The Seine Also Rises

MIGENNES, France — The African Queen ran roiling rapids under German guns. Fitzcarraldo’s 320-ton steamboat was hauled over a mountain in the Amazon. Our slog up the Seine in Almeria was a bit easier — yet still a love-hate voyage for the books.

This report was meant to be a light palate cleanser before doubling down on despots and dumbasses. But four days on waterways at the crux of the Old World ever since Gauls battled Caesar brought today’s global turmoil into sharp focus.

Heeding history averts crises. Ignoring it creates new ones, made progressively worse by new weaponry and technology. Far too many people today barely remember last week.

Hop aboard for a look at the ship’s log, reportage on the approaching Olympics and flashbacks from the 1980s when I moved onto my home afloat in the heart of Paris, then a livable, laid-back haven in a manageable world.

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Almeria left Paris at the end of April. The river was too high, and the engines needed repairs. But we were obliged to go.

Olympic planners are dead set on an opening-ceremony river parade. It is a gamble. In June 2016, the Seine rose two meters above its banks. This March, floods rose a meter above the quay where dignitaries are to tread toward grandstand seats.

Our problem was their obsession to hold aquatic events where boat people are reluctant to dip a big toe. A $1.5 billion pharaonic project was supposed to purify the Seine. It is a bit cleaner yet remains toxic with industrial runoff, oil spills and filth from upriver.

Most of the 50 boats at our port near the Concorde pumped waste into the river, a tiny fraction of total pollution. Currents swept it swiftly downstream. Still, we were ordered to link into Paris sewers, which spill into the Seine during floods. Upstream houseboats and working barges keep on dumping.

That might have been a good idea, Olympics or not, if it worked. But for most of a year, the quay has reeked with sewage overflow, forcing boats to bypass their connections. In any case, Almeria is a classic wooden boat that needs substantial work to comply.

More below on the Games, the port and Paris. Meantime, back to those four days of watching the world at six knots, about seven miles an hour, free of TV blaring yet more lunacy from Americans enthralled by a rapacious T-rex running amok.

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Friends know I’ve been threatening to sell Almeria for two years. I will, I fear, but not before she is restored to former glory to be passed on to someone who appreciates historic treasures in a throw-away world.

Her papers go back to 1937 when she was converted from steam power to diesel. She shuttled Royal Navy officers around the North Sea. We believe she did Dunkirk in World War II. In the 1950s, she was fitted with two BMC Commodores, marine versions of old London taxi motors.

An English couple rescued her from a scrapyard and brought her across the Channel. Her double planked teak hull, copper rivets and design suggest she dates to around 1900. A previous owner named her Almeria, a port in Andalusia. I’m told that means “freedom” in Arabic, but it probably doesn’t. Too good to check.

Covid delayed me in Arizona, and Almeria suffered. Lack of oil chewed up the port reduction gear. The injectors clogged. Water jackets rusted up. Damned if I’d have her towed for days to the only yard I trusted. Nearing desperation, I found Jeff.

If anything bears out the Rosenblum Theory of French Opposites, it is river people. At one extreme, the initial response to a difficult job is non. More money and pleading have a limited effect. Jeff, properly Jean-François Clement, is the other extreme.

He commuted from hours away in his magical mystery van. On the first trip, he surveyed the ungodly mess and remarked with a grin, “Why give up at the first little problem?” What he couldn’t fix or replace, he MacGyvered.

Extracting the gearbox nearly killed him. We sent broken parts to Britain where an engineer nearing 90, suffering from cancer, recast what he could. Jeff redesigned the rest. When the old girl was ready enough, I needed a real captain.

Any fool can drive a boat. The trick is reading the river. Almeria is built for high seas, with a deep keel and two far-apart props exposed to rocks and sunken detritus. Brian Latham, after 40 years of skippering cruise boats, is a human sonar sounder.

