with the guy who got sniped the night before! She and Bond have a drink and there is repartee. Bond deduces that the woman has been human trafficked as a sex worker since she was a kid, and promises to do away with the bad guy who somehow is also the guy that Bond is looking for. Good thing they’re the same person. How does Bond know they are the same person? Cause that’s what the script says, dummy!

Blah blah so Bond has to fight three guys right in the middle of the casino as people watch. Nobody calls the police or intervenes or even seems particularly amused. Which makes me think that this is a lair of Bad Guys who are in cahoots with the Main Bad Guy. Except that when Bond wins the fight, he just walks out of the casino and no one tries to stop him. So I guess the casino patrons aren’t in cahoots with the Main Bad Guy. I’m starting to wonder if all of the patrons took gondolas there, or if there is a gondola taxi or something.

So then the Beautiful Sex Slave Woman is on a sailing ship and Bond sneaks aboard and they have sex in the shower. The next day he wakes up and she is standing on the bow, looking over the waves toward what looks like ruins of an old city. He walks up to her and he says it is a beautiful view and she says or maybe not and suddenly there are five guys with machine guns on the deck behind them.

Cut to the ruins where Bond and the Beautiful Sex Slave have their hands behind their backs as the Men With Guns walk them along. Why is the woman tied up? I thought she was the sex slave of the Main Bad Guy. Did she do something wrong? I donno. Oh, who cares.

Believe it or not, I was enjoying this movie well enough until this point. You know, whatever, its Bond. But at this point, halfway through the movie, it’s like the writers forgot they were writing a Bond movie, and instead just threw together a bunch of hackneyed one-off scenes from other popular movies.

First: Bond is tied up and there is a scene so Tarantino he should have sued. A ridiculous Main Bad Guy (I can’t even remember his name, which is never a good sign) descends an elevator far in the distance and tells a story over the course of maybe three minutes as he walks from the elevator to close to the camera in one take. The story is about him growing up on an island and rats infested it and ate coconuts so they dug a pit and all the rats fell in and ate each other until only two rats were left, and then they let the rats go because those rats now eat other rats instead of coconuts. I am not shitting you. That is supposed to symbolize Bond and the Main Bad Guy somehow. Because Art I guess. The Bad Guy also does some weird stuff touching Bond’s chest and thighs before untying him. I guess he’s…gay? It has nothing to do with the plot and never comes up again, so don’t worry about it.

Next we have the most frustrating scene of the whole movie. The Beautiful Sex Slave Woman is tied up in the town square of the ruined city and the Main Bad Guy puts a shot of whiskey on her head as she begs for mercy. (I always hate people begging for mercy in movies, its why I watch almost exclusively Star Trek The Next Generation.) The Main Bad Guy has some dueling pistols and he gives one to Bond (who has a gun held to his head by one of the Lesser Bad Guys). They will take turns shooting until one of them knocks the whiskey off the woman’s head. Bond goes first, and misses. Then the guy goes, and shoots her dead. She slumps over.

“What do you think of that, Mr. Bond?” The Main Bad Guy asks.

“I think its a waste of good whiskey,” Bond comments, before dropping to the ground and using some martial arts and contortionist skills to kill everyone and hold the Main Bad Guy at bay.

Ok, what? If Bond could drop and kill all of the Lesser Bad Guys at 12:00 in the afternoon, after the Beautiful Sex Slave was shot, why couldn’t he do it at 11:59, BEFORE she was killed? And my God, “a waste of good whiskey?” Christ! I guess she wasn’t very good in the sack, huh Bond? I mean I know the guy is supposed to be a chauvinist but the woman he promised to save and could have saved but didn’t just got killed after getting beat up. If the writers needed a line before Bond killed the Lesser Bad Guys, how about something that makes fun of the Main Bad guy or something, anything, other than making it seem like Bond values a woman’s life less than a shot of bourbon. I almost hate Bond at this point. He’s now let one guy get sniped and the other woman get killed when he could have prevented both.

Then some helicopters arrive and its Mi6 and that means the Main Bad Guy is captured. I hit the pause button to see if the movie was over, thinking “well, that was anti-climactic” but, amazingly, there was still an hour left of the film.

From here on out the show is basically an episode of The Black List mixed with some crap from some of the lesser Die Hard Movies. The Main Bad Guy is held in a Glass Cell in the middle of the Really Secure Mi6 Headquarters, ala Silence of the Lambs. But, surprise! The Main Bad Guy wanted to be captured! You see, so he could infect the Mi6 Computer System from the inside!

There is, of course, no explanation of how the Main Bad Guy got out of his Super Secure Cell—it happens off camera and all the guards are dead. Also there is no explanation of how the Main Bad Guy put the virus (?) into the Computer — I guess he typed it in? And what does this virus have to do with anything? I couldn’t tell ya. It makes some squiggles appear on a big CSI-like screen and the new Q has to figure out what the squiggles mean, with his messy brown hair, like the guy from the Apple commercials had to do in Live Free or Die Hard.  

The most complex computer virus ever created takes approximately 1 minute to decode because Bond sees some letters close together in the bottom of the screen and tells Q to put them next to each other and they look like they spell out the name of an old subway stop that isn’t in service anymore and Bond tells Q to “use that for the key!” and then the virus visually unravels into a map of the UK underground tunnels. Good thing that virus turned into a map when the Code was put in! Who the hell is writing this.

Oh I forgot to mention that there is an attempt at a point or a B-plot or something. James Bond, since his injury, is not quite what he used to be. This is shown by a shaky hand, and he can only hold onto the underside of an elevator for 100 floors before he starts to lose his grip. In a scene where he talks to the young Q (you always know these tech guys because they wear Glasses and don’t know how to comb their hair—and they always have lots of hair!) the young Q tells Bond that they don’t make fancy gadgets like exploding pens anymore. (Isn’t that part of the fun of watching a Bond movie?) And also there is a really forced plot about Parliament shutting down Mi6 because they work in the “shadows” and rely on “human intelligence.” It seems like the writers came up with this subplot about halfway through the scripting process (which I am guessing took place over a couple of power lunches at Dave and Busters) and grafted it onto the plot with duct tape and a staple gun. I bring this up only because the writers can’t figure out if the Main Bad Guy is supposed to be Bond’s foil. On the one hand, he uses Software to attack people—that’s a next gen kind of thing. On the other hand, he tells Bond that he was M’s favorite agent in the 1980s (sorry, forgot to mention he’s an X agent. It doesn’t matter much). So he’s a generation older than Bond, but uses technology that the new generation uses. I kept waiting for there to be a setup or a showdown between the Main Bad Guy using New Technology and Bond defeating him with traditional methods. But nope. These points are just brought up to be dropped with no impact on the plot.

Take a scene where Bond is chasing the Main Bad Guy — I’m getting sick of this, let’s call him Dave — Bond is chasing Dave through an underground tunnel and he shoots at Dave as Dave is climbing up a ladder. Dave stops because Bond has him and can shoot him dead. Bond doesn’t shoot him dead, in order to give Dave a chance to say something about how he (Dave) can use a technology even Bond can understand-radio-to defeat him. He pushes a button on a remote that blasts a hole in the roof of the tunnel they are in, behind Bond. “I hope that wasn’t for me,” Bond  quips, instead of shooting Dave. “No, this is for you,” Dave says, and a subway train crashes through the top of the tunnel and almost hits Bond as Dave gets away. Good thing Dave thought to put that explosive charge on the ceiling, instead of getting away, so that when Bond caught up to him right before the train was arriving overhead and didn’t shoot Dave, the train would get Bond!

Blah blah Dave is trying to kill M. Oh no, not M. She’s only been the target in a couple of Bond movies so far. This must be serious.

Bond gets M and they make an escape from London and he stops to pick up an old Bond car from the 60s that has an ejection seat and machine guns for headlights. And he tells Q to leave a trail—an electronic trail, made of software—that’s hard to find, but not too hard to find, that only Dave can find, to lead Dave to the place where Bond wants to trap him.

“You’ve got a tough job there, son,” says a guy whose name and role I’m supposed to know because he’s been in the movie since the beginning but like everyone else he has no character. “You’ve got to make the trail hard to find. But not so hard to find that Dave doesn’t find it.”

”And not so easy to find that Dave knows its a trap,” Q observes, as a map of Great Britain shows up with dots moving northward showing where Q has left software breadcrumbs for Dave to follow.

If somebody said “Don’t call me Shirley” I would think this movie was one of the best parodies I’ve seen.

Our Heroes Bond and M pull up to a old Scottish Manor and as they drive through the gate the camera pans to a plaque illustrating the name of the place: Skyfall! That’s the name of the movie so you know that the plot must really be going somewhere now.

When I was a kid I named our house in the woods “Pine Haven” because we had a bunch of pine trees. I wonder if Chicken Little was the original owner of the Bond family estate.

Now for the part of the movie that is like Bond Meets the A-Team!

M and Bond, and a caretaker who is old but knows how to shoot a shotgun, have to prepare the Bond House for Dave. But they don’t have a lot of weapons. So they have to rig up some booby traps like bullets that fly up from the floor if you step on the floor board and bags of screws that explode when you turn the lights on. There is a melodramatic scene as they wait for the attack and philosophize about something I can’t remember as I hit the pause button to see how much time is left and realize This movie is almost two and a half hours long! They should have cut like 45 minutes out of this. Why are they now having this pretentious pseudo-philosophical scene? Is this supposed to build suspense? Is this supposed to be like the scene in Saving Private Ryan when the Sarge and the two other sit on the steps of the bombed out building, listening to the Victrola, before the big battle? Boy Saving Private Ryan was a good movie. 

Some Faceless Bad Guys With Guns show up but instead of driving their vehicles close to the house, they park a quarter of a mile away and walk toward the fortified stone structure where our hero’s are waiting. They don’t even spread out to surround the house so that the occupants have to defend multiple fronts. They walk basically line abreast so that anyone with a machine gun could mow them down in 30 seconds. It is also getting dark now.

Our heroes take out all the bad guys using booby traps and guns taken from the Lesser Bad Guys. But Dave is not one of the dead bodies! Then, oh no! A big military helicopter is heard approaching with speakers playing (I can’t remember I think Zeppelin). This makes me think that Dave represents the generation before Bond again. But he used the software cookie trail to find him, so he must be part of the younger generation that will replace Bond. These troupes are confusing me! What does the Main Bad Guy playing this particular song signify?? Nothing? Gah!!

