Pandemic Spring- Return to S.E. Alaska

 Usually I don’t write about myself or my own experiences in my blog. Instead I prefer to make a comment on current events in order to have a personal view of history later. That seems a worthwhile venture when history writing is often done with archival material that was made from the insider, establishment perspective rather than that of ordinary citizens. It can be difficult to confirm that ordinary people are even aware of major events much less minor ones, or what they thought about them. So a brief summary of my own Feb to May 2020 Covid experience would be useful retrospectively.

 In February I was still employed at a dental lab as a dental lab technician. I had learned about pouring dental models, cutting out dies made from white and blue powder/stone and other lab procedures for a year and a half. The lab had a sharp sow-down when they choose not to sign a new contract with the V.A. because of numerous onerous conditions the government placed on the lab if they wanted to renew. That list of conditions was quite remarkable including one that everyone in the lab be certified (I wasn’t), that the lab deliver the product to the V.A. by a certain time every day, that the lab books be entirely open to the government and so forth. The lab would need to become a kind of transparent auxiliary to the government. At any rate by the end of February it was evident that my employment was ending with business off. I need to formulate an emergency plan of a sort.

 I am from Alaska yet I was working in Montana. It was too early to return to rural Alaska because it is still snowed in during March on the road and woods to the shed where I stay. I had cold weather reinjured my feet on a late October, 12 foot skiff journey on the inside passage in 2018 and did not want to aggravate the situation. Instead I considered a place to look for work at another dental lab and finally selected Oregon.

  I caught a bus I Montana to Oregon. The bus ride was interesting because a somewhat unusual guy got on the bus in Butte, delivered by the police to the station at 5 in the morning. He conversed with himself incessantly and when the bus arrived, boarded. He went to the back of the bus, I sat up front relieved.

 The fellow eventually caused a bus delay that made the bus miss connections in Portland. Apparently he said the bus smelled like niggers when he sat amidst a bunch of black people, and the situation went on for some miles. A black fellow sitting opposite me said that he nearly caused a riot on the bus. One passenger said "What do you expect, this is Montana”. When the bus stopped at Deer Lodge to meet police, who boarded the bus, the unruly passenger after 20 minutes of talking resisted being removed from the bus. Two policemen had to drag him out. The older fellow hooked his feet around the metal that hold the seats in place to make the police work harder. I thought the guy had some kind of dementia from observing him at the station, yet I am no psychologist.

 Oregon was just experiencing its first Covid cases when I arrived. Portland Oregon had no bus station. The bus dropped off passengers on a poorly lit sidewalk at night in a seedy part of town with numerous homeless camps and tents on sidewalks. Passengers were left to fend for themselves and wait hours for next buses without a place even to sit down. That probably was tough on some elderly women and men at least. The next bus for me was several hours away so I walked to Amtrak and caught an Amtrak bus to Salem where I missed the connection to the coast.

 Salem has an excellent bus station. Lots of homeless people live in the area. A cloud of marijuana smoke drifted to the station from under a bridge a couple hundred yards away; it must have been a marijuana bonfire.

  I caught a bus in the morning to Lincoln City and another to Newport. Tracking down the dental lab in Newport I found that it was gone and out of business like thousands of others in the U.S.A. Chinese dental labs are very quick and cheap and turnaround is fast with FedEx. Within a few years dentists will likely send scanned from a patient’s mouth digital information about teeth to China via internet instead of sending impressions that are then used to cast models used for making crowns. More U.S. dental labs will close. As it is some U.S. dentists open their own dental labs in China with Chinese partners to save over the price Americans need to charge with a higher cost of living in the U.S.A.

 I applied for unemployment from Montana on the Internet site and it was approved. Unfortunately travel was being restricted and borders closed. I felt an urgency to go north while I could since getting a job now wasn’t probable.

 The Alaska ferry boats do not do much presently because of state budget cuts. Alaskan politicians are elected because they are oil-heads and cannot ever diversify away from complete reliance on oil taxes to pay for state government. When the oil price drops politicians do not have as much to spend. It is a cake job when oil money is available though.

 The Marine Highway web site said that a ticket from Bellingham to Alaska for one passenger cost $742. Usually they are two or three hundred dollars...eventually ferry service was stopped. Then the Canadian border was closed. With dentistry and dental labs becoming closed I chose to book an Alaska Air ticket to S.E. Alaska, leaving from Sea-Tac hoping to slide through before air travel was stopped. With three weeks advance purchase the ticket was affordable. I had to wait in Washington State for three weeks camping, first in Aberdeen Washington where I did hear an eagle sounding like the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth as best I can describe it, although at a higher pitch, and then in Olympia. The state was merging in to total lock-down and shelter in place by then. Used clothing stores were closed though dollar stores remained open. As in Newport libraries were closed and most internet access shut down. When all places to buy used paperback books closed it was nearly time for me to leave Washington and go to Seattle-Tacoma Int Airport via public transit.

 Public bus service continued though the front doors of buses were taped off. Riding was free and passengers entered and left via the back door in order not to contaminate the driver or themselves in turn. I left a $150 dollar bike at a bus stop that I had brought from Oregon on a train from Salem to Olympia since it would fit on the plane and I was down to fewer than $50.

 Waiting overnight at the airport for the plane to leave around 6 in the morning let me catch up on the Internet and chess. I started playing chess about eight years ago online. At the airport I played 100 games of blitz and left the rating at 1310. With good internet connections I can play above 1400 for a few hundred games. I must say that it was a little weird playing blitz chess after a few weeks off. I wasn’t to certain of my openings and middle game and so messed things up somewhat with complications from early on. That actually led to wins against higher rated players that expected more by-the-book moves.

 At 5 am I bought the worst cup of coffee ever made at Starbucks at the end of concourse C. Next time I will bring instant coffee to the airport. They may discriminate against senior citizens and pour the saved dregs of each pot’s coffee from the day before to dump on some unsuspecting customer.

 There were so few passengers in the airport that it was a great experience besides Starbucks of course. My only concern about getting Covid 19 in the airport was at the Homeland security screen where a gaggle of unmasked agents were in to close of contact. From there it was all good.

 The aircraft had just nine passengers on it. Upon arrival at Wrangell a policeman without a mask asked me where I would quarantine and I said at a place several miles away beyond the road at a particular address. The temperature was 25 degrees and my pack was heavy. I began the walk to the shed.

 Snow was still on the road March 31^st. That was a little worrying since I had no snowshoes and there were miles of up and downhill to cross. The snow was mostly frozen however and generally I walked on top of it. That situation would change later in the day.

