Different Slants

“OK”, you are saying, “enough about stuff already”.  This is the last of it, I promise.  It is just that I think it is important we understand our relationship with our stuff if we are to understand ourselves.

Where did it all come from?

The story starts in 1984 when Mary and I returned to the U.S. from 9 years of sailing around the Caribbean and other places.  We sailed our boat to Florida and within a couple of weeks I had a job offer – in California.  We flew out to L.A. with just our clothes.  That was all we had relevant to living ashore.  After  a week or two in a company paid for motel, we moved into a furnished apartment.  The job was to be in L.A. for just a few months then it would shift to the Baltimore area.  There was no point in accumulating much stuff in L.A. since we would just have to lug it back to the east coast.  I did however, buy three things, a television, a computer and a 1976 AMC Pacer – otherwise known as a self-propelled solar oven.  When the job moved to Baltimore, we packed all we owned into the Pacer and drove to the new location.

Once in Baltimore we started to settle in.  The first purchase was a used bed.  Shortly after that, two filing cabinets and a door to build a table for the computer.  Then a cousin donated a table and chairs so we didn’t have to eat sitting on the floor.  That job lasted only a year.  The next job was back in L.A. again.

This time the company paid for a moving van.  All our stuff, including the Pacer, filled half the van.

By now, Mary was pregnant.  We rented a nice three bedroom house in Lawndale and furnished it with stuff we found at yard sales.  Now we were getting into “stuff” big time.  We bought washers and dryers, sofas and chairs and of course all the “stuff” first time parents are told they must have.  I found a ten-foot long, floor-to-ceiling bookcase at a swap meet and set about trying to fill it (50 linear feet) with technical manuals and books.  I became interested in radio controlled model airplanes and acquired the necessary trappings for that hobby.

Four years later we moved a few miles to Manhattan Beach.  This required lots of boxes and renting a truck.  This place came with a garage that was useless for keeping a car but had a nice workbench.  There were great electronic swap meets in the area and how can anyone resist buying stuff that was really cool technology just a few years ago and now sells at a 95% discount?

In a few more years came another move.  This time 500 miles to Mountain View, California.  We filled the company paid for van, plus my camper and Mary’s car.  Mark Twain wrote “Three moves equal one fire”.  I found that true from an organizational perspective but, after a fire you actually throw things away.  After a move you still have everything, you just can’t find it.

We rented a large, beautiful 3 bedroom house with attached 2 car garage.  While unpacking, I noticed a few boxes that had never been opened after the previous move.  I thought “I’ll probably need that stuff someday and there is plenty of room here so I’ll just throw it under the workbench”.  More furniture, books, computers, office furniture equipment, etc.

Four more years and it was time for the Big Move.  The stars, financial markets and real estate all aligned and we bought a house in Sunnyvale.  It took 5 trips with a rented truck including stops to drop off surplus major appliances to the friends who helped us move.  This was the first time we filled a new house on the day we moved in.  The year was 2001.  We made a conscious decision to quit accumulating stuff.

That is how we came to have so much stuff (though friends told us we hardly had anything).  In 2009 we agreed that we wanted to return to the cruising lifestyle.  That meant divesting ourselves of 26 years of accumulated stuff.  We began having yard sales and giving things away to friends.  Things we could not sell were hauled to Goodwill or Weird Stuff, a surplus electronics store.  The house went on the market.  We spent months going through things and determining the best way to get rid of them.

How do we get rid of it all?

You would think disposing of ones possessions would be an easy thing to do.  Not so.  You don’t want to rent a dumpster and just chuck all their stuff into it.  After all, this is your stuff.  It is really good stuff.  You paid a lot of money for all this stuff, you ought to be able to get some of that money back.

Some stuff can in fact be sold if you are willing to put the time and energy into it.  We were not so attached to our stuff and did not hold it in such high regard.  We mostly went the yard sale route.  The way this worked, we would drag stuff out of the garage from 7:30 till 11:00 when we ran out of driveway space, then rest for an hour and then cart (seemingly) all of it back in from 12:00 till 2:00.  We knew things were being sold because we always had a wad of cash in our pockets at the end of the exercise but, the volume of stuff did not seem to change much.  In deed, we kept finding more stuff.  I found power tools I didn’t know I owned.  We found stuff we couldn’t identify.  It was like people had been breaking into our house at night and leaving stuff.

There were some things that did not sell at the yard sales.  These we tried to give away to various charitable organizations.  We were surprised to discover that many charities will not take just anything you offer them.  Some can be as picky as the yard sale customers.  There were other things that had sentimental value, mostly photographs and family heirlooms.  These we tried to pawn off on family.  Our son, age 24, would have none of it.  Some simply went into the rubbish bin.

Then there were the 30 years of financial records.  Until recently, your social security number was printed on every bank statement and account summary sent to you.  Why did I keep all this stuff for so long?  I guess because I had someplace to put it.  Now it had to be shredded.

Eventually, by May, we had reduced the stuff to what we thought it made sence to keep on the new boat.  This was mostly clothing, tools, a few books, and the dinghy left from our previous boat.  But the new boat is 5,427 miles (great circle route) away.

How do we get it there?

We looked at a number of shipping companies on the internet and found basic shipping quotes to be less than we expected.  If you want door-to-door delivery, the prices are much higher.  We also found weight did not matter, it was volume that counted.  There is a 1 cubic meter minimum price so reduction of “stuff” below 1 cubic meter does not save you any money.  That determined how hard we would try to reduce our stuff.

