Visitors to the Calhoun Walmart can also get a $30 medical checkup or a $25 teeth cleaning, or talk about their anxieties with a counselor for $1 a minute.
Prices for those services and more are clearly listed on bright digital billboards in a cozy waiting room inside a new Walmart Health center. Walk-ins are welcome, but most appointments are booked online beforehand. No insurance? No problem. Need a lab test on a Sunday? Sure thing.
Walmart “care hosts” take customers from the waiting area to one of 12 care rooms in the 6,500-square-foot facility. Afterward, patients are steered to the in-store pharmacy. While they wait for their prescriptions, they can visit the produce section and grab some veggies recommended by the doctor. Later, there’s even a free Zumba class in the community room.
Dubbed the “Economy Skynest,” the new cabin section is the culmination of input from hundreds of passengers and three years of research and development at Air New Zealand’s Auckland Hangar 22 innovation center.
The Economy Skynest will consist of a mini sleeper cabin with three bunks on each side of a narrow aisle plus a stepladder to access the two top beds on either side. Details are still scant, but it should be located somewhere in the coach cabin and each bed should be over 58 cm wide (22.8 inches) and 200 cm long (78.7 inches) long. Passengers who book a bed can expect a full-size pillow, sheets, a blanket, ear plugs and privacy curtains as well as lighting options designed to help travelers sleep. The airline is still exploring options like putting in reading lights, air nozzles and personal USB outlets. Passengers would still fly in normal economy seats, but be able to use the Skynest to sleep during some portion of the flight.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Denis Pombriant who has been a CRM industry analyst for 20 years, spotting trends and advising clients. He has written three books including "Solve for the Customer" and "You Can't Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It." He has also turned his attention to the climate and sustainability in his newest book, "The Age of Sustainability." He recently also wrote about health and antiserums around the current crisis here. He lives and works in the Boston area and travels to California very frequently. Here he writes about how his painting takes him away from science and tech in his day job:
I was once struck by the way martial arts are practiced, especially, though not exclusively, using the Japanese idea of a “doh” or “dao” which roughly translates as a “way” connotating a philosophy or doctrine. People who know me will not find this surprising. The essence of this approach, which can be seen in martial arts like karate, judo, and taekwondo, is that you practice the art, striving for perfection, knowing you will never really achieve it. It’s the pursuit that matters.
This teaches humility and patience given the realization that perfection is not possible in this life. It’s also very liberating that, with perfection off the table, the focus can be on sustained improvement over many years. This appealed to me as I set out a few years ago to figure out visual art, specifically drawing and painting because all my life, I really sucked at it.
What appealed to me was the low-tech approach and the low cost. I’m a believer that whatever one does, a hobby should be diametrically different from what we do in our work-lives. Things haven’t changed much in painting since the invention of the collapsible tin tube to hold pre-mixed paint in the middle of the 19th century. The tin tube enabled artists to take their easels outdoors to paint “en plein air.” The result was Impressionism and the art world has never been the same. The tin tube was a disruptive innovation, another reason I like art.
Stuff I have learned
For everyone who thinks they can’t do art, there is hope. In a 1979 book, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” Betty Edwards unlocked for average people like me the secret of drawing, painting, and generally enhancing creativity. We spend most of our time in the left side of our brains where logic and language are centered. The right side of the brain is home to spatial perception and other things related to creativity and it doesn’t communicate very well. Doing art is a matter of accessing the right side of the brain and then shutting up. When I am in that “zone” I can’t speak much and time flies by. Later, I can look at my work and recognize where my brain was when I was painting a particular part.
Other stuff I learned includes the rules of perspective which are ridiculously easy to learn though surprisingly most people don’t. When I first learned perspective, it was a revelation. What I’d always thought of as three-dimensional vision only gave me about 2.5 dimensions; I’d never seen things in real 3D before though now I always do.
There’s a lot of chemistry involved in painting. For instance, the solvents you use, turpentine, or water have a profound influence on how you work and what you can achieve. Perhaps more interestingly, mixing colors is almost an art in itself. There are cool and warm versions of every color and some are transparent while others are opaque. The green you get from mixing blue and yellow is completely dependent on the blue and yellow you start with. So, a typical palette of paint might include a dozen different colors, including some that would seem redundant.
