Genesis
no not the pop group with Phil Collins but the start of things type. The sort of let there be light type of the
biblical sense. Every project needs a beginning, a point of
departure and every beginning needs inspiration. I remember as a kid floating stuff like rubber
tires, bloody great logs hazards to shipping Styrofoam, flotsam, and jetsam and
such. Riding on them like Captain Ahab on Moby Dick’s
great white back. Indicators confirmed
suspicions of the primordial beginnings of sailing.
I started off poor from a broken family in a small
mining village in Scotland so there was no transatlantic circumnavigation in
daddy’s yacht. No gin and tonic at the
Yacht club. I grew up in an orphanage
and clearly remember getting into some serious trouble when George Stewart and
I found some truck inner tubes and decided to run this uncharted river in the
hinterland of Ayrshire. It was two days
before the police found us. We were
adrift like Huckleberry Fin, absolutely free, well at least until we were
caught. I have looked deeply into my
miscreant youth to find the moment of the spark the ember that would develop
into a full blown obsession but it is veiled and hard to see like a penny
dropped into a wishing well that tumbles ever deeper into darkness there are
flashes, reflections, but nothing tangible just a vague sense of the void.
Navigation started quite early on there were the
embryonic sorties on to Dartmoor when I was twelve. I had signed up for the Duke of Edinburgh
Award scheme and we had to slog from hill to hill. Try finding a twelve year old today that
could or would want to do that. Dartmoor
famous for Arthur Conan Doles “Hounds of the Baskervilles”, failed prison
escapes, and dead Royal Marines. Our
first night on the moors and the rain was torrential It was then I decided to start
the fire with the map. A very nice example of improvisation as we
huddled hypothermic. Which doesn’t seem
like your most catastrophic navigational failure until you realize that you
might need it to traverse the rest of the moors the very next morning. Regardless of how sophisticated my sense of
direction is today on that morning on that hill I discovered the ability to
improvise, adapt, and overcome.
