Roots

Being a Navy brat, and later navigating my own Navy career, nothing I could call home ever left much dust on my shoes before being washed away with the next tide. Having retired in the same southern Maryland town where I finished my Navy career, I haven't felt anyplace drawing me back home. Yet, intriguing information that my older brother just discovered, now makes me feel like Calvert County, Maryland is where I belong anyway.

According to my brother, who has long been curious about the Gillett family genealogy, our

great¹¹grandparents are Leonard R. Calvert and Alicia Grace Calvert through their daughter Mary and son-in-law Isaac Chapline. George Calvert, my great¹⁰grandmother Mary's brother, was responsible for arranging the chartering of Maryland as a colony apart from Virginia. He was a baron with the title Lord Baltimore, after which there followed six others with the same title. I've long had a vague sense of being deeply rooted in America because family oral history noted that our ancestors arrived shortly after the pilgrims. Only now am I able to feel a special attachment to a historical place of origin, and it happens to be the place where I have been living for the past 15 years 😃.

I feel that through this discovery a personal desideratum has, in part, been fulfilled. As Sister Miriam MacGillis put it:

It really matters that we exist. Not to be shoppers or professionals or this-that-and-the-other -- those things are secondary; but what really matters is this deep, deep, deep identity and meaning.

Thirteen generations is deep.

Photo by Matti Frisk

In terms of genealogy, it is possible to go deeper, but Sister Miriam is referring to reaching even further back into cosmological unfoldings to gain awareness of evolutionary history as the ongoing process of creation.

My next step back in time is to finish reading the 940 page tome by Will Durant given to me by my late mother on The Reformation - A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300 - 1564 (covering Leonard and Alicia Calvert's early years). Reading this now is very fitting for another reason, as this year marks the 500th anniversary of Luther's nailing of the 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Come September, we will also try to attend our first Renaissance Festival, which is a pretty big deal in Maryland.

Canoe U - Who Knew?

Consciousness of global warming will rise with the seas. Other parts of the world, particularly the Far East, will gain consciousness earlier than America, but the truth will become clear to those of us on the east coast faster than you might expect. Studies modeling climate change often select the turn of the next century as the datum for reporting outcomes, leading casual readers to think that the interim won't pose a major problem. In the case of sea level rise, it is important to understand that there is no escape - we are already locked in to being driven back by the sea in many littoral areas regardless of how much we mitigate carbon emissions. The more salient question is: how quickly will the seas continue to rise?

Recently, scientists have found that there is a strong possibility that previous estimates of the inextirpable rate of sea level rise are short by half if the West Antarctic ice shelf calves off into the drink. A study done this year looks at what that could mean for east coast U.S. military bases. It also includes a scenario for the case that Antarctica doesn't fall apart. Either way, bases on the east coast will struggle to adapt to the sea's encroachment on their territory.

The Navy will gain awareness more quickly than other services as a result of port visits in Japan, the Philippines, and other countries where sea level rise is having a more dramatic effect. Several coastal military bases will also find themselves surrounded by communities suffering from increasingly flooded homes and businesses. As storm intensity increases, the rise in mean sea level can also be magnified by storm surges, so natural disasters will convince many more military leaders of the problem sometime in the next two decades.

Annapolis, though hardly the most severely impacted, has a recent litany of incidents that serve to raise awareness of not only the Navy community, but also Maryland lawmakers who convene about half a mile up the street from the frequently flooded dock area. Even without the new alarm over Antarctica, projections are for an increase of flooding events to 180 times per year by 2030. The Naval Academy has already seen an increase in flooding and can expect to lose all of its athletic fields along with several buildings over the long term.

Photo: Bill Taylor 

There will probably be those from the "ships at sea" school who try to capitalize on the expansion of their nautical domain, but they will be outnumbered by sand crabs who won't appreciated being flooded out of their secure nooks. I wouldn't be surprised to see an increasing number of midshipmen being steered into oceanography or other new environmental majors in the coming years.