In 1948, two twin boys, 14, drifted under the Golden Gate as their boat malfunctioned. They survived to have whole, productive lives. As a result, Kirsten came to this world, and maps of lakes in California got an artsy, old-school touch.
Kirsten’s dad grew up running up and down the hills of the foggy and picturesque town of Sausalito across the Golden Gate. Right after World War II, many boats were still built at the nearby shipyard, and they quickly adapted to peacetime use. Work abounded, and the region’s economy was about to boom. Though the US Navy didn’t need as many Liberty ships and tankers once the war effort was over, the military presence remained in the area, helping kickstart Silicon Valley decades not long after.
At 14, John and James, Jack and Jim, were restless. One can picture them as a pair of rascals from a Jack London story. The two teenagers had no difficulty assembling a few scraps into their first boat to sail around the bay at a time when their father, a painter of German origin who had developed a brain tumor after falling from a ladder years before, wasn’t doing well.
From the house where they grew up on 67 Sunshine Avenue, perched on one of the town’s steep hills, they could see the blue bay when fog allowed it, an invitation to roll down as fast as possible and get aboard anything capable of floating.
It was 1948, the year of completion of the Sausalito Ferry Terminal, which, along with the Golden Gate Bridge, completed in 1937, had turned the isolated backwater community into a commuting town, changing its social fabric. Decades later, Jack will assure Kirsten and me that his first memory, at three, had to do with the inauguration walk of the magnificent bridge, which allowed people and children from both shores to walk on foot or roller skates for an entire week before it opened to vehicle traffic.
That’s how John Dirksen, along with a bunch of kids from Sausalito, may have walked for the first time across the long of a piece of engineering that transformed Marin County forever, connecting the bay’s north shore to the city by road. No picture has survived in the family from the event, but John, who now can’t recall the events anymore, had always had that memory present. And, if he was there, Jim had been there, too. (Jim died a few years back).
The fading memory happened a mere 30 years after the 1906 earthquake.
The sight of a Clipper entering the bay
One day in 1948, the twins were repairing their boat to prepare it for newer adventures, perhaps even sailing across the bay. Unfortunately, the rudimentary rudder got dislodged, setting them adrift and destabilizing the small vessel, which tipped over. Clinging to the wreckage while submerged in the freezing water, they got caught by the strong current under the Golden Gate. Once trapped by it, the wreckage accelerated at the mercy of the elements, expelling them towards the open ocean.
The two teenagers knew what was at stake and tried to get out of the ocean current to no avail. They talked about abandoning the boat and swimming to shore, which seemed impossible given the rising tide swell and the waves. By the time they left the bridge behind, they were getting cold, and Jim, always sure of himself, looked for his brother’s opinion of the situation.
What to do? Drifting towards the ocean as it was getting dark didn’t seem wise; swimming in desperation when the boat could barely stay afloat, given the bristling waters, was hardly the safe option. Time was running out. They had to decide before it was too late to swim back. There was a problem, however: they were good swimmers and even better boat sailors, and they knew they couldn’t overcome the current, no matter the effort. What, then, resignation?
When they were about to leave the bay behind, far away to their right, the horizon may have looked like a painting by Turner, with the menace of an immense ocean ahead of them. They were only fourteen, but realized they had to keep their cool and focus on just one thing: Preserve as many forces as possible to attempt survival when the chance arrived.
When they spotted the silhouette of a Clipper-class boat coming their way, they started signaling their position. The Clipper slowly got closer, and they started screaming and waving their hands amid the waves and gusts as the leftovers of their boat disappeared and reappeared in the random ups and downs of the rough sea.
Not long after, when their bodies were turning numb in the freezing waters, they knew they were saved when the boat’s trajectory went unmistakably their way. Seen from another boat, the scene may have inspired Joseph Conrad to start—or finish—a story of noble souls at sea.
