Drop-Off

Jonathan Bonfiglio and Joshua Cogan

Written by Jonathan Bonfiglio. All images by and courtesy of Joshua Cogan.

May 2015 – Marble House Project

 

“No other mammal moves around like we do. We jump borders. We push into new territory even when we have resources where we are. There’s a kind of madness in it.”

Svante Pääbo – Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

 

1.

Sailboat in the Woods

 

There is a sailboat in the woods. She is nowhere near the sea.

She has been here for three years, and is headed east. This place is something like a staging post for what is to come, as her owner works on her and prepares her for the ocean.

Conrad Grillo is 53 years old and lives on 118 acres of land in north Vermont, close to the border with Canada. He is selling up.

When he talks of the land he talks about the feeling he had when he first arrived, twenty-five years ago, how he walked up in a snowdrift and felt he had landed in a kind of harbour. The place kept its word.

But time passed and life played out, and of course no land is really ours, spatially, even less so in terms of time. The world moved, as it does, uncovered different dreams and succumbed to whispers of urban promise carried on the wind, whispers which tend to be heard with most awe by the young, no matter where they find themselves.

Now Conrad’s house is empty. He lives there in body but his thoughts are already on the ocean. His fridge is unplugged and there is no discernible food in the kitchen. He talks with enthusiasm about seasonal foraging in the woods. Being there, you can only imagine where furniture might once have been – there are no clues to guide you.

But there are pockets of ongoing life: on the only occupied shelf in the living room lie half-a-dozen open books on sailing and sailboats, proudly displaying old photos of Tla Hla, his 42ft aluminium junk rig, because she had a life too, before this new adventure they will embark on together, when they can, when the house sells and they can get the funds together to sail, out over the mountains, into the ocean.

 

2.

Wanderlust

 

The so-called Wanderlust Gene – variant DRD4-7R – underwent its first significant study in 1999, and was found to be present in approximately 20% of humans worldwide, correlating strongly to peoples with a migratory past.

‘Discovery’ of the gene immediately led to a deluge of press articles worldwide which highlighted in declamatory fashion how scientists had found the gene which explained incessant movement in certain individuals. It was presented – in some contexts subliminally, in others overtly – as the primary item of evidence in defence of people who regard home as nothing more than a half-way house for the next voyage or journey. In-keeping with the recent uncovering of all genes linked in some way to a particular characteristic, underscoring its discovery and in particular dissemination of the news surrounding it was a kind of permitted resignation in the reader: “Look, it’s not my fault, it’s part of my genetic make-up, there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s just the way I am.”

The subtext of the articles also included the invitation to be one of these movement-type people (life protagonists, pioneers?). Whether or not the reader had the gene, they were encouraged by the reporting to envisage themselves as having its make-up and therefore the component gene, because who doesn’t imagine a different life, different places, different choices – and in making those choices being once again at the centre of our lives, rather than bit-part players at the fringes, the norm for many of us.

But only in their imagination, because at one and the same time, underscoring everything was also a clear inference that we are trapped by our genes, by our past and by our make-up; that we shouldn’t struggle against ourselves because we already are who we are and that this is the person we were always going to be – a kind of predestination.

Freed inside a cage.

The narrative – in fact – played to much the same method of paradoxical entrapment which sees capitalist structures present a freedom-of-market-choice and open-individual-narrative to consumers whilst at the same time shrouding the fact that variety of choice is limited to only the most powerful brands, owned by a minority of companies and people – and where that isn’t the case (as if these exceptions disproved the rule) they soon will be.

It is the paradox of a presentation that leads us to concepts of heroism (individuality) whilst underscoring our victimhood (commonality).

As such, and apart from being wholly inaccurate, this kind of reporting is also societally problematic, not just to the individual – for instance, those trying to give up smoking – but also because to even the partially cognisant it recalls the paltry, diminishing and very present history of humans who on taking on the victimhood implicit in predestination become passive in the fight (any fight); a self-perpetuating, exponentially-increasing, not-so-silent majority of silence in the face of evil – bar the reactionary shouting (and voting). In fact, it’s not a particularly expansive leap of logic to suggest that the kind of outrage that (often anonymously or under guises) predominates on message-boards and across social media are actually the impotent throatful cries of enforced inactivity, passive engagement – the ire of the bystander who imagines and rails against preventive boundaries – but is also secretly pleased to find them there so they cannot in actual fact step into the action, be found out under the bright lights.

