Day 4 in New Zealand: Glowworms, Kiwi, and a Maori Cultural Experience

To make up for not doing a ton of sightseeing the day before, we did ALLLLLL the sightseeing today!

Probably one of my least attractive qualities is that when I'm traveling, I prefer getting up and getting going as early as possible. I like to be standing at the museum door when they open it for the day. If I'm doing something that requires a reservation, then the earliest reservation is the reservation for me! Crowds get larger as the day goes on, and I hate crowds, and I also just kind of like to be the first person to see something that day.

So it wasn't even completely light out by the time we were in our rental car winding our way west from Rotorua, and before most other people had probably finished their breakfast that day, there we were with our group, following our guide and hiking our way down to Waitomo Cave. 

It's on the grounds of a sheep farm, so you know what that means!

My ultimate New Zealand day tour would be riding around sheep farms, eating snacks and stopping to gaze at endless hills of sheep standing picturesquely:

Here's the entrance to the cave--you can see the footpath on the very right of the photo:

Before we entered the cave, the tour guide gave us a lecture about the endemic flora and fauna. Partway through, he mentioned eels, and I know I didn't say anything, but I think my face probably did something, because he stopped his lecture and said to me, "Do you like eels?"

Y'all. You KNOW how I feel about eels, so obviously I was all, "I LOVE EELS," and then HE was all, "Do you want to see an eel up close?"

?!?!!!!!!!!!

You can only really see one in the above photo, but there were so many eels in this creek! OMG it was so magical.

So then the tour guide went down to the bank of the creek, knelt down, and sort of patted his hand on the water. And I kid you not, a literal eel swam up and stuck its head out of the water, and let the guy scritch it exactly as if it was a kittycat:

That's not a rock the guy is patting. That is a literal eel!!!

It was so great.

You know what's also great? Anytime I get to wear a headlamp!

Literally think I should buy a headlamp for walking Luna at night.

We didn't really use our headlamps for more than a few minutes in the cave, because obviously you don't want a headlamp on when you're looking at glowworms, so honestly I think they just had us turn them on for a bit to make it more fun for us. Or maybe it was, like, secret disaster prep so we'd know how to turn it on in case we all got stranded inside.

Actually, all of New Zealand was VERY proactive with disaster prep. Every group thing we did included a lecture on the emergency meet-up spot, what various sirens meant (siren less than 30 seconds is just calling out the volunteer firefighters; siren longer than 30 seconds means flee for your lives), and how to summon help if our guide collapsed. Just hold down the red button on their walkie-talkie!

But this day held no disasters, just glowworms!

Glowworms are so great. They're the larval stage of a fungus gnat, and they dangle these long strands of mucus out of their mouths, and they glow near their butts. Moths and other insects that fly into caves are attracted to the light, then get caught up in the mucus strands and the glowworms eat them.

Alas that they're terribly hard to photograph, especially after you turn all the external light sources off so your eyes can get used to the dark and see even more glowworm lights:

Just imagine, in the above photos, a hundred thousand more lights around the brightest few that my shitty phone camera picks up. Imagine the ceiling is the night sky somewhere unpolluted and dark, and the glowworms are all those stars you've always heard look super amazing in an unpolluted, dark night sky. We took a leisurely boat ride in complete darkness down the little stream running through the cave, and the ceiling was like the greatest night sky full of stars ever. It was honestly one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life.

After seeing the glowworms, we took a snack break, then hiked over to a different part of the cave system for a dry land tour:

This part of the cave looked very reminiscent of the limestone caves I'm familiar with in Indiana and Kentucky, and it turns out that they really are very similar, with the same type of karst topography and limestone created from a former shallow sea. 

But instead of mastodon skeletons hidden inside like the caves at home, these caves have moa skeletons!

This right here is the first I've heard about the moa, but stay tuned, because the next day I found every single moa skeleton in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and I took its photo.