The helicopter does a number on the place with its Even Bigger Guns and once again I am thrown out of the movie with the thought “Jesus Christ do you think the guys who just approached on foot and got slaughtered knew that this helicopter was coming? Maybe they should have waited five more minutes to attack, from two directions at once?”

Bond tells the caretaker and M to use the tunnel in the kitchen to get to the chapel that has not been mentioned before. But wait I forgot to mention that the caretaker had earlier told M that when Bond found out that his parents had died, he had gone into the tunnel and didn’t come out for two days and when he did, he wasn’t the same. I’ll give the writers credit for this: by introducing the tunnel ten minutes earlier, it is at least not a sudden, fantasy-like escape route. But I expected something more from the tunnel where James Bond literally buried his trauma as a child. It is a tunnel! Have these writers ever heard of tunnel vision? Or repression? “Burying” one’s trauma? I’m not saying I want to see James Bond crying on a couch but how are you going to introduce this idea into the movie and then just leave it? Nothing happens with the tunnel. It is merely an escape route for the protagonists. That’s it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a MacGuffin is just a MacGuffin.

Grenades, explosions. The helicopter explodes and it is the biggest explosion. The helicopter must have had like a million gallons of gas in it’s tank. Like the huge explosion of the airplane that crashes in Die Hard 2 Die Harder even though the plane was landing because it was out of gas. I’m not sure if the helicopter exploding in this movie reminded me more of the helicopter exploding in the first Die Hard because it descended a little and then exploded, or the helicopter exploding in Die Hard 5 A Good Day to Die Hard because it kind of looked like a soviet helicopter, like the helicopter that exploded at the end of Rambo 3, the one that takes place in Afghanistan. Yeah, that’s the exploding helicopter it reminded me of.

Everybody dies except Dave who follows M and the caretaker out to the chapel and he puts a gun to M’s head and his own head next to M’s and he wants her to pull the trigger so that the bullet goes through M’s head first and then his. He tells her she has to pull the trigger. He had no problem shooting up parliament and shooting a house with a helicopter when he thought she was inside, but now he needs her to pull the trigger. She is reluctant to do so, and that gives Bond enough time to show up and throw a knife into Dave’s back! Dave turns and as he dies he says something to Bond that I couldn’t hear but its so annoying to rewind on Roku, I always go back too far, so I just kept watching. Turns out M was shot and she dies in Bond’s arms and there is a hint that maybe he was going to show some emotion but not really, and one gets the impression that that is supposed to be The Scene That Everyone Will Remember About This Particular Bond Movie.

It occurred to me that the good guys know that Bond and M are holed up at Bond’s house. Why could they not have had some troops standing by in ambush for when Dave and his Lesser Bad Guys showed up? Plot holes are one thing when they occur to you when the movie is over, but when they are so obvious they occur to you when the movie is going on, sheesh.

Well so M is dead and Bond’s house is destroyed but that’s OK because Bond feels good now, he is physically strong and mentally back with no problems and it turns out the Good Looking Agent who shot him in the beginning of the movie is going to take a desk job and its Moneypenny! Surprise for anyone who didn’t see that coming because they are both blind and deaf.

So what is wrong with this movie? Its not that it defies belief and is full of plot holes. It’s not that it tries to imply that the main character has some trauma he needs to work through. Its that…both! In a James Bond movie.

Why do viewers watch franchise movies? Because they know what they are getting when they sit down to watch. If you get something else you feel cheated. I wanted to watch a movie where a spy gets some gadgets, finds himself in absurdly maniacal situations, and uses his gadgets and spy abilities to get out, save the day, save the woman (at least one of them!) and do it with class. Instead, in a vapid, almost insulting attempt to “bring the franchise into the new millennium” we get the suggestion that Bond is suffering trauma, but he never deals with it; that he’s “getting too old for this” (like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 4 not Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon 1) and doesn’t save anybody throughout the whole goddam movie! He doesn’t save the Asian guy that gets sniped; he doesn’t save the Beautiful Sex Slave Woman, and he doesn’t save M. Plus, I’m not even sure that he secured whatever “list” he was fighting the guy on the train for at the beginning of the movie! Not a single character grows or develops. What did Bond learn, or how did he grow, over the course of the film, while all the other people died? Especially the woman who had the whiskey on her head, that was really just gratuitous.

Look, I’m not saying that I want James Bond to become a more enlightened character with each mission. I understand escapist entertainment. I’m saying don’t pretend you’re modernizing a franchise because you desaturate the color of the film, suggest Bond has “trauma” and do nothing with it, and kill off characters because you don’t know what to do with them. If that’s “modernizing” a franchise, no wonder everyone prefers an original.

 

Why I Like Science

When did “science” become a word with political connotations? I guess around the time of the Scopes Monkey Trial. But science ought to be considered an objective medium, not subjective content.

“Science” is a verb, not a noun. Science is a method, not product. Science is analogous to “language” — it is a set of logical rules that allow for communication.

Sorry anarchists, but you have to have rules, in order to interact. Yeah, I know, “rules” have a bad connotation. “Rules” suggest things that you are forbidden from doing because they are “against the rules.” But “rules” also establish a framework of how to interact. And rules are absolutely necessary. Rules tells us how to do things correctly. They are a meta- part of interaction. Would you like to play a game? Well you need to agree on the rules of the game. Or else there can be no game. There is no game without rules–the rules define what the game is, the allowable actions, what choices you can make to win the game against other people who are also playing by the rules. There can be no strategy without rules, or else the loudest most powerful person wins all of the time. The rules are the medium by which people interact to play a game.

Science is set of rules. You can’t make up a new set of science rules in order to “win” an argument. If “an object that is in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by another force” is a rule of science (physics), you can’t say that that applies in some circumstances but not others. That’s the rule. So if I throw a ball against a wall and it hits the wall and falls to the floor rather than continuing in a straight line, I have to explain how that happened according to the rule (gravity is an outside force pulling the ball toward the center of the earth).

Cheaters break the rules. They can’t win unless they (a) pretend to play by the rules but don’t; or (b) declare the rules invalid. People who are against science don’t fit (a) but can only rely on (b).

Here is a rule of thumb: if you meet somebody that says that “science” itself is fake or subjective–they are probably trying to win at some political argument at which they have no objective ability to win.

Let’s take two examples:

  1. Two men are on one side of the Grand Canyon. They are hungry and thirsty and need to get to the other side. One man says “We have to climb down the canyon to the valley and find a way back up the other side to the village that we can see on the other side.” The other says “I think we can jump across.” Science allows the two men to have an argument based on a common set of objective facts. Says the first man “I think if we jump, gravity will pull us toward the bottom of the canyon. We can only propel ourselves forward at 3 mph, but gravity will propel us at 32 feet per second toward the center of the earth…and the other side of the canyon is 1/4 mile away…if we run and jump our momentum will not be enough to carry us forward to the other side of the canyon before gravity pulls us down.” The men can have an argument based on specifics IF they agree on the science. The second man could say, for example, “If we hike up the canyon to that outcropping, we only have to jump three feet to the other side.” That’s a legit argument, based on the rules of science. If the second man, though, says “Nah I don’t believe in science, I think if we run and jump we will fly through space and not get pulled down by gravity” then the first man should say “This guy is a lunatic and I’m definitely not going to follow this other guy’s lead.”
  2. Two legislators are debating whether to adopt a law that says that $1M should be spent to plant corn in the frozen tundra of Alaska. The first person says “This makes no sense…the seeds will never grow in frozen snowy ground…it just can’t happen because of science.” Now the second legislator can either say “well I have a plan to warm the ground so that the seeds will grow” (science) or “that’s just your opinion, I think seeds will grow in tundra if we want them to” (rejection of science; no ability to debate because the legislators don’t agree on a common set of physical cause-and-reaction rules).

In the last two generations our legislators have devolved into kinds of people. One says “we should do X because it makes sense based on everything we know about how the world works” and the other group which is elected due to contributions from groups (religious; corporate) which exist due to the status quo, who cannot win an argument based on facts, who therefore have to cheat at the game by championing a public opinion campaign against science as a set of rules.

Objectively: “We know that evolution is real, everything we have learned through the scientific method proves it.

Subjectively: “I reject the whole idea of the scientific method. Why? Because…well because I can’t win if we use science. Therefore science itself is wrong…and everybody can believe what they want…and how come you’re talking about science? If you talk about science you must be a communist (1955 Joseph McCarthy) or a pedophile (2020 QAnon).”

You can disagree about the conclusions of the scientific method (the premises are wrong; you reached a wrong conclusion based  on the facts)–but to call science itself wrong or to suggest it is based on political opinions is a really good sign that the person with whom you are talking has an opinion that is not based in reality, just some emotional opinion.

I base my conclusions on science and really despise people who argue against me based on non-scientific feelings, whether they are on the right (“there’s no such thing as global warming because God made the earth”) or the left (“there’s not such thing as truth”; “If I say I can see auras around people then you can’t tell me I don’t even though I can’t explain why or how that could be true.”)

Science, essentially, allows a person who is intelligent to tell a person who is not intelligent that they are full of shit. That’s why I like science.

The Upside of COVID

Letisha is making acrylic paintings and inventing a better box for holding spaghetti. My neighbor was out with her 19 year old daughter fixing a bike that hasn’t been used in ten years. I made sauce for my mozzarella sticks by boiling a tomato and adding spices, and as Mr. Food used to say on CBS afternoon news in the 1990s, “Ooh it’s so good.” The Trump administration is passing $2 trillion legislation to put money into the hands of working class unemployed and it even might give them a few more dollars than they’d have earned cleaning toilets and scraping customer’s half-eaten food scraps into the garbage. It is a strange COVID world.

Social distancing sucks…at least as far as my vices are concerned. By bank account doesn’t mind that I’m not spending $35 a day at bars. That’s going to help me put a down payment on a house.

I have to say that I am pretty proud of my generation, which at this point is the dynamic segment of the body politic. If you told me six months ago that bars and restaurants would be closed and 17 million people would be unemployed overnight–a 3,500% week-over-week increase–I’d have predicted, if not riots in the streets, at least a movement on par with Occupy NYC. Instead, everyone from college students to the elderly have basically taken this all in stride. I think that shows a maturity among The People that one may not deduce existed based on the behavior of our electoral representatives.