Outrage as a by-product of impotence.

~

Because when we accept defeat, we are more likely to be defeated again afterwards, develop a narrative around ourselves of the inevitably vanquished.

And this has more than just personal implications, because when we are defeated – or perhaps more importantly when we come to regard ourselves as defeated, whether we actually are or not – we become playthings for others, be they marketers, politicians, or concentration camp guards.

Because when we are defeated, we are happy to be fed slurry for fear of the consequences of things becoming even worse, for us, rather than railing and resisting in the hope of generating positive change.

Because when we are defeated we splinter into shards.

Defeat is done alone, whereas success breeds community.

~

Of course no credible scientist is going to tell us that a particular gene directly leads to a particular characteristic. What they may tell us is that at best it pre-disposes to behaviour and that there is still much in play after this point which could yet affect the story.

They may also say that there is no certainty that arrow of causality is aligned in that direction, or even that if it is that there is no guarantee it is only one-way. They may also add the coda that even if the picture were so simplistic as to assume that a solitary gene was singularly responsible for an attribute, that it is just as likely that movement selects for the gene, in other words that maybe the biggest cause of movement is not a predisposition but is the movement itself – we move because we have moved.

We move and feel wonder at the sheer scale and magic in the world – in what is out there – and realise that we can never know everything but how beautiful it might be to try.

~

Which is perhaps where a greater point lies, because say for the sake of argument that there really was a wanderlust gene, or something like it which generated wanderlust in us – or even if people actively choose to really exhibit such tendencies, whatever their predispositions (we are all predisposed to death, but we continue to rail against it all our lives), restless physical movement in and of itself is not the de facto indicator of this trait, but a certain kind of mental movement just might be.

 

 3.

Give

 

There is one room in the house which isn’t empty.

It is downstairs, and has a small desk next to a woodburning stove, and a much longer wooden surface on trestles, full of wooden pieces which have been prepared for Tla Hla, all hand carved.

“I can do about six of these in a week, if I really go for it, but you know, time, well, it doesn’t mean that much to me. They sell new for about six or seven hundred dollars apiece, if I was to buy them in, but I just want to make everything myself.”

In the corner of the room are the sails, neatly folded and ready.

“All rope has given in it, so you have to pull it really taught, right along this line, and then slowly, with the blunt needle, stitch it up. I just don’t understand plastic, you know. You have to make sure that the rope is what’s taking the tension, and not the sail.”

The room has big glass doors that face out onto the hillside, onto the pond he and his wife dug out twenty years ago, which had plenty of fish in until an otter passed by one fresh spring; down into the valley, where hidden among the trees is some kind of road leading to a junction and a barn with a tower perched above, now crushed in on itself by rain or lightning, as if a warning from the gods about the dangers of rising above your station, what can happen if stretch your dreams to breaking point.

But breaking point is not a fear here, for Conrad Grillo, the ocean sailor in the mountains, because it’s not in his make-up. It’s not breaking points which haunt him, but vanishing points, the point at which the light meets the horizon and drops off, out of sight. The places unseen; the spaces beyond us; the things we do not know. This is why he does everything himself, because he hasn’t done it before, and he doesn’t want to challenge himself to see if he can do it or not, there’s no point in that for him – he just wants to see how he does it.

“They messed around with her, made her too heavy, gave her a bigger rig, filled up her keel with more lead. I didn’t want that. I wanted her how she was meant to be. So I got in there and cut it out, you know, by hand.”

“The lead keel?” it’s an involuntary question I ask.

“Sure. But it was too big to move so I put it in an iron bath and lit a big fire, melted it all down. Lead melts at 600 degrees, iron holds strong still at that temperature. It was getting dark and still it wasn’t all melted. My arms felt so stretched that day, and my legs shortened, because of all the lead I was carrying.”

“How did you get it all out of the bath?”