   I am getting a little old for walks with a pack several miles through snow on a road then through logging slash further. The trip was slow. The day grew warm (34 F) and the snow become soft. My steps occasionally fell through the top leader down into the snow a distance. After a couple or three hours of that I approached the final downhill and uphill of the road portion and trudged on.

  Snow trudging brings one to focus narrowly on each step and if one will break through the frozen crust with a jolt or not. When I broke through I would sink in to the knee or more and find extraction and resuming to the next step challenging. When I reached the rotting old wood bridge at the bottom of the hill I was spent. I tried going uphill and each step was a failure. I decided then to begin discarding stuff from the pack to lighten the load (eventually days and weeks later I recovered all of the items I had discarded carefully in garbage bags.)

 First thing to go was the sleeping bag. In time as I struggled up the hill with every step falling through I discarded everything including my notebook computer, except for a couple of items in a small plastic bag.  Extra weight makes one break through snow easier so getting rid of it is a good idea. Snow lurks in cloud and shadows fading away in meaningless trickles in spring. The day was getting late; it took me 6 hours to walks half dozen miles to the shed. The final steps on the road were about 100% fall through with wet shoes packed in s’no rather than snyes. Walking ¾ mile through logging slash late afternoon was comparatively easy. It was downhill and frozen snow in shadows made it simpler to step over or around leftover wood materials piled all-akimbo here and there. A familiar bird appeared to sing a bit here and there as the tired trudge drew to completion before the rain began to fall.

  I left some food at the shed 19 months before when I had to leave early because of the cold reinjury. Simple stuff like rice and flower are helpful in lean times. When I walked in to town after quarantine for two weeks plus one waiting for snyes to melt on the road, I discovered on the Internet that Montana had reversed itself and denied my unemployment claim.

  I applied for social security in Oregon when Covid made it look like getting a new job would not occur for some time. When in Wrangell an email from social security said I had to call them and answer questions before I could be approved. Unfortunately the trac fone I bought at Wal-mart in Newport did not work at Wrangell. I believe it was some kind of Android 4G incompatibility issue with local service, maybe it wasn’t.

 I was broke with two government agencies acting like benefit the well off and f the poor. Government policies are made by comfortcrats that have no idea of the actual problems of broke people. Because I filed a tax return on time (in Feb 2020 and paid the tax due in full) I would not get the $1200 payment until maybe October. That completed the perfect storm of no-pay and broke on an island in Alaska. My inflatable wouldn’t hold air and the small outboard wouldn’t start. The heavy metal boat required good tide, current and weather to travel the miles to a dismal landing site closer to town.

 I found with some investigation that the I.R.S. doesn’t process tax returns with payments until June. So July would be the quickest time to get the Covid $1200 for a ticket so somewhere because I did not use direct deposit because I was not expecting a refund. The I.R.S. will not let one change one’s information or add direct deposit unless one has a credit card and phone in one’s name and I have neither. When the check is issued it will go to the address where I used to work.

 I am therefore thinking about trying to sell my 12’ skiff to buy food and purchase a plane ticket to someplace with a social security office if they ever reopen in order to expedite my application.

 Each walk in to town is a round trip of about 12-14 miles. No phone or way off the island. Government agencies that are useless for present purposes. No generator and not enough solar panels to charge a computer for writing a book of some kind. This is the start of an interesting working retirement I guess. I will need to get a job and find somewhere to build a shed I can access more easily than this one that I sold to people I worked for.

 That was my Covid era experience. I have read from the Bible of course, at the shed, fed a few birds I have known a few years, and read a pair of fiction novels as well as from Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’. The novels are worth mentioning.

 One is ‘The Girl Who played With Fire’ by the late Steig Larson. Larson wrote three good books about Sweden and then died. He brought the three novels to his publisher before he died in 2004. All that fame after he was gone. Better late than never…

 The other book is ‘The Cobra Event’ by Richard Preston. That book is a very informative primer on biological terrorism and recombinant D.N.A. and R.N.A. splicing to engineer a lethal virus. It was written during the Clinton administration and remains quite good.

 After reading it I have listened in vain for a description of how many bases the Covid virus has…7000?

  This particular island has taken adequate defense measures against virus transmission. The next larger island north has its cases though. Travelers such as fishermen and seafood processors can bring in the illness, as well as others permitted by the state government to journey about the state though with restrictions.

 I hope that governments take the time to become aware of the real value of putting travel quarantine’s internationally to prevent the next and possibly more deadly virus from going around the planet like wildfire. Quarantine’s are fire breaks and can serve well.

 The value of local agriculture should also be realized. Every home and town should be encouraged to support a garden rather than blocked by local ordinances. The city of Wrangell for example should create a ten acre garden plot to be used in emergencies for growing food locally, and in normal times could be used for recreation.

 

 

 

 

 

What Characteristics of the Higgs Field and Public Capital ?

One may wonder if is the Higgs field that provide virtual particles the ability to emerge from a perfect vacuum, or what the characteristics of a Higgs field are, such as strength over distance and how it could be compared to an electromagnetic field. If a Higgs field acts upon virtual particles is that part of an explanation for the appearance of gravity curving space near stars for example, and it is instead virtual particles being affected by the Higgs field that seems to curve space or act like dark energy or matter. Seemingly if select particles that were neutral such as neutrinos became charged en mass that might affect or distort space outwardly.

 I was reading a book during my two weeks of covid quarantine that suggested such ideas. Answers will need to wait for some future chapter perhaps in a book yet unwritten; presently though the seeming American economic malfeasance concerning the paucity of ecological economic thought in party political platforms has grabbed my attention. There is a lot more than I have time to write here about the rise of private sector capital and fall of public sector capital to net zero. Corporatism reinforced by neo-cons and neo-liberals alike fail to reform capitalism so it keeps a Democratic form of government in the United states alive, vital and adaptive to demographic facts in relation to the decline of the planet’s ecospheric health; with 80% of Americans bought into the Wall Street concentrate wealth and just make a profit social design the prospect for rescuing the ecosphere from continuing steep decline leading to human decline seems minimal to vanishingly small.   

Democracy is supposed to be adaptive, responsive and directed by enlightened republic leaders who fully inform the populace of points requisite for keeping the nation healthy and strong including environmental health. In the just for profit blind lemmingway dash to oblivion there is a complete lack of ecospheric intelligence and drive for profit; business doesn’t need to be done that way.

