Tag Archives: Great Loop

Grace and The Glory of Minutiae

We set our sights on grand goals–for me, the publication of a new book; my book tour down the Hudson Valley; ultimately, a “grand tour” of the U.S. though the Great Loop. But the great majority of our lives are filled with mundane minutiae. It’s hard not to lose motivation when the victories are so rare while the work is so frequent, unprofitable, and unacknowledged.

Toward achieving happiness we have choices. We can push our dreams and goals out of our minds in order to rid ourselves of the anxiety that comes with trying to attain them. (That strikes me as a pretty sad path). We can set goals and fight through the work that needs to be done, biting our lip and numbing our mind, while telling ourselves that the work will be over soon, and then our goal will be met. But over a timeline it seems like such a path would lead to an aggregate of annoyance for fleeting feelings of success. Or we can take what I think is the enlightened path, where we acknowledge that the minutia, the unacknowledged and unprofitable steps, are part of the whole experience of obtaining the goal, and try to enjoy those steps as part of the chosen experience.

Eleven years ago I read an essay in Farmer’s Almanac about Grace–a word I’d never really thought of before, especially in a secular sense. The author talked about how he used to loathe shoveling snow. As soon as the snow would pile up he’d get mad, then go out and rush through shoveling his driveway, taking the biggest shovelfuls he could lift in order to get back inside as quickly as possible. I remember he said that if you see your neighbor doing that, and you don’t like them, you should let them keep going on that way, because they’ll have a heart attack soon. (If you’re reading this blog I probably like you, which is why I’m trying to convince you not to act that way.) Anyhow one day the author of the essay was outside and suddenly he just had a change of opinion. He realized that picking up the heaviest scoops of snow didn’t get the driveway shoveled faster, because he tired himself out and had to rest. It also made his back hurt. Instead he started taking little scoops, and he stopped sweating, and then he stopped shivering. Then he wasn’t so uncomfortable or cold or achey. He looked around and noticed that it was actually quite beautiful outside as the snow fell. He realized he was getting exercise, which made him feel good about himself. He found himself even making little side paths just for the hell of it. After that, he didn’t look forward to snow falling, but he didn’t resent it either. He just acknowledged that when the snow fell, he had no choice but to go out and shovel it, and that he was equal to the task, so he might as well do it his way, enjoying what he could about it, because what possible benefit was there for him to deplore the idea of doing what he had to do before and while he was doing it? He called that Grace: doing what you have to do without complaining, in a mindful way, and even deriving some joy from what could otherwise be unpleasant. The essay struck me as really very wise, and for the last decade I’ve tried to follow the author’s advice. I think it’s helped me attain an aggregate of happiness that is far beyond what a  person feels if they don’t enjoy how they spend the majority of their time.

For example, last Wednesday was a pretty average day. I had a neat dream that made me think at 5:45, and since I drifted awake, I decided to get up and start living. (If you hate the idea of getting out of bed in the morning because you’re afraid you’ll run out of energy and get yelled at over the course of the day, you’re probably not living gracefully). So I got up and started doing my Fives, as I call them: I wash exactly five dishes, put away exactly five articles of clothes from my hamper, practice a melodic progression on the keyboard exactly five times, do five sit ups, five push ups, and read five pages of a book. None of those things are themselves very taxing, and over the course of the day, if I do my fives five times, I’ve done 25 sit ups and push ups, read 25 pages, learned a melodic progression, done my dishes and put away my clothes. I enjoy going from task to task, thinking about how my hands or stomach muscles feel, or what my mind is thinking as I read. I feel like I’m Here, Existing, which seems to me so much better than having my mind somewhere else because I’m daydreaming because I don’t like what I’m doing because I’m working for someone else’s profit just to get money.

After each set of Fives I do a task which is mundane or boring or irksome–the minutiae of everyday life. I was done with my first set of Fives at 6 a.m. and I updated my Excel spreadsheet which has my list of receipts for expenditures for my book business, including the cost of building my boat for my boat tour. I updated the list and it took about 15 minutes and I thought “Why did I think this was going to be so irksome? Because I had to open a drawer and look at receipts and type them into boxes?” I found that so far this year I’ve spent $1,409 to purchase copies of my book, build a model of my boat, and build the plywood deck. I would normally pay 30% of my income to taxes at the end of the year, so keeping track of this amount (which is tax deductible) will save me about $400. Not bad for 15 minutes worth of work. I did my next round of fives.