What I do
I’ve concentrated on landscape and still life painting though there are a few portraits and abstracts in the pile in my office and lately I’ve given a lot of attention to the human form (stay tuned). My wife won’t let me hang anything in the house except for the powder room on the first floor, which I have designated, somewhat ironically, the “salon de refusee” in homage to the Impressionists.
I had to learn early on that I was not creating a photograph, such realism is beyond me and if the scholarship is to be believed it was very difficult to achieve even for artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer. They allegedly used optics developed in the universities in Holland to project an image onto the canvass, which they then painted. There was a delightful documentary, “Tim’s Vermeer,” a few years ago that showed how this was done. The producer was the illusionist Penn Jillette. His partner, Raymond Teller, directed. Boy can they can spot an illusion!
How I work in layers
Most people I know develop paintings in layers. I start with a drawing that I then transfer it to the canvass and then paint in monochrome to give me a sense of the values. For instance, the sky is always brightest, the foreground next and its colors are most saturated while the background, at least in landscape paintings, pales with distance from the viewing plane. This provides a 3D effect called atmospheric perspective.
Layering also gives you a chance to play with applying translucent colors over more opaque ones. The result can provide a shimmering effect perfected by the Impressionists.
My pictures are okay, not great, kind of appropriate for my skill level (maybe I’m an Imperfectionist). I like to play around with reality in homage to the surrealists, people like Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte and one of my favorite American surrealists, Gertrude Abercrombie, a Chicago artist of the mid-twentieth century.
You can see Abercrombie’s influence in my painting “Schrodinger’s Cat” as well as a small homage to Magritte. Erwin Schrodinger was a quantum physicist and Nobel Prize winner who did foundational work in Quantum Mechanics, but you can research that one. In that painting I try to depict the quantum probability of a cat being in a picture on a wall and simultaneously sitting in a doorway overlooking a beach. Magritte was famous for that green apple and Abercrombie liked doors opening onto strange places. Hopefully, this preserves my standing as a geek.
“Blue Heron” depicts a big pond where I walk my dog; no physics involved here.
And geeking out one more time, “End of the World” is my depiction of the asteroid hitting the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago that ended the reign of the dinosaurs making way for us and other mammals.
Right now, I’m working on a piece with a horse sticking its head out of a barn door at sunset and also a beach scene from my recent vacation.
Why do I do this? I don’t know! Must be a right brain thing. But that’s my Doh and I’m sticking with it.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Catherine Marenghi, a poet and writer living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She was formerly a publicist, business writer, journalist, and entrepreneur in the Massachusetts high-tech industry. More information is at www.marenghi.com. She had previously contributed to this series on Genealogy - her decades-long search for her roots in Italy. Here she writes about her new life in Mexico:
Like many people who have had a long career in the high-tech world, I had a public self and a private self. The public self was a responsible citizen. I earned money, served employers and clients, provided for my family. I saved for my son’s college education and for my retirement. I invested and planned for a future whose parameters I could only guess.
My private self was a poet. Few people even knew of that side of me. I quietly wrote poems, occasionally submitting them for publication, but never had the time or the energy to develop my creative side to its fullest.
When my son graduated from college in 2013 and was finally launched into the world, my private self said, “It’s my turn!” I felt like a lab animal sprung from my cage. Still gainfully employed in corporate marketing at a global software company, I starting allocating my precious vacation weeks to writers’ retreats and conferences.
The first was a writers’ retreat in bucolic Vermont. I was prepared to write poetry all week, but one evening, while exchanging stories over the dinner table, I found my fellow writers staring in disbelief when I told my personal history – something I had never done before. They frankly didn’t believe me when I said I was raised in a one-room farmhouse with no indoor plumbing.
Then the retreat owner said to me, “You should write a memoir.”
The idea had never occurred to me. I didn’t think my life was important enough to warrant a memoir. And I had kept my private story secret my entire life, even from my closest friends. I always wanted to be known for what I am and what I achieve, not to be pitied as the poor girl raised in rural poverty. But the timing was right. I was in my late 50s, and no longer worried what people thought of me. It happened, too, that I was in the process of cleaning out my mother’s house after her recent death. I was finding documents, pictures, and a family history I had never known.
That’s when I started writing Glad Farm: A Memoir, about the thriving flower farm my parents had in the late 1940s, before I was born. I never knew, until I searched my mother’s cedar chest, that my parents grew gladiolus. The farm prospered and then failed when the gladiolus fell from popularity, and I had been raised on the same flower fields never knowing their origin. My parents never talked about it.
