Tag: wild salmon

Me and Joshua Slocum

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Today’s post is written from the Starbucks in Freeport Maine. I didn’t want to come into town. My perfect perch right along the sleepy bay covered with swirls of white and black stone with hair and beard made of seaweed didn’t want me to leave. But it’s June 5th in Maine and raining constantly and…it’s only 51 degrees.

Things are getting rather damp inside of my tent! I needed to dry out and send a few emails. I also needed to update this website blog as to where things are.

Today’s post is specifically inspired by Joshua Slocum and his sailing sloop, the Spray. I knew I’d be stuck inside my tent for my whole stay, based on the weather reports. So I went to the local bookshop and picked up something, anything, to do with the ocean. I didn’t want something serious. After spending the entire last month focussing on editing 14 episodes (Spoiler Alert: I finished!!) of a podcast related to some difficult environmental topics, I just wanted something escapist to read. I also came to the coast of Maine to be near where salmon used to thrive. I wanted to put my feet in the water in a place connected to where they should be, as a reminder of why I do what I do. So a good book about the ocean seemed fitting. This terrible and good passion (Salmonfolk) has taken me over it seems and I do need time to rejuvenate and a sense of place is important. I put my feet in the cold Maine water and think “salmon need to return here” and thought about how much we don’t even know what they brought with them, when they were here: The sense of returning. The promise of the long view. The long count. All things sorely missing in modern society.

I digress. Sorry. I do that a lot. Slocum…that guy solo sailed around the entire globe in the late 1880s in a boat about 35 feet long. I read in my tent late into last night, sleeping back damp, my feet just wouldn’t dry out…the rain hammered, I could hear the ocean gurgling around the large blocks of stone on the shore nearby. I wondered a lot how Joshua and The Spray were probably never quite dry either. Man…what an adventure. He was also 51 years old when he set out. I am 51 and setting out on this strange adventure. I am houseless. I do petsitting currently to keep my costs super low so any money I make can go straight towards conservation work, Salmonfolk and a few other side projects. I go where the long term housesitting gigs are up and down the East Coast of the USA. It also makes it so that IF I ever get real funding to travel and interview and film then I can go.

Reading through this book made me feel a bit better. I love what I do but yeah…doing a thing you don’t see anyone else doing (living houseless to focus on saving salmon) can be a lonely thing. I will now just pretend I am at the helm of The Spray when feeling out of sorts. However I will make sure to not take Slocum’s other journey…after he returned from sailing around the globe, he later headed for the Orinoco River and never was seen from again. Noted: I will avoid the Orinoco.

So the cat is out of the bag! Yes. I finished!!!!

It feels so amazing to have hit my high water mark for the project. I gave myself one month to finish Season One and I made it with about 24 hours to spare before I had to move to my next house. What is next for me? Now I shift into the zone of seeking funding for the sound design and sound mastering that is critical to making this podcast the best it can be. I have an amazing Sound guy, Jay Siebold. And he produced the existing 5 episodes you can hear on any podcast app but if you don’t have a fave app (or any) then you can easily listen HERE So I will be now be working on securing those essential funds. I have to tell you though…these remaining 14 episodes are just…just!!! I can’t. It’s too hard to describe. You will just have to listen!

Meanwhile, in case you haven’t heard enough from me, here is one more episode from Youtube that I think will interest those of you who wonder how I do the work.

Plans

On By thevideoslabLeave a comment

Musings from a coffee shop sun splashed window in Lambertville NJ. I spent the night at a friend’s house here. In one week he is starting the move to Prescott, AZ. Which is wild. Because that is where we met, in 1993. He’s on the move now with his family of 4. I am on the move with…me. My camera gear. A head full of poems. A mind packed with coalescing strategies for how to make more online content and films regarding conservation issues. I just wrapped up a 30 year dream of working full time at a ski resort. It was heavenly and worth the wait. As of now I am gainfully unemployed. Roaming. Visiting friends and family up and down the east coast of the USA. That will last most of April. Then in May I embark upon an artist in residency where I will work on nothing else but editing the remaining 10 episodes of a podcast I started 1.5 years ago. Season One of Salmonfolk Radio will finally be out by June. After May, I have no idea of what I will be doing, where I will be living, what income will look like. If most knew how little I had in my bank account, they’d not think me sane for this plan. But life has plans. You know? I have been working 60 hour weeks nearly every week since May 15th. I am a tired boy. Sometimes you have to go with it. There is an open space in front of me and I need that. Everything is pointing in this direction. When that happens you won’t realize the reward unless you trust and go forward. You can’t obliquely trust. It has to be pointed or life isn’t worth it at all. A lot of this is informed by pragmatism. I have been on food stamps. I have been upper middle class. I have been handed huge sums of money. I have asked for money. I have seen fortunes come and go in my life and felt the tide ebb and flow enough to recognize when the tide is coming in. So perhaps this isn’t trusting of me at all. Perhaps I am just surfing this wave in nice and easy. 

The last time I was in this coffee shop was in December of 2021. Feels like a decade ago. When here last I had just completed taking care of my father, who has dementia and he had moved into a retirement community. I had my son with me and I was driving him to start his new post pandemic life in NYC. This was all about a year after mom had died of cancer and dementia. I had wrapped up being a full time caretaker for my parents for nearly 2.5 years when last sitting right here. 

Now it’s 2023 and that means that I have spent about 18 months free of that. I never thought I would make it out of my caretaking role. And yes, I am working on a book about it. And yes, it’s a worse reality than you are imagining if you haven’t been there yet. Indeed, surviving it and coming out on the other side of it and celebrating being alive again is better yet than anything I have experienced…besides the joy of having kids.

As I get closer to NC, where I used to live and made Bolin Creek Unpaved, the picture frame of my week there is filling in quickly. Things are heating up all over again. The town council (most of them) are hot (so hot!) to pave through Bolin Forest. Yes. In our time of runaway global heating and runaway deforestation…the self anointed environmentalists of Carrboro NC are trying to claim that paving through the forest is literally the best thing for the environment that they can imagine. It’s fucking…just fucking wild. So I have brought my mics, 3 cameras and am already storyboarding. When I am down here I will be teaming up again with old friends and non profits and creating content to help educate the locals. Which is frustrating. It’s honestly bizarre that you have to find a way to explain to your fellow human beings why paving through a forest is bad for the planet…but in this age of disconnection, that’s where we are at as a species somehow.

I will also be premiering Old School Stone while there. OMG. So stoked for that! John, the 84 year old star of that film will be with me in attendance. Or rather…I will be in attendance with him. He is the film. Though this film has conservation themes for sure, the joy of this film is that it’s all about the joy of exploring outdoors. I am not selling an idea. There is no call to action. It’s just pure outdoorsy fun told from a wise man’s perspective. This will mark my 4th feature length film premiere.

John is not young. Neither am I lol. We began filming in 2018. I am grateful that we are both alive for the premiere. Even if it only shows once in front of a live audience, I am grateful to have that chance. So excited!

Well…that’s about it. I am about to hit the road once more. More driving time means more thought time to plan sequences to film along Bolin Creek. More ways to inform the layperson about science in ways that makes them choose things that are good for themselves in this bizarre time of the disappearance of common sense and self preservation.