Face decision, rescue made
But the twins’ prank didn’t end there. A reporter from the San Francisco Examiner got notice of the event and decided to run it on its cover on Mother’s Day. His chief editor may have liked the idea, as the story ran the paper’s cover front and center:
Twin Boys, 14, Rescued from Near Death in Bay
Mrs. Martha Dirksen of Sausalito, mother of 14 year old twin sons, got a Mother’s Day present yesterday she’ll never forget.
San Francisco Examiner, 1948
Her sons, Jim and Jack, freshman students at Tamalpais Union High School, were saved from almost certain death as they slowly drifted through the Golden Gate toward the Pacific Ocean, grimly hanging to the wreckage of their disabled sailboat.
After signaling their desperate situation to the lone Clipper for over an hour and a half, their perseverance was rewarded. As explained by the journalist from the Examiner:
“A quarter of a mile from the Gate, on the seaward side of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Clipper’s skipper, Roy Land, 29, a merchant sailor of 356 Santa Ana Avenue, told his companion, Charles Peery, 32, 344 Moncada Way:
San Francisco Examiner, 1948
‘Let’s investigate that wreckage out there…’
RESCUE MADE
Brief minutes later, Land and Peery were hauling Jim and Jack Dirksen from the wreckage of their catskiff, Chips II, both near exhaustion.”
Land’s testimony allows us to see how dire the situation may have been, and how clear the priorities were for the two kids:
“The only thing either one of them said when we came alongside was ‘save our boat, mister —she’s still able to float!”
San Francisco Examiner, 1948
Jim, the assertive one, became the interviewee in the story, explaining the adventure to the reporter:
“We were just sailing around, and then our rudder came out of the pinlets. Jack had on his life preserver, but I didn’t—at the time. We tried to get the rudder back in but a gust of wind whipped us away over. Jack was balancing the boat with his weight. Then another gust of wind blew the loom over…and water started pouring in. The boat was on its side, and we were in the water—hanging on.
San Francisco Examiner, 1948
“We swam off and got the rudder, and the oars, which had floated away, and then we swam back to the boat. Meanwhile, I’d put on my life preserver, but I had a tough time doing it, it was so wet.
“After that, there wasn’t much we could do except hang on. We took turns balancing our weight on the boat, so one would be up to his neck in water for a while, then the other.
“We kept drifting. The Gate got closer and closer. We saw a Clipper class cruiser (the Lorac) sailing around, and we waved as hard as we could. But after a while, we could just wave now and then, our arms got so cold and tired. We figured the water was about 52 degrees. (The Coast Guard later confirmed this estimate.)
“We tried to be calm—we told each other we couldn’t get nervous—to just keep our senses and just wait. Finally, Jack wanted to swim for it, and we talked it over for a long time. Finally, we figured our best chance would be to wait it out, and take a chance on the Clipper seeing us. But we knew we didn’t have much time left.”
“The ocean was getting closer, but we held on. And then the Clipper saw us.”
A productive life
At school, Kirsten’s dad was doing better than his brother, who suffered from dyslexia and seemed to have found the love of his life: sailing. They were separated at school when Jim had to repeat a year, and the contingency brought them even closer, as if they sensed that their trajectories could differ irreparably during adulthood.
Years later, my father-in-law benefitted from the GI Bill after serving in Japan; he became an engineer working on the first satellites spying on the Soviet Union, right when the aerospace facilities of NASA and Lockheed Martin grew around the shore of Mountain View and Sunnivale. Meanwhile, his brother—the more assertive growing up, the braver, the one more successful with girls—settled with a more bohemian, equally exciting—and probably fulfilling—life.
Jim learned different trades and married earlier than Jack. All his spare time was spent building, fixing, and using all sorts of recreational boats. Perhaps the many scares from early sailing made him a lover of sea and lake charts and all kinds of maps.
Before satellite navigation, Google Maps, and Starlink, recreational sailing was a word-of-mouth activity. With no Internet forums and social media to turn to, only experience, friendships, and good documentation could get you far in your boating adventures. Years passed, and Jack left for Germany with his family to work for the US Army in Europe amid the nuclear threat lying behind the Iron Curtain. Meanwhile, Jim owned many boats in California, Florida, and beyond.