I can tell you that as a single male who spends a lot of time in bars, shelter-in-place has been a drag on my social life. But I’ve been forced to spend time outside of bars before, because of being broke, and I knew I could deal with it. I’ve got a lot of hobbies. I thought that most other people would freak out though. I thought that crime would go through the roof and Facebook would be full of complaints. Instead, I see people posting “Eye Spy” comments–where people are posting the first picture in their phone’s photos that has the color yellow or blue. You know what that reminds me of? It reminds me of when the power would go off in New Baltimore as a kid and me, my sister, my parents and maybe my grandparents would sit around for hours playing Eye Spy or bunko or cards. And you know what? Its really refreshing!

A couple of years ago there was a blackout for a night and I was driving through Ravena. I saw kids out riding bikes and jumping in puddles for the first time in years. I think I wrote a cynical comment about it on Facebook at the time. Now COVID has been like a month-long black out and instead of bringing out the worst in people, at least everyone in my social group–which if you include Facebook friends is over a thousand people–it has brought out the best. Videos of Jesse making a marble roller coaster with his daughter. Julianna watching Charmed with her dog. Someone said that the animal shelters have sold record numbers of animals. Good for the animals. Good for those rational animals who act as masters: humans. Doesn’t this all show that we are all fundamentally…decent?

If we are fundamentally decent–as I really believe–the what about COVID makes it apparent where a month ago it was not?

Is it the fact that we are in a crisis? Let me say, emphatically: NO! Crisis-mongers sell crises. Often, they sell crises with the argument that it will make people come together and act as good citizens. Sometimes they are right, as in the case of a hurricane or earthquake when people band together out of empathy and volunteer or donate to victims. In other crises, like global warming or poverty or lack of health care, people don’t particularly respond because the problem is too big to figure out and nobody wants to try and help if other people don’t seem to be helping, too. And then you get your crisis-mongers who give us professionally-made crises that serve as opportunities for war or civil police action, pitting one group against another for the benefit of the political and economic actors who benefit electorally and economically from the likely response of the people to the crisis, because the people are scared. Those are the crises that seem to go on for ten or twenty years, paid for through general taxation, for the general enrichment of war mongers and industry. No–the decency of people is not the result of a crisis, as though we are usually indecent unless a crisis makes us rise to the occasion. Rather, the decency of people is becoming apparent because this particular crisis has damaged those processes and habits that usually and unnaturally cause us to act indecently.

What COVID and shelter-in-place has changed is the perspective of what we need to do, as individuals, to survive, economically in modern society.

Don’t you think it is pretty unnatural for two people to have children, and then to pay childcare providers to take care of those children until they go to school, and then send those children to school, and then for the two people to come home in order to spend a few hours with the children after nine or ten hours of commuting to work and working and commuting back, so that they spend a few stressed-out waking hours with their offspring 5-out-of-7 days a week? Until COVID that was what you had to do. Why? Because there was this idea that you had to be physically at work in order to do your job. The worker could not be trusted to work at home, because they would slack off and the employer wouldn’t be able to squeeze the maximum amount of labor out of the employee to maximize the employer’s investment. Now COVID has made remote work necessary, and it turns out its not the end of the world. Even at my job with the Legislature, there are rules for bills being physically printed and carried to different locations, and legislators being physically present to constitute a quorum. Staff had to be physically present to sign legislation as it was turned around from the Legislative Bill Drafting Commission from a word document into a Legislative Bill Draft. Staff would generally work 90 hour weeks in March in order to be physically present when the bills were “turned around for sign-off.” This was the most stressful part of the year, when people brought cots to work in order to sleep between meetings that were scheduled all night long. Now, by necessity, staff was sent home to telework. Systems were devised to sign off on legislation electronically. Instead of 100 hour weeks, many staff were able to do the same work in 40 or 50 hours–while being home with their families. Why would we ever return to the old system? It required tens of thousands of man-hours for the same result–why? In order to show that workers were busy? Why? Because if workers aren’t visibly working until the verge of exhaustion, they are lazy or exploiting the system? For modestly more than a subsistence wage?  Sheesh.  I am glad that COVID provided a justification for workers capable of remote work to do their jobs from home without the perception of being lazy or gaming the system. It turns out that work in an office is pretty unnatural and nobody wants to do it, and its better for us to do it as little as possible–and, it turns out, if we can work less, we’re going to spend time with our families and friends, which is a good thing for the individual and the kids and the friends and the families and everybody else in society.

And what of those workers who cannot remote-work because their job requires their physical presence? The fact that the federal government expanded unemployment insurance for those workers who are unemployed because their business closed is surprisingly, again, decent. The fact that the economy and therefore Trump and the Senate Republicans could not have survived the next election if 17 million people suddenly found themselves without income only diminishes the decency of the act by degrees. The increased unemployment subsidy and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance for those who would not otherwise qualify for unemployment is probably the most decent thing that the federal government has enacted in three and a half years. The fact that the benefit is not merely adequate, but equal or exceeds the money that these workers would have made had their businesses not shuddered is actually extraordinary. That the Congress in a little over a week voted for a $2 trillion stimulus plan, with a Republican Senate and President, really defies belief. The fact that Republicans have claimed responsibility for such a New Deal-like response makes me think that it will be difficult in the future for them to argue for straight Trickle-Down stimulus in the future. The cat has been out of the bag for twenty years that trickle-down economics doesn’t work, but now its really going to be hard for politicians to argue that does, having taken such liberal action during COVID in order to protect the economy which Trump needs to survive electorally.

What of those front line workers in the healthcare industry? Who work at grocery stores and on mass transit? This crisis has surprised a lot of people by informing them that these workers, too, often work for a subsistence wage without health insurance. Oops. Turns out that that’s a problem. Here’s what I see happening in the next few months. Health care workers are going to have to make a decision, based on their treatment during this crisis and the likelihood of future pandemics, about whether they want to work in healthcare. It reminds me of the Black Plague. The Black Plague killed 50-75% of Europe in a year. Prior to the Black Plague, the Feudal System reigned in Europe–Lords/Landowners gave protection to serfs who scraped the earth for their bare survival and gave the great majority of their harvest to the Lords for profit. After the Black Plague, there were so few people to farm that Lords had to actually pay wages to workers to get them to farm. This was the first step in the transition of the European economy from serf-labor to wage labor. I think after the dust of COVID settles, healthcare workers will require higher wages and health insurance in order to work in the healthcare industry. I don’t think there will be strikes. I think there will just be a shortage of people working in the field, which will trigger higher wages and benefits from hospitals and insurance companies in order to lure them into service.

All of this begs the question, for me: are we done with 40 hour work weeks in offices for subsistence wages or a little better? Or have we subtly transitioned to an economy where there is a more relaxed relationship between government, employers and employees? Must work be stressful and irksome in order for employers not to feel taken advantage of? Must all workers commute to work, in the process incurring childcare costs and commuting costs, or can we just continue with this system where a remote worker works to the extent that there is work to do, and spends the rest of the time at home, doing whatever they want to do?

Rather than tie up this note with a thesis statement or something, I want to throw out an idea. Imagine that everyone who is working from home now just continued to work from home. How would that effect families? How would that effect family budgets? How would that effect people’s sense of well-being and health? How would that effect the environment? Take this for a thought experiment: Albany has a lot of state-owned office buildings. What if 60% of the workers in those offices worked from home? Would the parking and air quality improve in the city? Could the state vacate most of the floors in those office buildings and retrofit them for low-income housing? How would that effect rents in the city? How would that effect crime in the city? Would it bring money to the state through such rents? Would it enable the state to pay property tax on those buildings, which they are not doing now? If the state was paying property tax on 10 buildings in Albany, which it is not paying now, wouldn’t that decrease the property taxes of the other real property owners? Wouldn’t lower taxes make real estate more attractive, triggering the purchase of more buildings which are currently vacant, further decreasing property taxes? Would this create a greater tax base for Albany to pay for amenities like parks and festivals and a rejuvenated waterfront? Could Lark Street be the next Warren Street in Hudson? If so, wouldn’t that provide a market for all the craftspeople who live in Center Square? If Lark Street had a dozen new shops with interesting items for sale, and maybe functioned as a pedestrian street on Saturdays like Burlington, with a band, wouldn’t that draw lots of new people to the area? Wouldn’t that be a boon to the restaurant owners and the tipped workers in the area? If the answers to all these questions for Lark Street are “yes”, wouldn’t the answers be the same for a lot of small cities?

 

 

 

Joker Review (2 out of 4 stars)

(Image from ScienceFiction.com)

“Joker” invites comparison with “Taxi Driver.” Some people might even claim that Joker is Taxi Driver for millennials. If that is true, let’s think about what that means.

I was about 21 years old when I first rented Taxi Driver, on DVD, from the video store. I’d heard that the guy who shot Reagan had been affected by the movie, so I decided to watch it mostly from an historical perspective. I watched the movie, sat for about five minutes thinking, and then I watched it all over again. Then I watched the documentary. The next day I watched the film again.

Taxi Driver follows an insomniac cabbie named Travis Bickle, a loner, a Vietnam vet (in a scene where Robert DiNero does pushups in his kitchen, his back is covered in whip scars) as he forms a plan to Do Something, anything, to declare his existence.

Joker’s protagonist seems to have a similar motivation. He is a loser by any normal standard, and he can’t seem to make friends with anyone. But there is a difference. Travis Bickle is unhappy, but he does not appear to other characters in the film to be mentally ill. He holds a job, lands a date with a beautiful woman, his co-workers joke with him. Travis Bickle’s problem is that he unconsciously sabotages himself. He takes the beautiful woman to an x-rated movie theatre. He toughens himself by holding his wrist over a stove flame and does a regimen of pushups, then eats a meal made of bread, milk, honey about 10 tablespoons of sugar and whiskey in a bowl. He pushes his TV stand with his foot further, further, until the TV falls and breaks, and then he buries his face in his hands as if to say “Why did you do that!” The effect is that the viewer understands that, yes, the world in which Travis Bickle lives is filthy and he is surrounded by seedy characters, but this is to some extent the result of faults in Travis’ behaviors. Almost as though, at some level, Travis wants to live in his environment, because it allows him to reinforce his misanthropy and his feeling of martyrdom.