“I used a ladle, you know, did it one spoonful at a time, poured it to make those smaller blocks over there.”

He points to a tarp, partially uncovered, under which are more lead bars than you can count in a sitting.

“That was one of the tougher days.”

~

Lying alongside Tla Hla are her masts, filled and welded, now waiting to be reinstalled.

“I’m thinking I’ll put them in here. You know, get everything just right before we move.”

I suddenly have a vision of the boat being pristine up against the green horizon, ready to move, every detail considered and prepared over meticulous months and years, but with the land not selling and no funds available to go anywhere.

“What do you do when you come across a problem that requires two people?”

He shrugs. “You know, I get round it. I’m accustomed to working alone; got used to it a long time ago.”

And it strikes me at that moment that the wanderlust gene is not a gene at all but a light in the eyes, the light of standing out over the drop-off, the void, of straddling that space of unknown and near disaster, and working things out one problem at a time, seeing how long you can hold the position, and we humans can hold a position so much longer than we ever think we can.

In the face of all we are faced with, it’s a thing to give us hope.

“And if the land sells before she’s ready for the ocean?”

“I’ll just move in there.” The caravan. Thin walls that couldn’t keep heat in if they tried. In winter.

But it wouldn’t worry him. Neither would storms. Or waves the size of mountains.

“I’ve had enough of all of this,” he signals the air around him. “I don’t like where my tax dollars go. I just don’t agree with it, you know, where it ends up. None of it is spent on making the world a better place.”

 

4.

Outliers

 

In humans, behavioural differences that are maintained through time and across contexts are termed personalities. These personalities display consistent methodologies in decision-making within groups, but there are variations expected too, even within individuals (‘Within Individual Variation’), linked to time, space, intelligence, memory and so on. An older incarnation of an individual, for instance, will tend more towards risk-averse behaviour than his younger self.

In terms of memory, of course, decision-making can relate to experience – go or don’t go near water, danger associated with certain areas etc. And can also relate directly to decisions previously made in certain contexts and how these worked out – but in one sense at least there is an oversight in terms of academic studies on decision-making and memory, because it seems to me that when we remember results of decisions taken we not only remember how those decisions worked out, but also the importance of a certain kind of decision-making as it relates to us.

Irrespective of an ‘event’, for instance, locking a door once will impact on future decisions we make about that door without safety or break-in concerns.

Do we not step into the long grass for fear of snakes? Which may have nothing to do with grass or snakes but may have everything to do with the fact that we regard ourselves as somebody who is scared of snakes and make accordant decisions.

Or even if the water scares us, do we jump in? And thereafter always recall that we are the kind of person that ‘jumps in.’

These are all self-fulfilling prophecies. We do, and therefore are more likely to do again.

The point is that these decisions are not only worked out as a behavioural tendency, but that opting towards particular decisions becomes a part of us which we can repeatedly choose or reject, although rejecting of course becomes harder and harder the more we exhibit repeat behaviour.

In other words a decision taken at a particular point in time does not only serve that particular space and time but comes with a weight attached for all future decisions we take. The first decision in a particular circumstance. As such, all decisions we have ever made are not of equal importance but of diminishing importance the further away we get from the first decision, although rupture is always in our power (the potential to break and make a new choice, re-setting the choice clock to zero).

Of course there are variations across individuals too (‘Across Individual Variation’), where different individuals in a group exhibit distinct tendencies.

And then there are the outliers.

Most people in a group – whatever their behavioural trope (proactive vs. reactive etc.) – on taking certain decisions which led to increased difficulty, would resist making those decisions, like making a home on an exposed mountain-top over making a home in a sheltered valley. The winds blow too hard up there, it’s colder, harder to shelter – across all contexts making decisions to be up on the mountain would be a decision that humans either behaviourally resist from the first or do so over time as they learn. But there is one factor not usually taken into account here, one factor that cannot be explained in terms of cogent behavioural choices, because in essence it makes no sense, and that is that some people embrace difficulty just because; some people put themselves in positions of peril or vulnerability or risk for reasons which cannot be explained away by the parameters of conventional decision-making, because these creatures do not base their decisions on likely success, but on a series of values which the rest of their society does not even begin to recognise, because perhaps up on the mountain every day comes with obscene levels of challenge just in order to stay alive and exist, unlike down in the valley where there is shelter and food and water; but these people choose to be there just because the thing that trumps all the hardship and the struggle and the effort and the risk is not something practical but the incredible view from the top of the mountain.