This is why Kirsten and her older sister, Emily, were born in Germany. However, the family returned to California soon afterward, and the girls, who had barely learned the language, soon forgot it. By then, Jim and his young family had set to discover the secrets of the many California lakes, big and small, suitable for boating. He soon realized that nobody, not even the State cartographic surveyors or the utility providers, had mapped most of the lakes, leaving the task of finding the best spots to boat, fish, or camp around water in the wilderness a mere few hours outside the big coastal cities.
Getting to know every one of the Lakes in CA
With time, Jim’s children grew to share their father’s passion for the project, and the family decided to share the tips they had learned, along with updated information about services and beautiful hand-drawn maps. That’s how they came to publish Recreation Lakes of California, a book that soon sold out and gave them both a purpose and a living to keep doing what they most cherished.
A copy of the 17th edition, published in 2009, is described as follows:
“California is a land of many lakes, gorgeous scenery and a myriad of recreational opportunities. This book is a complete guide to over 460 lakes in California with detailed maps and current information. A must-have for campers, RVers, fishermen, boaters and anyone who loves the outdoors. Includes campgrounds for tents and RVs, marine facilities, types of fish, picnic sites, hiking and bicycle trails, equestrian facilities, swimming, waterskiing, resorts and nearby services. Contacts, phone numbers and all the details you need to know about visiting these lakes are listed.”
I only met Jim once, a little after marrying Kirsten. Like every summer, we visited the Bay Area and planned a family gathering with some of the Dirksen side of the family in Santa Cruz. He came with one of his sons and his son’s fiancée. It was enough to see the look of complicity and smiles that the old twins dedicated to each other. They didn’t talk much, for they weren’t talkers.
Sitting by the side of a pool, Jim had a Clint Eastwood allure, still tall and imposing despite the age and severe health issues, most of them derived from a serious accident years before in which he had tried to save his boat from a fire in Florida. The injuries were so acute that, by the time his twin arrived at the hospital straight from the airport, Jim demanded assistance to die. His twin may have reminded him that they weren’t quitters. “Remember the time we went adrift under the Golden Gate?”
Theirs are lives lived in a more innocent world that still allowed for unplanned, risky adventures. A world in which recreational boat enthusiasts didn’t rely on satellites to find the perfect spot but on experience, word-of-mouth, and, in the case of California, precious documents such as Recreation Lakes of California.
A world relying on a digital layer of (superficial) information
Boat lovers found in the book a reliable source with extensive documentation made by one of them with them in mind. They cherished the valuable testimony of hundreds of outings over decades of lake stays. But now, such a document is as exotic to anybody in the smartphone and Google Maps era as the astrolabe that made Europeans finally catch up with Arabs in the science of sailing during the so-called Age of Discovery.
Only Romantics, the saying goes, carry printed maps with them, especially when affordable portable PV solar units, power banks, and satellite Internet promise any vanlife or sailboat-living enthusiast the convenience of the digital age anywhere in the world.
We have come to rely so much on screens and digital maps that many conscientious travelers find themselves in dangerous situations once their signal stops working or their devices stop working. But, even when their devices keep working, the provided information isn’t as accurate as we may think. In early February 2024, two German tourists, Philipp Maier and Marcel Schoene, found the flaws of Google Maps in remote areas a bit too late.
They were in the Australian wilderness, relying on information from Google Maps while driving their four-wheel-drive near Cape York, a peninsula located in Far North Queensland. The application gave them a route from Cairns to Bamaga that they trusted. They left Cairns on February 4 and headed to an old dirt track, Langi. On February 6, their car became bogged, and they couldn’t shift it. The area had no mobile service or Internet connection. They were stuck and felt helpless.
Realizing they were stranded and disconnected from any network, they decided to camp out of their vehicle for a week, but realized that no help would come anytime soon, so they set to try and find a route out of the park on foot. With the help of a small drone, they looked for signs of roads while walking through the dangerous bush for 22 hours. They finally found the small town of Coen and found help to retrieve the stranded vehicle.
