Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Publishers Weekly Weighs In

Letters from the Pacific: 49 Days on a Cargo Ship

Sandra Shaw Homer. CreateSpace, $9.99 trade paper (132p) ISBN SBN 978-1-4944-7531-4

Homer (The Magnificent Dr. Wao) inspires readers with this chronicle of a 49-day “voyage of exploration” she took through the South Pacific—from the Panama Canal to Tahiti, Fiji, New Caledonia, Australia, and New Zealand—as a passenger aboard a cargo ship. Homer embarks on her journey for a number of reasons: to experience again “the joy of being afloat in the vast, undefined watery spaces” that she first felt as a child on her father’s boat; to find some sort of “magic” that would wipe out troubles both physical (arthritis) and mental (doubts about her long-time marriage) ; and, while seeing other countries, to experience what a friend tells her: “Keep looking inward and see what the moment has to teach you.” What she discovers—and artfully describes—are the joys and hardships of life on a working ship (“A freighter is a noisy, dirty, smelly beast”), the beauty of the high seas (“With little warning, the red blob of sun oozed forth from the primordial soup, then slowly backlit the clouds above it, first in mauve, then rose, then gold”), and the strength she finds to go back to her daily life renewed, with a new appreciation for the “someone who has always been inside me but has been ignored for too long.” (BookLife)

Photo by SSH

Photo by SSH

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Post November 8, 2016

Ever since November 8, I have felt as if I’ve been run over by a truck — unable to think straight, unable to make even the simplest of decisions, just pushing ahead, one minute at a time, to what end I’m not at all sure.  Today I ran into the following quote.  I have always found solace in the natural world, so I found the following very comforting . . . and fortifying.

 

“We don’t have the luxury of being complacent. So, no more getting up in the morning and reading the Guardian and calling it a day. You have to act at the end of the day; you have to do something.”

“It’s not about money. There is just no excuse for doing nothing. Abdication is not a possibility. Whoever you are, wherever your interest lies, whatever you’ve fallen in love with, you get out of bed every morning and you do something. You act, you step into the fray, and you fight for a human society that is in balance with the natural world.

“We have no choice. Otherwise we might as well kiss our beautiful planet goodbye.”  — Kris McDivitt Tompkins

espejo

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Creativity and Spirit

 

Recently, a young friend of mine asked me at the tail end of an email for my thoughts on creativity and spirit. I thought, “You have got to be kidding.” But I wrote back and asked if she wanted me to do a blog post, or could we save it for a conversation when I see her at Christmas (desperately hoping for the latter).  She hasn’t responded, so here goes . . . .

I have written before about the importance of being in the moment – or putting yourself back into the moment – when you’re writing. That seems to me the only way to achieve authenticity, to re-experience things, events, people, or conversations in a way that will reach into the reader so that she can see it, feel it, experience it in a new way. That’s the kind of connection writers always want to achieve, because it is truth-telling at its deepest level.  Spiritual teachers point to this “being in the moment” as connecting to the Divine . . . although there are plenty of great writers who are atheists!

But “spirit?” This is a word with far too many meanings, and I have no idea which meaning my young friend was referring to – and I’m afraid to ask her until I see her. Concepts like this are too difficult to pin down in an email.

Do we create only when “the spirit” moves us?  Or do we sit down every day in front of the computer just like going to work?  Where does that going-to-work discipline come from? Surely we are driven by something inside, be it ambition, egotism, the desire to connect with other human beings, anger at the injustices of the world, revenge, the profound love of the sheer beauty around us, despair, divine inspiration or just the simple desire to see our name on the marquee. Whatever it is, it flows through us . . . and will not be denied.

Personally, I have difficulty defining what drives me, so for convenience sake I’ll call it “spirit.”  Hope I’m not stepping on too many toes here!

I expect this post to rouse up a few of my readers to comment – let’s get a conversation going. My young friend will certainly be one interested reader.

Photo by SSH

Photo by SSH

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In Case You’re Tempted . . .

A version of this first appeared on off-the-beaten-track.net.

FAQS about Freighter Travel

Documentation, Visas, etc.

It can be a long and frustrating process arranging travel on a freighter. Not that many ships carry passengers anymore, they carry fewer these days because there’s no doctor on board, and there are varying age limits. The most popular routes are sometimes booked a year or more in advance, so it’s wise to get started early. Travel to a specific destination can also be frustrating, because many shippers prefer not to book passengers for a partial voyage.

The documentation required is also daunting, depending on which countries the ship will stop in. Visas, vaccinations, release forms, contracts, proof of travel insurance and medical certificates acquired no more than 30 days in advance of sailing are some of these. Handy to have a scanner so you can sign things and simply email them back. US citizen entry requirements for other countries can be found at: abriggs.com.

Booking Passage

Fortunately, most travel agents specializing in freighter voyages are familiar with all these requirements and are good at handling things in a timely fashion. My favorite is a UK firm called The Cruise People, because they have more varied and interesting offerings. For information about what it’s like to be on a freighter, freightercruises.com is the most complete – with the caveat that I have found this agency less than responsive.  They all will require a 50% deposit to hold a booking.

