Sovereign Nations

The city is beautiful when it’s buried…

It’s so slow…

…As if it had just rolled over in the middle of the night without disturbing the covers.

The mountains of snow erase the hard lines drawn by man if only temporarily .

So there we are, in Borneo, 1939.  The war was almost at hand…wait, that’s someone else’s story.

I walked 6 miles through the snow every single day to put a meal on this table.  Wait – we don’t have a table.

No bike, which means walking 2.5 miles from the boat to South Station, a half-mile from the train station in Braintree to work, do it all over again at night…that’s six miles, not counting walking circuits of the 35,000 square foot store in between.  A few weeks ago, we had this incredible cold snap.  It went all the way down to -4.  My shock absorber on my fancy-shmancy recumbent bicycle suddenly blew its seals and came crashing down on the chain, making the bike pretty much unrideable until I can replace my $400 shock that’s supposed to be indestructible.

Blah blah blah, bitch bitch bitch, but hey, I get another day off!

Then the second storm hit so hard that it froze the water around us along with the fog.  This is the first time we’ve seen frozen fog.  Suspended ice particles.  That was kinda cool.

We had a wonderful time.  We worked on Heart of the Lilikoi, Dena’s new book, the wind howling, doing what we really love to do.

Snow on ice in the marina provides an image of our immobility.  We can’t sail, we can’t work on the boat, we can’t travel or be at anchor.  Because of how extreme this is, we have to plug in to the grid for months at a time.  We don’t have to live like this – we stayed away all summer long – so we have to get to a place where we can live underway.  That means other latitudes.  We are not the first to realize this, and Florida seems kinda scary – overpopulated, making rules against how we like to live, politically fucked.  But we need to do more boating than we get here in New England.

Really, we can’t even ride our bikes.  If we can’t keep our bodies moving, we can’t achieve the feeling that we’re ready for anything.

Meanwhile, we’re having a great time playing in the snow and walking around town.  We’ll wring this place of every joy we can achieve.

Part of that is simply admiring the strange beauty of our surroundings.  The boater’s million dollar view doesn’t disappear with the falling of the mercury.

We have been blown, hand-in-hand, across a dock of solid ice in a Canadian ice storm at the break of dawn…

We have peeled our blankets from our frozen hull…

We have cleared docks of 4 feet drifts from the middle, because the snow bowed outward and we couldn’t see the edge…

We triumphed over Snowmaggedon…

We lived through Hurricanes Sandy and Irene, and the great Nor’Easter of 2009.

We know what’s going on here.  We know how to deal with winter.

Holy shit.  That was a real storm.

Yes, they have severe weather in Boston, as we can now attest.

We heard it was coming and came home early enough to add two more spring lines to our collection of dock lines.  We went below, hunkered down, and settled into smart wool and flannel.

Tuesday, the day MBTA didn’t run and the roads were closed, was celebrated from inside the cabin for the  most part.   We took advantage of a lull, and cleared a bit of the first round of snow from the cockpit and solar array.

Our effect was shortlived, as the dumping commenced…sideways, at sixty miles an hour.

Bow into the wind, the hard dodger, which ordinarily keeps rain, snow, and wind out of the companionway, acted as a vortex and insisted that the snow come hang out in our faces.

Then, in the middle of the night, the wind abruptly swung west and both our fenders ‘sploded.

After that, it was all rum and entertainment throughout the night.

Storm, shmorm.

The next day…

…which is today, we went out to clear the decks and found that direct sunlight will melt snow, even in 14 degree weather.  The side decks were filled with an icy sludge because the scuppers were frozen solid.  No longer.  It’s still cold, but the bad part’s over and the boat fared pretty well.