Viann’s Birthday

It was Veteran’s Day weekend of 1997. Viann was turning 42. We went to the Country Inn at Ventura for an extended weekend family getaway. Viann had a surprise planned for Saturday morning and wouldn’t tell anybody what it was except that we had to get up and leave the hotel by 6:30 a.m. Nice restful Saturday that!

The Hike Across the Grand Canyon (Viannah and I) in June had been the family vacation for the year and this was the next time we were “getting away” together. We were already in talks about what the Big Event for Katy would be. I wanted to be more decisive earlier this time and get in a more organized training regime. Everyone else was just trying to enjoy life.

This tension was not unusual in our family.

Thursday evening we were at the buffet downstairs at the Country Inn when Viann yelled for me to come to the window. By the time I managed my plate and got there it was too late, the rocket launched from Vandenburg had already burned out, but there was still a ghostly condensation trail to see in the twilight. Sometimes you could work hard for a long time for that special moment. Sometimes it just happened but you were too entangled in whatever was happening to just be there for it.

Saturday dawned early, as ordered. We got in the car and drove back towards Oxnard, looking for the public harbor. Once there, we found the Island Packers pier and store front, paid about $130 for five tickets, and waited to board the day trip out to Anacapa Island and back.

This was more like a birthday present for me than for Viann. Every time we would go to Santa Barbara or anywhere along the coast and look out at the islands across the channel, I would get that “what’s down this trail" or "what's around that bend” look in my eye. The Channel Islands National Park had a Headquarters in Oxnard right by Island Packers in fact, but you could only actually visit the islands by boat or plane and either way it was relatively expensive. Lots of people probably visited the islands, but not many did so lightly or on a whim. We and maybe 30 other people boarded the double deck boat and headed out into the open channel.

My seasick vulnerability was unchanged from the 1990 Sea Floor Geodesy expedition to nearby waters where it was discovered. This was a joint investigation between earth scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where I worked and Scripp's Institute for Oceanography, hosted on their research vessel Sproul. Sproul was a relatively small vessel that had been originally intended for hauling pipe up the Mississippi River. It had an acerbic motion on the waves in the open ocean; I was acutely motion sick for five straight days. Today, trying to leverage lessons learned, I tried sitting in such a way as to keep my head from moving much and gazed as far away as possible, preferably all the way to the horizon. Remembering the Sproul deck, I tried to sit where boat motion and diesel exhaust were minimal. The kids ran around the boat enjoying the sights, sounds and experience. I stayed put and managed, just barely, to keep my breakfast down.

The trip to Anacapa was the shortest that could be offered, Anacapa being the closest island, only a little over an hour on a boat such as this, on a good day such as this. Well, that plus about twenty minutes to chase a whale whose sea-surface “footprint” we encountered mid way.

The big excitement of the day was getting on and off the boat at the island itself. There was no pier at East Anacapa; only a bumper dock in Landing Cove with big signs saying, “Do not tie up here.” The skipper backed the boat up to the bumpers, holding it there with skillful motor manipulations while hands helped passengers and their gear onto a ladder at the just the right moment during each swell. All three crewmembers were quite busy until everyone was off, then they moved the boat off and tied up to a buoy a quarter mile off the island.

An experimental underwater TV camera system was in use just above the dock. We watched on monitors as divers showed us around the sites in the inlet. Swells caused blowholes to spray high pressure heavy mist in the adjacent cliffs. The water was about ten degrees (F) warmer than usual due to El Nino. The wildlife, fish and seaweed, were not thriving as usual. When the show was over, we climbed the 153 stairs to the flat top of the island. This too was required, the only way for a tourist to visit the rest of the island from the cove was up those stairs.

A full hike of a top-perimeter trail was only about a mile and a half and led past most of the available site seeing spots and improvements. The improvements included a rather primitive seven-pad campground with pit toilets.

