Bob McKerrow, 66, Aid Worker New Zealand

 This is a blog by men, for men, and for the women and men who love them. It exists for itself and of itself, as a testimony to remarkable men that have been in my life, and have influenced the man I am. I, and the other authors, hope that any man or boy, young or old, will come here and find inspiration and wisdom, and grow to be "a good man". On this blog you will find examples of how you can be, pitfalls you might avoid, culled from hundreds of years of cumulative experience of "being a man".

This blog has been over two years in the making. I finally found some impetus to kick its ass out the door this week. As I was applying some finishing touches I got a text saying one of the best people I have ever known, was dead. This project is dedicated to the memory of Blair Sheridan, 3 Dec 1964 - 30 Sept 2014: musician, friend, father, man, 

This is the link to Joe Lowry's blog 'How to be a man.'

 

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Blessed, Amongst Women

Bob McKerrow, 66, Aid Worker

New Zealand

 

It took me a while to find a picture of Bob that exemplifies this larger-than-life man as I know him. He's a polar explorer, writer, manager, humanitarian, bon-vivant... but most of all he loves life with an infectious enthusiasm. 

I find being a man is a mixture of roles: protector, provider, clown, outdoor educator, trainer to my children and wife (I have seven children), sensitive to all the females in my life, and a good friend to my mates.

The biggest influence on me was my Mum. She was the one that really shaped me and led me to humanitarian work. Eileen, was born deaf, as was her younger brother Ray, and in those days, anyone born deaf was considered deaf and dumb. But my Mother was a bright woman, she enjoyed Shakespeare, read poetry and she taught me to sew and knit, and to write well.

I loved my Mother dearly and was horrified by children’s cruelty towards her. I remember older kids throwing clods at her and then as a five year old, running down the road chasing after them and trying to knock the shit out of them, but often they would knock the shit out of me. I learned that being a boy (man) was defending yourself and other less fortunate. Bloody knees, black eyes and continuous cuts and bruises were my medals of honour.

When you have a disabled member of your family, someone you love dearly, and people discriminate against them, you grow up with a huge awareness of discrimination and where it occurs.

For me, being a man, is knowing where you come from and drawing strength from that. Explorers, surveyors,  blacksmiths, ploughmakers, shoemakers, labourers, clerks, sailors, miners, bushmen, and strong sensitive woman linked me through the past 150 years across the water to the highlands of Scotland, to the rivers of Prussia, the theatres of England.  My Auntie spoke of having Maori blood  through the village of Colac Bay in Southland and my family tree shows I am related to Buffalo Bill Cody and Charles Laughton, the Shakespearian actor. Perhaps, the most famous connection is to King James V, from whom the McKerrow historian says we have descended, albeit from the wrong side of the blanket.

Thinking of my heritage make me feel strong in the many difficult situations I have had to face. These have included Taleban soldiers threatening me with rifles, thieves in Colon Panama trying to knife me for my money and the cold barrel of an AK 47 pushed against my temple at night in Vietnam. I find my background gives me the cool-headedness to look them in the eye and ‘be a man.’  I find antagonists back down when you stand up to them. I suppose I have never been afraid of men particularly when comparing them to my tough Father. He was a strict disciplinarian and used to bring out a WWII German belt and beat us very hard if we misbehaved. But he was also an excellent handyman and I recall many happy days helping him do repairs around the house,  grow vegetables, cut hedges, lawns and resole shoes. He had two books on how to repair motor cars but being a labourer with five children, a car was beyond our family finances. 

 I go to my diaries from my early 20s and this is what I rediscover.

“For nearly two years I had been a part of all male mountaineering expeditions to Peru, Antarctica, and between times, on all male trips to Mount Cook and Fiordland.

“After nine months in Antarctica I looked in the mirror, and I realised a man without a women around him, is a man without vanity. Winsome, how I loved her. I wrote hundreds of letters to her during that dark, long winter’s night. She was at the airport with her new boyfriend to greet me when I returned from Antarctica.

