May 4th, 2013 – The steel wheels are spinning along the tracks noisily, the old rocks grow out of the grass around them, as the sheep chew hungrily at the new roots of spring. I have just read an article on R.S.Thomas, and am looking out of the train window at old men sawing on garden benches in the sun, and maybe, just perhaps, I am falling for my home yet again.

The grief of leaving West Wales just when, finally, it looks and feels comfortable and beautiful, and after an impossibly long winter, has almost stopped me from getting on the train back to the American Deep South. At last, we are poised on the edge of the American Beatnik project again. The Snowbird route South, into Hemingway country and beyond, possibly, into the worlds of Castro and Guevara.

Three years in the boatyard; two films, and a war-zone later, with books illustrated, and money in the bank, we reckon we can survive for about four months – longer if we find some sustaining occupation.

The ancient spanish port of Saint Augustine will be our first destination after leaving the quarter-mile-long condemned piers of Green Cove Springs, with all of its faded naval war-glory, its resident black widow spiders, alligators, otters and manatees. But first, we shall head into the dusty abyss of the workyard, propellers, water and refrigeration systems, one more coat of paint on the decks, and yacht varnish on teak.

I have been here before – 100% humidity, 100 degrees in the shade, local work grinding to a halt, the lone Briton grinding away on his boat in the mid-day sun. But we will soon be on the water, where it will cool, and should be tolerable. And then perhaps we will be living the dream of floating around on our boat in the sun.

July 31st 2013 – I look at our ridiculous choices, hardships, and the total lack of financial return I have to answer to when people ask me questions about fixing up this old, beautifully-built, strong, but unquantifiable ferro-cement boat, and I ask myself the question they are really asking: Why?

Then I read a passage at the end of my current reading-book; a favourite of my father’s, Admiral Evans’ account of the incredible disasters and excruciating near-salvations met by Scott’s last polar expedition.

He writes of the ‘infinite sadness’ with which they cleared up the mess in the antarctic in 1913. As they pulled out of the ice for the last time, leaving the pack ice, he describes it thus:

‘The evening before we finally broke through into open water was beautifully still, and a low cloud settled down in the form of a thick fog. – it was a change from the fine, clear weather – frost rime settled everywhere, and for a time we had to stop.

There was a weird stillness over all, and whenever the ship was moved amongst the ice-floes a curious hiss was heard; this sound is well-known to all ice navigators: it is the sear of the floe against the greenheart sheathing which protects the little ship, and it is, to the ice-master, what the strange smell of the China Seas is to the far Eastern navigator, what the Mediterranean “cheesy odours” and the Eucalyptus scents of Australia are to the P. and O. officers, and what the pungent peat smoke of Ireland is to the North Atlantic seaman.

I suppose the memory of the pack ice hissing around a wooden ship is one of the little voices that call – and they sometimes call as the memory of “a tall ship and a star to steer her by” calls John Masefield’s seamen “down to the seas again”.

I sometimes feel a mute fool at race meetings, society dinner parties, and dances; the lure of the little voices I know then at its strongest.

It is felt by the Polar explorer in peace times and in the hey-day of prosperity, and it is surely that which called Scott away, when he had everything that man wants, and made him write, as he lay nobly dyingout there in the snowy wild:

‘How much better it has been than lounging in too great comfort at home’

Reading this gave me the final resolve to come – no matter what – to the seas with my boat, as good as I could make it, and trust in the ‘voice’ enough to push through squalls and storms, and here I sit, writing ‘in too great comfort’ in the cockpit of the good ship Sandpiper, in Darsena, Northern Cuba. It is to this I owe the fact that WE MADE IT!

Blog – Unlocking our Sound Archive

The Unlocking our Sound Archive project took us today to Nant Flur and Bryneithinog. The light was nickel-silver, and the lichen on the massive rocks of the old dwellings was stunning. And we sat on a couple of them looking at a short rainbow on the hilltop above the forest and listened to the recording.

