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finn_island (2763210)

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Name:

finn_island

Location:

Omokoroa, New Zealand (Aotearoa)

Birthdate:

1949-01-19

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finn_island

livejournal.com (Jabber)

Bio:

Fraternal ancestors emigrated from Germany to escape Prussian wars. Grandfather died when I was >5. Stories told by his children speak of a kind and reserved man who was not afraid to challenge the authority, made friends with Indians, and supported his family during the depression with odd jobs from auctioneering to bootlegging. His wife was stoic, friendly and admired by my father. They had six children three of whom never married. My father the second youngest was raised in Sterns County, Minnesota. Not far from where he lives today.

Maternal ancestors emigrated from Wales and Ireland. Grandmother’s first husband was a building inspector who died in a suspicious scaffolding accident. She remarried and shortly after the birth of her second daughter my mother, contracted scarlet fever. The extended family was quarantined by the public health service in their home and watched her die as the neighbours looked in. Survivors moved in with an aunt married to an insurance broker. He provided for half a dozen of his wife’s female relatives in Hartford, Connecticut. Her father was left to fend for himself. She only saw him once after her mother’s death.

My parents met during the war at a social club. Pop was a radio operator in the merchant marines. Mom worked in an insurance company. I was born in post war NY @ ’49. Within two years they moved to MN where five siblings sprouted - three girls then two boys. As the eldest male I was privileged and encouraged to achieve at home and in school. Siblings were more or less left to themselves. I was the first person on either side of the family to either attend or graduate from college from known generations. My loving, hard working , temperant family were poor Catholics.

Thru youth I lived in a house of women, mother and three sisters. Father held two or three jobs working midnight to 8 am at the telephone company so he could hold a second full-time day job doing concrete/cement work or carpenter’s apprentice. Today father is 81 and works hard every day. He believes the meaning and purpose of life is to work and work me he did, every day, all weekend and all summer creating new jobs before the old were done. I seldom played, resented endless mindless chores, nevertheless I followed in his footsteps. Ma & Pa’s relationship was turbulent, mainly over money, lasting until divorce in their late 40’s. Father remarried and is in martial bliss to this day. Mother never re-married. She focused remaining years on progeny dying of cancer 5 years ago at the age of 77.

Excelling in primary and secondary school I struggled through university because of the pressures of continual work to pay for tuition, books, commuting and all personal expenses. I studied physical chemistry and biochemistry. My last job at university was in immunological research at the University of Minnesota hospital cancer research unit. I was invited to work at the Sloan-Kettering cancer research facility in Manhattan but instead chose the Peace Corps. I escaped the Vietnam draft because of a sympathetic physician’s diagnosis.

I met my wife M the last year of high school at a St. Valentines day dance in my childhood school. She is the oldest of eight Irish Catholic children. Her father is a plumber and mother a homemaker. Similar to my family’s background, hardworking uneducated Catholics. Because of adventurous lifestyles and time spent rearing siblings we chose childlessness.

Peace Corps years in Vava’u Tonga I taught science/math learning to love the ocean like only a land-locked farmer could. M practiced maternal-child health care from a motor bike. Returning to the states we found a depressed economy. The transitional culture shock of returning home was unexpected and profound. Neither of us could find work and lived with family and friends for two years. M worked relief nursing. We saved $2,000. Old university friends invited us to travel with them, one couple to France and another to Alaska. TAPS was on so we drove to Fairbanks and settled in Sitka to be near the ocean, glaciers, and a volcano. I taught chemistry and teacher education at Sheldon Jackson College becoming department chair. M nursed @ the Public Health Service hospital, then school nurse, and eventually learning medical records at the community hospital. Our 2nd year we bought a 17 foot wooden sailboat drifting amongst fjords and inlets near Sitka. In the winter we lived on a 34 foot fishing boat while the owner sojourned in Mexico. Significantly I met a man who was to become a mentor and change my life. He built a wooden sailboat in the mountains of southern California and sailed around the world. He taught me how to climb mountains without trails. Looking to buy a larger boat we could live on he advised, “build one - don’t worry about how much it costs, where you can do it, or how long it will take, just start, the rest will follow.” Within a year I started. We moved to an uninhabited island three miles off shore where we resurrected an old cabin, built a boat house and commuted daily to Sitka in cold and stormy winter darkness. Every year at least one close friend died on the water or in the air. For work I taught in nearly all the villages of southeast Alaska. Three times I got out of a small plane and it crashed on the next flight, twice killing all onboard, once severely burning passengers. I had several near accidents myself both air and water borne. Seven years later I launched a 38 foot ketch built from a fiber glass bare hull. Spars timbers hand hewn from Sitka spruce found floating in the sea then hollowed, glued and tapered. Surplus lead sheathed phone cables melted in an old cast iron sink then poured into 5 tons of ingots. Every piece of wood cut and finished with hand tools. I started the project without any experience in boats or boat building. FINN took ten years to build.

Following FINN’s launch we moved to Juneau in search of new careers. M. worked at the Legislative and Ombudsman offices. I as a chemist with ADEC. Within a year I was recruited to a newly formed hazardous waste program which required managing contracts to write state regulations and investigate suspected contaminated sites. Reports streamed in steadily showing extensive contamination especially wherever the military had been (nerve gas, abandoned experimental nuclear reactor), mining (mercury and arsenic on a Nome playground), oil refineries (ground water contamination), pulp mills (dioxins), and Skagway ore terminal (lead) to name a few. Eventually one particularly complex site, the MAPCO refinery in North Pole became the largest state-led hazardous waste enforcement case in the country. I left ADEC becoming an environmental management consultant specializing in hazardous waste, contaminated sites, emergency response, and worker exposure. In the midst of this EXXON hired me during the spill. I was the principal author of the EXXON-VALDEZ Oil Spill Clean-up Plan. M and I divorced in 1987.

In 1993, we sailed from Seward to San Diego then Hawaii where my partner of 7 years decided she had enough sailing and would return home to Alaska. Immediately after leaving Hilo a hurricane swept in behind with the highest winds ever recorded in the central south Pacific. I narrowly escaped. First stop was Palmyra Island an uninhabited atoll. In a ten day period two ships sank. Fellow sailors re-floated one. A fight broke out between two people over salvage rights. One of them pulled out an AK-47, two of us tried to defuse the situation. I left Palmyra for Samoa and Tonga. A month at sea, alone.

The planned circumnavigation was no longer driven by the pressures of a partner’s homesickness. Given the political opportunity to immigrate I re-established myself in a new country. My first job was hazardous/industrial waste manager protecting public waste water treatment facilities from contamination. Moving to central government I worked on international treaties and drafted the county’s first hazardous waste legislation. In the private sector I became NZ’s leading environmental auditor examining the largest industries in the country including the world’s largest dairy factories, Mobil Oil, and the timber industry. Later in the capital city of Wellington I managed the NZ’s largest environmental restoration project. Now I’m an environmental consultant for one of the fastest growing cities in NZ. Currently I live aboard FINN in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand.

Interests:

5: adventure, environmental activist, offshore sailing, outdoors, ski mountaineering

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