Joker’s protagonist never has a chance. He is portrayed as being mentally ill at the beginning of the film, having spent time in a mental hospital. His coworkers are mean to him, he is the victim of a beat down while dressed as a clown (his job), and then his boss doesn’t believe he was beat up, so he docks his pay. One of his coworkers gives him a gun (the film seems to suggest that the coworker wants to get Joker in trouble), which he then drops while performing at a children’s hospital. A woman on a bus yells at him for being nice to her kid. While riding the subway, three drunk rich kids start to beat him up. Even Batman’s dad, who is running for mayor, punches Joker in the face. Oh, and Joker lives with his mom and used to get beat up by her boyfriend as a kid. Okay, so the guy is mentally ill and very unlucky. I mean the guy gets beat up two days in a row by strangers.

I get it, this is a fictional Gotham City, it’s not supposed to be the real world. But that’s kind of the problem with this movie. It seems to take itself seriously; it seems to want to make a comment on mental illness and the subculture that doesn’t get laid and hates the trust fund people. But to get to the point that the viewer feels some kind of sympathy for the anti-hero, the film has to make the world in which the character lives so brutal that it stops being a real world. It’s like the film wants to have it both ways: it wants to say, “See, society drives people to be like the Joker,” and also, “This is not society as it really exists.” Some people who identify with the Joker may feel that the world is the way it is presented in the movie, but they are delusional. Everybody has a good day every now and then, and they can make something out of it, maybe. The Joker has never had a good day in his life. So he kills people. Is that some kind of moral?

Even if you have not seen Taxi Driver, you know the scene where DiNero stands in front of a mirror and practices tough talk. “You talkin’ to me? Well I don’t see anybody else here. Okay. Take THAT ya FUCK!” There is a very similar scene in Joker, where the character pretends to meet a girl on a dance floor and fantasizes about shooting a guy that’s with her, but he accidentally shoots a hole in his wall. There’s another scene where he walks into an automatic door. So the Joker is bumbling. Travis Bickle is methodical: he cuts a curtain rod and fashions a kind of holster so he can hide a gun in his sleeve and have it drop into his hand. He walks up behind a robber while shopping at a bodega, points the gun at his head, says, “Hey,” waits for the robber to turn around, then shoots him. When, in the end of the movie, Bickle goes on his killing spree, it is unexpected, but not surprising. When Joker goes on his killing spree, I think he was the only one in the theatre who didn’t see it coming.

So the biggest problem with the film is that it doesn’t seem to know whether the Joker is already a psychopath, or “society” makes him one. It seems to suggest that he is already looney when the film starts. So then, what is the point of the film?

Roger Ebert almost always gave at least a half of a star, unless the movie was so aggressively bad or morally bankrupt that he could find no cinematic value to it whatsoever. One film that he awarded zero stars was called “I Spit on Your Grave.” In this movie, a woman is terrorized and raped and tortured and left for dead over the course of an hour and a half, and then she gets her revenge by terrorizing and torturing the men who terrorized and raped and tortured her. “The whole point of this movie seems to be to show such awful things being done to one person that you don’t feel so bad when they do awful things to other people,” (I’m paraphrasing Ebert). But the problem is that the viewer doesn’t feel that any justice has been done, just that a woman had her life ruined and then was just as bad to the bad people as the bad people were to her. Is that entertainment?

What makes Joker watchable is Joachim Phoenix’s performance. He does a very good job of seeming mentally ill. And that’s what most of the movie is, watching Joachim Phoenix act mentally ill. But you could probably save $15 and talk to John outside Lionheart if you want to see someone act mentally ill. Or you can watch the President speak at one of his rallies.

Probably I am being too hard on this movie, but it almost literally begs to be contrasted with Taxi Driver. It has DiNero in it. The characters pretend to shoot themselves in the heard with a gun made out of their index and ring fingers, just like DiNero did in his closeup at the end of the climax of Taxi Driver. If a film is going to try so hard to draw a parallel between itself and a classic, then it raises the critical bar.

The cinematography of Taxi Driver moves the plot. In one scene, Travis Bickle looks at the bubbles in an Alka Selzer, and the camera zooms in and holds the shot for half a minute as the background noise of diner conversations fades out. This says “Travis Bickle is zoned out.” In another scene, Bickle stands talking into a payphone, and you hear him apologize and rationalize his having taken Betsy to an x-rated movie for a date. The camera pans away so Bickle’s voice is off screen, while the shot shows an empty hallway for 45 seconds. The message: Loneliness. The only scene that really stands out to me from Joker is one where he dances on some steps in the sunlight in his Joker outfit. The message: the Joker is insane. But I already knew that.

Taxi Driver’s characters are multi dimensional. You kind of don’t like Betsy, but you see why Travis would be attracted to her, and she gives him a chance. You don’t care for the pimp, Harvey Keitel, but he is funny and seems to want to protect the 13 year old prostitute that he whores out. Travis Bickle is actually likable, he seems to have a sense of morality. The result is a feeling of foreboding and loss as the film reaches its climax and you realize that all of these characters are going to die because of the choices that they made. Joker’s characters are as one dimensional as you can get. There are Drunk White Rich kids, who throw french fries at nice girls and punch clowns in the face, so they have to get shot. There is a Mean Fat Coworker who gets the Joker in trouble, so he has to get stabbed in the neck and eye and his head smashed against a wall a bunch of times. There is a nice midget who is always friendly, so he does not have to get killed. There is a Delusional Mother who let her boyfriend beat up the Joker when he was a child, so she has to get smothered. There is a talkshow host who made fun of the Joker for being a terrible comedian, so he has to get shot on live TV. There is a rich guy whose wife wears pearls, so he has to get shot and his wife has to get shot. The only character development in the movie is when the Joker draws a letter in his notebook.

John Wick was entertaining. John Wick kills sixteen thousand three hundred and forty-seven people, because they killed his dog. There is no universe in which any of that makes sense, so you just watch the film and admire it for the complexity of the choreographed fight scenes. Joker only kills six people in the movie, so there is significance to the murders. It’s like the movie wants you to think that murdering is okay as long as you’ve been treated badly enough by everybody and never had a good day in your life. I’m not sure that’s a great message to put out there, because when people are depressed and lonely, they forget about any good days that they’ve had, and they think they have never had a good day and everyone has treated them badly and they are miserable through no fault of their own. Does that mean that they should go murder people? Maybe they ought to just go on vacation, or to a bar, or get a hobby. Woodworking is nice. Or hiking.

35 days, 362 miles…

When we left Silkie’s Crows Nest marina, the guy who let us use the ramp said “You been here a week and you ain’t left Sharpsburgh yet. This three or four month trip of yours is gonna take you three or four years!” Well, now we are in Portsmouth, Ohio, 362 miles south of Sharpsburgh. That means we’re traveling an average of 10.34 miles a day. At that rate we will make it to New Orleans 158 days from now, around March 11th.

Sam and I would be quite broke and in need of chiropractic care well before that point. Probably some psychiatric care as well.

The problem isn’t that our boat is unsafe or that we didn’t plan well ahead of time for the expedition. I’ve been planning the trip for almost a year, building the boat for eight months and fundraising since May. But we barely finished putting the boat together when we got hit by the hurricane flooding in Sharpsburgh, our primary motor died after a week, and as a result we keep having to spend two days to a week on shore as we get motors fixed or make changes to the boat to make it lighter and more maneuverable.

Out of 35 days, we’ve been stuck on shore due to weather or motor problems 21 of those days. Our average when we’re actually moving is 25.85 miles per day, and we’ve had a few days in which we have travelled more than 40. This includes the time we’ve spent locking through more than half the locks on the Ohio, which can take some time out of our day and necessitate stopping as well as slowing down the river’s current.

At that rate we will make it to New Orleans in 55 days, or around December 5th, which is actually about five days before I had originally planned to arrive.

So, everything hinges on getting the motor fixed or getting a new motor that runs.

Even if the motor only works until we get to the Mississippi, I’d be happy to stay close to shore, row for steering, and float with the current for propulsion. But we cannot go through the remaining 9 locks on the Ohio without a motor, at least not with the boat in its current length.

If we cannot get our current motor working, or find a replacement, within a few days, we are going to basically cut the boat down to half it’s size, get rid of all equipment and tools except bare essentials, use the trolling motor for emergency power, and propel the boat, basically, by oar.

The upside to that plan is that we will save on gas and we will look like Arnold Schwarzenegger by the time we get to Louisiana.

This trip is turning into a rehash of my adventures on the Hudson, except the seven boats and five years from those expeditions are all crammed into one, this time.

By the way, this was supposed to be a book tour, so I’ll put a plug in here. My books are called “Coming of Age on the Hudson” and there are two volumes, but they are quick reads. There are pictures. Just make sure you buy the blue copy on Amazon, not the yellow one.

 

A Breakdown of Costs for Our Ohio/Mississippi Expedition

I wanted to explain how we arrived at our funding goal–to explain the cost drivers. It’s probably difficult to imagine how we budgeted for our upcoming adventure, 2,000 miles down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in a homemade barge pushed by a speedboat.

Construction & Equipment

Here is a picture of the Quartermaster’s List–the items that we have to check off as we load our supplies in New Baltimore before shipping them overland to Pittsburgh. The items in black I have acquired over the years or already bought for this expedition. The items in red we still need to procure. Take a glance to see all the different kinds of things we have to bring to navigate the rivers safely, legally, enjoyably and sustainably.

The costs to complete the boat’s construction, equip it for the three-month expedition, and finish the electrical system, add up to $2623. 