Now it was 6:45 and although I hadn’t done much, I had the satisfaction of knowing that I’d done a fair amount of “over-and-above” work before most people’s alarms had gone off. Next I set about re-formatting my new book, Siren Song, so that it will have a title page, a blank page, and then the page numbers would start on the first page with text. First I tried to figure out how to reformat the Word document by clicking on the drop boxes in the toolbar. I didn’t want to Google how to do it and have to find different answers and read them and click between the web browser and the document, reading and following the directions on a help page. But then I did, and discovered that you can divide a Word document into sections using the Headings tab, and number them independently. I made a section including two blank pages, then the title page (so that the title page would appear, like in a book, on the right-hand side after the reader flips one blank page, then an empty page on the left, so that the text would begin halfway down the middle of the next right hand page.) Then I had to Google how to delete the numbers from the first section (which was complicated). After completing and saving the formatting of the draft I signed into CreateSpace, the publishing website, and uploaded the file. They have a proof-reviewer after the document is uploaded. In reformatting the book I’d added an extra page after the title, so the text began on the left page after a full blank page after the title page. Etc. I edited and re-uploaded the draft six times, each time taking several minutes for the draft to upload. I began to wonder if I would get the draft finished before I had to set out for the day. With some luck, just after 8 a.m. (1 hour and fifteen minutes later) I got the document uploaded, the cover designed, and the whole package submitted for final review to the publishing outfit. Review takes 24 hours, and when the book is done I can publish it on Amazon and Kindle. (I have to charge $4.99 to make 84 cents per copy; I will be lucky if I sell 100 copies of the book, called Siren Song, about leaving my employment at the New York State Assembly. So this hour, added to maybe 300 other hours, will bring me in maybe $84. That comes out to about 28 cents per hour–though theoretically I could always sell more copies. (If it wasn’t for grace and patience I could never be a writer.)

By now it was a few minutes past 8 a.m. and I had to leave by quarter to nine to meet my friend Sam at Lowes to get some materials for finishing the construction of the deck of the new boat (which I will use for a book tour down the Hudson Valley in August). So I had about 35 minutes, which I used to edit and post a picture I’d taken two days earlier with Tess Collins, who runs McGeary’s and used to own the Lark Tavern, which was the best bar in Albany, and in which several scenes in my book are set. I emailed myself my picture, then realized it was in my “i-cloud”, but then I had to edit the picture and save it so I could post it on Facebook, and then I struggled trying to tag McGeary’s and the old Lark Tavern page (though it was easy to tag Tess)–so the post took 30 minutes–another piece of minutiae. But, as with the other minutiae that morning, it has the potential to be profitable: the post got 6 shares and 160+ likes, many from people who I do not know, through Tess’ page, who now know about the book. If five people buy the book as a result, I’ll earn $24.25, which isn’t bad for a half-hour’s worth of minutiae.

By 9 a.m. I’d driven to Lowes in Glenmont for the next step that no one will see when the boat is finished. I had to buy a piece of 15/32″ plywood, two 2X4s, 25 3-1/2″ bolts, nuts, washers and a 1/4″ drill bit. I didn’t have a way to transport the plywood with my 2001 Ford Taurus, but my friend Sam met me and we loaded it onto his car’s roof rack. By 9:50 we’d driven the materials to New Baltimore. By 10:10 we’d carried all of the materials out of my parent’s workshop, lined up the canoes, and put the parts of the deck together on top. So 4.5 hours after waking up, I could finally begin the physical work for the day. My goal was to build the bow of the deck, which, like the back portion of the deck, had to sit higher than the middle of the deck, in order to allow for the rise of the canoes at their bows and sterns.

We began by building a simple wooden square, which will be bolted to the center deck and extend between the canoes forward to support the foredeck.