Traditional conservatives like the Cato brothers of republican Rome sought to keep the people free in a Republic and sacrificed their lives to keep it so rather than falling into an imperium. American alternatively seem indifferent about drifting into a plutocracy at the top of Wall Street that isn’t capable of competent leadership since it sits atop a shareholder pyramid that seeks profit as the abstract end-in-itself. A fetish of wealth developed that serves as a paralyzing poison working against any rival ideas in a nation that is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas and experimental laboratory of political philosophies, reforms and efficient actualization of statecraft.

If one were to average the national income demographically, the most rich individual could be limited to earning 300 times as much annually as the average salary. Corporations could be limited to 30,000 employees. Once shareholders had maxed out on earnings excess corporate profit could be reinvested in the corporations itself or be used to form a different business that would need to become independent. Businesses could be made to be vetted for ecological efficiency before allowed to start up. Maybe business proposals could be reviewed and the best ten of twelve proposals allowed to go ahead after public review; the public should be more involved in business forms and profits should be made on producing product rather than through finance and capital gains that were just investments in corporate stock. No individual should be allowed to invest in more than three corporations. Taxation should be progressive and rise to nearly 95% near the event horizon of maximum allowed of individual capital permitted socially that would be made with an equation including total national income, number of citizens and legal residents etc. Keeping ownership of private capital by an individual or a certain percent of national income would defend against plutocratic political encroachment as exists at present. Private capital should be more egalitarian and individuals of creative genius concerning development of material products and intellectual properties would not be repressed, yet would be socially supported and encouraged to actualize their ideas that are qualitatively and quantitatively productive with investments in new corporate business start ups that they would perhaps lead or direct though the personal profit would remain limited a the statutory personal national cap. Individuals of creative, manufacturing genius might build creation of several businesses of benefit to society, the environment and space development without need for a mountain of personal capital. A strong social safety net lifestyle that integrates housing, health and transportation with the environment through an ecological restoration reformation with continuing free education to help society bootstrap positive social transformation of its economic modus Vivendi with intelligent design is probably necessary for the survival of human life on Earth with any kind of a decent lifestyle for everyone in a healthy global ecosphere.

Still, it is easy to overlook other important questions like what actually goes on inside the event horizon of a black hole. Keep in mind that an event horizon is an arbitrary place that has sufficient gravity to prevent light or anything else from escaping outwardly. If one wasn’t crushed continuing on toward it maybe the questions of what lay beyond would appear.

Gravity is the primary power of a black hole in that it attracts mass. Gravity is also the most weak of the basic forces of the Universe (except maybe the Higgs field), therefor I wonder how gravity can tear apart the electro-weak and strong forces of mass it attracts and when and where it does so? I would think that some physicists would have very good guesses by now concerning the structure of a black hole, yet there may not be any that are readily available on the Internet.

I would not think the traditional conjecture about a singularity existing would be very satisfactory presently since it fails to account for dark energy, dark mass, the Higgs field and even virtual particles that arise in the singularity if any. Why wouldn’t gravity also be destroyed at the singularity? Is a gravitational field at singularity something like an electron in its own field? If gravity is an apparent phenomenon caused by virtual entanglements of the Higgs field, do the field spin characteristics change and lock up at a certain point at a nominal singularity with other configurations of quantum fields arising or evolving between the singularity and event horizon?

Apparently fractional charges of quarks and virtual quarks becoming entangled with the Higgs field; even at a distance if virtual quarks become two dimensional to travel at the speed of light, could be a theoretical paradigm in which to discover a practical explanation for the phenomena of gravity, dark matter, dark energy and spatial expansion. Without the Higgs field that is Universal, yet perhaps not of the same intensity everywhere, mass is two-dimensional rather than three, and is actually there massless until the electroweak force encounters the Higgs field, slows down select particles to sublight speed and is permitted by considerations of special relativity to have the extra third dimension in the direction of motion. The book that I was reading does give one the opportunity to consider numerous new relations of mass, dimensions and space-time.

I threw in a few questions here that are no more likely to be answered soon than questions of how the U.S.A. can reform capitalism to make it support ecospheric renaissance and full social de-victimization in the stream of history are. Interesting to consider even so. Did the Higgs field pre-exist the big bang? What is its source?

Transparent Halloween Masks vs. Wuhan Virus

Maybe clear Halloween masks with replaceable nose and mouth filters, plastic lenses eye security against labial aspirants and plosive verbiage bearing Wuhan virus spit-spray; with surgical gloves from dollar stores that may be enough to allow reasonably safe business activity until a vaccine is made. 

There are of course other measures such as tracing newly infected person contacts; yet practical face protection in public spaces would probably help much to slow the spread of virus in highly traveled Europe and the United States. Store clerks should be able to buy a mask at a dollar store for a dollar and have twenty replacement filters with it. The rubber band holding it on should be sturdy enough not to easily break.

Wearing a Halloween mask to work might be a hassle, though possibly humorous too if not just transparent, however people have worn masks I think in prior times of European plagues. The Wuhan virus should not be too big of an inconvenience if the correct trick will bring the right treat of good public health.

Travelling salesman algorithms for determining quickest routes between different cities might be analogous to an algorithm for finding possible Wuhan contacts, yet with second and third generation, primary, secondary or tertiary contacts etc. If the variables such as cities or contacts are unknown, determining the shortest route (or using a similar program for finding contacts with deductive logic) with several unknowns could be very difficult. When Covid 19 point contacts are widespread in appearance over several free for business states instead of at a single point of origin such as at Kirkland Washington via SeaTac and Wuhan China quite possible, the plan to have people track down a second wave of infection may require additional measures such as masks if the virus is to be comprehensively contained until a vaccine arises.

Considering the federal economic response to the Wuhan virus I get the sense that it was regarded initially as a hiccup in the economy to which a full financial bailout should be used. Perhaps as in time of protracted war a rationing system would have been more practical with financial reinforcement intended to be available for the rest of the year at a more measured scale.

Adding trillions to the public debt seems like a poor idea. The British had vast revolutionary war borrowing that wasn’t repayed until near the start of the 20th century. The people paid private lenders tax dollars better than a century as American taxpayers may be forced to do.

The U.S. public debt soaring to more than 26 trillion dollars is about equal to U.S. public capital so the public has about zero public capital generally. Most U.S. capital is held in the private sector and that fact alone make economic reform to an ecological economic footing that may be required to address the primary challenge to Americans of adapting human economic methods to one that is synergetic with restoration of the national and planetary ecosphere directly. Global warming is a incidental element of the general decline of the ecosphere that would be corrected if ecological economic practices adapted to competitive yet non-market oriented free enterprise capitalism became the way of the U.S.A.

Clever Safe Businesses Should Be Allowed to Open?

I was considering how my blog could be an essential blog after listening to a fellow with a tire store bragging a bit about his responsibility as an essential public business in a radio commercial. Great responsibility goes to those businesses remaining open he commented. 