Fuel

While the Ohio and Mississippi are not tidal like the Hudson (and therefore will provide current to push us along), and while we will have a windmill-powered electrical system attached to two electric motors to steer, we nonetheless will have fuel requirements. First, in case something goes wrong with our windmills, we are bringing a small generator to supplement our electrical generating ability. More importantly, the Mississippi is a very sinuous river, like a piece of boiled spaghetti that fell on the floor, which means that while we will float generally south, we will constantly be crossing and re-crossing the shipping channels. In order to avoid being run over by commercial tankers, we will have to use a gas motor to stay as close to shore and to cross the channels as quickly as possible. We want to have at least $1000 budgeted for gas. (Subtotal: $3623)

Transport

In order to get the barge, the supplies, and the speedboat which will function as a tugboat to Pittsburgh, we will have to rent a Uhaul. We’ve built the barge in sections no longer than 8-feet in one dimension, so that all of the pieces can be loaded into a long Uhaul. We will also have to take a pickup truck with the speedboat on a trailer. New Baltimore, NY and Pittsburgh are 444 miles apart by road. Our fuel miles-per-gallon are going to be pretty horrible. If the Uhaul costs around $400 and each vehicle uses $100 in gas, we’re looking at $600 to get the supplies to their starting point just above Pittsburgh on the Allegheny River. (Subtotal: $4223)

Food

If we budget $2,000 for food, for two people, for 90 days, it comes out to $3.70 per meal. We’re going to be doing a lot of fishing and Ramen Noodle eating so that we can afford to have meals in towns sometimes. (Subtotal: $6223)

Docking Fees

The whole point of this trip is to visit as many small towns and big cities as possible. We’re going to try very hard to sleep at anchor or to find people or businesses along the way where we can tie up in a safe place, leave the boat, and explore. But I imagine we will have to pay for dock space in some of the larger cities. Since docking fees can cost $12-$20 per foot, and our barge is 20-feet long, staying at a marina can cost us $240-$400 per night. (Or, the equivalent of 100 of those $3.70 meals.) Were going to avoid it as often as possible, but if we stay at a marina once per month while on this trip, that will cost around $1000. (Subtotal: $7223)

Emergency Repairs

Sam and I are pretty good at making unorthodox repairs to stay afloat, and I have a small backup motor and redundant systems to charge the batteries, but if something goes wrong and we need to buy new batteries (which cost $110 apiece) or have a marine mechanic replace a propellor or service our engine, we would like to have a little reserve cash. $300 seems like a good number. (Subtotal $7523)

Working Backward

Sam and I will each have our personal life savings of about $1,000-$1,500 before we set sail, but we will also have our personal bills to pay such as cell phone bills, health/car insurance, loan payments etc over the three month period. So that knocks necessary fundraising down by about $1000, to $6523. Also, I have a security deposit from my apartment worth $1100, assuming the landlord doesn’t try to take it, so that brings the fundraising down to $5423. My GoFundMe is currently at $1380, so Sam and I have to raise $4,043. 

Along the way, Sam and I are going to do a little busking. We sing and play a couple of instruments and we’ll put out a tip jar. I’m also going to try and sell as many of my books about Coming of Age on the Hudson as possible. I earn $4.83 cents when I sell a volume on Amazon, so if I sell 1,000, the trip will be paid for! But realistically, we hope to raise the money through a combination of book sales, busking, GoFundMe fundraising, doing casual labor down the rivers, and regular old river charity.

Anyhow, I just wanted to explain how I arrived at the GoFundMe goal, so you didn’t think I was pulling it out of thin air.

Here is a picture of the barge, almost completed, in New Baltimore as of July 19th.

“Float of the Phoenix” in Colwell Cove in New Baltimore, NY, about 15 miles south of Albany. (July 19th).

 

I’m Switching to GoFundMe from Kickstarter

Thank you to everyone who pledged to Kickstarter, but I’m not going to make my funding goal, and Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing site. If you pledged to Kickstarter your credit card will not be charged, and if you could donate instead to my GoFundMe I would greatly appreciate it!

Below is a picture of my quartermaster (supplies) list for the three month trip. The funding will help me obtain supplies (although I already have a lot of the equipment like anchors, motors, batteries, etc) and provisions along the way. The fundraiser will also help me cover 1) transporting the boat overland to Pittsburgh on 8/28, which will require renting a Uhaul and the gas for another pickup truck; 2) docking fees which range from $12-20 per foot in some areas; 3) fuel which I need to run an outboard to stay out of the channel to avoid commercial traffic as the Mississippii meanders; 4) food for Sam and I; 5) finalizing the electrical system on the boat; and, 6) an emergency fund for repairs along the way.

Thank you for your donation!

Supplies list as of March.

2,000 Miles Down the Ohio and Mississippi–Pittsburgh to New Orleans by Raft

Ever since I was 21 and planning to build my first boat on the Hudson River, I’ve daydreamed about taking a raft down the Mississippi. Thirteen years later, I’m actually doing it. Starting on September 1st, 2018, I’m leaving from Pittsburgh on a homemade boat, and hoping to get to New Orleans about three months later.

I just launched a Kickstarter campaign, to raise $7,000 for the trip, which you can visit for details on the upcoming project. In the meantime I just wanted to tell all of my family and friends about my plan.

I started drawing the plans, making a schedule, setting a budget, and gathering materials back in January. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I looked at some of the designs for my previous boats and picked out the best parts. The new boat actually incorporates pieces of all of the rafts I took down the Hudson, plus hardware from a sailboat I bought but never used, a motorboat I bought but never used, several canoes, a sunfish, and a rowboat. For that reason, I decided to name her Float of the Phoenix.

Initial Drawing of Float of the Phoenix, March, 2018

As you can see from the picture above, I designed the boat to be two boats. The front 20-feet are essentially a floating barge with an 8×16 foot cabin. In this barge are rooms for me and my partner on this trip, Sam, a commode, a galley, and a bar. This barge will be propelled, very slowly, by two electric trolling motors (which I have left over from my Hudson River trips), as well as a small 4.5 horsepower engine. These motors will be enough to steer the boat, but hardly enough to push it into a headwind or upriver against a current. At the back of the living-space/barge, the boat interfaces with the speedboat which I bought in March. The speedboat has a 50 horsepower engine, which can propel the entire rig at around 3 mph. (Given that the current on the Mississippi runs around 3-4 mph, this would provide 7-8 mph movement relative to the shoreline when piloting the boat downstream). Or, the speedboat could be detached, the barge could be piloted alone or remain anchored, and the speedboat can travel 35 mph. Kind of like how the starship Enterprise-D has can separate its battle bridge from its saucer section. The combination of the two crafts gives us the space to live and store supplies, and the security to bring equipment like computers, but also a one-day range of 60 or more miles if one person stays with the barge while the other uses the speedboat.

Pontoons

I discussed the boat design with Mike, my partner on the Hudson River trips, during the first three months of this year. The main points were how big to make the vessel, how to get it to Pittsburgh (the only water route to the Mississippi is through the Great Lakes, over Michigan, through a canal at Chicago, and down a portion of the Upper Mississippi, which would add thousands of miles to the trip), and what to use for floatation. I decided I had to transport the boat over land in a Uhaul, so each piece had to be de-constructible to portions small enough to fit into the bed of a truck. I also decided that the best kind of floatation would be pontoons, as opposed to a displacement hull. We tried looking for second-hand pontoons from a pontoon boat, but they cost thousands. I contacted a company from New Zealand that makes plastic pontoons, but they said that the cost of transporting them to the U.S. would be many factors higher than the cost to me to purchase them. I thought about building my own pontoons out of plywood, but I’ve never been able to make them hold water, and they would cost a lot of money and time. I thought about using large-diameter sewer pipe, but, again, only one store stocks them in my area and they wanted $400 for a 16-foot pipe. Meanwhile, other years I have used 55-gallon plastic barrels and they worked great. I used to buy them for $13 apiece from a gourmet tomato sauce factory in Catskill, but they’re out of business. It takes 450 pounds to submerge a 55-gallon barrel. They are 2.5 feet in height. I could make two pontoons, each from seven barrels laid end-to-end, which would give me 6,300 pounds of displacement. I found a car wash in East Greenbush that sold the barrels for $10 apiece. They got their detergent delivered in them. So Dad and I drove across the river and got them on a rainy Sunday afternoon in March. In case you’re wondering, a standard pickup bed fits exactly 14 55-gallon drums standing upright. We brought the barrels to my parent’s house in New Baltimore, where, for the previous month, I’d been creating a work area in the woods behind their house.

Barrels from a carwash.

The problem with using barrels on a boat as opposed to a dock is that barrels are designed to float, but not to cut through water. The way most docks are designed, and the way I’d designed Assiduity back in 2009 (on which this vessel’s design is loosely based), the barrels are tucked up under the decking of the dock, strapped into place individually with fire hose, and there are gaps between each barrel of several inches. When a boat constructed this way is pushed through the water, not only the first barrel but every barrel gets pushed through the water, creating drag. Meanwhile, every vessel has a hull speed, which is the speed at which the vessel moves through the water most efficiently. Hull speed is based on the length and shape of a hull. Basically, when the bow of a hull cuts through the water, it creates a wave. At slower-than-hull-speed, that wave breaks along the sides of the boat, creating drag. At hull-speed, the wave breaks immediately behind the motor at the stern of the boat, creating the least amount of frictional resistance. (Boats can travel above hull speed, but it requires exponentially more power AKA fuel consumption for every integer increase in speed).

To overcome the problem of 14 barrels making 14 individual waves, I decided to combine the barrels into pontoons. This would come with a double benefit: not only would I greatly decrease the drag on the boat by presenting a solid shape to the water, but in the event that any part of a pontoon is punctured, it would only damage 1/7 of the pontoon, because each pontoon is composed of seven individually-sealed barrels.

I could only think of fiberglass for combining the barrels. And before I could fiberglass I had to get the barrels into a pontoon shape at least temporarily. I decided to use Gorilla Tape. It took me one day of working alone, and a few hours with my friend Andrea, to get the pontoons duct taped together. For ease of transport, we made two sets of 4-barrel long pontoons, and two sets of 3-barrel long pontoons.

Some of the barrels duct taped together.

Now the fiberglass cloth could be laid across the barrels without falling into the spaces between them. It didn’t matter that the duct tape will eventually not hold up to the stress. It just needed to hold the barrels together until the fiberglass hardened the barrels into a single shell.

Fiberglassing is not fun. You have to use an epoxy, which is a two-part chemical that hardens when mixed. A “hardener”–the smaller container in the picture–is mixed with a “resin”, which begins the reaction. The mixture has to be exact, a few drops too much hardener and the mixture will cure in just a few minutes; too few drops and it will never harden. The cheapest epoxy I could find was from Older Timer Industries, on Amazon, for $87 a gallon. [TIP: If you’re ever using epoxy to fiberglass, get all of your materials set up first, like your brushes, and your fiberglass strips cut to size, because once you mix the epoxy you’re working against a ticking clock. Also, put the hardener into your mixing container first, and the resin on top. It is counterintuitive but it will help you mix the materials together more easily.]