Here's a diagram they had of their entire cave system, although it's not completely explored and mapped:

As we early bird tourists were chatting towards the end of our tour, we figured out that most of us had basically the same plan for the rest of our day, and we had a fun time continually running into each other at the Fat Kiwi Cafe and the Otorohanga Kiwi House.

We had to skip the few nearby hikes and a local caves museum, but... KIWIS!!!

But first, breakfast!

More delicious flat whites. More delicious crumbly savory pies. I finally figured out that there's a difference between "cabinet food" and the proper menu, or at least most of the places we went to had a menu board up high, and then a glass display case below the counter with a whole other selection. You can either get something made to order from the menu, or pick something already made from the cabinet and they'll heat it up for you.

Only took me four days to figure that out!

Now to the kiwis!

I chose this spot out of all the other many and varied places to see kiwis because it promised a whole little zoo of New Zealand's endemic wildlife, and you KNOW how my kid feels about zoos! And it was a great place to visit, not crazy crowded and with lots of birds and lizards to look at. The kid was delighted.

Here's the taxidermied version of what we're supposed to be spotting:

Here's a random sign that got me curious to know what kiwi aversion dog training looks like:

You can't have any light in the kiwi room, and it is so freaking pitch black that I literally walked into a wall twice. You're basically looking into the kiwi enclosure, where the kiwis think it's delightfully nighttime, and they're sort of bopping around and finding snacks and taking little naps, etc. It took a LOOOOOOONG time for my eyes to get accustomed enough to the darkness that I could even start to make out any kind of movement, and honestly even longer before I could actually see a kiwi, but after a very, very, VERY long time standing there silently and straining our eyes, we actually could see the kiwi pretty well! Occasionally they'd even wander right up to the glass so we could see them up close. They are adorable, all fat and ball-shaped with beaks sticking out, and I LOVE THEM.

The kiwi were soooo cute, but I definitely wasn't sad to also have plenty of animals that I could properly see in the daylight!

Antipodes Island Parakeet

Elegant Gecko

And a little proof that it doesn't matter how early I wake up, anyway, because my body has no concept of what time it is:

One o'clock pm, my foot--it is surely 2am and I could lay down on the sidewalk and fall asleep happily, if not for all the sights left to see!

Okay, this is crazy: as we were walking around the zoo, we kept running into people from our morning tour group, and we'd smile and wave or stop to chit-chat for a second. But one time, the person I was chatting with was all, "Do you want to see the video I took of the kiwis?"

I said, "GASP!!!!"

She said, "I know, I know, but my phone has a very good Night Mode." And, indeed, she DID proceed to pull out the fanciest phone that I've ever seen in my life, and she showed me (and then later emailed me, at my request, ahem...) this:

Fun fact: when I tried to translate her email's signature line in my head, I decided it read, "My iPhone blesses you." Alas that I missed some figurative language, for when I took it to Google it actually read, "Sent from my iPhone." Semantic translation is always such a pickle!

OMG I just realized that I should have also asked her for the videos she surely took in the glowworm cave. Dangit!

I'd dithered a lot about which Maori cultural experience to book for our trip, because I knew I wanted us to do one, but they all sounded the same-ish but had vastly different price points, yikes. I eventually settled on the Mitai Maori Village, and... I dunno, I'm still glad we got the chance to learn about the Maori cultural traditions, but none of us exactly had a blast, and I won't feel the need to do another one next time I visit. 

The parts where we learned about the actual Maori culture were VERY interesting. We got to see the hangi that cooked our meal--

--and we got to see a lot of traditional Maori ceremonial activities, both on the water--

--and in a model traditional village:

This part was super interesting, and it also seemed like the performers were having a lot of fun with it, which is also nice:

But omg everything was soooo crowded, and I felt like we were herded everywhere in just a massive tourist scrum, and then sat down at a table elbow to elbow with strangers, and then herded again through the buffet, etc. I couldn't really tell what we were meant to be looking at or where we were going on our "walks"--

Do you know where I am or what I'm looking at? Because I don't!