I must have ten or twenty readers of my few thousand posts each day so this must be an essential blog, or not. During this time some people still hate environmentalists. Some people prefer to be stupid about the decaying environment and are proud to swell with the historically maladapted way its always been done; normal enough I guess.

Google stopped paying anything about seven years back and I have never figured out how to fix whatever it is that needs to go in the html code so I could actually earn something. Hence I don't really care; I write because I write.

Yet businesses and educational facilities that can figure out really safe ways to transact business during the covid 19 era should be allowed to open. Non-standard innovations that are really clever and safe might be invented by some and perhaps imitated by others. There should be some kind of profit incentive to drive people to think about how to get things done in the shop without allowing a possibility of transmission of a virus. The advantage would be that the smart shop owners are open while the laggards remain unsafe and closed. Government agencies might want to consider how to get a quick inspection and release to open for the inventive.

The novel coronavirus reminds me a lot of Camus' book; The Plague or of some accounts of the bubonic plagues of 13th century Europe though of course, it is not as grim as that.

In that era doctors wore bird shaped masks with long beaks to avoid inhaling the plague. It was fleas that carried the virus however; maybe the pnuemonic plague is easier to get from breathing toxic air from the infected.

image from-wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Beak_doctor_mask.jpg

It is still somewhat difficult for me to believe that medical people have a hard time adapting air pumps from Harbor Freight or wherever with regulators to intubation and respiration applications; in the 1950s Americans invented everything routinely, apparently now they think everything need be bought at a store and is disposable.

Covid 2nd wave Scenario/Public Debt etc

There is quite a bit of public commentary on how many weeks will be needed to isolate Americans in order to let the novel coronavirus pass over the nation “so it can open up and get back to work”. Instead of painting blood on their doors the people have horded toilet paper. The paradigm seems a little off to me, since it is not quite like waiting for the comet Halle Bopp to make a close pass to the sun and disappear on an outward bound course; the virus could reappear from Mexico or South America and elsewhere after it has been subdued in the U.S.A.

One passenger from Buenos Aries next September travelling to Chicago could re-infect the nation. A single illegal alien travelling north to work in Los Angeles, some stray business executive not showing symptoms arriving in Seattle from nation x could re-infect the nation for round two of national pandemic 2.0 Waiting ten weeks to “open” the nation after the “spread” is stopped and the virus disappears may be safer than waiting 3 weeks, yet the fundamental paradigm for biological vector proliferation seems off and inadequate. Economic reform to ecological economics that have good national firewalls and ordinary quarantine times for migrants and visitors should be requisite.

The United States might not be able to spend federal dollars like drunken sailors with trillions of dollars added to public debt every time a foreign bug enters the country from a leaky international security screen to prop up the national economy. The virus outbreak has been compared to war in support of massive federal spending, yet the debt of the Second World War was paid off just a couple of years after the conclusion of the war.

The present public debt has been compiling since the Reagan administration and no one in government will pay it off nor has a clue of how (tax the rich at 90%).  Zero interest loans to big banks enables the richest to mint five free e-dollars via loans for each one on deposit with real money repaid. In each crisis the rich get vastly richer and the public hopes for the little payment to buy food and do the laundry. Inevitably the Congress will call in time for cuts to services to the poor to help balance the federal budget. Broadcast media sycophants echo the general parameters albeit with two sided criticism and suppression of any alternative ideas.

The mass media search for wealth and power, audience share and control has largely displaced the marketplace of free ideas and advocacy that flourishes in a healthy democracy. Media are as pro and con fans of the rich and powerful rather than independent advocates of new ideas and different directions. They are followers rather than leaders and prop up anachronistic though rich establishment organizations. In the U.S.A. the media-political establishment relationship reminds me of that of the C.P.S.U. and its party organs with the most rich and political-media elite cliques enfeofed in power in comparison to politically passive proles.

In America 80% of the people own cars destroying the health of oceans and atmosphere for human purposes and are also invested in Wall Street; they are corporatists signed on to Mussolini-Hitler style corporatism quite unaware. Democrats are neo-liberals and Republicans the same more or less with more accent upon management interests. One party outwardly favors atheism, homosexuality and legal dope, abortions etc more than the other. Corporate leaderships favors godless worldliness without moral reservations. The lemming factor driving most toward mass disasters is explicit.

Though it would be pragmatic to change toward sustainable and safe economics it is socially unrealistic to do so. Democrats advertise band aids for global warming that lack red blood cells of ecological economic principles and practices. They would wonder; doesn’t ecological economics mean recycling bottles and paper?

Even practical preparations for biological attack are lacking. With all of the robotic research couldn’t some few thousand upgradable robotic contagion nurses and heavy lifting robots be made to serve in dangerous areas when human workers are perishing? Wouldn’t self-driving electric powered ambulances spare a few drivers from contagion? Aren’t there many prep technologies that could be made and stored for emergencies that could be upgraded every decade or so?

Ecological economics would require vetting of business forms to examine their effect on the environment as positive or negative. Positive ones would be permitted to go ahead; negative ones failing the eco-zoning criteria would not. There would be good safety nets for workers when they were not employed. In effect the national workforce would become temporaries with their safety net maintained by the government rather than Wall Street.

Workers would have free public education, medical and basic income. Eco-zoning would apply to all structures with a goal of restoring the ecosphere to full function through remediation and construction with no net loss of biota.

With biological technology becoming so sophisticated and genetic engineering becoming commonplace for national security to depend upon the kindness of strangers isn’t a good policy. The idea that mass surveillance and a totalitarian information state will know a priori about any possible development of dangerous biological vectors is equally silly. Restoration of a social and environmental business ecosphere with natural firewalls to de frappe biological war vector should be an obvious policy direction to take. With the acidification of oceans, loss of bees, mass extinction in general and global atmospheric heating there may not be enough clues for political leaders to notice concerning the fragility of human existence and environment to be distracted from Wall Street profits.

Human civilization faces a challenge of the need for complete change of its historically aggregated physical structure from the type one kind of historical sprawl to one intentionally designed to adapt optimally to the world ecosphere. It is a great challenge for a civilization to change its basic structure and form for renewal and a challenge perhaps never met. It would be like asking Aztec civilization, or Inca, to rid itself of its structures and become Roman without pyramids and with arches and columns. Or it would be like asking Roman civilization to live upon water in a raft community, yet that is what is required of the United States as a world leader if humanity is to extend its generally peaceful occupancy upon the planet for a considerable period of time.

