Cinderella goes to the ball. I always wondered how Cinderella felt the morning after the ball. She dances with Prince Charming and the next morning she wakes to sweep the cinders once again. How does she pass the time between the ball and his arrival with the glass slipper? I -- being of tender feet -- can think of few things more tenuous than attempting to walk in glass slippers. I am safe. Cinderella's slipper could NOT have been a size twelve.

What is the point of this children's tale? Today I was able to speak for a half an hour with journalists from my hometown. Normally, such things are disquieting. I do not enjoy them. In this case, I felt as if I'd been invited to a party. I knew many of the individuals on the other end of the phone. It was the most human interaction I'd had since the twelfth of September (the night before I departed from the Canary Islands).

I definitely had the easy end of things. I did not plan the party. I did not arrange the guest list. I did not sweat whether the phone was going to work. Nor did I have to clean up afterwards. All I had to do was turn on the telephone at the appointed hour and answer it when it rang. "Fifth Third Bank, mid-Atlantic Branch, may I help you?" Long pause. "Tori, it's Diane, I'm about to connect you." I could hear a hint of nervousness in Diane Stege's voice. As for my opening line, I'd caught Diane's normally flexible intellect off guard. "She doesn't trust that the phone is going to work," I thought.

Jim Gaunt was the first person I heard over the speakerphone. There was a smile in his voice that put me at ease. The phone disconnected twice, but we were able to re-establish contact without too much delay. I found myself unaccustomed to talking. While I speak with members of my support team regularly, we talk about tropical depressions, or how many amps my solar panels are putting out or how's the pump on the desalinator. With satellite time being three dollars a minute for the telephone calls, there is not a great deal of casual conversation. Not so today. Each person asked questions in turn. More than once when I was about to deliver a smart-aleck response to a perfectly reasonable query, I thought, "Be careful Tori, these people have notebooks." All in all it was good fun. As soon as I hung up I thought of Cinderella and how I would feel in the morning with no one to speak with. It wasn't so bad really. I went back to sweeping the water past my boat with my two oar shaped brooms.

October 21

This was my best rowing day yet. Not in terms of distance, but in terms of ease. I rose well before sun-up and took up the oars. There was a line of dark clouds that brought rain for the early part of the morning, but by ten they had given way to a thin layer of stratus clouds. These clouds stayed with me all day and broke up in the early evening. The result was that I had enough sun to run my water-maker and to charge my batteries, but the clouds protected me from the worst of the sun's rays.

The wind was fair all day and the swells for the first time since the start (it seems) had a bit of distance between them. This made the rowing much easier. Over the course of the last few weeks it has been difficult to get ten strokes in succession without one swell or another disturbing the rhythm. Not so today. I rowed a bit more than twelve hours. The wind died in the evening.

October 22

There was little or no wind today. The seas were very calm. I'd been waiting for a calm day to have my halfway celebration. I rowed for an hour, then climbed into the bow compartment to retrieve my new snack bags. The cashews are back! And, Sesame Blue Corn Chips. Yes. If only I had some Benedictine from Burger's Market on Grinstead Drive to go with them. Ah well, all in good time.

I rowed a bit more. Still, no wind. I replaced grips on my oars. After 1600 miles, the old ones were a little the worse for wear. I put new padding on the shafts of the oars to protect them where they occasionally hit the gunwale. I made extra water for a bucket bath and pulled out my clean shirt.

Then, I went for a swim. I'd not planned on doing any swimming, unless I fell overboard. The sun was very bright with no cloud cover. I was quite hot. I wanted to see if there were any barnacles attached to the hull. I tied a line to my harness and jumped in. Once in the water, I thought about how many miles of ocean stretched beneath my bare feet and what might be lurking in those waters. I considered Columbus's "sea monsters" and I jumped back into the boat. Seeing how easy it was to get back in, I felt encouraged to go back in again. This time I took the video camera. I think I managed 4.5 seconds of video. The boat went up and down, the camera went up and down. In the jostling, the battery popped off the back of the camera. I went back aboard, dried my hands, returned the battery to its mounting and climbed back overboard again. I tried to film the barnacles but water leaked into the casing, and I gave up on the camera.

There are barnacles on the hull. I tried to scrub them off with a sponge, but it was too soft. After about a half an hour I gave up. Back on board, I took my bucket bath and put on my clean shirt. YES! Very nice. Then, surprise, surprise, I rowed.