I worked on the book obsessively, nights and weekends, while still working full-time in corporate marketing. The book was published in 2016, and I launched it in a rented conference room overlooking the Charles River in Cambridge, MA, in the same building where I worked every day, in front of my co-workers and friends.
Meanwhile I had also started attending writers’ conferences, including the annual San Miguel Writers’ Conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, encouraged by a friend who had traveled there. At the time I knew nothing of Mexico. I spoke no Spanish. But the conference inspired me with world-renown keynote speakers like Alice Walker and Mary Carr, informative panels on the publishing business, workshops to hone my craft, and the company of fellow writers.
And San Miguel itself was dazzling: a gorgeous Spanish colonial town, high in the Sierra Madres. I was seduced by its exquisite architecture, draped in bougainvillea vines, drenched in color and sunlight. I felt strangely happy, and young, when I walked its cobblestone streets. I would sit on a bench in its central Jardin, staring up at the soaring pink gothic spires of its parish church, the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, and wonder why I had never known of this magical place.
In San Miguel I found reemerging in me the young poet I once was in my college years. I was even dressing the same way as I did in my youth, wearing blue jeans, Frye boots and peasant blouses. A feeling of well-being, and intense belonging, washed over me.
I attended the same writers’ conference in 2014, 2015, and every year since, allocating a week’s vacation in February each year. To further nudge me toward San Miguel, Boston experienced consecutively the three worst winters in its history. Since the conference is in February, I found myself making the painful transition from Mexican sun to blistering Boston winter at its worst.
Finally I said, enough. No more digging out my car from under mountains of snow. I am going to retire a little early, and live the creative life I had been deferring so many years. After my memoir was published in 2016, and feeling encouraged by the positive response, I quit my high-paying job, sold my house, and moved lock, stock and barrel to San Miguel de Allende, where I own a lovely house and live as a permanent resident.
It's not that I have totally abandoned technology in favor of the rarefied poet’s life. Technology has enabled me to participate in readings and book clubs anywhere in the world. For example, my book Glad Farm has been the selection of book clubs as far away as Bogota, Columbia, and I have joined their discussions via Facetime and Skype.
And after a miserable experience publishing Glad Farm with a traditional publisher (the outfit abruptly shut down and ran off with all its authors’ earnings), I self-published a second edition on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (formerly Amazon CreateSpace), and receive monthly royalties and sales reports like clockwork. It’s a beautiful thing. (Vinnie's note - if you want to see how efficient the Amazon process is, read my post here)
I actively market my writing on social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and my own website. Facebook in particular lets me connect with current and prospective readers in real-time, run surveys, and post upcoming events. And Submittable lets me submit my poems and stories to publications worldwide without ever leaving my home.
I’ve never regretted the move to Mexico. The town has a vibrant creative heart that pulsates with activity. Besides the writers’ conference, there are monthly author events, and a Poetry Café hosts monthly poetry readings. I have since joined the board of the Poetry Café and have frequently read my work before warm and receptive audiences. I belong to author groups and book clubs. There is also a lively arts community, and often the literary and visual arts come together in art gallery readings.
My first poetry book was recently published, Breaking Bread, and I am actively researching and writing an historic fiction based on my Italian immigrant grandparents. I continually publish my poetry in literary journals in the U.S. and Mexico and approach all my writing from the perspective of a poet at heart.
I often travel to the U.S. to see family and friends – the low cost of living in Mexico makes it possible. And I don’t regret waiting so long to do the creative work I always wanted to do. My career in high tech put my son through college, with no debt, and gave me the retirement funds to live in the most beautiful place on earth.
I’ve never believed in impetuously “following your bliss” if you don’t have a way to make a living. My creative writing is not enough to pay my bills. It rarely is. But through practical planning, I have found a way to pursue my passion while living in comfort and surrounded by beauty. There is no money in poetry – but there is also no poetry in money. I have found a way to bridge the two in el corazon de Mexico.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is my former Gartner colleague, Bill Kirwin. (BTW, I have tried hard to balance the topics in this series and the gender, age and ethnicity of the contributors, but have failed badly on one dimension - this is already the 4th Bill in the series this year!). Bill introduced the TCO concept to the world while at Gartner and advised several clients on IT economics and value realization. He has continued at the International Institute of IT Economics to provide thought leadership as a researcher on the economic and financial impact of new IT paradigms such as AI, Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data. He has his fingers in several other areas including administering the Gartner Alumni Facebook page. Here he writes about his wicked sense of humor that most of us have enjoyed for - well, forever:
My passion is humor. For as long as I can remember, I have found the funny side of life. When I was a kid I would perform skits for my family, often standing in front of the TV to gain their attention. After I broke out of a shell of shyness, I was the class comedian in middle school leading to a certain wise guy notoriety with the administration – ‘nuff said.
