I always like joking that when I take the ferry to work that I'm getting in touch with my nautical, seafaring heritage. It just sounds really epic and somewhat pretentious and mysterious all at the same time. But it's really the truth. The Bischers love them some salt air. Some of them were truly seaworthy.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in "the book", aka the early-19th century navigation manual/text book/log of my great-great-great grandfather, Carl Fredrich Büscher. Oh yes, back in the day, there was no Complete and Total Bisch. You all have the officials at Ellis Island to thank for that (I'm assuming, anyway. "What's that thing over the u? Eh, what the hell, it's an 'i' now. Move along, Bischer.")
Anyway, I don't know much about him, but I can assume Carl was all living in Germany and studying how to be Horatio Hornblower or Ahab or Quint from Jaws before they were even seafaring archetypes. And you know what he really had to study to be good at this sort of thing?
MATH. LOTS AND LOTS OF MATH. Which, unless he had a scar under his chin and an almost constant hankering for anything with a peanut butter-chocolate combination, a love of the ocean is where the similarities between Carl and I end. Also, his penmanship makes me skeptical of our relationship because both my father and I have awful handwriting. No, really, if this blog were handwritten, we'd all be screwed. But luckily for us, Carl Fredrich was neat, and also knew how to use a compass quite well:
While the book is about all the basics of navigation and tides and latitude and longitude and all that, there's also parts about journaling, like so:
Which has made me decide to refer to my Yankee Journal as Von Journal from now on.
Navigating nine innings is just as important as keeping a ship from crashing into rocks or veering off course into The Bermuda Triangle, you know.
Anyway, since this book has a line of succession and gets passed down on the first-born male, name-carrying side of the family, I can lay no claim to it. But I sure as hell took lots of photos of it this weekend, and am in the process of making some art for over my fireplace. As well as posting some stuff here, because it looks cool.
Which I'm sure was exactly Carl Fredrich's intent back in 1832.
