Another lap around The Sun
My folks and I went to Ryn's house for a bread and soup dinner this new year's eve. They promised that it would last until the new year on the East Coast, but no one really felt like quitting that early. When I left the s'mores were still cooking around the bonfire in the driveway.
I got to catch up with a local man named Paul who was the high school geology teacher and a troller. Still is a troller. I knew him from when I did maintenance on an old Grand Banks for a geologist who lived in Fairbanks, but kept his boat in Petersburg. Keeping a wooden boat in Petersburg is a year-round job, so Larry paid me well to scrape, seal and paint every spring. I also helped him put up the tarps up every fall when he was done exploring. We had to put up an elaborate wooden frame under the blue tarps, and secured the tarps tautly with dozens of yellow bollards. The elements always worked the tarps loose, however, so it was my daily wintertime duty to go check on them. One record snow year, it took all my young back could manage to squat from underneath so that the snow would slide over the rail. The harbor was so full of snow too that eventually there was just kind of a pile of snow all around the boat, with a faint bergschrund delineating it from the water. Paul told me tonight about how he has been shrink-wrapping his boat for the last three winters. With this system the bollards are obsolete, as the whole waterproof membrane is effectively tailor fit to the boat with the application of a heat gun. The wrap can even be used for multiple winters if it is cut away carefully, as it can be re-shrunk more than once. As ingenious as this new method is, I am grateful for working in the blue tarp spaghetti era, as it was not nearly as foolproof and I was a fool with an hourly wage.
The other main conversation point of the evening was model flying objects. We talked about drones, RC planes, gliders, and hot-air balloons. The best anecdote was from Paul, who had participated in the Korean Conflict, mostly as a minesweeper. In his off time, he travelled to Japan where he could get parts to build gasoline powered model airplanes. On one foray to test one of these hobby crafts, Paul and his Jeep driver set a plane loose over some rice paddies not far south of the 38th parallel. This was before the days of radio remote controls, so they had the engine on a timer, and trimmed the wings so the plane would fly in tight enough circles that they could theoretically follow it in the Jeep. It turns out there are substantial thermal updrafts over the hot humid rice paddies. This caused the plane to continuously gain altitude as it did it's laps overhead. Eventually, it was only a speck, trending towards the 38th parallel. Paul hopes that a North Korean rice farmer came across it and made a gift of it to his children. I like to think that it fell into the hands of the North Korean government, where it would have caused countless man-hours of spyware suspecting scrutiny.
When it comes down to it, we are all on a craft with a limited fuel supply, set to make as many laps as we can around a mass of gas. What will happen when someone comes across our wreckage? I guess all we can hope for is an updraft due to decomposing organic matter which sends us on an unexpected trajectory. Maybe we will make someone smarter than us go "Huh?".