Personal site of journalist, baker, and storyteller Tony Ganzer.
Blog posts on media, introspection, society, and more.
You could call this a precursor to the much-anticipated “In Search of Blue Water: Part 2.” I’m sure my reflections on sailing the coastal waters of Catalina/Santa Barbara Islands will be just as potent, if not more introspective. This post is my warm-up. The last weeks re-acclimating to the U.S., to another time zone, to “standard” food, entertainment, and everyday trials have been interestingly frustrating. No thanks to, but not exclusively because of, the Sandman.
Being as hip as I am, I’m now reading Thomas Friedman’s 2006 book on globalization “The World is Flat.” The New York Times Columnist is sharp in international affairs, and tells the tale of outsourcing from many perspectives: the Chinese learning Japanese to serve Japanese companies; the Mormon housewives and retirees hired by Jet Blue airlines to work the company’s reservation system; the call centers in India serving any number of U.S. companies.
Friedman tells of how Indians earn about $300 a month to work in these places, with full medical coverage for ALL family and free dinners every night. Most of these workers have MBA’s, and at minimum undergraduate degrees in something impressive like engineering or mathematics.
Though most of the island trails were blocked by makeshift barriers to protect nesting pelicans and seagulls, two prized trails were still open for conquest–the one to the peak of Santa Barbara Island, and another to a small lighthouse on the very edge of the island.
We had sailed for hours from Catalina, seeing nothing but rolling waves and the occasional scavenging bird.
Now was our time. Santa Barbara has no residents, and only a small ranger house, and we would exploit that freedom in every way possible: to enjoy what nature had set neatly and alone off the coast of California.
It was clear when the wall-o-warmth hit me in the jetway, and again by the friendly faces of disdain in the terminal, that I had returned to America, and to the desert, after a short 13.75 hours in the air, not counting a glorious layover in the Newark airport. My ink-stained fingers could not deny it: the chapter of 2 months in Germany had ended.
If you take the DW bus line, or follow the DW road signs, it comes upon you like a whisper in darkness. One moment you’re drowning the sound of noisy Mercedes, Audis, and VWs on Bonn’s busy Reutersstrasse, and the next moment you’re breezing under a canopy of helpful trees. You can see the corner of a former government building. But when Bonn lost its placing as Germany’s capitol, Deutsche Welle was drafted to fulfill the immense structure’s potential.
This is not London, but to tease the rest of this post I’ll borrow from Ed Murrow. “This is Bonn, and there is ‘life’ going on.”
If you’ve been biting your nails waiting for the next installment of “In Search of Blue Water,” please don’t worry–it’s coming. And the pictures of sea lions and gratuitous sailing vessels will be worth your time. For now though, I must talk about more recent events.
The Arthur Burns Fellowship has had be tied up and tired for a couple of weeks now. A whirlwind orientation in Washington D.C. brought an unbelieveable amount of context to heading abroad. Speakers, bankers, politicians, lawyers, and regular ole journalists all piled into the German Marshall Fund to help 20 journalists find their way to being foreign correspondents.
Editor’s Note: This is the first of three narrative accounts of a journey at sea. More dispatches to land in the coming days.
It’s sometimes hard to swallow: the stinging reality of things we can’t change. As regular readers of this site know, my best friend Joe is heading to Iraq on a 1-year deployment.
I’ve known him for many years, since our days teaching at a Boy Scout camp in the Inland Northwest. Joe taught lifesaving, and I taught rowing, but we both cherished sailing. We were both introduced to harnessing wind by a laughing coworker pushing us into a small boat, alone.
Those coworkers are long gone, most never having sailed again. Joe and I…are sailors.