Late in the afternoon, I came up with one or two things on board that might help me scrape the barnacles off the hull. But, this must wait for another calm day when I have enough sun for a bath after my swim.

Midnight ramblings:

I had a nightmare. I subscribe to the theory that dreams are just a way for the brain to amuse itself while the body recuperates from the day's labor. The brain's idea of a practical joke is to fool the body into thinking something is truly amiss. In my nightmare, I arrived to deliver a speech on environmental policy to a dinner meeting of about 1000 environmental professionals. I'd worked very hard to prepare a witty and intelligent presentation. As I entered the large conference room, to my horror I realized that this was not a gathering of environmentalists, but ECONOMISTS. A polite woman guided me to the head table where I was seated between two professorial looking gentlemen and began furiously to rewrite my speech for the evening. Before I took the podium, I awakened on the American Pearl with heart pounding and sweat on my palms.

Then I was so intrigued by the intellectual riddle I could not go back to sleep. How WOULD I rewrite an environmental speech to be palatable to a group of economists? For the last 1000 years, environmental policy has given way to what humans termed "economic necessity." In the next 1000 years, economic policy must give way to environmental necessity or we may be doomed as a species. We cannot continue to foul the planet without the risk that we will go the way of the dinosaur and the woolly mammoth.

That we live in one global environment is a no-brainer. This is easy to understand. Air and water circulate. What we bury in the ground does not always stay where we put it. That we live in a global economy we are only just beginning to genuinely understand. If we allow developing nations to follow in our fossil fuel laden footsteps, we are asking for trouble. In America there is the pervasive (and perverse) view that solar power is unworkable. This is a lie.

I am in a little rowboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. All the power I need to desalinate seawater, to type this letter on a laptop computer, to listen to the weather report on a short-wave radio, to run my global positioning system and to communicate over a satellite telephone comes from two small solar panels. They are good solar panels I admit -- from Siemens Solar Industries. The two panels could easily fit on the roof of my car (a Geo Metro). You might argue, "but Tori, you are in the tropics where the sun is reliable." To which I would respond, "I used the same solar panels last summer and even off the coast of Newfoundland in a heavy fog always had all the power I needed." (The panels even survived 18 capsizes without any drop in their output.) Solar power IS workable as are a number of other renewable energy sources.

These energy sources may not be workable in the United States where our addiction to fossil fuels is well established. Making the switch would be expensive and inconvenient, but hardly unworkable. The economist in the back of my mind says, "It would cripple the economy." Nonsense, we can put a man on the moon, but the moment someone suggests we should deal with the poison coming out of our exhaust pipes we hear the mantra, "It will cripple the economy." That's a load of garbage.

Fine, let's not begin the energy revolution in the United States or Europe or any other place where the economy is based on tapping into a centralized power grid. Let's begin with countries that are barely on the map, places like Zanskar, Ladok or Pashmir. What's to stop right-minded individuals (or governments) from taking the latest in solar and wind technologies to light up schools and hospitals in distressed and developing nations? Once the price of satellite time comes down, these schools and hospitals can join the world dialogue over the Internet with THEIR laptops and THEIR satellite phones. Not only would this add new voices to the world dialogue, it would give them a model for industrial development that is not based on burning trees, gas, oil or any other modern pollutant.

One might take as a model the revolution in computer processors. Once everyone tied into a mainframe, and people fought about who should be allowed to use the available time and memory space. Then a bunch of Silicon Valley titans cut the umbilical cord to the mainframe and freed us to run around the world with powerful computers tucked under our arms. Still, most of us must tap into some power grid to operate these powerful new tools. Why not cut those cords too?

It is not such a bad dream. Is it?

October 23

I was late in getting up this morning. The brainstorm reflected above is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It was almost 9:00 AM before I took up the oars this morning. There is still very little wind.

Yesterday afternoon I began to alter my course to the South to catch a favorable current that Jenifer Clark (one of the world's foremost experts on the meanderings of ocean currents) brought to my attention. To the North is a warm eddy that circulates clockwise. To the South is a cold eddy that circulates counter-clockwise. Ideally, if I pass between 6:00 (the South side) of the warm eddy and 12:00 (the North side) of the cold eddy, I should get a nice push to the east. I may not have gotten far enough South in time to take full advantage of the current, but the water here definitely feels heavy on the oars. There is no doubt that there is a current with me. It should last for the next day or two. This is a lovely gift from the ocean.

As ever,
Tori