This proclivity of finding something amusing in almost any situation led me to the one-liners and puns. My mind constantly churns phrases and words that with a few twists can make a mundane situation funny. To wit – a friend was telling me about his bout with a bladder problem that necessitated an operation to correct. I immediately asked him if that changed his IP address. I have used that pun in numerous occasions, each one appearing spontaneous.
My Connecticut license plate is PUNDIT. That works on several levels:
My vocation as an IT industry analyst forecasting the future makes me a pundit of sorts
I love puns
When I score on Wordplay, you could say I punned it
Humor has served me well in my personal and professional life. I have used humor to seal deals, to maintain connections and to make new friends. I use it to make small talk at social events. I even can attribute my marriage and its duration to the humor I share with my wife Marilyn. However, my attempts at humor with my three daughters has mixed reviews. I once took the invoice from the phone company and put it on my head and declared – “Look, I’m a telephone Bill.” My oldest still brings that one up.
In most of my life no topic has been off limits for a humorous treatment. Over the past ten years it has been tempered by political division, gender issues, racial awareness and perhaps by some limited maturation on my part. I still find humor in many of these domains, but I share much less of it. The occasional blonde joke still slips through. Having recently re-watched the Mad Men series, I honestly don’t miss the old days. That was then, this is now.
Today, I continue to read the Sunday comics and scan for good ideas to build into my repertoire. I maintain a modest email based “jokenet” with about fifty regulars that contribute and appreciate funnies. I used to send out one per day, but now I batch them and send them out a couple of times a month. Efficiency! Personal Productivity! I really don’t have the time or bandwidth to scour other joke sources or even mobile apps for jokes – my jokenet contributors keep me busy.
On the other hand, I seldom go to Comedy Clubs, where I find the humor too caustic. I’m a big fan of Mrs. Maisel on the Amazon channel. I watch every episode of The Daily Show, now with Trevor Noah. But truthfully, I am my own funniest person. Having a laugh and getting a laugh are two different experiences.
I have had many passions in my life – surfing, skiing, boating, racecars, music, but each has had its course. But humor has been my go-to through all those phases. I think it’s a keeper.
Today, and actually in about five minutes, I will take my dogs out for a hike in the woods and I will think up one liners and practice on them. They are a kind and patient audience…in the meantime, enjoy this I just dredged from my jokenet contributors.
Photographer and Fashion Institute of Technology professor Jessica Wynne has spent the last year documenting the numbers, symbols, and models drawn by mathematicians onto chalkboards. The photos capture the thought processes and physical efforts of professionals in a medium that has been largely abandoned.
Wynne tells Colossal that she enjoys photographing the dusty work surfaces because of “their beauty, mystery and the pleasure of creating a permanent document of something that is ephemeral.” The “Do Not Erase” photo series, soon to be published in a book by Princeton University Press for release in 2020, includes boards from institutions and universities around the world. Wynne hopes that viewers can appreciate the aesthetic of the worked surfaces while “simultaneously appreciating that the work on the board represents something much deeper, beyond the surface.”
Popular Mechanics has a nice history of Disney's animatronic evolution
In 1969, with construction on Florida’s Disney World commencing, development began on the next evolution of the audio-animatronic: a strictly hydraulic non-character-specific tool kit that allowed for standardized, adjustable, and efficient builds out of the dozens of animatronics that would be needed for the new park. This became known as the A1 figure.
The A100 debuted in 1989 in the form of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Great Movie Ride at Orlando’s Disney-MGM Studios (now Disney’s Hollywood Studios). Like the A1, the A100 is really a tool kit allowing engineers and builders to use certain components as needed, and there are still plenty of fully functional A100 in the parks today. Many of the Jack Sparrows in the Pirates of Caribbean rides are A100s. As well as George Washington and Abe Lincoln in Orlando’s Hall of Presidents—so is Donald Trump.
