(Almost) Guilt Free...

Map: InfoPlease.com

                                        Map: InfoPlease.com

      Think of a "river" of chalk, one nearly as wide as a small city and one which starts halfway up the eastern coast of England, heads inland near London them splits east to become the white cliffs of Dover before exiting south of Southampton.  Said the article in National Geographic: Chalk is a pure type of limestone composed of tiny shells of marine organisms.  Deposits are found worldwide, but in England the geological ripples from the rising of the Alps 40 million years ago brought a wide swath of it to the surface.  It's porous and fractured, with up to 40 percent of its bulk made up of spaces between the rock grains.  Rain that falls on chalk sinks into the ground, sometimes taking months to percolate through the hills...Rainstorms produce no floods, and in drought the rivers continue to run.  The water acquires the temperature of the rock -- 50 to 54 degrees Fahrenheit all year...The world has fewer than 300 chalk streams.  Fascinating stuff, until you read this portion: Miles of the Itchen and the famous Test, which runs down through the Hampshire chalk to its mouth near Southampton,  have been turned into easy-fishing parks with carefully mown banks,  gingerbread fishing huts, and huge nursery-raised trout.  Fees to fish the most celebrated stretches can run to more than $600 per day.  The fast-bubbling water and the varied ecological niches of the natural stream have been erased.  And it was here in this altered landscape that we were embarking on our own journey of illusion.  We were beginning our cruise... 

     Yes, guilty as charged.  We had already burned through a ton of fuel just to get here, as in about 50 tons of jet fuel (which coverts to just over 16,000 gallons).  And now we were about to jump on an even larger vessel which would about 3x that amount each day.  In fairness, we weren't on one of those floating cruise "hotels" which can hold over 7,000 passengers (the typical Princess/Norweigan-type ships carry between 4,000 and 5.000 passengers, although the newer ones used by Royal Caribbean carries 7,600 passengers and has 20 levels to house them; those "monster" ships, often 5 times the size of the Titanic, will move just 56 feet on a gallon of diesel...yikes).   Nay, our ship held less than 900 of us, although overall we represented just a drop in the bucket.  In 2023, well over 30 million other people jumped on a cruise ship.  Folks were tired of being cooped up after Covid, or so say the pundits meant to analyze such things.  Or maybe many people were just ready for a getaway, which was us.  And we had joined the throngs primarily because this particular cruise would hit many of the places we had placed on our bucket list.  So a quick challenge to you...pull up a map of the UK and plot these cities as we leave Southampton (which in itself is about 2 hours southwest of London): St. Malo (okay, that one's in France), Falmouth, Waterford, Dublin, Liverpool (need I add, the home of the Beatles), Belfast, Ullapool, Kirkwall, Lerwick.  But after all of that, we would then shoot over to the fjords of Norway for the rest of the trip. Both my wife and I doubted that we could have ever put together such a comprehensive trip.  So yes, we felt a bit guilty at this indulgence but not that guilty.  

     But by looking actually looking at a map, i had already learned something.  Liverpool was straight across from Dublin, and right above that was Blackpool.  So what, you ask?  Turns out that if you ask for the definition of Dublin in Gaelic, you have...Black Pool.  So move up a bit on the map to Scotland and you'll find that Glasgow is pretty much straight west from Edinburgh.  And further up there sat Loch Ness, "...the second-largest Scottish loch by surface area after Loch Lomond, but due to its great depth it is the largest by volume in Great Britain.  Its deepest point is 230 metres (126 fathoms; 755 feet), making it the second deepest loch in Scotland after Loch Morar.  It contains more water than all the lakes in England and Wales combined, wrote Wikipedia.   And notice that natural canal that splits Scotland in two?   I didn't.  And those Scottish islands, as in nearly 800 of them scattered about (not all are populated, however).  Our cruise was only stopping at the Shetlands (we'd been curious about it since watching the popular series) and the Orkneys (home of the Highland Park and Scarpa scotch distilleries).  But now glance back downward at the map and there sat that dang Isle of Man plopped out in the middle of the Irish Sea (fittingly, it's pretty much independent of the Crown, and yet isn't...go figure)  And there was Stonehenge, and Canterbury, and even Hadrian's Wall.  And while i had heard of all of these cities and places, i discovered that the map in my head was far different from the actual navigational map before me.  I'd had a similar map experience of seeing anew when I searched for Angkor Wat (was that in Thailand or Cambodia?) and looked at that area.  With an unmarked map of the Asian Pacific, could you quickly point out Bali or Singapore (so close to Krakatoa), or Komodo (yes, those lizards come from that island), or Midway (that costly WW II battle); then there were the Marshall islands, Fiji, American Samoa, and Tahiti (which is actually south and east of Hawaii).  And don't bother to ask about Tuvalu or Vanuatu (which itself is made up of 80 islands (hint, it's right near New Caledonia).  Or the famous Cook Islands, named after the controversial but talented sea captain, James Cook, who died at age 51.  It was surprising how little I actually knew about what places were where, and how equally little I knew of how those ancient mariners on rafts and small sailing crafts not only navigated and charted such vast distances, but dared to even take the chance.  Flying overhead, or steadily cruising on a large vessel, both equipped with satellite coordinates was one thing, but to face the vast unknown and pretty much hope that you'd discover new lands?  It was truly a different world...

