Home By The Sea

    Have you ever sold a house?  Have you driven by the home where you grew up and mourned at the loss of the trees you climbed as a kid?  Or have you further looked up the old homestead on Google Maps and dropped yourself on “street view” to have a look at the new siding, the dual-pane windows, or the swing-set peeking over the backyard fence that the new owners installed?  Sure, probably.  But I bet you’ve never found out that a former home had been given to another country, and that that country repainted it, and moved it 7,700 miles away?

                My “home” from July 1981 to May 1983 was in Honolulu Harbor but it wasn’t a building.  It was a ship.  I spent the majority of my hours, both awake and asleep, on the cutter Jarvis.  And when it wasn’t in Hawaii, say in Alaska or the middle of the Pacific, I spent pretty much every hour there.  My bed, my meals, my work; it all took place in a metal box 378 feet long and 50 feet wide. 

                The Jarvis was named after David Jarvis of the Revenue Cutter Service, a forerunner of the Coast Guard.  Lieutenant Jarvis became a hero when he led an overland expedition 1,500 miles to deliver food, in the form of 382 reindeer, to stranded whalers in Point Barrow Alaska in 1898.  Why they weren’t eating whale remains a mystery.

                I’ve never returned to Hawaii to revisit her although I’ve thought that it would be pretty cool to show my two sons where I stood bridge watch and how we lowered boats over the side to take boarding parties to foreign fishing vessels.  Google Maps will not allow me to “stand” on the wharf where the Jarvis is usually moored.  I am restricted to the road outside the gate where trees and buildings block my view.  The terrorists win again.  But neither of those issues matter now because if I do return to the Aloha State or even if the Google car is allowed to drive on to military bases, I’ll never see my Hawaiian home again.

    Because…

                earlier this year the Jarvis was decommissioned and then “given” to the Bangladesh Navy.  Gone is the bright red stripe on the bow; which was actually international orange, the same color as the Golden Gate Bridge.  It’s been painted over white.  Gone are the large black COAST GUARD letters painted along her hull; like a black Hollywoodland sign.  A plain F28, which has some meaning to her new crew, has replaced it.  Gone are the American flags, the Coast Guard flags, and the Coast Guard personnel.  Replaced I suppose by Bangladeshi flags and people.  Gone is the “Jarvis” painted on her stern, replaced by the name Somundra Joy.

                I tried to find what Somundra Joy means but was unsuccessful.  I guess there are some questions even The Google can’t answer.

                There are basically two ways a ship ends her life; she is either cut up for scrap or finds the sea floor.  The Somudra Joy, now the largest ship in the Bangladesh Navy, will patrol the Bay of Bengal.  In fact she arrived in her new home port of Chittagong two weeks ago today.  She will live to fight another day (another decade?).

Maybe it’s a good thing.  While not a living thing, she is still “alive” and she is still doing what she did 30-plus years ago when a young man from Fresno who had never spent one minute at sea came aboard her.  On the way to Chittagong the Somudra Joy delivered 40 tons of relief supplies to Manila for the Philippine typhoon disaster victims, although I doubt any of it was reindeer. 

In other news; Bangladesh has a navy.

*The picture above is the former Jarvis leaving San Francisco Bay on a foggy morning.

Little Note / Long Remember

             

Seven score and ten years ago Abraham Lincoln gave what is arguably his most famous, arguably the United States most famous, and perhaps arguably the World’s most famous speech, providing you’re prepared to do a lot of arguing.  The Gettysburg Address was delivered those 150 years ago, in under two minutes after the first speaker of the day went on for two hours.

            Ken Burns, the documentarian who made an unequalled Civil War documentary along with an East Coast biased baseball documentary, has started a website called learntheaddress.org where anyone can upload of video of themselves reciting the famous speech.

            People are doing it from couches and classrooms, from the offices of politicians and the studios of pundits, from California to the New York Islands, on cell phone videos and classroom audio/video equipment to major network studio cameras, and from modest homes to the halls of power.

            There are literally hundreds of videos and no real search function so you have to either peruse by most recent, by state, or alphabetical.  I watched dozens of them and have compiled my list of those that I thought merited some attention.  Remember these are from the ones I actually watched.

Worst performance by a professional is actress Alyssa Milano who didn’t bother to memorize it.

Ken Burns himself delivers it like a lecture; ticking off each point as if he were going down a list.

President George Bush recites it like a student in an elementary school classroom, likely garnering him a solid B.

President Carter starts out strong but seems to tire near the end of his minute and a half rendition.  But he is pushing ninety.

Bill Clinton delivers it like most of his speeches while President, with practiced sincerity for something written by someone else.

Barry Obama sounds like he’s a preacher delivering it from a pulpit, like most of his speeches.

Although I wasn’t a fan, I would have liked to have seen Ronald Reagan’s take.  He could speechify. 

While I like most of Louis C. K.’s humor, his delivery of the speech comes across like a shadow of President Bush’s; classroom recital, but he’d likely be lucky to get a C.

TV news host Rachel Maddow gives a good reading.  Too bad it sounds like someone is announcing bus arrivals in the background.

Most mysterious video is Red Sox / World Series hero Shane Victorino who shows up in a compilation but not as an individual clip.

Best headgear goes to Jon Jarvis, Director of the National Park Service for his Smokey Bear hat.

Best amateur “performance” goes to Tip Scarry for his updated presentation and prolog.  He gets a second mention for coolest name.

Worst video is the one that just came up with some text that said “404 Error.  Content not found.”  Of course that might have more to do with my Internet connection.

Best Background goes to Lily Ward of Ohio who did it in front of a Lord of the Rings movie poster for some reason.  Maybe she thought it was originally a speech by Aragorn to rally troops before the gates of Mordor.

But the best and most professional performance, in my opinion, was Conan O’Brien.  His reading sounds like he knows exactly what each sentence, each word, means and he gives what feels like the correct emphasis on the correct word in each one of those sentences.  It’s such a quality reading, again in my opinion, that you can forgive him for mispronouncing the third “cannot.”

Consecrate.