Work on the next evolutionary step in audio-animatronics—the A1000—was already in motion (so to speak) before the 2015 Star Wars attraction announcement. Yancey and Thomas say their team were working on eight different sizes of A1000 for about a year before being asked to take what they learned and apply it to creating customized Star Wars figures. It was perfect timing.
The goal of the A1000 program was to create a family of standardized electric figures that provides more control and design repeatability for both build and maintenance purposes. So Disney pioneered proprietary software programs that provide predictive renderings and pre-visualizations that assist in everything from seeing how a figure moves in a costume to predicting when components need replacing. But the ultimate goal is to get as close a lifelike performance as possible.
With a vertical leap of 10 feet, a robot performs a gymnastics routine no human could ever replicate. This robot does not feel pain, and it is easily repaired after a fall, so it takes risks no human would take. In the next event, a martial arts competition, we will watch two humanoid robots fight to the death — if you can call it that.
Welcome to the 2026 Robot Olympics. There is no event planned like the one we’ve described here, but we believe this kind of event is on its way.
Back in 1990, a Robot Olympics was held in Glasgow, Scotland, and it included simple demonstrations like obstacle avoidance and pole balancing.
Robots will be featured heavily at Tokyo’s Olympics next year, including as equipment carriers and mascots, but they will not be competing.
With robots like Boston Dynamics’ Atlas already performing gymnastic feats most humans can’t imitate, it seems likely we’ll start having major competitions where these robots compete for medals and countries show off advanced robots they’ve designed.
For Procter & Gamble, that startup studio is known as P&G Ventures, which has created four consumer-facing brands since it was founded in 2015. The studio’s aim is to work outside P&G’s current categories to find areas where the company could create the next $1 billion brands that could eventually fold into its portfolio. So far, the studio has launched natural insecticide Zevo, digital skin analyzer Opte, skin-care treatment Metaderm and menopause brand Pepper & Wits.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Bill Kutik, who for 30 years, has been known for what he’s done inside rooms: starting the HR Tech Conference, moderating 117 panels, writing hundreds of tech columns and hosting his video series Firing Line with Bill Kutik®. Here he reveals his secret life outdoors:
Financial planners are right: Once even semi-retired, you'll spend a lot more money on travel. I’ve always craved being on the edges of Nature where two of her essential elements collide – mountain tops, canyon walls, beaches, oceans (open or pounding on cliffs). Now with more time and money, I’m exploring even wilder edges – at the ends of the earth!
As the founding editor of Backpacker magazine – still published by Rodale Press on paper after 48 years! – I’d always planned my early adventures and did them the hard way. Often hauling 50 pounds on my back, walking for days to get to a spectacular place. There I was delighted to watch the sun go down and come up, even while having to sleep in a tent on the ground and – violating all civilized norms – cooking sitting down and going to the bathroom standing up!
Middle age found me seeking more comfortable wilderness adventures with the company that pioneered helicopter skiing in the Bugaboos, a spikey mountain range in Canada. Their daily fees of $1,000 to $2,000 per person had financed building expensive wilderness ski lodges. After keeping them empty all summer for years, they finally came to their senses and created a heli-hiking program that cut out all the hard parts!
The Guilty Pleasure of Using a Helicopter for Hiking!
A helicopter brings you to the lodge, where you get everything needed to hike. It deposits you, a guide and your group of nine others on a spectacular ridge above timberline. When that breath-taking walk ends an hour or two later at a 3,000-foot drop-off, the guide radios in the chopper to take you to another! All day long. Nights are spent in the lodge eating a splendid meal at a table for 10 and sleeping in a comfy bed with a private bathroom. And ski racks on the walls.
I started sailing the same tough way after learning as an adult. Once pulled into racing, becoming navigator was a natural with an easy pivot from topographical maps to nautical charts. My favorite races ran continuously for two or three days and nights on open ocean on sailboats 40-to-68-feet long. As navigator, I was always working – making the races seem like a week – catching cat naps in full foul weather gear lying on the sail bags on the cabin floor.
I started at the perfect time in 1980 as navtech took off, accomplishing ever more complicated tasks, and forcing the navigator into more strategic thinking. Sound familiar in enterprise software? It started with the question “Where are we now?” answered by interpreting the sine waves of Loran-A. That became “Where are we going?” plotted with the radio tower generated numbered “time difference lines” of Loran-C. Finally “How do we get there, and are we doing it most optimally?” just by looking at the GUI of chart-plotters with a real-time position overlaid from GPS. Just like business tech has made lots of low-level work obsolete.