The era of exterminating wild life on real estate with border to border dead zone need end and thoughtful human living situations innovated that permit maximum personal liberty with security and minimal adverse ecospheric impact.

Spray-on Surgical Gloves Might Be Faster to Produce

Somewhere there must be a spray-on glove product, easy to remove, that would be suitable for emergency and medical service workers. Then vast tubs of goo could be made and shipped to those with dirty hands.

If Obamacare had not been designed to ream the rich and Wall Street, and was instead made to serve the poor and those that can't afford medical coverage, a better government operated expanded V.A. and poor people's clinic network with capacity for 30 million could have been developed able to process mass casualties or illness in a pinch.

Plainly the corporate emergency medical system is lacking. it isn't able with use-on-demand bed capacity able to increase quickly enough, and making a profit from pandemic emergency really should be part of the paradigm anyway. The public apparently isn't well led by either party on the topic.

A healthy government medical system fr the poor and veterans is plainly a necessary part of modern statecraft as pure corporatism is about profit and short term gains rather than empirical and historical reality.

Incorrect Eschatology Can Read Like a Novel

Christian pre-millennialists and Muslims share an incorrect interpretation of scripture concerning when and how the end times will present. Muslims believe that Jesus will return to help a Muslim mahdi wrap things up with war and death while pre-millennialists interpret scripture including the New Testament in such a way that is too familiar to Hollywood and writers with a transporter-rapture of Christian and an anti-Christ taking over the world with sundry cataclysms and Armageddon. That is apparently all wrong.

The end times of New Testament scripture generally referred to the horrific events of the first century A.D. the Lord said would occur. Jerusalem was destroyed with more than a million dead etc.  The new age that followed was the Christian era and long term increase of the faithful believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. That time of increase could go on for thousands of years except for the malfeasance of unsound environmentally rotten economic policies evolved from the past that are maladapted to a very populous world. No one knows when the Lord will actually return for a third time to really wrap things up (counting his appearance after crucifixion as his second coming). People must soberly wait and see.

In the meantime, especially during the novel coronavirus 19 mileau, it is a good time to establish a priesthood of believers church structure with Christians meeting in small egalitarian groups sharing liturgical duties with a standardized, Biblically correct structure. Maybe eight people is enough, sitting around a few card tables with safe distancing. A network of priesthood of believers church groups could be maintained after the conclusion of covid 19.

One other point about wrong hermeneutics; People commonly misunderstand the book of Genesis. God creates time and is himself atemporal and unbound by strictures or dimensions of space and time. If God evolved the world in six days that comprised for Earthers billions of years; if the world is 4 billion years old, the meaning of end times itself could be quite a few more than one would expect in the context of a thriller novel. The actual meaning of the end of the age, besides the end of the Old Testament covenant way of salvation of obeying the law of Moses strictly as all that was provided (when Jesus provided a new way that was more difficult to flunk) can have several meanings- even several thousands years starting with the crucifixion and resurrection of the Lord.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/garrison-clifford-gibson/god-cosmology-and-nothingness-theory-and-theology-in-a-scientific-era/ebook/product-24438116.html

Surfing the Bubble

The precipitous drop of Wall Street averages during the novel corona virus era is a reminder that the stock market has been over-valued since the end of the cold war. It was a bubble investors surfed that collapsed with a little prick of foreign imported virus. Where the fall stops and stabilizes is hard to say. My guess is somewhere around 15,000. Full disclosure; I have nothing invested in it. 

Bubbles form in economics and investment markets. Investors ride the bubbles that sometimes seem like Chinese puzzle boxes with the core box size hidden somewhere within others. One bubble collapses and another grows within. Investors may bubble jump or exploit quantum super-positioning that allows a quick redistribution of location from a novel collapsing bubble to an inner membrane that is more stable and expanding. 

U.S. economics is based on non-sustainable, disposable ad hoc technical structures rather than the true farming of a century past. Lightning bolts of invention and innovations dump items to the market with legions of hands-on applicators on the payroll. Form and crop position factors, human crop factors, bring allegiance to methods as ends-in-themselves, such as automobiles. With the closure of automobile production lines presently, the opportunity to keep the closed forever, perhaps repurposing them to support electrical mass transit and local drone l.e.m. passenger cart intermodal links, arises as a start on transitioning the nation to an ecological economic new foundation.

 The primary obstacle to changing the bubble structure of U.S. economics is just the people. About three of four Americans are invested in the stock market and own at least one automobile. I don’t, and would seek ways to continue to not own one. When the bubbles of global warming and mass extinction break I can at least look at my fellow citizens and think; good job people.

People just aren’t going to change and expect government socialism for the middle and upper classes to bail them out whenever a bubble bursts. They want to call government supporting their businesses conservatism or neo-liberalism, as in recent times it has. Actually it is corporatism such as Hitler used. Macro-economics shakedowns happen periodically and usually result in concentrating wealth  with lesser businesses driven under networked power. The very poor and homeless are generally left out of the benefits of the bubble political economy. Corona virus 19 is the latest example. 

 In Oregon I found shelves in retailers had plenty of isopropyl alcohol. In the state of Washington retailers’ shelves were empty. Apparently panic hording wiped out the supply. Isopropyl alcohol-especially 59% alcohol is very useful for ordinary hygiene for campers, hikers and homeless people; it can replace showers completely for weeks, except for hair washing of course. It would be a courtesy if retailers limited individual sale of isopropyl alcohol to just two in order to leave some supply for homeless hygiene maybe an executive order should be implemented to make it so.

Democrats Candidates Apparently Hate Free Medicare B,D for the Elderly

Democrat Presidential candidates ignore the easy slam dunk of getting free Medicare Plan B and D for the poor elderly that can’t afford it. Speaker Pelosi would say; ‘what’s that?’ so far as getting the most vulnerable to Covid 19 real medical care. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders will talk about pie-in-the-sky and ignore the practical and affordable at the debate. Maybe they just want the elderly that don't really need Medicare to survive the scythe.

Covid 19 might not go away soon so it would be useful to have an intelligent redesign response to adapt the economy to continue functioning with younger and middle aged workers at the core who apparently can contract the virus with less than lethal effect.

The virus is said to perish in three days so keeping public libraries open for seven days and closing it for three should be a new norm. Many businesses and public spaces should have three day weekends to let the virus die.

Providing free internet connections to let the poor access the internet to apply for unemployment checks or social security would be helpful too. The prosperous have regular phone connections and an electrical outlet while the very poor often do not. Libraries should keep their wifi on even if the library itself closes.

