It's time to WORK!

Surrounded by palm trees, we've set up house under the clear blue October sky in Wauchula, Florida.

We are at work. Yes. We landed our rig in Wauchula, slightly west of the center of Florida and 50 miles east of the city of Bradenton. We have set up shop as Workampers at the SKP Resort (SKP stands for Escapees, get it!) Jo works in the office for a day and a half on the weekends, checking in travelers, sorting mail, etc. I work Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. My job description is a pot-potpourri of doing a little electrical work (rebuilding circuit-breakers and plugs for the various sites), lawn mowing with a giant machine, pool water testing and helping incoming campers back their rigs onto the lots.

I work for the president of the co-op, a decent, mild-mannered fellow who hails from Michigan. Jo works for the office manager whom she replaces on the weekends.

We receive a small stipend for our work. But the best part is we get our site at no cost, along with free electricity and free laundromat.

This is a little village of 126 home sites. Some of the homes are mobile homes that don't more. Others are rigs like our's. A handful are ancient Greyhound buses from the '50s and '60s that have been converted to homes. I met up with the owner of one, his name is Swede, when I pulled the handle off my weed-whacker machine while struggling to get the motor to start. Swede was puttering in the workshop when I brought it in for fixing and he drove with me to his lot and rummaged in the basement of his 1956 Greyhound bus. He still drives the bus down from the north each year, although he says it's getting harder to do this as he and the bus get up in years. He eventually came up with a temporary solution to the weed-whacker by tying the pull-string onto a nail and then taping the nail to the plastic handle.

Down the road, next to the office, there's a couple who have a pair of skis screwed to the wall of their mobile home. He spends his day in the glassed-in Florida room keeping a checklist of who comes and goes. Why does he do this? No one seems to know. He just likes keeping tabs on everyone. He doesn't give the notes to anyone. Just sits there all day long, noting who comes in and who goes out of the resort.

Over in the back area of the park, we have two Sand-hill Cranes who commute in each autumn and spend the winter here. Last year, they gave birth to two chicks so it's going to be interesting to see whether they return from the north with their chicks this year. No sign of them yet.

We have three great-horned owls that hang out on the power poles and swoop silently in the night to capture their prey.

As one of our first projects in our new location, I have redesigned the front area of our rig, under the dash. We eliminated our old cathode tube TV a couple of years back, but found the new LCD TV, while thin and elegant, was thin on sound. So I installed a new sound system under the set, adding awesome bass and increased volume. The cats were thrilled by opening the hole behind the TV set and they took the opportunity to explore this great cavity before it was filled in with my new sound system.

A Navigator for the Ages

Captain James Cook has insinuated himself into my consciousness during the past two years. While we wandered in Alaska, his name popped up in Anchorage and the coast south of that city. Cook Inlet, Turnagain Arm, and a dozen other names up in that remote part of the world highlighted the influence of Cook's voyages.

Then, we went to the end of the eastern part of the North American continent and Capt. Cook made his presence felt many times. He mapped the entire coast of Newfoundland and created charts that were so accurate they were used until just recently.

All of this created a hunger in me for more information about Cook. I remember learning about this great navigator back in school. It it was fairly scimpy in details. The easiest way was to visit Amazon.com and search for Cook biographies. There are a handful and I chose one by a rather stuffy Englishman, Richard Hough, who did a pretty thorough job.

Cook was born in Yorkshire, in the north of England. His father came from Scotland but crossed the border when he married. James took up the seafaring life aboard a coal-carrying boat that ranged up and down the east coast of England. He was essentially self-taught and he realized he wanted more than to be a coast wanderer.

Britain ruled the seas back then so he naturally joined the Royal Navy. It didn't take him long to make a mark with the Admiralty and the First Sea Lord ordered his captain to knock off the French in Quebec and Nova Scotia. That's where Cook began to latch on to the idea of charting the coast as well as the St. Laurence River. His charts are spectacularly detailed and accurate.

When he returned home, he took a wife, got her pregnant in time to be ordered off to sea in the HMS Endeavour for a circumnavigation of the world, via Cape Horn, Tahiti, New Zealand. He was ordered to find the southern continent which everyone thought was out there. He failed in finding Antarctica because there was just too much ice for him to push farther south than 70 degrees to find the mysterious land. But he discovered and charted the eastern edge of Australia. This voyage took more than two years and he kept his men free of the dreaded scurvy by requiring them to eat sauerkraut (vitamin C), along with fresh fruit as soon as he touched land like Tahiti or New Zealand.

The natives were a fairly tough bunch, of course, prone to eating their own. But the ladies were able and willing to meet the needs of the seamen when they, far from home, sought the favors of the chicks.
The girls had been infected by earlier French visitors to Tahiti, however, and the boys picked up a fair amount of the STDs of the time. Cook had had the ship's surgeon check all the men before they landed to be sure they would not infect the women. So there is an ironic justice there as the Brits moved in on the locals.

Cook returned home a hero, impregnated his wife again and the Admiralty sent him off on a much larger expedition. This one required that he chart the Pacific coast of North America after pushing as far south in the Pacific in yet another attempt to locate the southern continent. On his way to the land north of California, he happened to discover the Hawaiian Islands. He enjoyed those islands before moving north and east to chart the mainland all the way to the Bering Sea. He had hoped to find a passage that would either allow the ships to sail east across the top of North America, or west across the north of Russia. Can't get here from there, of course. But he surely kept trying.

Aboard the ship on this voyage was William Bligh, who was a master mariner in the sense that he often was used by Cook to locate channels and passages with a small sailboat where his large ship did not dare attempt to enter.

Bligh was a tough case even then and was pretty brutal with his crew – a sign of things to come when he returned years later as captain of the HMS Bounty.

On this third voyage, Cook seems to have gone through a fair large personality change. It is possible the endless thieving on the part of the natives throughout the Pacific ground him down (they were always stealing parts of the ship, hatchets, compasses, clothing. But it seems more likely there was a mental change caused by some vitamin shortage.

His temper flared too often, he turned to flogging which he had steered clear off in his earlier voyages. Anyway, when the Hawaiian natives stole some valuable material from his ship, he ordered them shot and when they swam out of range, he determined to take a party ashore and hold their king hostage.

It all ended badly when some of the Hawaiians (who generally seemed to believe he was the god Orono) decided to attack him. They hacked him to pieces on the rocky beach and then took his various parts and distributed them among the different villages and tribes.

It's a great, great story that does not end happily, obviously. His men negotiated with the king to retrieve as much of Cook as was possible and they gave him a decent burial at sea. Then they sailed their ships back to England – arriving four years after setting out.

Mrs. Cook had produced another kid in the meantime and lived on for more than 40 years.

His impact on cartography as well as discovery is for the ages.