--and greatest crime of all, before we got herded from the river ceremony to the theater, our host told us not to stop to take photos, not even of the super cool sacred natural spring that was easily the most awesome thing there, because we had to get to the show and we'd be coming back by on our walk later and we could take photos then. 

Yeah, the host didn't mention that the walk we could take photos during was going to be a nose-to-tail shuffle in the dark, sooo... not really prime photo-taking opportunity, you know?

That being said, the food was good, the show was excellent, and you've got to get your Maori cultural experience somewhere, right?

So again, glad we did it, wouldn't do it again.

Anyway, enough with the bitching--tomorrow we're going to go see more geothermal wonders and hike on top of a mountain!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

Day 7: Wellington to Pancake Rocks

Day 8: Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers

Day 9: TranzAlpine Train Across the Southern Alps

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I Made My Kid a Travel Tea Set, Including A Homemade Tea Wallet, and She Loved It!

Hooray for gifts--especially gifts with homemade components--that turn out to be a hit!

My older kid is sooooo hard to pick out gifts for. She's nearly as hard as her dad, and he is the worst person to pick out gifts for that I have ever met in my life. Seriously, the kid doesn't feel the need to own books. She doesn't like new clothes unless it's something she specifically thinks she needs--and she never thinks she needs anything. She's a minimalist in general, so any kind of acquisition of new stuff is rarely her favorite.

Fortunately, she's also my adventure kid, always up for a new experience, so if I'm out of ideas, just about anything travel or activity-centered is bound to be a pretty good fit.

Hence the travel tea set! 

The kid already owns this electric kettle that she uses in her college dorm room, but I think this gift would also work fine for a college kid without an electric kettle, because they can always get hot water from the school cafeteria. 

The nicest store-bought part of the travel tea set is this travel mug. I've had one for maybe four years now, and I can assure you that it is the BEST travel mug ever. It's completely leak-free, even four years of heavy use and lots of (hand)washing later, and it holds its temperature perfectly. I've never tried it with anything cold, but back when I subbed I'd make myself a cafe mocha in this mug at 6am, then pull it out of my bag sometime between 1 and 2pm and have to leave the lid off for a few minutes to cool it down enough to drink. If I forgot it in my bag and took a little test sip the next morning at 6am, it would still be warm enough to drink. So I think it'll be perfect for a kid who's got to trek through an Ohio winter to her 8:30am literature class, and isn't done until after her 4:00 science lab.

I didn't get very creative with the tea selection, because I wasn't sure how adventurous a busy college student would want to be with her travel teas, but you could be really fun and adventurous with it. I even shopped around for a tea of the month subscription set for a minute, but eh, at this point in time I think she's fine with Celestial Seasonings.

Fun fact: did you know that Celestial Seasonings is sort of low-key a cult?

My own personal favorite part of the travel tea set, though, is the tea wallet that I made!

I followed this tutorial nearly to the letter, only subbing in stash bias tape instead of making it as the tutorial calls for, and it turned out so cute. This way, the kid can put hot water in her travel mug whenever she's got the opportunity, but wait to actually steep the tea until she's ready for it.

I'm already dreading sending these kids back to school, sigh. Spring semester always feels SO long right at the start, knowing the next school break isn't until mid-March, and I know I'm going to feel so lonely slogging through the coldest and gloomiest part of the year without my daughters. But I do kind of like the idea of the kid going through her busy days nurtured by a nice, hot, comforting beverage that I've managed to provide for her from the next state over. 

I just need to figure out what I'm going to nurture myself with when I'm missing them the most!

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Day 3 in New Zealand: From SEA to Sulfur

The best sight in all of New Zealand is the Robert C. Seamans anchored at the Halsey Street Wharf in Auckland:

She'd arrived the previous day while my partner and I were sitting down to the Lord of the Rings Musical, but because the kid's cell phone was completely dead we didn't know it, and we spent a bit of the next morning wandering down Quay Street until we were both like, "Hey, does that look like a tall ship that serves as an oceanographic research station to YOU?"