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‘Ty’n ‘nabod Dai Crofftau?’ (do you know Dai the crofter?). Tom Bryneithinog is hard to pin down as an old man, if you want him to talk about the forestry. He’ll tell you about hiding the sapling trees between your legs to get more money from the forestry commission, and how one farmer went to complain in Tregaron and came back paid-off with a better price, and happy to leave the hill with his family.

Dai Morgan used to tell me stories about running away with the mountain ponies when he was a young horse-boy. So near-by and yet, in another village. Dai used to point over towards the north side of the Ystwyth Valley and, conspiratorially, quietly say, ‘they’re different, those people’. North Wales, you see. They think differently. I can see it now in these crofts. They had a local perspective. And even though they were mobile – many lived away for a few years and worked in London – that was most certainly a foreign migration, reminding me of the London Kurds or Portuguese, and when they were back on their lands, it was exotic to for Nant Stallwen to marry into Llew Goch (family running the pub in Bont). 10 miles away, if that.

Another fascinating and evocative weekend was spent listening to the myths of the mountain folk of Ffair Rhos on Coflein – this is opening up a whole trail of links and research! Corpse candles and highwaymen. I never knew there were 6 fairs at Ffair Rhos through the years. Peggy Maesglas from Soar y Mynydd, over 100 horses, she had Hiraeth, boarding for school in Tregaron, so her family came.

And now, as we walk around the ancient croft ruins (yes, there were crofters in Wales, not five mile from where I live), we see trees planted – birch and beech, by the looks, at least, which are again changing the landscape and how people interat with it. ‘We carried the body of one massive man into the cemetary on our shoulders’, he recalls, ‘he was huge’. Everything is meted out in practical terms with Tom Bryneithinog. Values and prices litter his accounts of working life. ‘Ronnie John from Bont has bought the best land’ in the re-allotment after the forestry changed everything. To used to go up for the shearing to Nant Stalwen. 100 shearers, 5000 sheep (although the farmers never told us excatly how many. Someone with the flu in Nant Stallwen died of the flu because he drank cold water in the night. I was the only person to go out in the snow with the horseman postie. The brother of Dai Croftau cut his hand shearing and died from poisoning. (the doctor didn’t get there in time – Dad used to help him get there over the hill. He’d catch a horse and go up). The chapel-goers would die more than the chapel-goers. They were tricking the big king. The ones who went to chapel were hypoctrites. You shouldn’t go to chapel if you don’t live that way during the week.

Map of the Walk:

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The landscape is boggy and hard to navigate. But roads – even tracks – were less important when you consider that everybody had a horse which could graze the mountain grass. Free fast transport for everybody. And Peggy Maesglas says that the roads that the forestry brought in destroyed the communities.

The baptists sold the chapel, and the buyers came with a lorry and took it Bala!

It was a badger, it was just the Beast of Bont. But there is a big cat that lives here. Down at Capel Dewi. With a hole in it’s throat. They do say that that big cat has been round here. Only once though. They saw it down in …. They travel so fast (although not as fast as a dog). With a fox, you’ll get it with one shot. And hares. I was a big shooter. The dog-hunters are the ones to blame, pulling creatures to bits. Even farmers feel for the fox. They should ban it.

Motorcycle Mapping was first used in a humanitarian OpenStreetMap context during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which was also where Ivan and I first worked together. To establish the importance and impact of Motorcycle Mapping, Ivan put subsequent project together to use this techniques to map bednet distribution in a Malaria project in Kenema, Sierra Leone.

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Dr Ed Monk was on the team, and got this paper published in the Transactions of the Royal School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, of which I am proud to be cited as a co-author. Newsweek also covered this project, and the article can be seen HERE. Although there is much coverage of me, it was Ivan’s project, and this project, made possible by the steady commitment of Randy Jones, helped to establish the motorcycle mapping techniques which I was to use at scale in the Northern Uganda Refugee and Ebola mapping projects (HERE and HERE).