Australian critters
The Google Maps mishap forced them to hike for days past crocodiles, snakes, and deadly spiders. For more on this, read Bill Bryson’s account on Australian critters In a Sunburned Country:
“It [Australia] has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world’s ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures—the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish—are the most lethal of their type in the world. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. Pick up an innocuous cone shell from a Queensland beach, as innocent tourists are all too wont to do, and you will discover that the little fellow inside is not just astoundingly swift and testy but exceedingly venomous. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. It’s a tough place.”
In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson, 2000
Philipp Maier explained the technological dead end they walked into in remote Australia:
“Google Maps said we should go to the national park right away, and we thought just do it because maybe the main road is closed because of a high river.”
Roger James, a local Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service ranger, respects and understands the wilderness like in the days when people still knew how to read maps and navigate with a compass:
“People should not trust Google Maps when they’re traveling in remote regions of Queensland, and they need to follow the signs, use official maps or other navigational devices.”
Access to constant geolocation and social tagging at remote landmarks has had other effects on our perception of the world —and also on the lives of those living near places that become popular destinations for people to take memorable pictures or create videos to post on their feeds. The other side of a relative economic boost of previously little-known places is a loss of privacy and, in extreme cases, the degradation that comes with the “tragedy of the commons,” as more and more people geotag their posts at a place, many more people come, clogging small roads, trashing entire areas, and disrupting wildlife.
Leaping between two fingers of rock atop a pinnacle
Let’s consider, for example, the Instagram frenzy around one previously remote natural landmark, Svolværgeita, a 150-meter-tall (492-foot-tall) pinnacle facing the remote town of Svolvær on the island of Austvågøya (in northern Norway’s Lofoten archipelago). It got so popular that the parking at the trailhead (called Fløya) to climb up the steep mountain and take a picture amid the two rocks crowning the pinnacle, that the parking keeps expanding.
Guides such as Lonely Planet explain the “activity” as follows:
“You’ll see it on postcards all over Lofoten —some daring soul leaping between two fingers of rock right above Svolvaer. To hike up to a point just behind the two pinnacles (355m), walk northeast along the E10 towards Narvik, past the marina, then turn left on Nyvelen and right on Blating veg. The steep climb begins just behind the children’s playground.”
Disruption around the trailhead is worth mentioning, though the place, which is above the Polar Circle—north of, say, Iceland or Alaska, though enjoying a milder climate thanks to the Gulf Stream—still feels solitary if compared to the crowds of Florence, Venice, or Barcelona. Other neighbors, however, aren’t as happy: if you prompt Google Maps with “Svolværgeita” while in the area, the application will bring you to a street culdesac at the very bottom of a place with no marked trail to hike up.
The digital misunderstanding is intense enough for the neighbors of this formerly calm street outside Svolvær, Lofoten, to post handmade signs that read “No parking” and “Privat vei” (private road).
The signs offer a glimpse of our times: Technology was supposed to enlighten us like the ultimate transubstantiation of the fire of Prometheus. Sometimes, however, it prompts us to delegate our agency and self-reliance in exchange for a poorer, not-always-convenient, digitally curated experience.
What does the technology of convenience do to our sense of place and space? Is it always a winning outcome compared with that of previous eras? In The Question Concerning Technology (1954), German philosopher Martin Heidegger expressed how our sense of space was about to change forever with the rise of cybernetics. As we enframe the world in grids of known knowledge, the places get reduced to mere points in a functional grid, stripping them of their uniqueness. With no discovery, there’s no perceived intrinsic value left.
As I recall Jack and Jim’s adventures on their boat, I wonder what we have lost in quantifying our world to monetize and gamify it.
Let’s relearn how to navigate with the stars like the Lofoten Vikings, and also, let’s keep printed books and maps (or let’s make them again) to keep by our side during our adventures. If or when things fail intermittently, there will always be the stars.