Filed under: Daily Life
There was an eerily warm north-easterly blowing over the mountains and into San Francisco. The air turned dry while whitecaps rose and broke across the Bay; the conundrum of living in a place with ocean in one direction, and desert in the other. On the street, people wore t-shirts and carried winter coats. Dressing is always a challenge when it’s 65 degrees despite the calendar’s insistence that it’s December 1st.
The weekend rolled around, but the wind did not dissipate. I headed over to Pier 40 early to help thread a new topping lift for the new spinnaker pole on Akyla. I was strapped into a bosun’s chair and hoisted up to the top of the mast where I had to find the end of a tiny white pilot line that I had previously sewn to the end of the bright red line laying in a tangled heap on the deck and use it to pull the topping lift up through the mast. It sounds a lot more complicated than it was. The whole thing took only a few minutes; the bulk of the chore was hauling me up the mast. (I made a mental note to get more aggressive with my diet!)
When the boat was rigged and ready to go, we motored out of the South Beach Harbor, following the Embarcadero around the city to the start of the Golden Gate Yacht Club’s Seaweed Soup Regatta. I was driving, and did my best to steer our way through the chop. It was a rough ride, with what looked to me like four-foot swells—though I’ve never understood how to measure waves. Suffice it to say, we were getting pretty thrown around.
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December 7, 2011
Oktoberfest. Oh yes it was.
That and the title of this article is really all you need to know how this Saturday’s sailing went. The fog was tickling the ribs of San Francisco Bay, but the sun was shining over Akyla. I got to South Beach harbor and helped to finish rigging the boat. Within minutes we were under sail, making our way to Berkeley for the BYC Oktoberfest. It was a pursuit race starting in the middle of the Berkeley Olympic circle out and around Alcatraz, skipper’s choice of direction—we would be sailing clockwise—and finishing in front of the Berkeley Yacht Club. The forecast was for light winds, but when we got there, it was blowing at 10-20 knots. We had an hour before our start, ample time to make a headsail change to accommodate the stronger winds and put on extra layers of foul weather gear to stay warm. Though the sun stayed out, it was not to be the tank-top day I was hoping for, and pulled my pants and sweater out of my bag.
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October 19, 2011
From Lithuanian Heritage September/October 2010
(Mushrooming)
My favorite word in Lithuanian, grybauti, means “to go mushrooming.” In English the meaning is simple and to the point, but in Lithuanian, the sentiment of the word is much more poetic. I didn’t fully understand it until recently when some friends put me in a pair of rubber boots, handed me a basket and a knife, and drove to a “secret spot” some 20km outside of Vilnius on a cold, damp morning. Wandering through a moss-covered forest with your head down, looking for small brown lumps hidden in the earth, it’s easy to get lost. You never walk in a straight line, glimpses of baravykai and voveraitės pulling you this way and that, so if you were to leave a trail of red paint on the ground it would look like a drunk lost on his way home from the bar, only to wander around and around in circles outside the front door. Lithuanians use the word not just to describe the act of picking mushrooms, but also any time they want to describe someone who is perhaps a little bit lost in life. When one of my ski racers takes a particularly wide race line through the course, we might say, “Nu, kur tu grybauji?” (Where are you wandering?) Or, if taking a wrong turn means arriving late to a party, we might explain our delay saying, “Grybavome!” (We were mushrooming!) The mountain bike race in Anykščiai this year was muddy from a week of rain forcing hundreds of riders to get off their bikes to trudge through the mud, creating a massive traffic jam at the start. I heard riders over and over exclaim, “Ir ka, visi grybauji? Baravykai daug šiais metais!” (So what, everyone is stopping to pick mushrooms? There are a lot of porcini this year!)
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October 7, 2011
With a month on Lake Charlevoix doing little else besides sailing under my belt, I though I was ready for the San Francisco Bay. After all, it does get pretty windy on the main basin. I found out quickly that on the Bay, sailing is the easy part, and racing is a whole other day at sea.