Fiberglass

Fiberglass also is not cheap. Luckily I had a roll laying around since 2010 when I built my last boat. Fiberglass comes in a long roll. You lay it on whatever you’re building or fixing and then you paint the epoxy on it. The epoxy gets absorbed into the threads of the fiberglass and when it hardens it makes a composite of a hard kind of amber with strong fibers running through it. It’s the same principle that makes bricks, which are dried mud and straw, so much stronger than just dried mud or straw. There are two tricks with fiberglass. The first is to select the right weave size as you’re buying it. Too small a weave (less than, say 1.5 oz) and you need to put many layers on before you get a good amount of strength; too big a weave (say, over 5 oz) and it gets hard to get the epoxy to permeate the weave and make a strong bond (although you could fix this problem by contacting an epoxy supplier and getting them to make you an epoxy with a lower viscosity). The second trick is to cut the fiberglass into the largest strips that can go around whatever curve you’re fiberglassing without wrinkling. You can bend fiberglass a little bit better than you can wood or plywood, which can only bend along one axis at a time, but if you try to fiberglass over a long conical surface with a sheet of ‘glass the size of a bed sheet you’re going to end up with a lot of wrinkles because it won’t lay flat.

Fiberglass sheet laid on pontoon.

In the picture above, I could use one long sheet of glass, because the barrels are cylindrical but not conical. That is to say, the fiberglass only has to bend in one direction–down–not sideways or diagonally.

Once I finished fiberglassing the pontoons, I started to think about what I could put on the front of them to make them cut, rather than plow, through the water. I discussed the idea of making shapes out of cardboard and taping them in place at the front of each pontoon and then fiberglassing them, with my father, but he had another idea. Back in the woods, I’d left my 2010 boat, Assembly Required, for the last eight years. Mike and I had made that boat by covering a canoe with plastic wrap and then fiberglassing it and taking the mould off when it hardened. So it had two bows made of fiberglass that were shaped like canoe bows. I took a saws-all and cut these tips off [insert mohel joke here].

It was a little janky trying to attach the tips of Assembly Required to the bows of the pontoons, because the tips widened a little wider than the barrels. Eventually the barrels would be sort of arrow shaped ====> rather than completely flush.

Barrels with bows.

Next we took more fiberglass and used it to attach the tips to the pontoons. Sam came down to help on this part of the project. He is going with me on the trip. It helps tremendously to have a second person around when epoxying, or carrying something heavy, or framing, or traveling 2,000 miles down the Ohio and Mississippi over three months.

Sam does some fiberglassing.

Mike always suggested filling anything close to the water with foam for extra protection. I decided to fill the pontoon tips with foam because they were the most likely to hit something. If they sprung a leak, the water could only fill as much space as not taken up by the foam I put in. I cut pieces of foam from a sheet of 2″ insulation foam I’d had lying around since 2012, and then I sprayed expanding foam into all the crevices. I used two cans.

Pontoon bows stuffed with foam.

Then it was time to duct tape the tops of each pontoon, to present a solid surface for the fiberglass.

Then I coated the whole kit and caboodle with more layers of fiberglass. The 1″ stick in the picture is in place to help the boat track through the water (move in a straight line).

In the meantime, I happened to see on Facebook Marketplace that a man in Castleton, across the river from Coeymans, was selling a rowboat for $200. I wasn’t quite sure how to support the deck of my barge if it was going to be 12-feet wide as planned, because the floor joists would have to stretch over eight feet unsupported between the pontoons. If I had something like a rowboat between them, it would provide support beneath the deck and also give me a lot of storage space. I checked out the boat, it seemed in good shape, it was light enough that two people could lift it, it was made of fiberglass, it was approximately the same depth as my pontoons, and it had flat gunnels (side walls) so that I could run the floor joists of the barge across and they would sit evenly. I bought the boat, Dad drove his truck up to Albany, met Sam and I, and we brought it back to New Baltimore. Sam and I tried the boat out in the Hudson with a trolling motor and found she moved well, and I needed just to patch a small hole in the stern and to get a bilge plug to fill the bilge hole.

The rowboat would form the center hull of my barge.

Now it was time to paint the pontoons with a pigmented “gel coat.” I actually did not do this. The gel coat I bought off of Amazon was the wrong product, and I was in a hurry to get the pontoons done (I only had one whole day and one morning a week to work on the boat during May). Instead I bought an “epoxy paint”–which I had never heard of before–from Shady Harbor Marina in New Baltimore. I could choose from green or red. I thought green was more woodsy.

Applying the epoxy paint.

I used the green epoxy paint on the bottom of the rowboat, too, and put about ten coats on the seam on the transom where the rowboat leaked. When I was finished, it was nice to see the three hulls all matching in color.

Pontoons and center hull finished.

But it’s as important to wear latex gloves when using epoxy paint as it is when using epoxy! I had been in a hurry that day and didn’t want to bother. Bad choice. After washing with gasoline, soap and water, and a pumice stone, this was the best I could do. I had to wait tables that night looking like I had moldy fingernails.

Wear gloves when you paint with epoxy paint.

Decking

The pontoons had taken almost a month and a half to finish. The reason they took so long was because I work on the boat in New Baltimore, and live and work in Albany as a waiter. Generally I would leave Albany at 8 a.m., put a coat of fiberglass on the pontoons between 8:45-11:30, and then I would have to drive back because it would take at least two hours for the epoxy to harden.

The decking was much more straightforward framing work, except that I had to plan it in sections which could be easily moved and transported.

The final boat will be 12×20, which dimensions are easily divisible by four, to keep my cutting to a minimum. (Plywood comes standard in a 4×8 foot sheet; 2x4s come standard in 8-foot lengths.)

I brought the two front sections of the pontoons and the rowboat down into my parent’s yard, where it is flat, and where there are electrical outlets nearby. I placed the hulls within a 12-foot square.

Starting to lay out the front deck.

The front of the pontoons (pictured above to the left and right of the rowboat) were almost exactly 12-feet in length, as was the rowboat, so that I could frame a deck by building three 4×12 foot sections of deck and bolting them together to produce a 12×12 foot deck, or 144 square feet. [144? Gross!]

I’d gone to the hardware store to buy the pre-treated 2x4s for the decking, but I forgot about all the bracing I would need, every 16-inches between the crown and base plates of the deck frame, to support the plywood. So I went around the “boat graveyard” in the back of my parent’s house and took all the 2x4s off of my old contraptions, raided my workshop for odds and ends, and ended up with the 30 pieces of 45″ joists that I needed.

This was June 7th. Dad and I framed out the deck sections in the yard during the mid-late afternoon (I happened to have a Thursday off).

Three sections of 12×4 foot decking, stacked atop one another.

Many hands make light work. I have a paragraph in Coming of Age on the Hudson about how one extra person does not cut your labor time in half, but by 4/5, because one extra person just makes it so much easier to frame something or cut something by holding the other end of a board so you don’t have to make a jig or hold a board in place with your foot while putting a screw in with your left hand and holding a screw gun in your right. Anyhow Mike and Sam (my friend from last year’s Hudson River boat) came down on Thursday evening and helped me bolt the frames together. Sam was much better than I am at drilling holes so that the bolts pass through in a straight line and don’t get stuck in the wood (because he measured everything precisely), and I asked Mike to focus on how to make a jig that would allow for the 4.5 hp gas motor to vice onto the back of the boat.

Mike and Sam helping to bolt the barge pieces into one deck.

I took a 12-foot board and bolted it through the 4×12-foot sections to hold them all in place. When we were done, I could really see what the dimensions of the boat would be.

Sam bolting the deck.

Loading the Pieces Individually

As I said, I had to construct the pieces in fragments small enough that I could lift them with one other person, and they could fit in a pickup truck, because I will have to disassemble the whole craft and ship it to Pittsburgh. On Friday of last week, Dad and I unbolted everything Mike and Sam and I had bolted together the day before, and shipped it to my friend Jake’s island on the Hudson River.

Loading the deck segments.

I was glad to see that we could load all of the deck pieces as well as the two front-halves of the pontoons into the bed of the pickup truck, as planned.

The whole front deck and pontoons in one pickup bed.

We brought all of the materials to Jake’s island. They would be safe there, so that Sam (the other Sam, who is going on the trip with me), and I could assemble them on the beach inside Jake’s island’s cove on Monday, when we both had a day off of work at the restaurant at which we are jointly employed.

Assembling the Boat for the First Time

On Monday, June 11th, I picked Sam up at his apartment and we drove to New Baltimore to assemble the deck on the pontoons. We hadn’t yet tested the pontoons, or the rowboat after I’d (attempted to) fix the hole in the transom. We drove to Brigg’s Island, the island of which Jake is the caretaker and where we’d build the boat. Brigg’s Island is 1/2 mile south of Coeymans and forms the northern boundary of the Hannacroix Creek. Jake maintains the northern tip, where he has a dock with a sailboat that he and his friends are fixing up. There is a very steep staircase that leads down from the north cliff of the island to the river. To the left of this staircase is an outcropping of rock which protrudes north toward Coeymans. This outcropping creates a natural, small, beach bay approximately 100 feet across. The bottom of this bay is sand. The bay is made of sediment which flows into the bay from the tidal action of the Hudson, because the north side of the island has been filled with silt from dredging the Hudson, so that the “island” is technically now a peninsula, although the easiest access to this bay is from the tip of the island, which Jake owns, by boat, rather than overland, through the jungle which has grown from the deposited silt over 95 years.

I wanted to assemble the boat on the sand beach within the bay, because I was wary of the effect of frequent tides and wakes from barges and speedboats jarring the boat as I took several weeks to assemble it. I preferred to bring the materials to the beach and anchor it in such a way that 3/4 of the time, the boat would be beached (and therefore immune to the effects of wakes, tides, and winds) while 1/4 of the time it would float, so that I could come to the island and test the buoyancy of the pontoons and the motive power of the outboard.

So, Sam and I had to carry the pontoons and the frame down a staircase to the very tip of the island, which is composed of broken rocks which are submerged for 1/2 of the day and dry the other half, and get the pieces around a sheer outcropping where our only choice was to carry each individual piece while wading hip-deep through moss-covered rocks (an endeavor which would require several hours).