Some usually crowded facilities could be kept in service with limited access and safe spacing criteria met with sign-up for appointment slots. Perhaps a way to create inexpensive yet effective ad hoc neo surgical masks could be made for users of public facilities, and idle workers could produce the improve masks. People aren’t required to be standardized and stupid, or should not.

If more ventilators are needed it should be possible to innovate some mass production tech to supply air to many lungs in large room. Scuba experts, air-line connection people, computer chip measuring volume programmers, input outflow etc shouldn't be a problem to put together. Mass octopus hookups with regular pressurized line people and physicians who know where to cut and splice, and what disposable connectors are need to keep air in and out of lungs.

Many of the elderly cannot afford Medicare plan B and so must forego medical visits to doctors to see if anything can be done about whatever ails them including Covid 19. Medicare is designed by the upper middle class and it is they whom are the primary beneficiaries of the cheap for them service.

Schools could use cheese-wheel transparent plastic temporary structures with the big cheese teacher at the hub; none of the student or teacher would be able to breather or infect others as all would enter and exit separately aft.

Innovating functioning, practical long-term structures is a better adaptive plan than to use mass economic closure without thinking about shutting the poor and elderly out.

Spread of Covid 19 Spending Reassures Neo-Liberals

News on the novel corona virus went viral. Spending is the remedy for everything with intelligent thought not needed or wanted generally, though with just one breath the gerontology of Presidential candidates could disappear along with the Senate; that’s something situationally, ethically speaking to consider. High quality breath mints need be found to combat the spread. The real reason Darth Vader wore the air filter was likely to be dark side of the force insight into the approaching monkey-bat-Chinese super-cold fish-marketed for death cold virus. Darth was no big dummy.

https://www.ratburger.org/index.php/2020/02/25/who-now-no-longer-uses-word-pandemic-as-opposed-a-couple-of-hours-ago/

Newtria Chin-Dimple wrote the past feud years that V.A. and Community poor people’s clinics should unify and expand with new beds and transport structures added to create a vast center wing canard free public health care system for the poor for free instead of the paper-bureaucrat’s dream of Obamacare for everyone. Wall Street is the reliable go-to answer for everything; he was ignored.

Several states have let their school kids have a few weeks off in order to allow them to find more new and novel contacts to keep busy with in the neighborhood. Give teenagers time out of school because of the chance of catching something like a flu for them and they will auto-ground themselves at home wearing surgical masks. Schools are undisciplined environments without a chance of innovating secure from cold transmission structures with frequent temperature testing. Buying a play station for every school kid with Resident Evil games could train them at home without the mess of libraries and classrooms. President Trump might consider taking on an out of school apprentice in case the elder team is struck down in their prime.

The media has criticized President Trump for being slow to provide test kits and good responses to preventing spread of a super-cold virus; it is so easy to declare martial law and send the likely suspects to medical concentration camps in America after all. The virus has elicited news comments about the spread such as topsy-turvy, double or triple double whammy and hand washing advice ad nauseum. Just a year or two ago news reported that hand sanitizers don’t work- was that fake news?

 A Harvard economist suggested that the federal government send everyone a check right away to compensate for the virus. It need only have the treasury crank out dollars electronically via Federal Reserve loans to big banks that can loan five times that on deposit. Everyone at Harvard, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckerberg need a federal check to spend down the dreaded disease. Nothing like scientific precision in federal spending and new debt to restore confidence in markets and their ability to invest in China.

If the U.S. government would just issue gift cards at Starbucks for everyone; perhaps for a thousand dollars so every threatened citizen-subject of Rhodes scholars and her majestic can buy ten or fifteen anti-virus prophylaxis coffees with four insulating feet of puffy, pouty, cloud-like whip crème on top under a sweet cherry the novel virus might reach a quick end. Federal spending is the key to defeating the enemy novel cold virus that normally would disappear on its own except for the spit in the beer can put in the freezer for storage that one infected worker thought might be worth something some day.

Next year or two everyone will have a vaccine for the novel Covid 19 virus  that will be free and easy to get waiting in line to attend the delayed N.B.A. championship series, Olympics and other games.

Making the Turn (a short story)

Making the Turn

©2020 Garrison C Gibson

There was a good price on a skiff some distance away. Buying the craft in July seemed like a good idea though time would need to be taken away from work; maybe a vacation. Without much persuasion or any at all the deal was made. 

The boat would be picked up in Juneau in September.

The vacation started later than planned, the seller needed to be out of town until sometime in October. No problem, the buyer was salty enough to feel comfortable to make a journey more than 150 miles over the water in the dark, rainy days of fall.

Gear for making the journey was stolen from a ferry terminal. A g.p.s. and other technical items were lost. Not much existed in the budget to replace them. No problem, the buyer was an occasional sourdough spanning about a half century.

Arriving in Juneau was good. Familiar sights and mountains greeted the traveler. Low mountains rising a few thousand feet from sea level were picturesque though shorter than those of the average elevation of mountain where he worked. He found a taxi driver at the Auk Bay terminal.

The Philippino cabbie was a good fellow. He seemed to know his way around and did fairly well with the cab. He knew where the hostile in Juneau was. A nice facility for a good price, the driver dropped me and agreed to return the next morning.

Bad weather forecasts predominated. Several days of windy weather were ahead, many with rain. The journey would be interesting; it was time to arrange to see the boat at the seller’s home.

The taxi arrived and found the right street up on the side of a mountain. He remembered taking a passenger nearby on a free New Year’s Eve ride for those with too much to drink. The snow on the steep road made for a treacherous course. The fellow was home. The 12’ skiff was upside down on the side of the driveway.

Finding everything fine a plan was made to take the vessel to the water in a few days when the weather cleared. A few days waiting in the empty though nice hostile wasn’t too bad a prospect. Much shopping for items to make the journey work was unfortunately, in order. Plastic gas can to refuel the two and a half horsepower motor, a spare spark plug, tarps to get out of the rain and the all important knee-high rubber boots were on the list, purchased and placed into a cart. When the goods were got the voyager called the taxi driver who swiftly appeared and took the goods to the hostile where they stayed a couple of day.

With a fair enough weather forecast the next day with wind expected to be less than 15 M.P.H. the trip was on. Next day the taxi took the equipment and journeyman to the boat. The seller put the equipment in a truck and loaded the boat together with the fellow who would be taking the boat. In an hour the boat and driver were dropped off at the boat ramp at Douglas. God byes were said, and good luck. A dark, overcast sky made the trip seem a little dicey.

