DHG When in Nome Do As The Nomans Do
Dutch Harbor Gear · Alaska Field Notes
Rough and Ready
No such thing as good weather here—only good clothing, good laughter, and the right kind of nothing.
Ordinary World
No Such Thing as Good Weather
It is the locals, some emos, who just get wet. Others, poets, go dancing in the rain, hoping to be struck by lightning.
The song remains the same in this infinite playlist called the rainforest. Charlie Chaplin liked to walk in the rain because nobody could see his tears.
I do not cry, like the Little Tramp, because it is over. I smile, like the Big Kahuna, because it happened.
The Call
The Real Voyage of Discovery
To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere.
How I do time is how I create and recreate myself. On a ship, one lives in the grand manner of writers. We basically do nothing all day.
At sea, I could do my mind no greater service than remain in my default mode of idleness.
Foreign Land
On Land, Mother Nature Changes the Rules
Here, in the Alaskan wilderness, is the preservation of the outer world. The sturdy distinctions between blue-collar work and leisure have been broken down by Mother Nature, which is beautiful but will kill you if you are not prepared.
Think Deadliest Catch meets Ice Road Truckers.
So you squirrel away money for a rainy day—which is every day here.
Trials
The Right Kind of Nothing
On a ship, it is basically travelling for people who really cannot be bothered doing it. Think Love Boat meets Fantasy Island and Gilligan’s Island.
The battles are so fierce because the stakes are so low. Nothing happens next.
Yet it has been a salvaging of my inner life, the “right kind” of nothing, and a way to recover my whole life, a lived vocation, a principle.
It was not the six or eight hours visiting exotic places that made the experience, but my recollection of it: day after day at sea, and getting there. The endurance. The idleness that was the mother of possibility.
My idle hands, living like the idle rich, a slap in the face to blue-chip ambition. After all, the goal of ambition is sublime leisure—where, with my 2PM power naps, I remained a well-rested being who had only to dream with my eyes wide open and behold.
If a little idleness is dangerous, the cure is not to be less idle, but to be more idle—to be idle all the time.
Revelation
Nothing But the Truth
I used to make things up—full of magic, innocence, feeling, and vision. I would embellish the truth to make a better story.
I was actually affirming what I wanted: state it and create it.
Now, as time passes, little by little everything that I had spoken in falsehood became true. All the lies have been washed away by these last few years at sea.
It is nothing but the truth.
Connected Theme
Time, Idleness and Re-Creation
This field note belongs to the larger Time Millionaire / sea-life philosophy: a life in which idleness is not failure, but fuel.
The Elixir
The weather may be brutal, but the deeper discipline is learning how to turn idleness into possibility and memory into truth.Alaska toughens the outer world. The sea restores the inner one. Somewhere between the rain gear and the 2PM nap, a life philosophy takes shape.