Avalon via the Rideau Canal

I’ve been itching to write about the connections and parallels between the current Climate Emergency Sailboat conundrums and the climate crisis for a while now, and how what I’m doing matters to that, but I’ve been too busy putting out fires to plant trees, and that metaphor is just the tip of the iceberg. Things are up in the air right now, because I’ve missed my time window for going south, and I’m waiting for answers, so I’ll write (and there’s photos at the end)………

If I wasn’t an environmental activist, the place I’d arranged to dock in Ottawa would have worked out fine anyways and that would’ve prevented the current tangle of issues. The person who’s apparently taken over from the person with whom I made arrangements, though, doesn’t want an environmental activist there. No point arguing.

Plan B went sidewards; ditto plan C, and the alphabet’s been behaving like it was typed by a drunken octopus ever since.

So I’m docked at a lock station again, and facing winter again.

I think I’ll pull Skoro around the back side of the other end of the dock. Nobody else can fit there very well, and I can just slide her in. The more out of the way I am while here, the better, to be fair to other boats and to the lock staff.

Part of the reason most other boats won’t use the space is because the weeds are so rampant it makes the water seem shallower than it is. They also don’t want their big motors mummified in mucky green stuff… but my little sailboat will fit nicely.

The weeds are having a bumper year, in spite of the pandemic-related increase in boaters challenging the environment (and yes, I am a small one but I am one). They’re thicker and deeper everywhere. People comment on it all up the system. There’s bays solid with lilies, and seaweed forests as tall as I am. Algae spreads in the shallows so thick and bubbly that it makes me think of green cheese on French seaweed soup.

Nobody catches big fish really either. So many people fish on this waterway, but it sounds like it’s not what it used to be. A lot of people aren’t even comfortable eating Rideau fish any more, either.

People still swim lots… but I hear many saying the water isn’t clean enough any more. It’s too green, and too full of gasoline.

The Rideau is like this because it’s a very shallow year. That, combined with warmer water temperatures due to the unusually hot weather, creates an aquatic greenhouse. The fish are no more accustomed to these environmental changes than we are. The river isn’t.

Yes, it’s an unusual summer. More so than last summer… and the one before… and so on. And next summer, it will again be the hottest summer in a hundred years, or whatever the Stepford-edition weather forecasters tell us. They’ve been happily gibbering that at us so often that we don’t really hear it any more. Yes, every time it really is the worst (insert weather incident here) in a hundred years, over and over. Or — we are now constantly living in the least screwed up weather moment of the entire rest of all our lives… because it’ll keep getting worse.

The river is changing because the planet is overheating and those in positions to make huge changes don’t, and individuals are overwhelmed or disempowered, and time isn’t stretchy enough, and it’s all happening too fast to keep up with it.

I can’t. Keep up, I mean. I really have been putting out my own metaphorical fires too much to keep properly informed about the real fires burning all over the world.

If I try to stay on top of the specifics, I won’t be able to process it all, and I won’t be able to do anything except be caught in the wrong currents.

But I know the details are worse every day, and worse than we can afford.

Everything is more extreme. Next summer the Rideau will be muckier. We’ll all be hotter. Winter will be stranger here, and hurricane season will be harder.

Plan A was that this wouldn’t happen, and plan B was to not let it happen if it started, and so there is no plan C. Now, some of those in positions to do so are trying to turn things around, or at least slow the boat, but the men with the biggest paddles are still forcing us forward, certain the shoals are where they’ll build their personal techno-Avalon.

But Avalon was never accessible to those who didn’t understand it.

And now, the future on this planet is disappearing into smoke and water.

My own boat had a good plan A, and I confirmed it, just like so many of us confirmed that it was alright to live as we do… but my plan A disappeared in a puff of smoke and water,

I had a good plan B, and confirmed it… but it turned out that was based on old information and no longer possible… familiar?

The hastily drawn Plan C involved bureaucracy arguing with itself, and a community divided by pockets of racism and anti-environmentalism… much like the larger circumstances now.

So now the planet and I are wondering what’s next.

I have options, though odd and limited. I need a safe piece of ground so I know I’ll make it through winter. Then I’ll have time for fixing things — health care situation, plans, things on the boat… I feel completely discombobulated and very adrift and I’m concerned about finding somewhere for winter. But I am fairly sure that somehow, things will work out. I’m trying to find any of plans D through Z or a few other alphabets, but i know the universe didn’t find me a sailboat and a purpose just to take those away.

The life on this planet, and the planet herself, have no such certainty. It’s more than likely the planet will survive even if we don’t, but if we sail this ship straight into the rocks in hurricane season, it’ll become a floating wreck. There are plenty of others drifting around the universe.

People don’t want to hear that, but I don’t find it discouraging — quite the opposite. It means anything is possible; if.one extreme is, then so is something in the opposite direction to that. We still have the ability to make choices.

Moreover, it means expectations don’t matter, nor do differences of perspective. All that matters is doing the right thing, for its own sake… and doing that is what will make the differences that need to be made… and that means everything we do is part of that.

I (former hoarder with extensive academic justification) don’t want walls and furniture and ‘stuff’. I (former shopaholic and human-ecology/material-culture thesis student) wear the same few clothes repeatedly. I (former OCDish neat freak) share warm watermelon with wasps on a public picnic table, get water from sinks and outdoor spigots, and do dishes and laundry in pretty funny places. I’m frazzled and covered in scrapes and bites and bruises… but I feel GOOD. I just don’t care about how things ‘should’ be done any more. I need simple; I do simple. My life is complicated enough without trying to fit in — as you know from following me and/or this blog! Sometimes my life is like an Isabel Allende novel that got edited by a sleep deprived existential Tetris freak (I love Isabel so much, and Tetris is pretty cool, but the whole combination together doesn’t work so well). The point of this particularly rambly bit is that I gave up on normal a long time ago. That’s not nearly as hard to do as it seems, and it’s real… something we all need a lot more of.

And when that’s how we reframe life, it’s a lot easier to make the kinds of changes the planet needs. Really, our lives are just part of a symbiotic relationship between the planet and its inhabitants.

Like the Rideau… I’m surrounded by weeds and algae and I’ve got gasoline stuck in my sense of smell 24/7. The weather has been ridiculous. But it’s incredibly beautiful, and it’s still alive, and it’s worth changing to keep alive. The algae and weeds are not an inconvenience to be dredged away… they’re the rivers gurgling cries for help, how it grasps at us to beg us to stop. Humans used to take the utmost care of water, and we will be nothing without it.

The only things that make sense any more are finding the real things, realigning ourselves, finding directions. If we don’t find the perfect direction right away at least we’re not going the completely wrong way… turn around, try another dock approach… another dock… check the charts… go back through a lock, or portage, or moor halfway through the Long Reach to refuel.

But do it in a small boat, or a sailboat, or a kayak or canoe… share a raft… if we go together, at least some of us will get somewhere… we can see the world, and hear it… and when you’re going with the current, it will carry you.

You probably can’t see, but there’s a tiny bug crew manning this feather

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How to help the Climate Emergency Sailboat stay in the current…

Sporadic and one-time support through Chuffed, at

https://chuffed.org/project/climate-emergency-sailboat

Ongoing support via Patreon (though I’m still having trouble posting there, my apologies), at

patreon.com/climateemergencysailboat

Thank you… your help means the world to me… and I’m still trying to get to updating the budget/maintenance log/needs file, if you’d like to know what your help does.

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Photos… In reverse order, most recent first, because that’s how they uploaded and it took all night so I won’t try again!

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