A year ago today TC and I woke up on a narrowboat, not knowing that our lives had changed quite profoundly. We had rented it with her sister Lisa and David to putter up the Leeds and London canal toward Skipton. We noticed a Victorian house across the hedge. Last summer TC and I had flourished like graduate students in Glasgow and were committed to steer toward happy. They lived in a Glasgow flat and felt a houseplant needing a bigger pot so when David noticed the house was for sale I uttered, “you buy the house; we’ll buy the boat.” They did within weeks, we did in January then moved on board in May and here we are afloat.
A narrowboat is a British curiosity suited to the canals dug by shovel in the 1700’s that released the industrial revolution. Quaint now, they connected slave-grown Memphis cotton and Carolina tobacco with hand-dug coal to change the world, enabling Britain to rule the waves and subjugate people of many nations. They were built with short-sighted private capital, so they are too narrow for modern freight. In France, they were built by government wider and remain useful to this day, muttering about the daft Brits. Daft or not, more than 2,000 miles crisscross England today with thousands of people living on them full-time. In the cities many do so to escape high rent and impossible purchase prices. Our boat cost about $70,000 once we added solar and fiddled around. A new boat could easily be twice that but still a fraction of landlocked flat.
Called Fiddlesticks by the musicians who previously owned it, our floating tiny house narrowboat is about seven feet wide and 56 feet long; about 350 square feet. Small, not primitive: full kitchen, shower, radiators and wood-stove, double-glazed windows, skylights and internet. Solar runs everything but moving the boat. A British double bed is like a wide single, so I remodeled for a proper queen sized bed to run crosswise. With the slow nautical rock, we could sleep for 20 hours.
Canals are only 4 feet deep and don’t flow like rivers, but they do require water to operate the locks. This year has been the most severe drought in a century leaving the reservoirs dry. Our canal has been essentially locked down 5 miles to the west and 17 to the east. So, we have been forced to be utterly happy in the wonderful little town of Skipton filling up our water tank with a hose snaked through David and Lisa’s hedge.
Skipton has been a market town with a castle for 800 years that kept the Scots to the north. We personally love the Scots, but they do tend to carry off the livestock. The castle was home to generations of Cliffords who helped get King John to sign the Magna Carta and later start the British East India Company. The working people raised sheep and worked in the textile factories until quite recently when tourism arose. This is the gateway to the graceful green Dales which All Creatures Great and Small made.
There are few Americans. I ran into one in an electronics store who exclaimed, “Oh no! I am SO disappointed to meet you!” I wasn’t thrilled to see her, either. Let the colonists stay with JD Vance and his ilk down in the Cotswold.
Most everything I call “work” can be done better here. I usually type until people wake up 5 hours later on the East Coast and then often zoom. I bike 15 miles up the towpath, come back and do it again. This is probably the most productive writerly time of my life as the Leading Causes of Life Initiative grows ever more global. Our new book, Taking Responsibility for Complex Human Ecosystems: Deep Accountability, has a British publisher and will be released in a few weeks at Cambridge University. I’m on a direct flight to India in a couple weeks; South Africa is in the same zone.
The US political wildfire is making room for new thinking about how to achieve mercy and justice. Hold.Health drawning from global networks of colleagues is finding similar traction. TC and I keep our home base in North Carolina but in many ways Skipton is the center of our world of work because it is, well, more in the center of the world.
We hang with the Quakers here, where they have met in the same sandstone floored space for more than three centuries. I am quiet for a full hour for the first time in my life, amazing my friends and family. We stood quietly with them in front of city hall remembering the Hiroshima bombing. They now convene the broad faith community about Gaza noting that more Palestinians have been killed there than the in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I don’t think I would have heard that in Winston-Salem.
We Americans have been proud of our civic culture, but it is now mostly withered with tribal whining. Here people do the peoples’ work with many key tasks done by volunteers. The canal infrastructure would collapse otherwise. Today on the way to dump my waste cassette, one stood in drenching rain hoping to engage potential volunteers and donors. Fierce.
The food is good and pubs abundant. They are not like American bars, expecting families, dogs and children. Our grandson won at Bingo last week. I’m a malbec guy, but frankly fresh hand-pulled Yorkshire lager is better. Easy to find live music. And audience at open mic nights knows the words to the union mining and waterway ballads along with Delta Blues.
Our move toward the Island happened the same time as American went off into the formless void of stupid. We expected Kamala and can’t explain any of it to our friends here. Sad demise but the world moves on without it. The Brits have found life after empire and so will we.
Intellectually, there can be no “American academy” anymore; entirely corrupted, intimidated and ashamed of itself as one institution after another lays low when we need them most. Any intellectual roots jettisoned within months were obviously not very rooted at all. Nothing worse than my former hospitals, so annoyingly proud of equity, now abandoned like gum on their fancy shoes.
The dynamics of faith, health, climate, governance, peace, justice all transcend any one little people. Where better to think about that than on a canal dug by poor people at the beginning of the globalized industrial economy? And so we do.
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