It did, and it was!

Below is the photo I took when, after several minutes of looky-looing, taking photos, and indulging in the occasional enthusiastic waving, someone on deck apparently finally went around the ship to ask, "So... is it possible that someone's mom is here?" My kid seems to have come clean that indeed, it was possible that it was her mom giving off the big mom energy, she came up to verify, and I got my first sight of her in nearly two months!

Ignore everyone else on the ship laughing openly at me. I was excited!

Fortunately, my looky-looking and enthusiastic picture-taking also called attention to my proper camera, and I'm pretty sure my kid's response, when someone asked her if I'd want to come over and take a group photo of everyone on the ship, was something like, "Go ahead and ask her, but if you get her started she'll never stop," because someone DID come over and ask me, and I DID take a billion photos, both staged and spontaneous.

And then because I was already over there I indeed did NOT stop:

We didn't have big plans for the day, other than getting our girl back. We browsed a grocery store because local snacks are also the kid's favorite thing about traveling, and then hit up a bakery for flat whites and these little savory pies that were ubiquitous everywhere we went. They were delicious and filling, but OMG the crumbs! How are New Zealanders not constantly covered in crumbs?

Afterwards, it was a leisurely four-hour drive to Rotorua, with plenty of time to stop and look at Maori sights, eat ice cream, and gaze at sheep standing picturesquely on hill and pasture:

In the early afternoon, we checked into our hotel in Rotorua, then had to sort out getting all the kid's clothes washed (she'd been washing everything by hand for nearly two months...) and buying her a new duffel bag. I TOLD her that her IKEA Frakta, handy as it was for moving back and forth between dorm room and bedroom, was not sturdy enough to fly to Fiji as her checked bag, but Lord knows nobody ever listens to their mother! The thing had apparently been falling apart BEFORE she checked it in for her flight, so I gather she just wrapped a ton of tape that she somehow snookered away from an airport employee around it and, well, here it is begging for death and insisting very fervently that it will not hold together for ten more feet, much less across the entirety of New Zealand and then halfway across the world:

Anyway, did you know that K-Mart is still thriving in New Zealand? And their duffel bags were a terrific price, so the kid no longer has an excuse to look like she rides the rails on the way to the next Hoover Town. Also all their Christmas stuff was amazing. I am legitimately so mad at myself that I did not buy the pink sweater vest with Christmas buns on it, but all I can say for myself is that I was overstimulated and my unhelpful partner kept asking me unhelpful questions like, "Where will you wear that?" and "Where will we put that?" and "Do we need that?"

Yes, MATT. YES I DO NEED A RED SUIT JACKET AND MATCHING DRESS PANTS WITH SANTA HEADS ALL OVER THEM, AND SO DO YOU.

I swear, next time I am in another country when they have their Christmas stuff out and it's all amazing and the exchange rate is in my favor, nothing will stop me!

Thanks to the laundromat, we finally got an excuse to check out the cool New Zealand money:

That was our ice cream money for the rest of the trip!

The entire area is geothermically active, so fortunately, in between errands and chores, there was actually plenty to sightsee. This geothermal vent is literally in the backyard of our hotel!

When we were driving around town, we actually saw a ton of these in people's yards. A hole in the ground would be merrily steaming away in somebody's side yard, with a little fence around it!

Our hotel also had its own geothermal-heated hangi that we did not cook in, but my partner did almost burn his face off with it, so that's nearly as cool:

If I had a literal geothermal-powered oven in my backyard my gas bill would be nearly non-existent, because I would cook EVERYTHING in my magical earth steam.

Here's the area from a distance--we're inside a giant ancient caldera!

But here's what it looks like close up, just a short walk from our hotel:

I swear we are incapable of going anywhere without stopping and grubbing on the ground:

But to be fair, this beach in particular is good for grubbing, because it has hot spots. If you're walking and you see a wisp of steam coming up from the sand, you can stop and dig there, and the hole that you dig will fill itself with hot water. 