The battery in the picture is keeping the square from falling off. The final boat will have a cable running from the bow of each canoe under the deck as a suspension support. For added support we cut two lengthwise beams running from the bow of each canoe back to the deck. These required a little math to make the correct cut at the front of each beam to allow for the “rise” of either canoe (the two canoes are different brands and rise at different angles.)

Next we built cross-wise braces, and then we screwed the plywood on top and cut it at angles in order to match the shape of the aft deck.

Here is a picture from the opposite angle:

The angles need to be cut and sanded into a prettier shape, but by now it was 1 p.m. and we had to take everything apart and store it in the work shed. By this point in the day I’d been up since 5:45 doing minutiae items and the only “progress” anyone besides me would observe was that I’d built a small front deck for my boat.

I drove back to Albany and slept from 2-3 p.m. before getting ready for work. I worked 4-9:45 and earned $168 dollars from the job that pays my actual bills. By the time I got home, my girlfriend was asleep (she works 8:30-5 in an office), so I kissed her goodnight, then worked on this blog post from 10:30 to midnight. I did not complete it but by midnight I was exhausted, and I wanted to get up by 7 a.m. the next morning, because there is always more work to do, so I went to sleep.

In the past, on boat projects like these, I’ve often felt overwhelmed. But in the past on boat projects like these I was working at the Assembly working 60+ hour weeks, whereas now I work about 32 hours per week. I’ve got a lot more flexibility in how I spent my time. But the main improvement is that nowadays I don’t think of my job, or driving to Lowes, or making expense reports, or cleaning, working out, reading or practicing piano as obligations. Rather, I’ve got hobbies and goals that I want to experience, and an experience includes all of the preparation. I often joke that at 32 years old I’m “semi-retired.” But if you go through your life gracefully performing the minutiae of daily life, it doesn’t seem like work, and since I don’t seem to be doing work, I do feel like I’m retired. Ironically I’m probably more productive now than I’ve ever been, but I feel like I’m playing around all day. So the point of this post is that you can really get a lot more pleasure from life if you own what you’re doing and don’t think of it as toil. Your moods become more even, you get more accomplished, time seems to last longer, you become proud of the miscellany you’ve finished, you’re more mindful, you sleep better…all of that adds up to being happier and healthier.

A Step Taken Toward Casting A Die Across The Rubicon

For twelve years, it has been my dream build a homemade boat that can actually convey me from one place to another. Though I’ve built seven boats (eight if you count the improvements to my canoe that allowed Mike and I to travel from Troy to New York in a record three days), none has been what I really want: a kind of mobile laboratory, capable of moving itself with me inside.

I want to travel from Albany out the Erie Canal, through lake Erie to Detroit, north up to Mackinac Island into Lake Michigan, west to Lake Superior for a visit in Green Bay, south again to Chicago, through the Chicago Canal to the Mississippi, down to New Orleans, out to the Gulf around the Keys, and back up the east coast inside the intercoastal waterway.  It would be a 5,000+ mile trip and require tens of thousands of dollars. I want to visit the great cities of the eastern half of the United States; see the battlefields and sites of naval victories I’ve read about; survey the architecture; hear the differences in diction and music; taste the local cuisine; witness the geological structures; meet the local people; eat at the local restaurants; go to the local, state and national museums and colleges; contrast the cultures and economies–basically, sample and study half of America.

For that I need a boat. And tens of thousands of dollars.

I’ve had this objective for twelve years, from the time I started planning my first raft to go down the Hudson River in 2005. I can only think of three possible ways to make it happen:

  1. I could win the lottery. A lot of people say they would do x if they win the lottery. But the difference between a dream and a goal is that a goal is something you have a plan to achieve, and I cannot plan to win the lottery, because there is such an element of change involved.
  2. I could find one or multiple sponsors or benefactors. I could (a) start a GoFundMe site after listing the amount of money I would need for fuel, docking fees, food, occasional lodging, etc over the course of the trip, but it is unlikely that I could raise the $50,000 or more I would need to really study all of the small and large towns and cities along the rivers of the east over the course of a year, and I don’t want to just float along–I want to study America; or (b) I could try and find sponsorships from corporations, but I don’t want to deck out my boat like a Nascar and have to follow the dictates of a sponsor when it comes to where I visit and what I say and write.
  3. I could write a book and attempt to sell it along the way by meeting as many people, getting featured in as many local newspapers and radio shows, and connecting via as many social media sites as possible while I cruise the rivers and waterways of America.