Thinking that it would be hard to find a boat in need of sailors, I put my name on every crew list in San Francisco. Barely 48 hours went by before I got my first phone call. Within a week, I had a choice of boats. Early one Saturday morning, I took the bus across town to the South Beach harbor where I was a last-minute addition to the crew on Akyla—it means Shark in Russian. The boat is aptly named, because five minutes after I stepped aboard, I felt like I had been thrown to the sharks, all my skills in doubt. What little I knew about sailboat racing—Tuesday nights in Boyne City followed by cheeseburgers and beers at the BRI—did not prepare me for the level of intensity involved in sailing on Akyla in the Champion of Champions race on the San Francisco Bay. I thought I was pretty fluent in the parts of a sailboat, until now. Moments after we shoved off, there were commands being shouted—fortunately not all at me—that may as well have been in Russian. I mean, what’s a cunningham, a vang, or a running backstay? I couldn’t have told you then, but I can tell you now, they all change the shape of the sail, though on a level that was far beyond my understanding.
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October 6, 2011
From Lithuanian Heritage March/April 2008
(Tulips)
When it’s raining in February and snowing in March, it’s nice to know that I can get fresh tulips (they claim they are grown in Lithuania!) at the flower market on Basanavičiaus gatvė. There’s nothing like a large bunch of bright yellow tulips on a wet, gray day to put a much-needed smile on a person’s face!
Kaziuko Mugė (St. Casimir’s Market) was bigger than ever this year. It extended down Gedimino prospektas from McDonald’s to the Cathedral—yes McDonald’s is used as a landmark in Lithuania too! Stalls were not allowed on Cathedral square, but they lined the road a long way past Užupis, and were packed in all the way up Pilies gatvė in the Old Town. Marceliukės Kletis, a popular restaurant serving excellent Lithuanian food, had two cafes set up this year, grilling sashlykai (Lithuanian shish-kebabs) on pitchforks over a fire made in a pair of giant shoes. The grill masters, wearing traditional work clothes and straw hats, stood around with very serious looks on their faces and a bottle of water in their hands to tame the fires. There must be an explanation that I’m not aware of, but Kaziuko Mugė for some reason loves really big things. Besides the giant shoes, there was a giant chair, giant coffee cup, a giant window and giant pot of tulips. A few years ago, they had a giant chicken; I wonder what happened to him?
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September 25, 2011
From Lithuanian Heritage March/April 2007
In Ignalina, Lithuanian Independence Day, Vasario 16-ają, is celebrated with a festival of winter sport called Sportas Visiems at the Lithuanian Winter Sports Center. I went for the alpine ski races, but there was also cross-country skiing, ski orienteering, biathlon, target shooting, ice skating, and a very impressive winter triathlon which consists of cross-country skiing, running and mountain biking through the ice and snow.
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September 25, 2011
From Lithuanian Heritage November/December 2006
I was eating lunch a few weeks ago with a couple of British ex-pat friends who were recounting the events of a recent business trip back to London. They spoke of traffic jams and commutes, the astonishing price of a simple cup of bad coffee and the security hassles at Gatwick. They finished by declaring how happy they were to be back “home” in Vilnius where good coffee is cheap, a trip to the airport is never more than a quick in and out, and work is only a ten minute walk from home. The traffic jams are the same though. The work abroad business is booming in Lithuania with hoards of young people—some educated, some not—lined up for the chance to work in London or Dublin. On the other hand, Vilnius has become a haven for British, Danish, Dutch, and French businessmen looking for lucrative emerging markets and cozy lifestyle.
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September 25, 2011
Evening in Christchurch along the Avon river
There are ducks in New Zealand—I don’t remember their name—that mate for life. The female has a white head, and the male a black one and we first saw them while kayaking in Milford Sound. In Christchurch, they stroll through the Botanic Gardens in pairs, resting in the sun on the banks of the Avon River.
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July 22, 2011
My most recent article to appear in Lithuanian Heritage magazine: An interview with sailor and skier Karolis Janulionis. 
Follow this link to read the full article.
July 17, 2011
After the rain stops, September is the most beautiful month of the year in Lithuania. Temperatures are normally in the high 60′s in the sun, the skies as blue as Christmas Day in Aspen. The trees begin to turn yellow, orange and red, so that even the slightest breeze has them sparkling in the sunlight. It also turns out, that despite how small Vilnius is, it actually is possible to spend all afternoon people watching and not see a single person you know.
On such a day, I love to fill my backpack with my book, a couple notebooks, my newest Harper’s and my journal, and set out to find a nice table in the sunshine to pass the afternoon…
Continue September 18, 2010
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