If you bring a proper shovel, you can did a hole big enough to sit in and have your own personal hot tub, but we didn't have shovels, so we just used our hands to dig little hot tubs for our fingies:

If I had it to do over again, I'd probably have chosen to spend the late afternoon and evening sightseeing around Rotorua, but when I was planning the trip I got Influenced by everyone's travel photos and booked us tickets at a geothermal day spa. To be fair, it was just as relaxing and comfy as the travel bloggers said it would be, but you know how I am, and there were so many things in Rotorua that I. Did. Not. SEE!

Ah, well. I have to go back, anyway, to get my Christmas bun sweater vest, so I'll see the rest of the geothermal wonders of Rotorua then. And this hot pool *is* the first time that one muscle in my back relaxed since I tweaked it on the flight in, so there's that:

I also now know what a foot reflexology walk is and I swear to god I am NEVER doing that bullshit again! The kid and I went on it together, and I'm pretty sure she thought she was going to have to go get her dad to carry me out, I was in so much pain. Seriously, though--WHAT THE FUCK. I even Googled later "Why does a foot reflexology walk hurt so much," and the answers were pretty much, "Probably because your entire body sucks," so I guess at least now I know!

Just in case it was my liver's fault, I bribed it with some more Scrumpy along with our takeaway:

Tomorrow, we're going to see glowworms! And KIWI!!!!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

Day 7: Wellington to Pancake Rocks

Day 8: Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers

Day 9: TranzAlpine Train Across the Southern Alps

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Read a Book about America's Founding Daddy, Baron von Steuben, and I Have Thoughts

Baron Von Steuben statue at Valley Forge, October 2024

Washington's Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben by Josh Trujillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Baron Von Steuben and the issue of his queerness has been one of my Special Interests for a while. This biography is accessible, interesting, and brings up one of my related Special Interests, the impossibility of understanding sexuality, particularly queerness, in any historical context, along with the importance of trying to bring forth, discuss, and interpret historical queerness anyway.

One of the many complicating aspects of writing a biography outing von Steuben is that historical expressions/perceptions of homosocial relationships aren’t our contemporary expressions/perceptions. It’s a great example of the fact that gender, sexuality, and really even sex identity are cultural constructs. And because a certain cultural concept of heteronormativity was prescribed and assumed in all of the cultural contexts that von Steuben experienced, nobody thought it necessary to put into writing (that has survived, at least) exactly what the rules were for maintaining that heteronormativity, nor what rules could possibly be bent/broken and still maintain one’s heteronormativity. And because of the prescriptive nature of heteronormativity, people certainly weren’t writing down what rules they transgressed and exactly what that looked like and the extent of the transgression in terms of their contemporary society! So while I think it’s pretty clear that Baron von Steuben would have met our current contemporary society’s definition of gayness, there’s no evidence that he, himself, ever put it into words in such a way that we know for a fact that’s how he saw himself. And although it’s FAR more likely than not that his personal assistants/adopted sons Walker, North, and Mulligan, in particular, had some sort of sexual/romantic relationships with him, and in some cases some of them with each other, as well, Walker and North, for one, went on to have completely heteronormative marriages, and we have no idea how their male-male relationships impacted their self-concepts, nor how these relationships would have been viewed within whatever unwritten rules of sexuality that we also know nothing about.