Water was scarce on the island; people were required to pack in all their supplies, including water, for camping. One couple on our boat had done so; they planned to spend the night. They got a longer, more intimate talk with the ranger than the rest of us.

At the west end of the island, Inspiration Point featured a beautiful view of the other two Anacapas, Middle and West, and the rest of the Channel Islands chain, at least when visibility permitted. The east end was the location of a horn and lighthouse. We were prohibited from going around to the horn’s business end due to the high volume blast regularly emitted there. A small museum was under construction nearby; we visited what was there.

As we consumed our sack lunches, my balance was still swimming, and I still had to be careful in order not to get sick. I nibbled while everybody else wolfed.

About two, the boat backed up to the dock again and we all re-boarded, a sophisticated procedure reversing what we had done on arrival that morning. The return trip wasn’t direct to Oxnard; first it was around the east end of East Anacapa where we saw impressive rock formations at water level, beaches with sea lions nesting (from which we were supposed to stay clear) and a troop of kayakers. Then we headed west and viewed the north (mainland side) shore of the other three islands, hearing stories of a 19^th century shipwreck in a cove of one of them, and of a man who had lived most of his life on one of the others, only visiting the mainland annually. We also heard of attempts to ranch sheep on the flat top of East Anacapa where water was so scarce that the sheep would lick dew from each other’s wool coats to survive day to day. Indians had lived here in past centuries, attempting similar developments, survivals, and rites, as had the Europeans, with similar lack of success.

I practiced anti-seasick skills all the way back, surviving to the pier. The kids begged money to buy junk food at the onboard snack bar and played around the boat for the hour and a half return. The docking was expert. With one try, the skipper angled around backwards, coasting and turning at once to exactly the right position more deftly than I could head into a slanted parking space in a car. My head was swimming for the rest of the weekend, but we had all had a great time, and, we had done something that few others ever do, actually set foot on one of the Channel Islands!

People do this and that, what do we do?

Some people do scouting, some soccer, some kids latch on to church or school groups. There are many outlets for safe organization of kid’s energies. A component of my approach was to focus on each of my own in turn, trying to give each roughly equivalent attention, in small ways and in large. This was one of the large ways. The institution of the Big Event with each child was now established, documented and advertised. The concept and the first outplaying of it were the subject of the book about Viannah in the Grand Canyon. Now it was time to focus on Katy, the second, the middle child.

Viannah sidled up to Katy one day and confided, “You don’t want to do hiking.” Viannah’s event and most of the training had been hiking and it hadn’t been as much fun for her as it had been for me. There had been, well, stress between us. She would go anywhere with me, but backpacking had been costly with respect to that dedication. I felt that Katy might be different and thought of defending my approach. After all, I knew how to do hiking, the institution went back in the family at least two generations before me, and it could be relatively inexpensive.

Katy would turn out to be different indeed. On hikes she would not hold back and stall, kicking dirt down the hills to waste time as Viannah had. She would charge up a steep grade ahead and, barely out of breath but leaving me behind in the dust, would yell back down, “Dad, can we rest now?”

But she took the advice at face value and declared that she wanted to do something of a different type. “I want to see a river from beginning to end,” she declared.

I got out some maps. Viann picked up some brochures about various types of boating trips. I started a file called “River Trip.” I also started keeping better notes early in the planning phase, a lesson learned from the book about Viannah.

Well, let’s see, in the summer of 1996 we had the opportunity to drive past the headwaters of the Rio Grande in the Rockies. This river started there in south central Colorado and snaked through the middle of New Mexico before becoming the international border between Texas and Mexico from El Paso to Brownsville. I had seen parts of this river and could imagine the educational value of traveling its length.