     So, a few quick tidbits about the UK, or the United Kingdom, or Britain, or Great Britain...or England, although then you'd be leaving out the rest of Britain which includes Wales, and Scotland.  So which is it?  Admittedly, even as many times that I've been here, I'm still puzzled over it all. The main island, wrote Steves, is Britain, just Britain (England is just the center and southwest part of that island). Throw in Wales and Scotland and you have the "great" part of Britain. But add northern Ireland to the mix and you have the UK; now to complicate matters further, include that independent southern part of Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and you've got...the British Isles.  Got it?  Me neither.  A foreigner (a yank, if from the US) is excused for just saying the UK, or Scotland, or Ireland, as long as your saying those names while IN those countries (one caution: say any of that in Wales and you may be soundly corrected). But back to Britain...first off, it’s small, as in the size of Michigan, wrote Rick Steves in his guide to "Great Britain," so said because as he wrote: At its peak in the mid-1800s, Britain owned one-fifth of the world and accounted for more than half the planet's industrial output.  Today, the empire is down to the Isle of Britain itself and a few token scraps, such as Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, and the Falklands.  As the Brits might cynically say, "that's just Great."

    So beyond the food and sights and relaxation of a "vacation," what did I hope to discover by visiting so many countries, all in one fell swoop?  As with those early explorers, I looked forward to seeing new lands and new cultures, tasting new foods and digging into old and new histories.  And who could resist all the new accents, even those Norwegians speaking fluent English?  But wait, the book How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi asked: why do any of us even have accents?  After all, we all have the same larynx and vocal cords.  So ignoring the languages themselves, why do we have such different accents, (y'all)?  It's something called phonotactic constraints.  Wrote linguist Mari Sakai, PhD: Every language has them, and it just means that the language has some preferences for how to put the sounds together...English does not like three or more consonant sounds (not letters) in a row.  It gets a bit more complicated, but all that is for another post (as she mentions, when you picture in your mind the word "hobnob," we simply canNOT put the "b" and "n" together so we automatically separate the single word into two)...

      So, glance back at your map. We'd soon be departing for St. Malo in France.   During the war, the Germans built up quite a large defensive unit there since it was so close to England. In fact, their wounded were taken to the two islands of the coast, Jersey and Guernsey. The Allies saw this as a threat and basically flattened the city on the French side.. But the Germans saw the same threat on the English side at Southampton and how the Allies could easily resupply their troops and weapons, and thus basically flattened that town.  So it seemed fitting that we were leaving one bombed-out city for another, both becoming unwitting ports in a war long ago.   And it was also fitting that the ship we were on, just barely larger than the Titanic, was now heading to the city from which the Titanic originally departed for its fateful voyage.  This would be our first stop of the cruise, to a country geologists speculated was likely once connected to Britain, a land bridge so massive that when it collapsed, it created a valley so deep that the Chunnel had to be rerouted from its original path.  This likely explained what Robert MacFarlane wrote in his book The Old Ways on the Boulby Mine: This network of tunnels and roadways is collectively known as 'drift.'  There are more than 600 miles of existing drift burrowed into the soft bands of halite (salt) and sylvite (potash) that stretch below sea and land, out to the mining faces where --every hour of every year-- men and machines claw tons of potash from the seams, duct the potash onto hoppers and start the journey of this buried residue of a Permian sea up to the world's crop fields, where it will be spread as a fertilizer in both of the Earth's annual two springs, returning vital potassium to the growing cycle...Inland the potash deposit runs deeper, reaching a maximum depth of around 4,500 feet at the outermost limit under the moors.  Seawards, it rises to a minium depth of around 2,600 feet at the outermost point of the shipping channel...At 2,600 feet the air temperature is 35℃ [95℉]. At 4,500 feet it is 45℃ [113℉]...For the miners it is like laboring in the Sahara at noon, in darkness..  

     So off to a quick stop in France at St. Malo, a full moon now quietly fading from sight in the daylight but still exerting its gravitational pull.  On this side, as well as the Atlantic coast side of England (as mentioned on my posts about Cornwall), the tides can rise and fall an astonishing 19 feet, wrote Rebecca Boyle in her book, Our Moon. Those tides weren't something Julius Caesar planned on when he tried to invade Britain (his invasion failed).  But the Allies did, with Eisenhower (put in charge of the entire D-Day invasion) postponing the air-sea attack until the next day...better moonlight, and tides rising a foot every 15 minutes.  Conditions would be perfect...or so it was thought.  St, Malo is just 200 miles or so from Omaha Beach, and Normandy Beach.  But St. Malo wouldn't be known for its D-Day history, but rather for a famous writer and and defender of the Catholic Church...monsieur Francois Chateaubriand.  What??  Onward we sail.....