Gastineau channel is a few miles long. Direct S.E. winds often blow north making the trip south against the prevailing wind and waves. The captain of his craft loaded the boat and set the 2.5 on the transom, gassed it up, replaced the cap and kicked off shore. He noticed there wasn’t a drain plug in the boat and went back to drag the boat stern first back onto a dry spot on the ramp. He called the seller who promptly delivered a drain plug.  After bailing out a little water the trip once again resumed.

A two and a half outboard motor powering a fairly heavy aluminum skiff need go rather slow. Perhaps in calm water and positive currents it would reach 8 miles per hour. With opposition currents and non-positive waves it averaged about half that or 5 m.p.h. In a couple of hours the vessel neared the end of Gastineau Channel where a vista of several confluences of waters ahead could be seen.

Taku Inlet is a turbulent body of water that has interior winds flowing over an eponymous glacier often stirring up waves over tides and currents from Stephens Passage to the South and the waters east of Admiralty Island that lead to the sea at Icy Strait. The confluence of currents and tides makes for occasional complex wave patterns with winds suddenly driving wave to larger size that are focused and move toward Land on Admiralty Island just north of Doty Cove.

October days are rather short; maybe eight hours of light technically, although the height of the mountains rising from the water and dark cloud cover can make total darkness appear earlier. The driver was enjoying the trip he had made numerous times before usually without a motor; sometimes rowing an eight foot inflatable boat- the last time a killer whale or Orcas had passed very close by outside Taku Harbor (not Taku Inlet) before he noticed a cap was lose on the inflatable and the air was gushing out.

A third of the across the water crossing to Slocum Inlet 17 miles S.E. of Juneau the small rippling waves took on a different tone with darker scuds hanging from nimbus clouds scurrying wet as if they had someplace to be. An odd fog cloud with fingers crawled from Admiralty toward the water. In the distance whitecaps appeared. With just so much daylight remaining there wasn’t really a choice of turning back. The journey was to the south at any rate; one need be going somewhere.

One last photograph was made before attention to the boat need be given. There wasn’t really a way to know how much the waves ahead would grow or in fact what size they actually were. The transition into a survival situation was fairly sudden. Suddenly the boat was at its destination in the midst of large, roiling water with waves over which the boat need transect to reach the shore.

With so many current direction there was no way to know if the water was worse astern. Very quickly the driver needed to move the slow twelve foot boat sideways nearly perpendicular to the direction of the waves.

The waves were focused generally on travelling toward Doty cove several miles distant where they probably crashed on a rocky outcrop of land. The waves were space too close together and were too large to consider running with them several miles off course to an uncertain fate. Resolutely with an occasional splash in the face and rain with a wind apparently more than 20 m.p.h. the driver avoided the white wash break of the waves and crossed over the top of each just before they broke and extended the time of travel in the trough and rising swell of the next of each as long as he could, while watching for the unusual changes of wave direction that happened periodically. The transom of the vessel was too low to consider putting into the foam of wave breaks.

In perhaps two or three hours of survival sailing (I use the term to apply to motoring here) the vessel drew closer to Slocum Inlet where the boater knew he would find calm. The south side of Taku Inlet has a few places to get a boat out of the wind; even from the east, because of large coastal mountains that reach as high as four or five thousand feet there. Dark green evergreens ashore looked welcoming, except for the knowledge that the woods were the home of the great Alaska brown bear that can weigh more than 600 pounds and have a skeleton that resembles something designed by a futuristic predator laboratory with twenty knife-like claws, strong legs that look like coiled energy ready to spring in support of a mouth full of sharp teeth. The boater said a few prayers and knew his fate was with God.

The journey passed for the boater as if he were watching a video and was in it himself. It was an either/or, live or die, capsize or stay upright kind of experience. One mistake and the boat would capsize; with the speed of the waves and cold water temperature in the mid-30s it wasn’t likely they surviving turning turtle was likely.

Surfing a small motor craft when necessary is always a memorable experience. It is never a pleasure and better avoided. Suddenly the wind shadow of the mountains arrived. The crazy wave battle was over for now. The turn around the end of Taku Inlet eventually appeared and the water remained calm close to shore. The rewarding site looking far down Stephens Passage to Frederick Sound arrived. Hoping to go farther before dark as the day was drawing toward a close, the white caps were visible out in the midst of the passage to the west. The journey took the vessel beyond Taku Inlet wear a bear had killed a couple of young hunters dressing a deer some time ago and to the unfamiliar Limestone Inlet wear he expected to pass the night uneventfully.

Limestone Inlet is sharp break in the coastal mountain wall. It is narrow and deep and shallow; very except toward the entrance that makes a bad anchorage for a small boat in fall in case waves arrive. The other spot deep enough to keep water in it when the tide goes out is along the north wall. A crabber had left a mess of pots in that spot making it unsuitable for anchoring. With mountains over a thousand feet high around it that seemed like not much of a problem; camping along the south wall was good enough and there was enough water to prevent a bear from reaching the boat while asleep.

With such a shallow deep bay when the tide goes out there are hundreds of yards of dry where a boat unwary of anchoring could find itself on the dry for hours waiting for the next high tide to refloat in. Asleep in a small boat a hungry brown bear looking for a late fall topping up snack before the long sleep might look at a skiff with food and a camper in it as a seafood plate. Without a .44 mag and a speed holster awakening to a bite on an arm should best be avoided; avoid it in any case.

A steady cold rain fell and the sky was dark, the nigh black. An improvised lid on the boat made with tent poles and tarps was rather useless and even dangerous making quick exit difficult. In the middle of the night the sleep was disturbed by the boat slamming hard on the rocks. Clawing out of the cumbersome enclosure in seconds the fellow used an hour to push off the rocks. He paddled madly with one ore-the ore locks didn’t actually fit his oars, far enough to put his prop into the water. Fortunately the stern hadn’t crashed into stone to possibly break it. The motor started with the first pull.

In the dark the vessel skidded across shallow with the tail below the prop hitting skipping mud several times before coming to rest in a spot closer to the north wall. In the night the anchor was tossed numerous times to gain a hold. Wind still hit the craft; somehow the wind had come over the north mountains and covered most of the Inlet, and it was some time before a place was found that worked; enough out of the wind yet still in water. The boat would be on the dry for just a half hour of the twelve hour tide cycle, and dawn was just a couple of hours away. Sleep was impossible; he made a coffee with a propane torch heating a metal cup under the tarp, and tore down the silly tent. For the remainder of the trip his new leaky boots and a tarp would be his distance from cold water. He knew he was luck the boat just took a good dent yet did not break.

Each new day on the trip brought new and familiar sites. Sea lions, seals and whales, eagles and bear-coastal bays he had learned of from hard experience surfing an eight foot boat over Holkam Bay with an oar lashed to the stern for steerage or standing on a monarch scow trying to get a square sail up to catch a sharp wind to cross over Port Houghton while the goings good; the way home was one of his favorite places to be.

