Search this Site

Editor’s Log:
Setting off for the blue yonder

by Kat Tanaka

Normally, the rest of the nation looks on with envy at the weather we take for granted in Los Angeles, but we’ve been making national news with stories of flooded freeways and 100-year rains. I know it means something like “the sort of thing that happens every hundred years”, but it’s starting to feel like it’s been raining for 100 years, and going to rain for 100 more. Some people around me have talked about feeling as if they’re going to be washed into the ocean, but that’s going to be a literal truth for me. Your editor is embarking on a grand adventrue, as close to living in space as civilians can get. I’m about to set off for an unfamiliar ocean, to live aboard a sailboat. For those who want technical details, Ulysses is a 37-foot Dutch-built steel-hulled ketch, or so I’m told. It’s just words to me right now, to become visceral and real in a matter of days.

Paring down a suburban life where storage is nearly infinite if one is willing to pay the cost to what I can either carry on a plane or ship quickly in boxes, I have gained a greater understanding of weight and volume than ever before. I once loaded my life into a four-door sedan to travel with the circus. That seemed like a big leap, but it feels now like that was a small step with training wheels. In a car up the West Coast, AAA was just a phone call away, and long-distance drives are a familiar friend. Now I have my life packed into two (large) duffel bags, and simple amenities like easy access to hot showers, flush toilets, and land-line telephones will be as remote to me as they are to astronauts aboard the International Space Station. What I know about sailing vessels is all theoretical, as much as the early astronauts orbiting earth couldn’t be sure what it would be like there. No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy, and I won’t know for certain what it will be like until I’m actually aboard and the anchor’s aweigh.

I hope the Odyssey readership will indulge me while I explore the parallels between space station life and my own shipboard experiences. Meanwhile, I’m including two URLs for information on life aboard Space Station.

Editor’s Log: Setting off for the blue yonder

Editor’s Log:
Setting off for the blue yonder