AND our current concept of power dynamics and the taboo of power differentials within a relationship are very correct, but also very contemporary to us, so there’s no way to evaluate the morality of von Steuben’s strongly implied relationships with subordinates within his own contemporary culture. He absolutely had some relationships that we’d all consider criminal today… but were they then? We know there must have been some concept of some way to misuse the power dynamic between authorities and their subordinates and between older and younger people, because that gossip was used to discredit von Steuben back in Prussia… but did von Steuben’s behavior really meet that definition of misuse, or was the gossip about his relationships with teen boys back in Europe simply lies to discredit him? And later in America, when he did the same types of things and it was apparently fine… was it really fine, or did nobody simply care to protest? What were these younger assistants’ feelings about these relationships, and how did they experience them within their own contemporary views of work and emotional life? How would these experiences compare to, say, the experience of an underage wife to a higher-class husband, or really any wife to any husband, considering that women had no legal, property, or monetary rights, and sexual assault wasn’t an act considered possible between a husband and his wife, since the husband always had the “right” to sex with his wife? I haaaate strings of rhetorical questions in essays, and yet here I am, because we have no way of knowing what the reality really was, and it’s so frustrating that we don’t have time travel yet!

All that is to say that’s why tl;dr I’m distraught that this graphic novel biography doesn’t have a bibliography or even endnotes/footnotes. I want the sources that give the first-person statements that led the authors to their conclusions, and not even so I can try to argue with them, but so I can enjoy them, build context, and delve more deeply. Like, Baron von Steuben held a dinner party using his own funds for the entirety of the Valley Forge encampment, including the poorest, lowest-class soldiers, and the only cost of admission was that everyone had to be in their undies or naked? Please tell me where I can drink that tea straight from the source, please! The book notes that “John Mulligan’s written recollections and cataloging of von Steuben’s papers inform the first full biography written about the baron in the 1800s, after his death.” So… what is the title of that book?!? What would be some other authoritative but more current biographies to read? Or articles, even? Something peer-reviewed, perhaps? Hell, I’ll even take a PhD thesis! Since the book does bring up the problem of defining historical sexuality, I’d also expect to see some references or a bibliography or a recommended reading list for this. I did find a Valley Forge program (“The General Von Steuben Statue: Interpreting LGBTQ+ Histories of the Revolution”) in which Dr. Thomas Foster of Howard University drops a number of relevant book titles--The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic, Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, Sex and the Founding Fathers, and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity among others--so I’ve got a few to look up, but I’d rather have gotten relevant resources in an Appendix in this book.

Tangentially, but in light of that NPS program that thoughtfully discussed von Steuben and the relevance of interpreting LGBTQ+ histories, I was super disappointed when I went to Valley Forge earlier this year and did not see a single display, note, exhibition label, sign, icon, or ANYTHING that referred to von Steuben’s sexuality. Obviously, I get that the problematic nature of how sexuality was perceived in the 1700s makes it problematic to define von Steuben’s sexuality one way or another, but we all know that if you don’t bring up the possibility that a historical figure was queer, you’re basically giving everyone the impression that they definitely weren’t. And it’s not even just that they didn’t have signage, but I didn’t see any books on any kind of LGBTQ+ histories in the gift shop. I’ll even let you omit Washington’s Gay General from the shelf, since it has no bibliography, but there was nothing! I was so sad for all the queer young people dragged to Valley Forge as yet another boring stop on their boring family vacation who would have been SO excited to see some representation. Hell, I’m a 48-year-old bisexual woman in a heterosexual relationship, and *I* would have been excited to see some representation! 

I would have bought the snot out of a T-shirt with Baron Von Steuben’s face on it and the slogan “America’s Founding Daddy” and I would have put it on and worn it out of the store.

P.S. View all my reviews.

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My Kid Went to SEA and I Read a Book About It

The Robert C. Seamans in Auckland, New Zealand, November 2024

Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships by Elliot Rappaport
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found this book while I was looking for any input about the very odd-sounding study-abroad program my college student told me she’d been accepted into. I mean, my perception of a study-abroad is a semester in Paris, or maybe Australia if you’re feeling really wild. You take some classes, you travel on the weekends, and you come back with a harmless affectation having to do with Vegemite or macarons or something. But, like… a study-abroad doing oceanographic research while sailing in a tall ship in the South Pacific? Does that honestly sound real to you? As for me, I low-key thought my kid was getting set up to be human trafficked.