Bring Your Apartment into the Wilderness
Eventually I skippered my own cruising boat. Well, OPB in the sailing world, “other people’s boats,” either borrowed or rented. Having navigated many cruises for others, I knew it had all the benefits of backpacking – staying overnight in beautiful places – with little of the physical effort and all the comforts of bringing your apartment along. Which secretly, I’d always wanted to do when camping instead of using a tent. A cruising sailboat, no matter how beautiful, is still just an RV like a motorhome, though much better designed.
Then I discovered Lindblad Expeditions had combined all my worlds. Unlike most cruise lines with ships having 3,000 cabins and indoor roller coasters, Lindblad has a growing fleet of four-star expedition boats (carrying 45 to 148 passengers). Instead of selling the cruising experience of being aboard, Lindblad emphasizes the expedition and the adventures to be had after being ferried ashore in 10-person inflatable Zodiacs. And how comfortable was it to explore the best places – always the hardest to get to – in torrid heat or freezing cold, never more than 15 minutes from the comfort and luxury of the boat!
But old habits die hard. I still prepared for their cruises as though I had to skipper the boat myself. Bringing all the right paper charts, a small Garmin GPS and hand-bearing compass (both standalone devices far superior to iPhone apps), and the traditional desk tools of navigation (parallel rules, dividers, pencils and erasers). All set up as a nav station on my cabin’s desk. Sometimes large enough not to move my laptop to the floor – with the all-voyage satellite WiFi package I’d purchase for $250 to stay connected 24/7 like at home. Great connectivity from satellites, even in Antarctica. And no problems with rain because unlike home dishes, shipboard dishes are encased in white domes.
NYT Says: Tourists Over-running Antarctica
No surprise: Tourists cover the earth just as thoroughly as the Internet. Two years ago, I ended a terrific three-week expedition to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island and the Antarctic Peninsula at this enormous dock in Ushuaia at the tip of South America, "The Gateway to Antarctica." One of the Orca scientists on board complained that his academic grants never covered travel so he was constantly hitching rides from that dock to Antarctica from the 30 (THIRTY!) big boats, some of them now Carnival Cruise Lines, taking tourists there. I had to find someplace less discovered.
Lindblad served up a new destination: Wrangel Island, which seemed perfect. A Russian wilderness nature preserve off the northeast coast of Arctic Siberia with no village except for the park rangers, the largest number of polar bears and walrus in the world and the last place wooly mammoths survived! When High Stakes in the High North told me only 500 people a year visited, I was sold. Particularly since Lindblad visiting the place – running three trips last summer carrying 100 passengers each – was increasing tourism by 60 percent!
But the charts!?! How do you get Russian charts? Happily, I discovered charts had undergone their own digital transformation! NOAA, and its foreign equivalents, had exited the chart printing, storage and shipping business, which always left them with thousands of out-of-date charts. Instead NOAA has licensed dozens of shops around the country to print their charts on-demand by sending the very latest huge graphic files to the shops’ giant laser printers! Got the two U.S. Bering Sea charts I needed (with both the Alaskan and Russian coasts) printed at a shop 15 minutes from my house!
Naturally, at least one company, East View Information Services in Minneapolis, had gone global and established similar electronic connections with countries around the world. Russian chart of Wrangel Island? No problem: It arrived exquisitely packaged in a mailing tube three days after talking with Josh Cardinal on the phone. He could have supplied me with a custom chart with English labels for a lot more money, but I can read Cyrillic from taking high school Russian.
So now I was ready to visit the officers of the National Geographic Orion with its “open bridge policy” allowing passengers entry anytime. There I quickly established my cred with the 32-year-old Swedish navigation officer by knowing most of the acronyms and data points on his dozen electronic displays. Then I whipped out my Russian Wrangel chart (he had the same one in a drawer), and we really got down to business finding out what the plans were for the trip. Basically, visiting one incredible place after another.
After leaving Nome, we docked in the Soviet-era town of Provideniya with its boring apartment blocks, where Russian immigration officials came aboard to check everyone’s passports and visas. Lindblad had hired two Russian nationals to live aboard and broker relations with all local authorities. On the way back, we went ashore and walked around. This time, we left when the paperwork was done and anchored off Cape Dezhnev, the northeastern tip of Siberia (and all of Asia!) forming the west side of the Bering Strait.