I made my plan based on the third choice. I wrote a book, and I will attempt to sell as many copies as possible to fund my trip. The book is germane to the trip because it’s about building and piloting boats; once written I don’t have to write it again (the way that people with a skill must exercise the skill on an hourly basis or create more products to make greater integers of money); since I created the product myself I control what I wish to do; and the trip itself will constitute the advertisement for the book, so that book sales and my trip have a symbiotic relationship.

Before I can build my see-America-boat, however, I need to make some serious book sales. Yet, I thought, “How can I make the book sales without having a boat and traveling in order to generate news stories and a social following?”

The idea came to me just after Christmas: why not build a boat and sail down the Hudson again, this time on a week-long book tour, have my itinerary published in Boating on the Hudson Magazine, contact the commodores of and stop at all of the local marinas along the way, do readings in the libraries in the small towns, contact the local papers, and get a story in the New York Times upon my arrival in the city? Either I will sell a thousand or more books through word of mouth and print and social media, and know that my Great Loop expedition is potentially possible, or I will fail to make any money in the very area where I ought to garner the most interest and publicity, and I will know that a Great Loop trip is impossible for me.

And so I began to brainstorm  a new boat. I saved $15 dollars per serving shift from December to April and saved $1050 to start construction. I already own two electric trolling motors, wiring, and two canoes from my previous river adventures, but I knew I needed to include a small (3 hp) motor to make sure I could get from town to town for book events along the way. I had to be able to build the boat using my own labor with labor sprinkled in from my father, Mike, my friend Sam and a few other friends. I had to be able to build the boat in one month, between work shifts, at my parents house, in order to start the registration process (which takes 8 weeks for a homemade boat in New York State) by May first, in order to do the book tour during the month of August. The boat had to be either trailerable, or capable of dismemberment and re-construction, so that it could be transported to the river without a special permit from the Department of Transportation or monthly bills for docking it at a marina. The boat had to incorporate a cabin so that the books I bring along, and my phone or computer for blogging, don’t get wet. And yet whatever I planned to build had to weigh less than, say, 600 pounds, because the two canoes would provide the only buoyancy.

I started by reviewing the books in my library on boat construction.

My parents have a popup trailer that has been rotting “over the hill” behind their house for the last fifteen years. It hasn’t been opened in ten years, and it’s sunk up to its axel in mud.  My first idea was to detach the popup from its trailer and put it onto a frame which extended over the two canoes. The popup is only 6.5 feet wide, 10 feet long and three feet high when closed. But I looked up the manual for the popup model and found that it weighs 1,000 pounds. That seemed like too much weight in addition to the effort it would take to physically take the popup apart and lift it onto the canoes and ship it to the river–all of that seemed like too big a task.

Next I thought about building a boat, on two canoes, which had a teepee for a cabin, which attached to the deck via hinges. If the cabin was collapsible I could put the cabin down if I faced a strong headwind, thus diminishing the amount of “freeboard,” which is the part of the boat which rises above the water and is affected by the wind rather than the current. In the summer, the wind on the Hudson River tends to blow upstream, and becomes a significant impediment to downriver progress.

I threw the model together with cardboard after a particularly slow lunch shift at El Loco Mexican Cafe. But it wasn’t to scale and I didn’t like the triangular design, so I set about building an actual model. I went to the arts and crafts store for sticks, dowels, and a glue gun, and made a not-scale model of the canoes out of corks glued and painted.

A model is like practice that you don’t have to spend $200 dollars to learn the lessons from. Right away I saw that one problem was that canoes have pointed tips at the bow and stern, so you can’t just put a deck across them. There isn’t a flat surface to attach to. They’re shaped like bananas. So I thought I’d put bulkheads or beams arising from the base of the canoe to the height of the tips at the bow and stern, and run a 16-foot beam lengthwise on each, which would provide material to attach the crossbeams (which would attach the two canoes) together.