Preparation

Before my first voyage, I spent hours on line looking at maps of ports and collecting tourist information for every port city, all of which I printed and took with me. This was very useful preparation, although foul weather and a nighttime arrival prevented my disembarking in two of them. Unpredictability is a watchword in freighter travel. One never knows how long the ship will be in port, and shore leave is always at the captain’s discretion.

Communications at Sea

Internet: some companies are now offering individual email accounts through their satellite connections. This is email only — no browsing is available.  There is the sat phone, but it’s expensive, and its use is also at the discretion of the captain.

What to Bring

Packing for my first voyage took me two months! I was going to be in three climates and I had to keep extending my checklist when I remembered something else I couldn’t be without. Be prepared for 220 voltage, and take enough of your prescription medications to last the whole voyage. Ships’ medical stores are pretty complete, including antibiotics, and there’s a “slop chest” for cigarettes, toothpaste and other small items, although brands are limited.  For some it may be useful to know that some companies, CMA CGM among them, now have a “dry ship” policy. This doesn’t prevent your bringing liquor on board, as long as you’re discreet about it (luggage isn’t inspected), and nobody objects if you search out liquor stores ashore.

There’s always some kind of gym equipment on board, and sometimes a ping pong table, but if you plan to do yoga, bring a mat – few cabins are carpeted.  Bring a tablet well-stocked with movies, music, podcasts and books, if looking at the ocean all day is not your thing.  Some fellow passengers have brought cell phones with international calling cards, so they can at least text home when within range of 3G service.  Don’t forget your chargers!  A camera.  The list goes on  . . . .

Money

Make sure you have an international debit card so you can withdraw local currency from ATM machines, which are ubiquitous in all the places I have visited, except on Fiji, where there are three exchange booths on every block.

Sea Sickness

Sometimes, the weather can be rough, and freighters are not equipped with stabilizers as are cruise ships, so they bounce around a lot.  Anti-nausea pills help (they put me to sleep), the but best thing I’ve found are Sea Bands, small wrist bands with a round plastic button that you position exactly two finger widths above inside of the wrist.  There’s an acupressure point there that controls nausea.  You can find these on Amazon.

Accommodations

Cabins are more than adequate, with bed, desk and chair, sofa and coffee table, mini-fridge, plenty of storage space and a private bathroom (shower only), air conditioning and a window for looking out at either containers or the ocean, maybe both.  Once you’re unpacked, you’ll feel perfectly at home.  Happy sailing!

© Sandra Shaw Homer, 2016

The H. S. Schubert

The H. S. Schubert

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Speaking of Food . . .

I’ll never make it as a food writer, but I had fun describing the delectables on a recent freighter voyage.  Forgive me . . . I just couldn’t help sharing!  Excerpted from the recently published Journey to the Joie de Vivre.

People ask me about the food.  After my first freighter voyage, I was truthfully able to say, “Not that bad.”  Aboard the Matisse, it wasn’t quite as good, but it still wasn’t that bad.  Now, aboard the Coral, it is finally that bad.  I am eating for sustenance only and loading up on salad and bread and butter.

The salad is invariably iceberg lettuce, green or red sweet peppers, sliced red onion, unripe tomato and cucumber.  I suffered a small shock when I poured oil and what I thought was vinegar over my first salad, only to discover that the vinegar was really soy sauce.  I told the Messman I would like vinegar.  He brought me another little cruet of soy sauce.  Could it be that a Filipino Messman (he says he likes to cook!) doesn’t really know what vinegar is?  I told him as soon as I boarded about my milk allergy, and ever since then he has been assiduous about telling me he’s put a ‘little bit of milk’ in the rolls or ‘a little bit of milk’ in the mashed potatoes.  But today he asked me if I would like ice cream.  I begin to suspect he’s being impish.

The Chief Cook has a penchant for pork: Batter-Fried Pork, Steamed “Roast” Salt-Pork, Pork Slices à la Microwave and Roadkill Pork Chop.  Last night I was thrilled to find Steamed “Roast” Breast of Chicken.  The only fish so far has been Pressed Mackerel Steaks.  This morning I finally looked at the calendar and calculated that this voyage is 19 days, not 17 as I originally thought; that’s two more days on this incredible diet.  I can’t wait for Italy!

© Sandra Shaw Homer 2016

Photo by SSH

Photo by SSH

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Can You Taste It?

I feel I gave the sense of taste short shrift when I all I could think to do was feature the hyperbole of food writers.  So see how this one tastes.  Excerpted from the forthcoming memoir, Evelio’s Garden.

One of my chores on the verandah has been to cut back the basil. I have seven pots of it out there, all gone leggy and struggling with aphids. Evelio’s organic insecticide is the most potent thing I’ve ever used on these aphids, but they need to be sprayed directly in order to be killed, and when there’s a lot of foliage some get missed. A drastic cutting-back was the only solution. The infected branches I simply tossed over the rail, but the healthy ones were starting to accumulate in my basket in a sufficient quantity to make Rosa pause, in her mopping of the deck, to ask me whether I made pesto with macadamia or pine nuts.

Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me to make pesto. I hadn’t thought at all what to do with all this basil, but pesto sounded like a good idea. I had both macadamia and pine nuts in the house (the macadamias are local, the pine nuts a treasure brought by my friend Shirley from a small town 400 miles north of Toronto), plenty of garlic and extra virgin olive oil, even real, imported-from-Parma Parmesan cheese. I hadn’t made pesto in years, since jars of it often make their way into the Tilarán supermarkets, and washing and pulling off all those leaves from the stems is a chore.

Italian pesto isn’t a staple of the Costa Rican diet, but Rosa worked for many tourist seasons at an Italian restaurant near here. So when I had it all made up, I invited her to sample it.

“Better,” she said. “At the restaurant they don’t use any cheese. And why would theirs be runnier? Too much oil? Why wouldn’t they use cheese – because it’s cheaper?”

I confessed that, yes, no cheese certainly made their pesto cheaper. I pulled out a jar of the commercial stuff and read the list of ingredients; no cheese there either. I dipped my spoon into the lovely pale green paste I had just made, closed my eyes, and . . . ah, so densely green and nutty, with just enough cheesy sharpness to make all the difference.

© Sandra Shaw Homer, 2016

Photo by Marten Jager

Photo by Marten Jager

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The Joie de Vivre Comes from Within

“I am an ordinary person with an ordinary life. Even my acceptance of ordinariness is ordinary, the undercurrent of so many ‘big books.’ Madam Bovary, War and Peace, Freedom. The mistake is always the same: trying to live the life one has in one’s head instead of the life before one, which is endlessly generous if you humble yourself to it as the only possible means of fulfillment.”  — Tennant-Moore

Photo by SSH

Photo by SSH

 

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We Travel to Discover Ourselves

“The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was.”     Peter Matthiessen

 

 “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”   Lao Tsu

 

“Living abroad, traveling, both experiences simplify our lives. At home, the web of our social life, work life, of our responsibilities, even our amusements and pleasures, all conspire to complicate our experience. However good the life, it distracts us. Traveling we (can) leave much of that distraction behind. In the simpler world of traveling, experiences come to us one at a time. So they register more clearly. And there is more time to mull, to consider the kind of surprising connections that, for me at least, often lead to an essay or a story.  Occasionally even to a poem. I get back to first questions, questions about how meaning is made and sustained.

“Oddly enough, perhaps, something similar happens in writing about travel or the expat life.  Much of the clutter of living disappears; it’s easier for me to arrive at clarity and, I probably shouldn’t say, to approach mystery.

“. . . I travel hoping to get further in, to find in the world and myself a common humanity. I travel to awaken from the trance of our culture, the trance that leads us to assume that our ways are the ways. To travel is to know, to feel, that our ways are our ways and that’s all. I consider it a good trip if I suffer as much “culture shock” coming home as going.

“And I travel for beauty, to be undone by beauty. Just for the oh of it. To be always alert would be to see beauty everywhere, I suppose, but, fallen as we are, the beauty that is always there is just more available traveling. And I want it.”

Kevin Oderman, from an interview in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, Fall 2015

Chart of Panama Canal, Photo by SSH

Chart of Panama Canal, Photo by SSH

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The Echoes of Sound

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming memoir, Evelio’s Garden.

When the first Red-lored Parrots fly over in twos and threes, always easterly, my ears still remember the calls of the Canada geese on their southward run in the autumns of the north. Philadelphia is on the Great Eastern Flyway and, even in the center of the city, the call of the geese overhead reminded us of the wild places and cold sunsets on the Chesapeake Bay.

It was a haunting, hollow sound, a sound of echoes and lost places. My brain is still hard-wired to recognize those sounds and memories, even after so many years in a tropical country, far from the wintering grounds of the geese. And it takes me a day or two to realize that what I’m hearing is a bird the color of new leaves with a blunt head and a red patch above its beak that loves to gather by the hundreds in the trees and shake them to death while noisily deliberating what to do next.

A large flock of parrots cased the jocote tree today and determined, after a few raucous minutes, that the fruit wasn’t ready yet, and so they peeled off, some landing in the tops of the three eucalyptus trees next to the house, bending the slender topmost branches like a big wind, until they continued on their way.

In the North, the flights of the geese always pulled at me in a particular way, made me ache for other destinations, a less complicated life. They called to me of a simpler, richer time, a freedom and a dignity that our modern lives had lost.  The parrots harken to the same impulse in me, except that now I smile at the birds, at their noisy antics, and at my old associations, and I am reminded that what I have chosen for myself is a life infinitely richer than what I had before.

© SandraShaw Homer, 2016

Photo by Alison Shaw

Photo by Alison Shaw

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Encouragement for Memoirists

“Your life ends up being made up of the things you remember. You forget most of it, but the things that you remember become your life. And if you can make something that someone remembers, then you’re participating in their life. There’s something really meaningful about that. If feels like something worth trying to do.”

— Doug McGray,
Co-founder and editor-in-chief, California Sunday and Pop-up Magazine

Photo by SSH

Photo by SSH