His watchword is simple: If you wait until you’re ready, you’ll never go. When I fail to mask screaming panic in a crisis, he smiles calmly and says, “There is always a solution.” We found that out the first day. Jeff announced we were out of fuel.

Weeks earlier, we found the main tank nearly full, with no leaks or fuel in the bilges. Had someone siphoned it dry? A mystery. The smaller tank on deck was running low, and we were wasting fuel, idling perhaps for hours while a damaged lock was repaired.

Miracles happen. Near the lock, we chanced upon the Auxerrois, a container barge owned by Brian’s old pals. The captain gave us 20 liters, enough to reach Saint-Mammés, the only refueling stop between Paris and nowhere. But it was Sunday.

The diesel station’s website claims 24/7 service. Not really. Its grumpy owner shows up Sundays on request from barges that take on thousands of liters. Jeff called his cell phone and persuaded him to meet us.

He appeared a half-hour late with a curt, “Where’s the hole?” He fumbled with his credit card reader until I peeled 500 euros off my emergency stash. We pushed on to the Yonne and its 17 locks, most of them slanted and hazardous to exposed props.

Suddenly, I heard an engine stop. Jeff had vanished from his wheelhouse perch. A metal water circuit had burst. The temperature gauge didn’t work, but he smelled it. After a first-aid field dressing, he was up top again, juggling future jobs on his iPhone with jazz playing in his earbuds.

As we neared Migennes, I called Simon Evans, a burly Brit who has breathed fresh life into my old boat over the decades. Tying up in his yard, showering and opening a memorable bottle is one of life’s great thrills. That didn’t happen.

After heavy rains, Simon said, regulating floodgates left the Yonne too low. A sandbar blocked his docks. We moored nearby in the basin before the Canal de Bourgogne. Almeria had arrived. Sort of. Now the river is too high, and she is still waiting.

But that’s the thing about wooden boats. With patience they can last, essentially, forever. Rotted planks can be replaced. A Jean-François Clement and extra muscle can fit in new running gear. A Brian Latham can keep them off the rocks.

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I’d happily do it all again. Jeannette – wife, first mate and ambiance director – cooked elaborate meals in a dark, smoky galley. At night, we lazed on deck in old stone towns or remote jungled solitude. Adam Court, our stalwart Aussie deckhand, captured the trip on camera.

And there were those past reminders the world needs to remember. Conflicts in the unholy land, Europe and East Asia are based on old if not ancient territorial claims. But times and societies change.

In the 1980s, I awoke one morning in Paris as a flotilla of beefy men in steer-horn helmets rowed open long boats up the Seine. They were Viking reenactors returning to the scene of past crimes.

In fact, that horny headgear was a few millennia out of date. Marauding Norsemen who flourished from the 8th to 11th centuries wore what looked like beaten-metal rugby caps. Ruthless does not begin to describe them.

Vikings pillaged much of Europe, moving down rivers to the Mediterranean and into the Middle East. Leif Ericksson reached the Americas nearly five centuries before Columbus. Then they settled down and evolved.

Today, Norway, Denmark and Sweden top every indicator for model citizenry in an increasingly self-obsessed world: the freest press, the least corruption, health care and education for all. In sum, thriving capitalism rooted in social democracy, not socialism.

Their per capita development aid to people in need — as opposed to military hardware and grand schemes to rent loyalty from poor countries — far surpasses America’s vaunted largesse.

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Back to the trip log. After passing jungled shores on what might be the Ulanga River in Tanzania, Bogey’s route on the African Queen, or a Fitzcarraldo tributary of the Amazon, placid Pont-sur-Yonne brought the distant past into present-tense perspective.

Ninth-century villagers spanned the wide, moody river with a wooden bridge. Several hundred years later, it was replaced with a solid stone span. Its massive abutment is still there under a wide modern bridge.