We could drive to Colorado, boat around the headwaters, camp out, then drive (or float?) down through New Mexico, then along the international border and past Big Bend and Falcon reservoir maybe stopping by Alamo Village which was out there somewhere, and finally through The Valley to the mouth. I recalled there had been problems with snipers (drug runners) versus rafters in the canyons along Big Bend National Park. I also remembered pollution, and Falcon Reservoir in the vast middle of the river’s course. I had no idea what this sort of undertaking would mean, but I could estimate. A day here, a couple there, three or four at the scenic places, yes, it would take three or four weeks.

Three or four weeks! That was out of scope.

Maybe a month would be OK for a family vacation or a personal adventure later in life, but the Big Event culmination had been established at about one-week in length with the conservative use of appropriate other resources. Also, combining Katy’s event with a family vacation wouldn’t be fair either, particularly for Katy. Yes, the Grand Canyon had been a family vacation, but driven by Viannah’s event and not the other way around.

Well, what about a smaller river. There was the Brazos. It wound from northwest Texas somewhere down through Lake Whitney and Baylor to College Station and points south to a mouth at, where was it? Brazoria maybe? A team from some radio station in Dallas had attempted it once when I was a kid, canoes and portage all the way, and they had some sort of short wave with which they were supposed to stay in touch with Dallas. It hadn’t always worked.

I could visualize canoeing through farmland north of Waco and wondered if such a thing was even be permitted. Who owned the river, the people through whose property it flowed? The public? Who would you ask? Where would you camp? Was it in fact principally private property?

That could take about a week, if compressed, but just getting to Texas and back would take nearly a week in itself.

How about a local river in California? There were such things. The Los Angeles River itself was a possibility. It had lots of bike and walking paths along it. It was now concrete for its entire fifty-one miles. Sometimes and in some places there was water. That was certainly something we could visit and learn about but it didn’t seem big enough and it was too urban, just a concrete drainage most places. Maybe it could be used as a training site; it would depend on what we were training for.

There was a river up around Mt. Shasta on the other end of the state. We had been there and seen that once before John was born and when the girls were very little.

There were brochures at Sport’s Chalet for Colorado River kayaking trips. These were catered and guided trips, two or three days with a resort-like stop in the middle. That could be fun. I studied the advertisements. How would one train for this? Would we hire trainers? Buy kayaks? I had seen an ad for an inflatable two-man kayak. I didn’t know anything about boating, but I had an instinct that such a vessel would be a compromise, meant more to sell to someone like me than to be a useful vehicle for a serious trip of several days.

Bicycling was suggested. I had experience with bicycling, commuting, and bike camping. In this urban area, and at my middle age, I was worried about safety, particularly with Katy. We wouldn’t be side by side talking much on bikes. Not in the mountains around here. Not on Foothill Boulevard.

Katy was different than Viannah about expectations too. They both expected me to take the lead and do most of the providing which was only fair for a parent working with children. While Viannah, however, was willing to do whatever I asked, Katy made the River Trip declaration, and that was the end of the conversation.

Do Something

No matter what our ultimate voyage would be, I had basically decided that half of the training would still be in the form of hikes. Katy was twelve now and would fit into Viannah’s Grand Canyon hiking boots, and there were day hikes and half-day hikes that we could so without much trouble. The acquaintance to cost ratio would still be high and that was good.

My interpretation of the River Trip was that it might involve water sports or perhaps be conducted near water, a river, a beach, an island…. This scared me some. I didn’t have much experience with water sports and such; there were unknowns including unknown dangers. Water travel was still safer than going to Mars, another fantasy of mine. People had been going to sea and navigating rivers for centuries and there weren’t too many disasters, not per ton-mile shipped anyway.

So much of the world was out there ready to be explored. One didn’t really need to go to other planets to experience, enjoy and learn, but talk about terrifying! Could any sane person in a tiny vessel hurtling out of blackness towards a new, strange, cold planet not be anxious?

So, clear goal or not, it was time to get going. Time to start doing some of those training hikes at least. We’d get acquainted; we’d adjust to each other’s pace. We’d talk about the end goal, the Big Event while out on the trail.

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