And so on Sunday (April 9th), I drove from my apartment in Albany and picked up Mike, my perennial partner in boat construction, at his house 13 minutes away.

If you’ve read Coming of Age on The Hudson, you know that Mike and I are friends for more than two decades, having met in fifth grade, and that he helped me build and pilot all seven of my boats down the Hudson River between 2006 and 2010. So it might interest you to hear a brief update on Mike’s life.

Mike is married to Renee, who you might remember from Volume II of the book, as they met during, and she helped assemble, Excelsior, the fourth boat in the series. That was in 2008. Nine years later, they are married and live in a house in an affluent suburb of Albany. Mike is a professional civil servant, a profession which gives him an opportunity to improve methodically over time. He frequently takes civil service tests in order to qualify for new positions, and has availed himself over the years by moving, sometimes laterally, sometimes vertically, through various agencies of the state, learning the process and substantive material along the way. He is currently a supervisor and an M/C, having also been a member of PEF and before that CSEA. He also worked briefly after college for the Postal Service, and was therefore employed by the Federal Government.

I parked in Mike’s driveway and rang his doorbell. I walked through the entryway and saw Mike’s good parlor on the left, and the stairway upstairs on the right. We walked into the kitchen and looked out his sliding glass doors, over his patio, over his yard, at the pen he built for his bunny, Cleo. Upstairs, Mike and Renee have a master bedroom (1/3 of the house), with a master bathroom with skylights, two guest bedrooms, and a walkable attic. In the basement Mike hung a dartboard, we re-built a 1940s bedroom set into a bar and back-bar, he has a ping pong table and he’s put down wall-to-wall carpeting, which came in squares with an adhesive back. Mike has repainted his entire place in the last year, as well as transplanted evergreen trees along the periphery of his lawn. Also, he has climbed about 30 of the Adirondack Mountains in the last year, and biked from Buffalo to Albany (more than 360 miles) along the Erie Canal. And he and I have canoed 250 miles down the Delaware, 80 miles from Ticonderoga to Troy, and down the Hudson a second time. So he’s a pretty solid guy to solicit for help when building a homemade boat to sail on the Hudson.

We got in my Ford Taurus sedan and drove to Lowes. It smelled of saw dust. It smelled like we were re-living old times. We found a blue metal flat cart and made our way to the lumber aisle. We loaded three 2x4x16s which hung off the cart at least five feet in either direction, as well as four 2x4s, three 1x6x6s, bolts, washers and nuts. Loading them in my car was a challenge. The 2x4x8s almost fit, but the 2x4x16s had to be pushed through the back seat into the buttons of the dash and out the trunk, hanging six feet. We tied on some red tape and I made sure I took all the right turns wide. When we got to New Baltimore we had to carry the lumber (in two trips apiece) over the hill at my parent’s house where the canoes were stored. We walked down to the driveway, where the garage is located, and back over the hill, two more times in order to carry the bolts, nuts, washers, jig-saw, drill and extension cord over the hill. Not to mention once in order to search the fridge at my parent’s house for Coors Light (of which there was none) and then to make Captain and Pepsis, from what we could find behind my parent’s bar.

First we simply laid out the canoes to see how long they are, compared to their widths, which are almost three-feet on each canoe.

I’d planned to make the boat eight-feet wide. That way if something goes wrong, and I don’t want to have to take it apart, I can ship the boat along the roads to and from the river for any distance without a special permit. A 2×4 is by default 8-feet long, so we laid them across the beam of the boats in order to see how wide she would be.

My father came over the hill carrying my niece, and we all enjoyed the sunlight. My niece is too young to appreciate the novelty of such a situation, so my dad carried her back to the house, and Mike and I followed. Though we hadn’t come near to completing the boat, I had purchased and we had shipped the materials of which to build a frame, and I now had measurements off of which to make models back in Albany. So while we didn’t make a lot of tangible progress on Sunday, I had done a fair amount “back of the house work,” if you will, which is necessary to any elaborate operation.