 

5.

Drop-Off

 

We live in the age of the pop-up memorial.

Temporary erections by the side of a road or up on a path, places where maybe a climber slipped off a rock face or three teenagers died in a car crash. A slow-burning candle in a box alongside some flowers of course now wilted and some words trying to convey the weight of what is felt by what happened here, something like ‘Too Soon’ or ‘In Our Hearts’ – and, of course, failing, because nothing can accurately convey loss except loss itself.

These glimpsed memorials have one thing in common, which is that they are almost all erected in spaces of transit, away from home, where people who were engaged in movement of one sort or another and in that act met an unfortunate and final demise. As well as mourning the individual who is lost to us before their time, these memorials also have a broader function in society: to repeatedly alert us to the danger of movement – they are a warning to us that above all, whatever else we choose in life, we should stay still.

~

Conrad has built a forge in Tla Hla. He was a metalworker for twenty years and is insistent that out on the ocean he be able to weld any problem shut. Wherever there is a screw through the deck or on the hull he has taken it out and is sealing it.

“I like metal boats. When I started looking, I knew she would have to be a metal boat.”

He is preparing a vessel in his own image, a vessel unable to countenance defeat.

Many people are waiting for Conrad to move, to see whether he pulls it off or not, in order to reinforce their own idea of who he is and who they don’t want to be.

But whether he makes it or not is missing the point, because Conrad has already moved. He moves every day. Every day he steps onto her bow, looks out to the mountains or the ocean, and wonders what unreachable thing he can reel in. Nothing is impossible, or too much trouble, it just takes time and effort. And that’s fine by him.

If he ends up getting her in the ocean, they will remember him as the crazy guy who took the boat in the mountains to the sea, but they will say this in the same way as they dismiss a crank evangelist. And if he fails, well, then, all the better, because he overstretched, and brought about his own downfall. It was hubris, after all, self-caused.

Because when people think about Icarus their tendency is to see a fool who exceeded his reach.

Whereas, in truth, his failure was a given – failure is a given for all of us, in the end, and when you park the trivial incidence of the fall, all that you are left with is his aspiration and imagination, how beautiful it is that he flew close to the sun.

 

Postscript

written by Conrad Grillo

29 May 2015

It’s been a study and continues to be one. And learning is what it’s all about for me. Exploration if you will. I prefer to look at the old stuff, an evolution of thousands of years of adventurers. The age of sail was lost to the age of steam (and petroleum internal combustion engine) and came back as a rich man’s deal where it’s easiest to write a check (and lots of money can be made). But the old ways were built on self-sufficiency out of necessity.

And if we want to stop supporting what we don’t want to support it seems to me that rediscovering where we left off so many years ago is the place to start. Wisdom is an accumulative product. One to be built on, not invented anew. Yes, we live in this world as it is, but if we want to change it we are the ones who have to start. And even if we don’t think there’s a chance (I personally think humans are just a blip on the radar, a hilarious evolutionary ‘oops’), we have to live with ourselves. And so I don’t worry too much about what others think but follow what I know to be necessary.

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Jonathan Bonfiglio is a writer, journalist and producer. As well as being Latin America Correspondent for Talk Radio, he is the author of multiple critically-acclaimed plays, as well as ad hoc poetry and prose pieces.

Joshua Cogan is an Emmy Award winning photographer and anthropologist whose work has taken him to 40 countries and 5 continents to produce his unique brand of ethnographic storytelling. Using his passion for culture, ecology and imagery, Cogan has consistently produced work across print, motion and web platforms. Recognition for those projects has come from standard bearers of journalism such as National Academy of Television and Sciences as well SXSW and Webby Awards for his partnerships creating new approaches to storytelling and cultural exchange – See more at: http://www.tedxbattenkill.org/displaywp_project/joshua-cogan/#sthash.7cPzfKIg.dpuf