conservation photography & writing
If Fromm could see us now, would he throw up his hands in utter defeat, stockpile shelf-stable foods and binge-watch British crime shows until the Armageddon arrives?
Or maybe would he happen upon Annie Dillard or Wendell Berry and understand something that was not available to him in the middle of the last century. And maybe he would find a reservoir of hope for our little lost species.
Friends, colleagues, countryfolk, I have rifled through 20 years of emails, blog subscriptions, and contacts. I found you. Now you are on another list. While I’m patting myself on the back for doing something I’ve meant to do for many years, you are perhaps rushing straight to the unsubscribe link. Carry on, I understand. BUT,Continue reading “Newsletter – 1/2026”
Some days ago a friend sent me a note of support about my recently released podcast, First Mate’s Log. Within this kindness was a word that struck a chord: quotidian. Sometime last year I began creating the podcast with an intention, but one I did not name for myself. And I realized upon reading myContinue reading “The Journey Quotidian”
Two years may seem a strange amount of time to pass before writing a “final” blog about life on SV Maggie May. But it has taken me this long to begin to emerge from the tunnel I entered when we docked on the Chesapeake Bay in late June 2023. When we stepped off the boat and moved back into our house, and into lives that seemed no longer our own.
Most people in the rural areas here don’t have air conditioning or televisions or even electricity necessarily, yet there is an energy and an air of contentment I have seen nowhere else in the world, certainly not in my own country. There are dark sides of course. There are always dark sides. To all of us and everywhere. And we have been here long enough to see some of those too. But what I take with me is laughter, generosity, self reliance, wildness, commitment, beauty, and for me a deeply inquisitive drive to better understand the nature of contentment. The world turns on this ethereal phenomenon. The Dominican Republic knows something important.
They were no longer wild creatures with their own endeavors toward life. They were curios and props for a culture of beings often too obsessed with being seen to see for themselves what is right in front of them. A wild bird mutilated. A creature of flight, flightless.
On Bonaire’s western shore, Maggie May floats upon aquamarine glass over what is known as the Bonaire House Reef. It’s a coral reef that extends the length of the town of Kralendijk, the main city center of the island. Though this reef has been more impacted by human development and enterprise than many other areasContinue reading “Under Rocks and over sand”
Outside the jade chrysalis, utter stillness. Inside, there was a riot of pain and self harm. The caterpillar devouring itself. At this stage the creature—or creatures more aptly—are a biological bridge between the caterpillar and butterfly. They are goop in a gilded sack, largely made up of what’s known as imaginal cells.
I think about that moment when our depth sounder goes from 290 feet to – – -. That’s somewhere beyond 300 feet, how much beyond is practically irrelevant. This passage the depth will fall to almost 10,000 feet. The sounder will read – – -, off soundings.
About midway down the western edge of Guadeloupe there is a small bay where the town of Bouillante nestles within the foothills of towering green peaks. Here most of the population speaks French, the air smells strongly of sulfur, and every day, for most of the daylight hours and long into the night, the communityContinue reading “Boiling, Guadeloupe”
I woke this morning at first light and climbed the four steep companionway stairs into the cockpit. I have climbed these stairs 1000 times in the past 18 months. The boat interior was dark but the sun, still below the mountains to the east, cast a pale light on the clouds in the western sky.Continue reading “The Beginning”
4:00 am is a time for nostalgia. I have been seeing some photos lately of dear friends in sweaters with leaves changing in the trees above their smiling faces. The fall, my favorite season at 38 degrees north latitude, has come home to Maryland, USA, and I am not there. And where I am the meaning of the word autumn is quite different, if it has any meaning at all.
Several years before we moved onto the boat, Bill began devising an energy strategy that would allow us to be as free from fossil fuel use as we possibly could be. How successful have we been?
A conscious approach to consumption becomes critical to sustainable life on a sailboat.
It was that type of rare and wondrous morning. Easy. Gentle. Light and lightening. When long-held burdens of the soul lift and time seems to stretch out and relax, lounge about easily as if it means to stay a while. Just here.
Had the Atlantic trade winds been westerly, we would be living in a very different world. These relentless winds blowing ever from the east facilitated the conquest and colonization of the Western Hemisphere; they made and unmade kings. And they make beggars of all those who try to oppose them.
These moments with nature’s magic have led me to think a lot about the idea of human-made mediated magic, and of its presence, or rather omnipresence, in our modern world.
Sometimes, perhaps even often, the thing unsought is the thing you need.
One year ago today Bill and I woke at dawn in Town Point Marina in Deale, Maryland. As usual the swallows and osprey had beaten the sun awake, and they chattered and fretted as we prepared the boat for its biggest day, the day we would cast off lines from our home port. Within theContinue reading “Destination Unknown”
I woke one recent morning to bright sun streaming through the hatch a few feet above my pillow. Through the open deck I could see morning shining on the face of our life raft’s grand title: Fortune Favors the Bold. (The jury is still out on this idea. If we ever end up needing thisContinue reading “The Grace of Sharks”
My computer still refuses to turn on so in lieu of a normal blog, while we have WiFi, I’ll post some thoughts/mini-blogs to try and catch up the SV Maggie May story. We left Great Harbour in the Berry Islands on March 28 hoping to get to the Exumas over a couple of days, inContinue reading “Reading the Water”
Fort Pierce, Florida, Birthplace of Maggie May Everything tastes so much better when you have reached the far side of an unexpected ordeal. My coffee this morning. The new box of Walkers shortbread I just opened. The breakfast eggs and potatoes Bill made. Some 16 hours ago I thought there would be no more breakfastsContinue reading “Andiamo’s Gift”
At 2:00 am I look up from my book to see Bill sleeping deeply, his sleeping bag gripped tightly around him against the cold. The dim blue light cast by a night vision night light pulls his face out of utter darkness. He’s just a face and a cocoon of maroon puffs of sleeping bag.Continue reading “The Longest Night”
A bald eagle perched in a long dead conifer has been witness to a spectacular procession of light-on-water these past 12 hours. He and Bill and I. We are all in the upper stretches of the Pungo River, near the point where the Alligator River – Pungo Canal reaches its southern terminus in North Carolina.Continue reading “A Very Pungo Thanksgiving”
ST. MARY’S RIVER, 11-5-2020 — Yesterday afternoon we sailed up the St. Mary’s River on a light wind from the southeast. This river, which we have returned to several times over the past months, runs southward from its headwaters to its mouth at the lower stretches of the Potomac. Along the way it twists andContinue reading “Donuts in the Desert”