Ashore, we hiked to the remains of a 1,000-year-old village, whose inhabitants had lived off the sea and erected arches of whale ribs, also used as roof beams for their houses. I practiced my high school Russian with two soldiers stationed there in a tent. Leaving, our boat hung a left around the corner and steamed along Siberia's north coast to Kolyuchin Island, only three miles long, but lots going on. We did not land but circumnavigated in Zodiacs for a morning of viewing polar bears and walruses.
After lunch aboard, we were back in the Zodiacs to see thousands of birds in rookeries on the steep cliffs. Dinner was postponed by a pod of three humpback whales (a type of Baleen whale) feeding 20 yards off the bow. Swimming up out the water with mouths open to catch all the fish, their baleen (or huge filter) clearly visible.
On Wrangel we saw lots of bears and went ashore where we didn’t see them! The Russian park rangers carried shotguns and bear repellent because the polar bear is the only animal in the world that will smell a human from miles away and hunt you down for food! Grizzlies, nearly the same size, will mess with you if you mess with their cubs. But polar bears want to eat you: Yup, they are the top of the food chain. Thought you were? Surprise.
As we went ashore, all the deck officers kept watch outside the bridge with spotting scopes and binoculars looking for any bears heading our way. It was like a safari on foot in Africa, only you didn’t want to see the animals, except for the musk ox, Arctic buffalo that live outside year-round! We saw some from afar, which was enough for me since in 1980, field producing a documentary film in the Canadian Arctic, our bush pilot had buzzed a herd of musk ox sending them thundering across the tundra!
The highlight was visiting tiny Herald Island (not on the map), just two miles long and 37 miles northeast of Wrangel. The spikey landscape on Herald Island is an aberration like Bryce Canyon in Utah, not a typical Arctic landscape.
There normally solitary polar bears gathered in groups. Different animals all have their own group names. We all know about a “herd” of cattle or sheep, probably a “gaggle” of geese, maybe even a “pride” of lions. Well, a group of polar bears is called an “aurora,” like “aurora borealis.” Herald had plenty. Also an “ugly” of walrus, which seems so unfair given their beautiful tusks.
Auroras would come down the hills every morning to see if the sea had washed up anything large and edible. When finished, they would walk back up the hill following the switchbacks they had cut themselves! (click on image below to enlarge). That was my favorite thing besides seeing them come out of ocean-front caves and jump in and out of the water. (BTW, polar bears are classified as sea mammals like sea lions!) In short, what you’d only see them doing in the wild, not in captivity, where they lose their freedom but eat better and get to live longer.
The haul-outs of uglies were phenomenal: hundreds of walruses lying around on three different beaches, not making a sound but the smell filling our nostrils. When I complained to the Zodiac driver that we should get closer, he politely replied the last time they did, all the walruses jumped into the water. Disturbing the wildlife is an environmental no-no. So not all “sentiment” needs to be acted on – a tip for my HR friends.
One beach had two sets separated by the width of a sandy one-way city street. Clearly Hatfields and McCoys. Seeing them swim was a kick. Moving slowly, a dozen or more swim together with their heads and part of their tusks above the water. Sort of comical looking.
After they dive as deep as 300 feet to dig clams (their main food), they spout like a whale back at the surface but through their two nostrils, so quite a wide spray. Makes them easy to spot. Their whiskers are stiff as bone, controlled by muscles, and are used to sense all sorts of things.
We visited the ranger station on Wrangel, which had a collection of remarkable found objects including genuine mammoth tusks found sticking out of the gravel and various walrus and musk ox skulls.
Came upon one ox skull just hiking around, which was terrific.
Want to know about global warming near the poles? Historical September mean temperature on Wrangel was 32°. It was never below 48° when we went outside! As a result, the nearest sea ice and ice bergs were hundreds of miles north, disappointing my college roommate and travelling companion, Tom Harpin. My wife Nancy doesn’t even want to chance being cold on vacation.
So in July 2021, we are flying to the northern tip of Norway, boarding Lindblad’s new polar cruiser Endurance (see video below), which is a ruggedized ice-class Polar Class (PC5) vessel designed to navigate polar passages year-round. We will be visiting the Russian Arctic port of Murmansk and then steaming northeast to the islands of Novoya Zemlya, Ostrov Isachenko, Severmaya Zimlya and finally to 82° degrees North and Franz Josef Land. I’m sure Josh in Minnynowhere will have all the charts.
If you’ve never heard of any of them, that’s just fine with me.
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