Mountains and women – they were, and are, a huge part of my life. Brasch, our great New Zealand poet said “Man must lie with mountains like a lover, earning their intimacy in a calm sigh” . In “Leaves of Grass” Walt Whitman’s says “ A woman contains everything, nothing lack, body, soul.”

The a close relationship I had with my Mum, with two older sisters and my Nana (and the distant one I had with my Dad) convinces me that women were the one who encouraged me, gave me my reference points in life.

Why was I spending so much time with men ? Was I having to prove myself? Well I had proved I was physically capable of climbing some of the highest mountains in the world, running marathons, and surviving a year in Antarctica with only three other people.

Yet I felt at a cross road. There was something compelling about leading a life of an itinerant mountaineer, explorer or traveller. I cast back my mind Peru to 1968 and the poverty that moved me so much . My first adult poem was prompted by the injustices I saw throughout Peru in 1968. I flirted with Marxism, read Nietzsche, Che Guevara.  Thoughts from Bolivian diary by Che  Guevara swirled in my head. In New Zealand Norm Kirk was emerging as a national leader, an engine driver who was about to railroad our country away from the clutches of racist conservatism. Being a man was being aware of the wider world around me.

These were heady times.  The music -  Dylan, Joan Baez, The Beatles, Joplin, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. The Vietnam war was becoming ugly - why the hell did New Zealand have troops there? Protests were strong.

During these weeks of running and frequent bouts of drinking at the Captain Cook pub, I came across an advert in  December 1971 in  the Otago Daily Times  wanting personnel to work in South Vietnam for a “ New Zealand Red Cross Refugee Welfare Team”. They wanted nurses, an agriculturalist, water-sanitation special, rehabilitation guidance officer, and a mechanic. Shit, this was for me. I could travel and do something structured for the people like those I saw in Peru.

Chris Knott and I had just got back from our miserable trip to Fiordland and we were together licking our wounds. We had miserably failed to climb Mt Tutoko and after a week of torrential rain we almost died of exposure and later were swept away when a swollen river picked up our tent as we slept.

The doorbell rang, and there at the front door was the telegram man with a message for each of us, inviting us to go to Wellington, for interviews for the New Zealand Red Cross Refugee team to South Vietnam.

A few weeks later I was elated on receiving news I had been selected to go to South Vietnam.

Chris missed out. He was to go back to England and spend the next three years working for the British Antarctic survey. I was the lucky one to have broken out of the mould being set for me to continue the lonely life of an adventurer

Defending my Mum on a number of occasions made me realise at a young age that discrimination is to be found everywhere, and that committed and motivated people were needed to stand up against it. That led me to the Red Cross, at the age of 22.

I wanted to be the protector, rescuer and change agent for all these people brutalised by uncaring soldiers in war, and to change the minds of the uncaring bureaucrats who were designated to care and help them.

Forty one years later I am still  working for Red Cross.

Whales, Polar Bears and Muskox

Geoff Carroll: Biologist in Barrow

Biologist Geoff Carroll touches one of the grey whales trapped in the ice near Barrow in 1988. Carroll was part of "Operation Breakthrough," as it was known at the time. Photo courtesy Bill Hess



He has survived two airplane crashes in bush Alaska. He has fought off an angry polar bear with only a jammed-shotgun-turned-baseball-bat. He has driven the most unruly team of dogs to the North Pole and he has looked into the eye of a whale, touched its head, and lived to tell the tale.

What sounds like a script for the "Most Interesting Man in the World" is actually reality for Geoff Carroll, Area Wildlife Biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G). Geoff runs Fish and Game's one-person office in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost city in America.

I count Geoff as a valued friend who I met at Point Barrow in 1985 after a 1500 mile dog-sled trip down the Mackenzie River in NWT Canada, across the Arctic Ocean into Alaska US, to Point Barrow.

Canoeing on the Boundary Waters north of Ely, Minnesota with Geoff Carroll (right) Jeff Blumenfeld (left) and my son Ablai McKerrow centre. Earlier Geoff's son Quin and Ablai canoed with their two Dads down a small part of the Mississippi. All 8 members of our successful North Pole Expedition celebrated our 25th in Ely in May 2011.Photo: Bob McKerrow

In 1988 Marie and Geoff Carroll stayed with us in New Zealand and we had a great time as two families.