We went with a company called APX with a warehouse in South San Francisco.  They offered to ship from San Fransisco to Rotterdam for about $450 (plus destination charges) if I handled customs and transport at each end.  That seemed reasonable.  We started packing.  The result was 15 boxes.  I am a fairly efficient packer, meaning my boxes are full and heavy – I don’t ship air.

One cubic meter does not fit into a Honda Accord.  Not a problem.  You see U-Haul trucks all over California with “$19.95 per day” painted on them.  I rented one.  I took the smallest truck they had and found $19.95 per is all they had room to paint on the truck.  There is also a mileage charge – 79 cent per mile!  Three hours of truck rental cost me over 100 bucks!

the "stuiff"

APX measured our stuff and it came to 1.033 cubic meters and 303 kilograms.  They expected it to arrive in Rotterdam June 18 and would contact us then.

So far, so good.  We took our maximum of carry-on luggage and headed for the boat in Stavoren, Netherlands with a four day stop over in Reykjavik, Iceland.  We took possession of our boat, Orca, on June 8, and occupied ourselves with all the things that must be done when you move onto a new (35 year old) boat.

We knew the ship our stuff was on was Philadelphia Express.  We found a great website, MarineTraffic.com that lets you track ships all over the world.  We knew our ship would be passing through the English Channel about the 17th so we looked it up.  There it was, almost on schedule.  Headed to Antwerp.  Antwerp?  Maybe it stops there before going to Rotterdam?  We watched.  On the 20th, it left Antwerp for England.  So where is our stuff?

The shipping agent in Rotterdam (not APX) had not contacted us so we called them (not as easy as it sounds).  “Where is our stuff?”

“It is being shipped by truck from Antwerp.”

“When can we pick it up.”

“Call back Monday.”

We had arranged to rent a truck from a garage in Sneek, a town about 5 hours away (by boat) from Stavoren.  We left on Monday and spent Monday night in the town of Heeg about half way there.  Tuesday we sailed the rest of the way to Sneek and called the agent.

“When can we pick up our stuff?”

“It should be here tomorrow.”

“Can we get it tomorrow?”

“No. Call back Thursday.”

Thursday, “Can we pick up our stuff yet?”

“No, it has to go through customs.  Send us the packing list.  We will call you when its ready”

We sent the packing list and sailed back to Stavoren on Friday, June 25.

We called the agent again on Monday, June 28: “Can we pick up our stuff yet?”

“Of course!  But you must clear it through customs yourself.  Can you be here tomorrow?”

“No, I have to arrange the truck again.  I will come Wednesday.”

We called the garage in Sneek but were told all their trucks were out for the week.  We called several other places and got the same answer.  Now what?  When in doubt, ask a bartender.  Hans, a good bartender and exceptionally helpful person had a friend with a VW camper.  Maybe he could help.  Hans called Jon, Jon drove over and we talked.  He was free Thursday and could drive us to Rotterdam and back.  We went for it.

We left Stavoren at 6:30 (July 1).  The idea was to get to Rotterdam by 9:30 so there would be plenty of time in case customs was a problem.  We did not want to make a second trip.

Things began well.  It looked like we would be there by 9.  Then traffic came to a stand-still.  There had been an accident on the A12 and the police were shutting it down.  Eventually we were able to get off but how to get to Rotterdam from there?  We had no map and the GPS insisted we take the A12.  Jon had lived in this part of Holland for 40 years.  We wound up traveling roads he had never been on through villages he had never heard of.  Some of the roads were so narrow that when two cars met, one had to back up to a wide stop so they could get past each other.  Picture a road, seven feet wide, with no shoulders and a canal on each side.

It took six hours to get to Rotterdam.  We had to wait for the agent to return from lunch.  He gave us our papers, some helpful tips, and the address of the customs house.  He was not sure customs would clear our stuff without paying import duties.

It took 15 or 20 minutes to drive to the customs house.  We went in and gave our papers to a lady at one of the windows.  She took them to someone else and offered us coffee while we waited.  After about five minutes, a very tall elderly gentleman in a uniform came down and waved me over to the window.

He handed the papers to me and said, “Whats the meaning of this?”

If those words had come from my father, I would have been worried.  However, I am learning to not attach the same emotions to words when spoken by non-Americans.  I explained that the shipment was household goods to go on a boat I just purchased.  He asked if I was staying in Holland on the boat or sailing away.  I told him I would be leaving, he smiled and said “OK”.  Twenty minutes later, some one else came down, called my name and gave me the signed papers to release our stuff.  We went back to the warehouse and loaded the camper with the 15 boxes we shipped from California seven weeks earlier.  The destination charges came to about $275.

Jon drove us back to Stavoren and the trip was pleasantly uneventful.  We unloaded the camper

Jon, the camper, and the stuff

and moved it all to the dock to be loaded onto the boat.

stuff on the dock

Now we have the problem of where do you put that much stuff on a 31-foot sailboat?  The answer is:

stuff on a boat

everywhere.

more stuff on a boat

The question I ask myself at this point is “Was it worth it all?”  I am not sure.  The total cost of the shipping, door-to-door, was about $1,100.  It also consumed several days of our time.  For that, we have all our old clothes, more tools than I can stow, some kitchenware we probably don’t need, and a bunch of photographs that should not be on a boat.  It might have been more cost effective to burn it all and buy new the stuff we actually need in Holland.

I thought we were detached from our “stuff” and in control of our lives.  When I see how much we went through for our one cubic meter of personal belongings, I have to reconsider.

By the way, we did manage to stow it all and make the boat seaworthy again.