This Fourth of July, my social media feeds — and, for once, television broadcasts too — were filled with tall ships.
This wasn’t an ordinary maritime festival. Sail4th 250, the maritime centerpiece of America’s 250th birthday celebration, was billed as the largest peacetime maritime gathering in American history. The Italian Navy’s Amerigo Vespucci arrived in New York after a multiyear circumnavigation of the globe. Four of the five surviving sister ships of the famed Gorch Fock class, including the USCGC Eagle, reunited for the Five Sisters Cup race from New York to Boston. The Dutch barque Europa, legendary in the tall ship world for her ocean and polar voyages, made the crossing as well.
And, just as they did during America’s Bicentennial in 1976, the tall ships stole the show.
All day, my phone filled with videos from friends and family because everyone in my life knows that if there are tall ships involved, I want to know about it. The funny thing is that my active life in tall ships lasted only about three years.
But I became a tall ship person much earlier than that.
I was a fourth-grade student at Taft Elementary School in Orange, California, when I first boarded the brig Pilgrim at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point. The overnight living history program was the culmination of weeks spent studying California history, maritime trade and Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s “Two Years Before the Mast.”
We learned knots and sea shanties and were split into crews. In hindsight, it should come as no surprise that I was assigned to the galley crew.
We learned about hardtack, salt beef and scurvy. We made stew because somebody had to feed the crew, and that “somebody” was a group of 10-year-olds. Looking back after a career spent thinking about food systems, agriculture and food security, I have to admit that perhaps my professional trajectory was set in motion aboard a 19th-century merchant brig.
More than 30 years later, I can say with complete confidence that it was the most impactful field trip of my entire K-12 education.
Then I forgot about tall ships until, years later and by complete happenstance, I met several Ocean Institute staff members at a street festival. They invited me to a tall ship festival in Dana Point the following weekend. I spent the day photographing tall ships under sail during a mock cannon battle.
I was hooked.
I started as a tall ship fangirl. Soon I was volunteering aboard Californian, the official tall ship of California. Eventually, I found myself back aboard Pilgrim, this time teaching the same programs that had captivated me as a child.
Along the way, I worked as a boat cook and yacht chef, crossed an ocean, sang more sea shanties than any reasonable person should know and eventually designed and built the galley aboard Californian after she was donated to the Maritime Museum of San Diego.
The remarkable thing about the tall ship community is how small it is. It has been more than 20 years since I last served on a crew, and I would still bet that I know someone aboard at least one of the ships participating in Sail4th 250. If not, I certainly know someone who knows them.
Perhaps all of this has resonated more deeply because, later this month, I’ll return to California for my 30th high school reunion. Like many people approaching a milestone reunion, I’ve found myself thinking about the experiences that shaped the person I became.
As I watched the tall ships sail into New York Harbor, I realized that if someone asked me where my adult life really began, I might have to answer: in fourth grade, aboard the brig Pilgrim, sometime around dinner, when I was assigned to galley duty.
Some of the most important parts of our lives are not always the longest chapters.
Perhaps that’s why the tall ships will always steal the show for me. I may have hung up my rigging belt years ago, but I never really left the experience or the community behind. Once you’ve been a tall ship person, you’re always a tall ship person.
No recipe this week because no one in their right mind needs a recipe for salt beef or hardtack.
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