I will let Candice Bressler tell the rest of the story.


Originally from a ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming, Geoff took a little vacation to Alaska in his early 20s and – like a lot of visitors – Alaska seeped into his blood, and he never really left. He attended the University of Alaska Fairbanks and graduated with a bachelor of science in wildlife management. His passion was whales, so he traveled to Barrow and started an annual bowhead whale census. He enjoyed the ice work so much that he was a member of a National Geographic sponsored 56-day dog sled expedition to the North Pole. Eventually, he moved to Barrow permanently.

In 1988 – one year prior to coming on-board with ADF&G – Geoff was working for the North Slope Borough’s (NSB) Department of Wildlife Management. Despite not having his character cast a role in the 2012 blockbuster film “Big Miracle,” Geoff played a valuable and essential role in Operation Breakthrough, the international struggle to free three California grey whales trapped in the ice in the Beaufort Sea near Point Barrow.

Geoff first heard about the whales from a local whaler, Roy Ahmaogak, who was out scouting on the sea ice. After hearing the report, a small group, including Geoff, decided to travel by snowmachine on the 30-40 minute journey to the only breathing hole left open in the progressing sea ice. “It was a remarkable situation, like nothing we had seen before. We took a few pictures and thought, since we might not see this again, it might be good to get a video of this,” said Geoff. The group, in amazement, headed back to town and asked the local television station if they could borrow a video camera. The station was hesitant to loan out the camera, instead sending a cameraman and Geoff’s wife Marie, who ran the NSB Information Office, out with the locals. They took footage and did a quick impromptu interview which eventually made its way to Channel 2 in Anchorage. “Somehow it got into the national news and exploded from there. We were surprised when it went international. We had no anticipation of that,” Geoff explained.

Within days, Barrow was transformed from a sleepy secluded village to the bustling backdrop of a dramatic media zoo. In town, visiting journalists and public relations campaigners were scrambling for their next story. Out on the ice, the whales were fighting to survive, taking turns surfacing to breathe as the ice got thicker and the nights grew colder. The whales’ friends on the surface were nothing less than a captive audience. For a whale biologist like Geoff, it was a windfall. Around the world, there are some toothed whales in captivity, but it was a rare instance to have baleen whales to study and interact with for three weeks in one’s back yard. “The opportunity to work with a species of animals you don’t often get to work with up close and personal was really an interesting time for us as biologists,” Geoff described.

As the world scurried to make sense of these events and to try to put into motion a series of creative albeit hapless solutions, Geoff along with other local residents worked with the whales every single day. The one initial breathing hole was getting smaller and smaller each hour. “[Fellow biologist] Craig George came up with the idea to use a chainsaw to make the hole larger for the whales. It was pretty grim watching the hole get smaller and smaller. The only thing that was keeping the hole open was the whales coming up every five minutes and stirring up the water,” Geoff said. It then occurred to them that maybe they could cut another hole. “The whales were really reluctant to leaving their original hole; they saw it as their lifeline.”

Marie Carroll prepares to leave the whales and return home to Barrow by snowmachine. Geoff hands her a shotgun as bear protection. Photo courtesy Bill Hess.





Fortunately, two gentlemen from Minnesota were sitting in their living room watching the story unfold on television, and they saw the plight of the whales. They worked for a company called Kasco Marine which manufactured water circulators. Uninvited and unannounced, they jumped in an airplane and brought their water circulators up to the top of the world. “We noticed the whales were attracted to those circulators. The whales would orient on those things, and they were also attracted to lights.” Geoff and crew began using the circulators and portable lights to train the whales to move from hole to hole. “It was quite a process to teach the whales to move from one hole to the next, but after a few days, the whales learned that it was safe. That was the big victory for us.”