The morning brought a new hope, yet there were white caps visible in the passage ahead. There was a kind of glow from somewhere under the clouds that joined sky and water where a line of sunlight broke through. The waters become clearer when the summer’s algal bloom is gone, the salt water smells fresh with ozone from the rains, raising anchor the fueled journey started again.

Once one leaves Limestone Inlet there aren’t too many good anchorages before reaching beyond Holkam Bay. Maybe the north side of Port Snettisham offers a place to bring a boat in, yet there are the bear, and the south shore is very stony and one must portage an inflatable a long way up the beach- a metal boat just wouldn’t work there.

One may find a place on the north side of Holkam Bay for an inflatable to be carried out of the water, and there are a few islands in the bay where one can spend the night on a boat carefully- the boater did that more than once on short rations and another with a sailboat without a motor; it was a tough time in the dark. He saw a humpback whale try to keep an island between itself and a noisy tourist boat going up the bay to Tracy Arm as he waited for the wind to rise and instead found a very slow moving current that took him south and out of the bay.

A cold day’s journey took the boater not only to Holkam Bay; unbelievably he ended up at Hobart Bay; inexperienced with a machine powering his boat the vast distance travelled in one long day was beyond his belief and hope. He set an anchor in the bay he was familiar with, Sunset Island offshore to the S.W.

With a couple of coffees the very uncertain morning looked promising enough. It was a long way from the anchor spot near the deserted whale and eagles feeding ground when the herring returned in the spring. He didn’t know how the wind would be on Port Houghton though Hobart Bay itself was calm. Losing the weather radio to thieves brought more guesswork and dead reckoning to the trip.

He spent an hour and back going to the Port entrance with the time wasted; the winds drove up wave too much; another wave intersecting direction to cross Port Houghton to Cape Fanshaw’s Cannery Island was required and they were too substantial. Wind and waves change with tides commonly, and fog sometimes arises as well. He decided to wait a few hours and kicked back in the boat. In an hour he grew impatient and decided to try it again.

The entrance to the Port, right along the N.E. shore was barely screened from the waves. Though the wave height was enough to make crossing at the wide entrance a bad idea because of the inevitably downwind drift with the wave that would make him miss Cape Fanshaw bay and likely take him out into the middle of Frederick Sound where he would in effect be out of control and luck if he could catch the lighthouse islands or Gambler’s Bay far beyond on the other side toward the south end of Admiralty. He choose to head upwind into the Port wear it grew narrower before crossing, then traverse a little bit; not too much, toward the S.W. where he could make short work of the several miles.

The upwind, downwind journey takes more time; it cost the better part of the day. He knew there weren’t good anchor spots easy to find on the south side of Port Houghton toward the entrance until reaching a little farther south to the entrance behind Cannery Island where even fishing boats sometimes take shelter from the wind.

The wind, waves and approaching darkness were adversaries and it was difficult to tell where the entrance to the channel was. Most bays on the outer side are exposed to the waves and fairly useless for boat camping. Dragging anchors and boats full of water from beach breaking waves can make a terminus of travel. False entrances abounded when in good water and summer the challenge is quite low. The boater wasn’t sure of what direction to go; he thought he may have gone too far going along the shore. Each turn made him think he was approaching the Cape itself. Waves grew with intensity, yet just before dark he found a turbulent entrance and that itself was the entrance to the channel at last. Though last dusk he motored some distance south and camped off Cannery Island in the rain by the rotten remnants of pilings from the place abandoned nearly a century ago.

The night was again cold and wet; his feet hadn’t been dry in days. He bailed out the boat often and found the boat pump the seller had included very efficient. In the morning he counted his blessings. One never knows what winds will be; the morning seemed good. Cold with the start and with a coffee in hand he broke camp and headed for the Cape.

Cape Fanshaw is itself fairly unremarkable except for its location. It is a spit reaching into Frederick Sound with a great few of the internal sea. The driver thought of it as Arnie Saknussen’s lost world. One of the last great wild spots in the United States unspoiled by development he hoped it would for countless generations remain so.

Taking the small craft around the cape on a fair day he knew that crossing Frederick Sound was a gamble; waves could occur that would terminate the trip, although worry was useless when necessity arose. Point Highland as he thought of it, looked over the Sound too as well as Farragut Bay. Using that as a guidepost was his custom; it was a good crossing point to traverse the Sound to Portage Bay on Kupreanov Island. That is necessary in order to go into the city of Petersburg some 50 miles south of the Cape. He needed to cross the sound at some point and it was the narrowest spot and simultaneously the most scenic.

His crossing went well and steadily; waves didn’t arise until reaching Portage Bay. He had plenty of fuel remaining and daylight hours. Motoring upwind against rising small three foot wave he plunged ahead as there was still light. The day took him along the west side of Kupreanov until reaching Petersburg harbor an hour after dark. He found a spot in the grid, tied up, covered up and fell asleep.

He spent three days around Petersburg waiting for rain and wind to abate. Cold and damp under the tarp sleeping on a narrow metal boat seat under a downpour the chance to leave was quickly taken up. He left the grid and motored south down Petersburg narrows between Mitkov and Kupreanov Islands and beyond Voevoda Island to Sumner Strait. The slow trip made the boat in the waves to test the difficulty decision block difficult; to go forward was probably to lose his life, so he turned about and went north to Petersburg. Another night in the grid. Next morning he travelled around the other side of Mitkov Island and again south. The wind this far in Frederick Sound is screened by coastal mountains and Mitkov. At the south end of the island is a very shallow narrow strait named Dry Strait- the tide goes out completely and it is dry for several hours each day. In the cold rain he went as far as he could and anchored watching the day pass and night get closer.

At last the boat refloated. He trough off the tarp and started the motor heading with the fast Stikine River current along the south side of Mitkov briefly before cutting over toward Kadin Island. The water becalmed and there was a starry night. Darkness arrived and he journey on catching the distant light of Wrangell. He avoided an Alaska ferry boat with his slow craft and reached the city harbor in the night. The journey was nearly done.

Next day he returned to the cabin. That night some sort of cold weather trench foot like injury appeared. He had damaged his feet decades before walking through snow and streams with combat boots until his feet later would swell up nearly twice the size for a time. Apparently his feet that were on fire and felt a couple times worse than a torn rotator cuff persisting for seven days because weather didn’t allow him to return to town were brought into that condition by the cold wet feet for a few days this time. The water portion of the journey was for the time, forgotten.