Well, apparently the Sea Education Association IS real, and Elliot Rappaport captained for them for several years. So while everyone else was reading this book for the weather, which, to be fair, IS interesting content, I was reading to learn more about what life is like on a tall ship/oceanographic research vessel crewed primarily by college students.

I love how respectfully Rappaport writes about these student crews, while still telling cute and funny stories about them. On their first day at sea, he writes about them, “Stunned and eager, they rush to help, faces bearing the telltale signs of sensory overload and the glaze of freshly applied sunscreen.” Sounds about right, especially for my student, who in her one call home from a port in Tuvalu informed me of her realization that she “really needed to reapply sunscreen every two hours to keep from burning.” It’s not as if her mother has been telling her that her entire life or anything! Ah, well--everyone knows that experience is the best teacher.

In Rappaport’s writing, you see the benefit of experience, as the students transform from seasick and hapless students to competent sailors over the course of their couple of months together, and you get the idea that even when they’re leaving frowny-face Post-its on the navigational log or asking uncomfortable questions about colonialism in the South Pacific, Rappaport appreciates them and his valuable role in their education. I was especially interested to read his anecdote about seasickness and how it’s overcome, and to learn that even Rappaport occasionally suffers from it. I enjoyed his anecdotes of atypical adventures, the cyclones and storms, the occasional medical emergency on board, the time that they came upon a ship in distress in French Polynesia and the college student who happened to be a French minor was called upon to translate, but I’m also VERY happy to report that my student claims her own sailing was wonderful but fairly adventure-free.

At least, that’s the story she’s telling her mother…

My college student sailed on the Robert C. Seamans. Rappaport has this to say about the ship:

“The Robert C. Seamans is forty-two meters long, a sailing school ship built of steel and certified to carry a crew of thirty-eight on any of the world’s oceans. She has white topsides, tan spars, her gear well-kept but with the characteristic patina of working vessels. Her name is displayed on trailboards at the bow, raised wooden plaques that have from time to time been lost to the sea in severe weather.”

All of his stories and descriptions are equally as vivid as this description. I won’t lie and say that I was always following his meteorology explanations, because I really wasn’t, but his authorial voice is very real, both conversational and competent, if that makes sense. He’ll be telling you an interesting story about meeting a guy in a bar during a blizzard, and the guy telling him about being a rescue pilot and what his voice sounded like and how young he looked, and then he’ll hit you with, “On some days without warning you meet the people you most aspire to resemble, and in following can only strive after their example.”

Damn, Rappaport. That hit hard.

Even though I wasn’t reading for the science and geography lore as much as the “this is what it’s like to sail on a tall ship” lore, some proper facts did get pounded into my head. For instance, this fact I had to look up later to truly believe it: “The Hawaiian chain begins amid molten pyrotechnics at the eponymous (and geologically brand-new) Big Island and then runs northwest, farther than most people realize--a row of diminishing dots strung nearly to the 180th meridian, halfway to Japan.” There’s a really cool map on Wikipedia that shows the full archipelago! I also researched his brief anecdote about Moruroa and the nuclear weapons testing that the French did there, and OMG it’s so bad. And I found a new citizen science project in Old Weather, which transcribes old ship logs to collate the scientific data hidden inside. His section on Cook Strait also reassured me that I was justified in being miserable seasick on the ferry from Wellington to Picton, ahem. What else would one expect from “a giant funnel, set to amplify whatever wind exists into something more powerful”?

I’d love to read more histories by people with unusual career paths like this, especially sailors, which I honestly didn’t really think was still a career until my kid told me she was going to spend the semester being one. She’s an environmental scientist, and although she did proper scientific research on her trip, imagine the value of a thousand-plus years of ocean data that we’ve lost every time a sailor died without passing on their stories. The Old Weather database is unlocking the valuable information hidden in those ship logs, but imagine all the casual anecdotes we’ve missed that would have provided datasets about flora and fauna, ocean currents and weather, just from mining the lived experience of historical sailors.

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