For a whale biologist turned whale-trainer, it seemed like almost non-stop that he was out with the whales. Most of the training took place at night when the media circus had scattered. “I know we would sleep every once in a while, but there was so little sleep that it’s all a blur.” Geoff and his Iñupiaq wife, Marie, also had a brand new baby at home, too. “One night, the 60 Minutes crew showed up at our house at 3:00 o’clock in the morning, and my wife had to go out and read them the riot act and chase them off.” Geoff continues, “The operation was a family effort for us. While a bunch of us were out there cutting holes in the ice and moving the whales along, Marie and the NSB mayor were on the Russian icebreaker trying to keep them from running over the whales.” Geoff was in high demand, by both the media and the whales. He preferred interacting with the whales. “You could get just as close [to the whales] as you wanted. Spending so much time with them, it was like having a pet dog around. You start to feel affection and compassion for them.”

While the U.S. government was trying major herculean efforts like airlifting a hover-barge and negotiating with the Soviets for icebreaker help, Geoff and a handful of other locals were out there getting their hands dirty – and cold. Working together in negative double-digit temperatures with chainsaws and simple tools, they came up with a really clever and effective technique to cut holes about 20 feet wide and 40 feet long for a total of four miles of sprawling holes. The water circulator machines helped keep old holes clear while new holes could be cut. “Eventually the whales were just zipping up and down the line of holes. They were pretty happy with it.” For Geoff, this was the most climatic moment of those exhausting weeks on the ice. “Sure, there was a happy ending in the movie, but in reality, the whales’ fate was up in the air. Nobody ever really knew what happened to them.”

Geoff still loves whales, and he still enjoys ice work. But a lot has changed since 1988. “If anything, it’s a stark reminder of how the climate has changed up here. [The whale rescue] started in the second week of October in 1988, and folks were driving trucks across the ice, and the large ice ridge had already formed. But in recent years it’s largely been open water in that same area until close to Christmas.” In the face of climate change’s complexities, Geoff still has some major challenges at hand.

As ADF&G’s Area Wildlife Biologist, Geoff looks after all the land mammals on 56,000 square miles of the North Slope. To put size in perspective, his territory is an area larger than the entire state of New York. It’s a challenging environment, but rewarding nonetheless. “Our caribou work is absolutely world-class. We do a better job of managing caribou in northern Alaska than any place in the world.” Geoff is quick to equate this success to a team effort. “Ever since I started working for Region 5, we’ve just had this fantastic group of people, really good, knowledgeable area biologists and other staff. The Region 5 staff is like an extended family. For some reason, we’ve always been able to get along really well. One of the greatest joys of working for Fish and Game is working with a totally competent outfit – a totally competent bunch of people.”

The Region 5 "family." From left, Geoff Carroll, Karen Mitchell, Jim Dau (behind Karen), Steve Machida, Tony Gorn, Patrick Jones (center of back row), Charlotte Westing (with baby), Lincoln Parrett, Meghan Nedwick (back row), Travis Booms next to her, Phil Perry in front of Travis, Peter Bente far right, Rob DeLong in front. Photo by Karen Mitchell. Not pictured, Letty Hughes and Sarah Ferguson.


It is clear this whale-training team player has also moved mountains as a staff mentor. When pondering his greatest contribution to ADF&G, he responded, “I took on a student intern named Lincoln Parrett that grew up in Kaktovik and Barrow. He now does a very good job as our Arctic Caribou research biologist and has taken on most of the load for caribou work.” Perhaps one of Geoff’s greatest traits is recognizing potential and coaching it from the get-go – much like he did with his whales, much like he did with his up-and-coming intern.

Tracking Caribou is an important part of Geoff's work. Photo: Bob McKerrow
Geoff modestly explains, “It’s been a good run.” But for the man who – for ninety five percent of the last 20 years – has commuted to the office by skis, bicycle, or skijoring, and has dogsledded to all the villages in Unit 26A (he gets a lot better reception when he shows up by dogsled than by airplane), it’s definitely been more than a ‘good run.’ When he’s not wrangling muskoxen or helping to manage arctic caribou and moose herds, Geoff is a total generalist for his region: selling hunting licenses, staffing the office, and doing public and educational outreach. He is truly a jack of all trades, and just very likely – one of the most interesting men in the world.