Instead, I proposed that we carry the rowboat to the river’s edge at the bottom of Jake’s cliff, load the framing, screws, and tools on top, and I would wade around the island pulling the boat by a rope. Sam agreed, mostly because I emphasized that this was objectively the safest and most time efficient plan.

First we carried the pontoons, individually, down the staircase to the water’s edge. We put them in the water and they floated perfectly. I swam each one to the rock outcropping and shoved them into the cove, because the waves would push them onto the sandy beach just a few yards away. Then we carried the decking down and put it on the center hull.

The three segments of deck loaded on the center hull for transportation to the bay in which we would assemble the pieces into a boat.

Sam commented, “Dude, I feel like we’re in the 1800’s on the Erie Canal.” As I pulled him, inside the boat, around the corner of the precipice and dragged him and the boat onto the beach, he sang, “…fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.”

When we’d drove, carried, and pulled the materials into the cove, we were overcome by the picturesqueness of the scene.

The materials in Colwell Cove, waiting for assembly.

After all, what were our friends doing at that moment? They might have been in an office, working at a service job, overcoming a hangover, or playing video games. None of that could compare with the present, in which Sam and I were assembling pieces of our creative projection on a beach on a beautiful spring afternoon.

We assembled all the pieces, vice-gripped the trolling motor and marine battery into place, and installed the 4.5 hp outboard motor, to give it a shakedown trial. The electric motor carried us easily into the river, and then the outboard started up on the first pull, and moved us at least 3 mph. We went south to the mouth of the Hannacroix Creek, in New Baltimore, which is the one 1/4-mile of the Hudson River that I have visited by boat more than any other part of the 150 mile stretch from Albany to NYC (and I have gone past places like Coxsackie or Poughkeepsie four or six times.) I took this picture from the first evening we tried out the motors on the boat.

First time trial with the boat, at the mouth of the Hannacroix Creek, New Baltimore, NY.

It was a really grand time putting the boat together with Sam on a deserted beach with tug boats and yachts going up the river and the sun coming down, up to our calves in the water, the birds flying over, the fresh breeze blowing in our faces.

The next week was fun but stressful. I’d agreed to house sit/ cat and dog sit for my good friends Nyssa and Rich. They are two of my closest friends. After the apartment that I’d lived in for nine years burned down, I stayed with them, and their cat slept with me every night, and their dog is always excited to see me. At the same time, a group of folks I’d met on the river last year, who are part of an international organization called Ninth Wave which, among other endeavors, paddles rivers across several continents, were about to canoe the Hudson River, and I’d agreed to pick them up from the train station, let them sleep on Nyssa and Rich’s couches, and then drive them to New Baltimore where they would stage their 2018 river adventure. In exchange for the hospitality, they accompanied me to the hardware store to purchase the lumber for the walls and ceiling of the cabin, and then helped me paint the 35 2x3s and seven sheets of plywood, front and back. I had to paint them so that the lumber would not absorb water and increase in weight by 300%.

On the next Monday, June 28th (three days ago as of this writing), I picked up Sam and we drove to New Baltimore to frame out the walls of the cabin and the ceiling. We accomplished this task by 2 pm. Sam and I went to the Halfway House Tavern, the oldest business in Ravena, for lunch. Then we brought two canoes to Coeymans, lashed them together, and loaded the walls and ceilings on top. I figured it would be easier to paddle the materials 1/3 mile south to Jake’s island than to carry each piece from the top of Jake’s island around the precipice, our bodies semi-submerged.

The materials for the walls and ceilings of the cabin, loaded onto two canoes as a makeshift barge, Coeymans, NY.

Once we’d loaded the plywood and walls onto the canoes, there was no place left to sit. Sam and I tried to sit atop the lumber and paddle south, but the wind was blowing north, and twice we tried to paddle south only to be blown back north into the dock from which we’d departed.

I decided the only way to get the materials to the island was for me to take a rope and walk along the shore rocks. I’d done this for eleven miles along the Hudson in 2010, when the wind was so unfavorable that neither our motor nor our oars could overcome the blowback. Sam remained in the boat and used an oar, and later a 2×4, to keep the canoes from getting stuck on the piers that make the dyke along the western shore, built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1920s to prevent erosion and maintain the channel depth.

It was a treacherous expedition which took an entire hour to complete. The rope was short enough to be caught, frequently, on the protruding piers and the bolts of metal that extend from them. The rope tended to pull Sam and the canoes with the lumber into the piers. Fallen trees and other obstructions laid over the piers and required me to let go of the rope, overcome them, and meet Sam on the other side, ready to toss the rope, having paddled. The heat index triggered several alarms, so that we could not exert any effort without sweating so profusely that we required cloths to wipe our eyes. Then suddenly a storm broke over us, and it began to rain. Sam shouted jovially,

“Of course! This is our luck, man!”

And I rejoined, sarcastically,

“Hey it could be worse!”

After we did finally make it to the cove, we just checked that the barge was anchored and tied up well, which it was, and unloaded the supplies on it.

The Cabin

Two days ago, June 19th, I went to New Baltimore and met my dad to build the walls of the cabin. I used to not like to work with my dad, because neither of us had any experience working with power tools or framing walls. Now, I love working with my dad. He has learned about framing walls and using power tools from me, as I built boats and a cabin in the woods at Mom and Dad’s property. Especially, though, Dad read my book, and there is a lot of specific information about boatbuilding, and he is a character in it, and we have grown closer since he read the book, and I have come to anticipate his help and ideas in my boat construction.

He is also nearly seventy, and although he is a great help as a physical laborer–greater than, say, any girlfriend I’ve had, even at sixty-nine years old–I don’t want to tax him. So I like to ask Sam or Mike or my other friend Sam to help me move heavy things that require dexterity.

But Dad can certainly carry a framed-out wall, hold up 40 pounds, or suggest unorthodox ideas by which to complete a task, so I certainly like his company.

Anyhow yesterday, Dad and I went to the island. Sam and I had already deposited all of the heavy parts to assemble. Dad and I had to transport our bodies, a cordless drill, screws, some lumber, and a waterproof roof rack that you might put on the top of a car, to the cove, around the precipice that is 5-feet deep at high tide, which it was.

The wind was blowing so hard that white caps were crashing over the surface. Dad asked me about an object he descried in the river, whether it was a stick. I confirmed that it was a whole branch, almost a section of a tree, floating downriver. It took merely ten minutes for it to float a half mile past us, which suggested the river surface was blowing south quite fervently.

The most eventful part of the day was canoeing around the tip of the island into the cove in the heavy wind. Dad, I believe, has only been in a canoe one another time, and we were loaded with supplies. Dad got into the front of the canoe, and a barge passed just as I was pushing us off. A wake broke over the bow and doused him with water. Soon, though we were around the tip of the island and the wind blew us safely into the cove.

I brought the anchor up. It’d held the barge off the beach. When the anchor was aboard, I blew right onto the beach, next to Dad, who waited with the canoe and supplies. Once beached, we began to take the plywood and framed lumber that Sam and I had brought aboard the previous day off the boat. Then we laid out the plywood decking, screwed it in place at the corners, and left a half-section right in the middle unscrewed, as a hatch for access to the rowboat.

Dad and Phoenix with decking.

Next we screwed the walls into place.

Walls attached.

Here’s a view out the front of the cabin. Hopefully I’ll have a similar view for about two and a half months straight this fall.

A view over the bow.

The hatch opening was 4 ‘ by 4’, and gave access to the entire rowboat for storage space.

Inside the hatch.

Today, June 21st, the first day of summer, Dad and I went to the island and put the roof on. We used a cordless drill to drill pilot holes, and my power drill plugged into an inverter attached to a marine battery to drive the 3″ contractor’s screws. Adding the roof made the structure much more ridged.  My phone overheated so I had to take this picture from back atop the ridge on the island, on zoom, so it is a little blurry. That is the status of the boat as of today.

The boat, with three walls and a roof, as of June 21st.

The Next Steps…

The next steps are to finish the construction of the boat, fundraise for the expedition, wire the electrical charging system, and prepare the boat for transportation overland from New Baltimore, NY to Pittsburgh, PA.

Construction

The portion of the boat seen above is currently 12-feet square. The finished boat will be 12-feet wide by 20-feet long. Thus I will be extending the length of the boat by eight more feet, the same size as the cabin in the picture. I need to finish fiberglassing and painting the rear portions of the pontoons, frame out two more deck sections like Mike, Sam, Dad and I made ten days ago, and then frame out the rear of the cabin and roof as in this picture. Then I need to purchase and cut the plywood for the sides of the cabin. The cabin will have 2.5-foot windows which will fold down around the entire length of the cabin, beneath which will be screen to help protect us from mosquitos. I will be adding a door to the front and a sort of hinged deck on either side which will extend over two canoes. The rear portion of the deck will interface with the speedboat I bought in February, as a barge interfaces with a tugboat, so I will have to come up with some sort of bumper system that also secures the speedboat in place when driving the barge. Interior work on the cabin and the final paint job will not be completed until we have launched in the Allegheny River above Pittsburgh.

Fundraising 

I am using Kickstarter, a fundraising website, to try to raise $7,000 for the trip. Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing fundraising site, meaning that people offer to donate to a project but are not charged for their donation unless the total amount of the fundraising goal is pledged. There are incentives built into the donation levels. For example, donating $25 entitles a contributor to a copy of my book, Siren Song, $60 gives a contributor a two-volume copy of Coming of Age on the Hudson, and $500 buys a contributor two days and one night on board the boat as we make our expedition. I have 30 days to raise the $7,000 or I lose any lesser amount pledged. The Kickstarter math is complex, though. If 140 people pledge $50 and get a copy of my book, and it costs me $10 to print a copy and $5 to mail it, and Kickstarter takes it’s 10% fees and charges, I net $4,200. If 700 people donate $10 and receive no books, I net $6,300. It makes it a little hard to budget the total amount of money I will have available until the end of the Kickstarter period. I’m also saving for the trip from my regular employment, but much of that money is currently going to purchase construction materials. Along the way, I am hoping to raise awareness of my book on Amazon.com and sell enough copies to supplement the amount I will start out with. The more books I can sell or money I can raise, the more interesting of a trip I will have, because I will be able to visit more places and see and blog about more things. Since the purpose of the book I’m writing on this project is to compare the political and cultural life of the small towns along the Ohio and Mississippi, and abstract those conditions or policies that are leading some communities to thrive, my fundraising is directly related to the quality of the book. The more I can raise, the longer I can stay on the river, the more places I can dock, the more tributaries I can travel up, the more cultural facilities and local businesses I can visit and patronize.