Napoleon dined at Pont-sur-Yonne in 1815 on his trip back to Paris after escaping exile on the island of Elbe. Then he had to cross by boat. Townsfolk blew up the bridge a year earlier to slow down advancing Austrian troops in yet another long senseless war.

Occasionally, cell phone towers dragged me back to the present. On U.S. campuses, pro-Palestinians and pro-Israelis faced brutal repression by police who had arrested more than 2,000 students, many only for doing what the First Amendment allows.

The internet and TV cameras relayed protesters’ one-note accusations to multiple millions. Donald Trump told his gullible cult that Joe Biden was behind it all. Much of America sees it as a simplistic showdown: Muslims versus Jews.

I’ve covered the runup to the story off and on since the 1960s, including the 1982 Lebanon invasion and two intifadas. Book research has taken me deep into its origins. Interpretations vary, but the facts don’t.

There are Christian Palestinians, Muslim Israelis and much else. Jews are united in horror over Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities but deeply divided over what has followed. This is not about religion but rather land, human dignity and concepts of justice.

The timeline is clear. Jews escaped Egyptian slavery and prayed on Temple Mount long before that star over Bethlehem led to Christianity. Mohammed came centuries later. Crusaders from Europe led Christian soldiers to rid their holy land of infidels.

If the criterion is prior occupation, North and South America belong to descendants of people who settled there millennia before Europeans set sail. An overheated planet with 8 billion people needs diplomacy and compromise, not widening conflict.

Since Jimmy Carter tried to make peace, extremist Israelis and Palestinians blocked lasting solutions. Barack Obama increased aid to Israel but failed to stop Jewish settlers from colonizing the West Bank or to move Israel toward an autonomous Palestine.

Then Trump took over, buoyed by Zionist friends’ campaign money and swayed by a grasping Orthodox Jewish son-in-law. He gave Benjamin Netanyahu, his old crony, free rein to reduce Palestinians to subservient apartheid.

Blocking arms deliveries is futile. Israel could pound Gaza to rubble without help. Boycotts punish a broad sector of decent Israelis ready to make peace. Despite Antony Blinken’s masterful statecraft, Congress and divided U.S. sentiment hamstring Biden.

It is hard to imagine anyone with a conscience condoning Israeli overkill and mass suffering in Gaza. Yet Hamas leaders callously exploit the rising Palestinian death toll as the price of eventual victory.

Americans who don’t think this through may well tip the Electoral College toward Trump, ensuring yet more humiliating despair among young Palestinians ready for war. That would splash lighter fluid across a smoldering Middle East.

Revisionist history also underlies Vladimir Putin’s obsession with Ukraine and other coveted parts of an imperial past where he is almost certain to advance if he is not stopped there.

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Almeria’s voyage revealed yet more signs of a challenge far greater than keeping peace in a hostile world. Geopolitical strife is ephemeral. A collapsed global ecosystem is permanent.

I’ve watched rivers ebb and flow over the decades with ever more unpredictable extremes. Increasing freak floods devastate homes and food crops. The warming ocean — there is only one — is rising as it suffers from acidification, pollution and plunder.

The “climate change” Trump denies started slowly a long time ago. Now, despite isolated action and much talk, we are hurtling toward that tipping point. Whatever amount of time is left to mitigate this trend, there is none to spare.

In this, too, Israel and Palestine are troubling brushstrokes in the big picture.

When Arab armies first attacked the fledgling homeland for Holocaust survivors and wandering Jews, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt had a rallying cry: Drive them into the sea. Today, zealots on opposing sides echo that: From the river to the sea.

That river, the Jordan, is a muddy trickle at one-tenth of its historic level. That sea, the Mediterranean, eats away at sand beaches. Saltwater pollutes Gaza’s aquifer. Jewish enclaves in the West Bank tap dwindling water tables for gardens and pools. Palestinian crops shrivel.

At the extreme, much of the now-disputed territory may eventually be unlivable for anyone. Not in my lifetime or the next generation’s. But maybe in Almeria’s.