Also, as of today, I am quitting smoking in order to save money for the trip (as well as for it’s health benefits)!

Electrical System

Having enough electricity on this trip is key. My partner on the trip, Sam, and I will be bringing our laptops, cell phones, and AV equipment in order to blog and podcast along the way. I need to use my phone for the river charts app which requires running my location services. The navigation and anchor lights and interior lights need to run. And I am using two electric trolling motors, mounted on the two sides of the boat, one of which is remote controlled, to steer when the river presents conditions that do not require the outboard motor. To power all of this equipment, I am installing two 1Kw windmill generators, which I already own, but which I need an expert to help me wire to the bank of four deep-cycle batteries which will store our power. We will also bring a generator and, if the budget permits their purchase, solar panels. All of this needs to be wired to a sacrificial fuse which prevents overloading in high gusts of wind and a charge controller, at a minimum.

Transportation

As of right now, the plan is to take the boat apart on August 1st and store it on land at my parent’s house until the last week of August, and then to rent a Uhaul to transport all the pieces, as well as the speedboat, out to PA. I would much prefer to find a professional driver with a flatbed to bring everything out. I have started to spread the word that I am looking for that service, but if anyone has any advice, please contact me at [email protected].

I will be updating this site at least once a week as the construction progresses.

 

A Day in the Life of a Pre-Adventurer

For the last 5 months, I’ve been planning a new adventure: a 2,000 mile trip down the Ohio and Mississippi from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. I’ve wanted to build a boat and sail the Mississippi since 2006, when I first started building rafts for the Hudson. I figured I would do it after I rafted to NYC, but then that took four years, and by the time I checked that goal off of the list, I had a career at the NYS Legislature. Then I left to go back to school, and by the time that was over I was completely broke. Then I said I would do the Mississippi after I published my first book. But that took longer than expected, and I figured I ought to try and sell some books to make money first. Now it’s time to piss or get off the pot.

The Mississippi has a current, unlike the Hudson which is tidal. I’ve built a houseboat before that floated on barrels. My plan is to do the same thing again, and use the river current to move me slowly south. But because the Mississippi is so sinuous, I needed to acquire a motor of at least 10 horse power to steer myself out of the channel to avoid river traffic. I really wanted a motor of 50 horse power. I’d rather have more power than I need, and use 1/10 of it’s capacity, because at some point there will probably be a strong wind or some kind of contingency where the extra power will come in handy.

A 50 horse power motor costs between $3,500-$5,000. But a guy from Tivoli (on the east bank of the Hudson just north of Rhinebeck) was selling an old boat with a 50 horse power Mercury for $875. He told me I could have the boat and the trailer, too. So on the one really nice day that we’ve had so far in 2018, my dad and I took his truck an hour south across the river and I bought the boat. The guy was nice enough to put two new wheels on the trailer and rewire the break lights and blinkers. We brought the boat back to my parent’s house in New Baltimore, and for the first time in 13 years of Hudson adventures, I became the owner of a boat that isn’t a one-time use item.

Dad with the new boat

I’m on a boat.

It was really a wonderful purchase. I just expected to get a motor that I could put on the barge I was planning to build, and instead I got a whole boat with an electric start, hydraulically powered steering, lights, bilge pump, chairs and cupholders.

So that was a warm day in February, and then it snowed or rained every day I was off after that, and today (Monday, April 9th) was the first day I could go down and work on it.

In the mean time, I’ve been drawing plans. I want the boat to be big enough that me and my partner on the adventure can live relatively comfortably and have our own little space. It needs to be water proof because I will be bringing my computer in order to blog about the communities I visit as I travel down the river. Also, Sam, who is going on the trip with me, plays guitar and harmonic and sings, and I play keyboard and sing, and we want to try our hand at pod casting and busking, so there has to be space for the instruments too. Also, space for a wet bar and an ice maker so I can have afternoon cocktails, a galley for making food, space for storing provisions and clothes and a telescope and a microscope, because I really do want to learn as much as I can about the rivers as I go down.

Rob (my partner on the Hudson adventures) and I have been talking and going over some designs, and it seems like the best plan is really to go with a square wooden platform like a dock that floats on 16 55-gallon plastic barrels and has a 12X10 foot cabin on top. We’ve built a similar vessel before. We discussed using plastic pipes or metal pontoons for floatation but they are too expensive.

My friend Andrew is an engineer and he will help me wire the two 1Kw windmills which I have owned for ten years, which should supply us with more than enough power.

The motor boat I just bought, which I call Delaney, because she looks like a floating DeLorean to me, will function as a tug, interfacing with the cabin in order to steer it at something like 3mph relative to the current, while remaining detachable in order to operate independently at 35 mph.

So, Sam is my co-worker, and he has been in the Israeli army and made road trips across the U.S., and he’s looking for an adventure, and we have complementary strengths, so he is going to join me on the trip. But he is not terribly familiar with my previous river trips, so I thought it would be a good idea for him to come down and see the boat and see a representative day of boat work, which usually entails a lot of driving and hardware store planning and helping my parents move furniture and very little progress gets made, but we get ideas for the next time we work.

And sure enough, that’s how the day went.

I picked up Sam from his Albany apartment at eleven, after getting lost. We drove to my friend’s house, because he was giving my parents’ a patio set and they needed help loading it into their truck. Then we drove to New Baltimore and ate a sandwich with my folks, and I gave Sam a tour of the “boat graveyard”–the 4 canoes, 1 sunfish, 1 sailboat, 1 motorless motorboat, and 1 homemade fiberglass catamaran–that I’ve managed to accumulate in the woods behind my parent’s house.

The big order of the day, though, was to bring the motor boat over to my mechanic, Glen, in Hannacroix, about five miles away. I wanted him to give Delaney a once-over and to fix the trailer, which was missing left hand turn signal.

We had to fiddle with the trailer to get it on the hitch. Meanwhile, my uncle Paul showed up with a kind of wooden diner table he’d gotten from a worksite, which he was going to give to my mom, which annoyed my dad because they have more furniture than they know what to do with but always take more–and I said I would take it down the river with me. So, boom, I have two benches and a table for the boat now.

Then we set off for Glen’s shop. We were doing alright until I looked in the mirror and saw that the boat was tipping way to the left and I shouted to dad to slow down. We heard a scraping sound and came to a stop. Dad looked back and said,

“Oh, crap, the wheel fell off!”

We pulled off onto a side road across from the New Baltimore Town Offices.

“Oh, crap, the wheel fell off!”

Sam and I went looking for the wheel, which had rolled onto somebody’s lawn, and then we came back and called Glen.

“Heyo?”

“Hi Glen, it’s Dallas Trombley again. We ran into a little problem. The wheel fell off the trailer. We’re stuck across from the town office. We were wondering if you might be able to help us out.”

“Oops! Okay, do you have the bolts? Or they came out?”

“I’m thinking the guy who sold me the trailer forgot to put them in back in February.”

“Well, okay…give me a minute and I’ll mosey on over.”

As we waited we looked behind us, where two quarter horses were watching us from ten feet away. Somebody came by in a pickup truck and said “Hey Kirk,” to my dad, and he said, “Hey, Jimmy.”

“Wheel came off the trailer, huh?” Jimmy observed.

“Yup.”

“You find the bolts?”

“Nope.”

“They’re probably here there and everywhere a mile back.”

“I think so.”

Another guy passed and offered to help us because he had some bolts and lived a little down the road, but we thanked him and told him the mechanic was coming.

Glen came and got under the boat and jacked it up pretty quickly. As he was working he laughed and said,

“I told Steven the mechanic I was coming here and he said ‘Can’t those people get over here without their wheels falling off?'” Because my father had been driving to Glen’s a couple of years ago, and his front wheel fell off, and Glen had to go help him.

Glen took two of the four bolts off the other wheel and used them to put the first wheel on, and then we followed him as he drove Dad’s truck with the trailer the last mile to Glen’s shop, the wheel wobbling the whole time.

***

Back at my parent’s house, Sam and I decided to try and open the 1980s popup camper that has been rotting in the woods for 15 years and hasn’t been opened in 5, in order to see if anything might be usable for our trip–like the sink or stove or inverter or table.

First I had to find the lever that turns the capstan or ratchet which lifts the top up. I found this under the camper under years of leaves. The popup works by turning this ratchet which has a spool on it and this pulls a cable which runs under the cabin and somehow lifts the top. Of course, as soon as I turned the spool, the rusted cable snapped.

So now we had to find a way to get the top of the popup off. We went down to the workshop and found a vice and a come-along and tried to squeeze the vice unto the cable, anchor the come-along, and use it to pull the cable. But the cable pulled out from the vice immediately.

I crawled under the camper and managed to tie a loop into the cable and hook the come along directly to it. We ran a heavy rope between two trees and hooked the come along to it. But it kept stretching the rope rather than pulling the cable.

Sam and the come-along with the camper.I then ran a rope to a tree that was farther away, and we got everything taut, but instead of pulling the cable, it started to pull the whole popup forward. Sam observed that the whole cable apparatus under the camper was probably seized up and rusted. So we gave up with the come-along plan, but not before I jammed my hand releasing the tension. It was the first blood of the new trip.

Sam asked if I was alright, and I said “There will be worse injuries than that on the trip, I’m sure.”

We tried to lift the top of the popup and some weird chewed-up cushion material flew out. Then we heard my mom calling that dinner was ready, so we gave up.

We had a nice dinner, and afterwards, as Mom and I were clearing some plates, Dad asked Sam sincerely, “Hey, what’s going on with you guys and the Gaza Strip or whatever. I saw something on the news.”

I wanted to say, “That’s quite the topic to bring up casually to someone you met three hours ago,” but Sam went into an immediate summation of the issues based on his experiences and seemed to explain it to Dad in a way I never would have been able to do.

We left around 6:30 and on the way back we re-hashed the events of the day.

“So, we managed to bring the boat over to the mechanics’ shop,” I noted.

“Hey, that’s something,” Sam observed.