Miles To Go.

Largest on water cleanup- Ever.

News spread pretty quickly that the Shell Oil LNG platform destined for Long Island Sound sunk back into oblivion last week, likely for good. In its proposed form, it would have towered above all other structures on either side of that great body of water and inspired the curses of generations to follow. It should have been a procedural layup, with the interests of the Sound split between two states, both struggling with budget and resource constraints, and zero organized advocacy to oppose the revenue generating and cost saving proposal.

Now the legend of how that didn’t happen continues to grow, just as quietly as it snuck up on everybody before the battle began.

Begin with Leah Schmalz, a delightful director of legal and legislative affairs for Save the Sound, a program of Connecticut Fund for the Environment who began the opposition eight years ago with meager resources and virtually zero platform to get the word out. She picked her punches wisely.

Then, out of no where, Kayak for a Cause jumped in, ostensibly because ”Save the Sound” had the brand that most directly fit the core values of the organization. But as KFAC learned more, both organizations realized the symbiosis of their existences. What followed was a virtual marching band of support for Leah and her work at STS. When STS needed to get the word out, KFAC designed an “on the water clean up” over 14 miles of sound. When STS needed a platform to gather more supporters, KFAC was there with a stage, a microphone,and a tremendous crowd ready to listen. When STS needed promotion during a crucial state senate vote, KFAC rallied its 10,000 donors to flood the capital with expressions of concern. And when STS needed financial resources to back up Leah, KFAC was there with five figure support, year after year.

Was is most amazing, perhaps, is that all of this was started with nothing, and done for love: One simple bet, and a few guys redirecting the proceeds to charity became an annual tradition along the Sound.

It’s now hard to fathom that KFAC has always been an entirely volunteer organization which somehow fields a crew of 500 committed souls every year to manage the logistics of a modern day Normandy with a beach party at the end. The leadership and organizational talents of this group are stunning. People like Shirleen Dubuque and Steve Showalter organize provisions, supplies and people with sublime, 11th hour hijinx. Kim Beaumont at DownUnder and Dave Haddox from Purdue have likely trained hundreds of kayakers to be safe enough to make the voyage. Tad Jones worked stage miracles for years, packing thousands of people into legendary beach parties that rallies the troops around the charities. Patrick Sikes was a master magician at logistics. Amy Rule and Kathy Foreman wrangle hundreds of volunteers to do undesirable work details at unmentionable hours. And Adam Uhrynowski and Brian Russell have this magic touch capturing the whole thing on film for us to replay over and again in the long winter months of  frozen water.

All of this energy was harnessed and directed to something good, for years on end. And then last week…

“In sending a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission requesting to vacate their certificates, Broadwater has signaled that their proposed floating gas plant is finally dead,” said Leah Schmalz. “Eight years ago, the citizens of Connecticut and New York recognized that this proposed project was not good for our environment or our livelihood,” Schmalz said. “It took years of fighting, partnering with federal and state officials on both sides of Long Island Sound, but now we can say that the health and safety of our Sound will not be compromised by the proposed industrial complex.” More here

Years ago, another KFAC treasure named Morley quoted Pete Seeger  in “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” from the stage, as she had witnessed KFAC grow from dozens to hundreds and then thousands.

I’ve been surprised by some good things happening in my lifetime. Sometimes quite suddenly.

Imagine a big see-saw, with a basketful of rocks sitting on one end. That end is down on the ground. At the other end, up in the air, is a basket half full of sand. Some of us are trying to fill it, using teaspoons. Most folks laugh at us. “Don’t you know the sand is leaking out even as you put it in?”

We say, that’s true, but we’re getting more people with teaspoons all the time. One of these days that basket of sand will be full up and you’ll see this whole see-saw just tip the opposite way. People will say, “Gee, how did it happen so suddenly?”

Us, and our little teaspoons.

Leah Schmalz is now working on controlling emissions and ecoli bloom from the Bridgeport harbor. Kayak for a Cause launches for its twelfth year on July 21th. And Long Island Sound is that much nicer because they do what they do.

"Play responsibly"

I’ve been trading everyday phone calls and emails with the developer that built our new family home. The experience hasn’t been perfect, from my perspective, but I acknowledge the guy probably has plenty other things going on besides the faulty control panel on my Kohler steambath.

Turns out, I was right.

Seems Brandon won the Connecticut Powerball lottery earlier this month, and it all came out today. For those that don’t know it, our new nhometown of Greenwich does not see a lot of suffering. In fact, if there was ever a town that did not need a lottery winner, that would be ours. If there is an Occupy Greenwich Avenue movement starting soon to decry the inequality of the 1% winning a lottery designed for the 99%, consider this: the town is full of rags to riches stories. It’s just that they usually involve numbers that come through a Bloomberg terminal, not spit out for a dollar at the local BP station. Luck is random, and this proves it, again.

But the BP station is where Brandon and his two boyhood buddies went in equal (I surmise) on a dollar bet that pulled a lump sum of $100,000,000. (Powerball markets it as $254,000,000 but that’s a 30 year payout into a black hole of tax policy no one in or out of Greenwich should take a bet on). I was recently told by an EO leadership swami that you can’t control the world, you can only control how you react to it. This is a good example of that.

He has been sitting on this news for the past three weeks. In the meantime, he has been responsive and professional about the various punchlist fixes he owes at the house. We knock something out every few days. And that says a lot about Brandon; old school, honest and possessing a genuinely good heart. I spend a lot of time thinking about Trust, and have written about the Heuristics of Trust , actually more than once. I’m not sure who bought the ticket, but the fact the three shared it also says a lot about their Huck-Finn like trust dynamic ($.66 would have bought out the others a few weeks back).

Today, they came clean and told the public. They had formed a trust, and will give a large amount to charity. They don’t strike me as the type of guys about to go on a race to the bottom and be deeply in debt 5 years after winning. It will probably not change their lives all that much, but that’s an outside view at this point. All I can say is, it has not changed my friend in the past three weeks.

That is a good story. Good on you mate.

Miles Sharpless Spencer with 24th kid, Byrdie

Back in the day, commoners would from time to time approach the lord of the manor and “claim kin”, hoping to reap some of the benefits of those that lived “inside the walls”. Needless to say, those living inside the walls were very comfy and pretty skeptical. It usually took very good data, a lot of money, or a big @#$% army to convince people you were legit. For example William the Conqueror started out as William the Bastard, until he set matters straight in 1066 at the point of a spear.

These days we can prove more with data.

First is the growing power of ancestral research because of the web (and the Mormons, thanks for the hard work!). I’ve spent some time on Ancestry.com in the past year poking around my family history. We have a lot of legends that have been passed down through the years, but not a lot of it based on verifiable facts. Thanks to web 2.0, I have now traced Spencer males back to 1728 with birth and death records, census data, and Sons of the American Revolution documents and guess what: the family actually did a good job of remembering the lineage without writing much of it down. My great grandfather did have 24 kids. He did have his last when he was 74 years old. And he did have a wife ~40 years his junior. Apparently, with his spare time he ran a farm in Central Pennsylvania. His great grandfather a Joseph Sr. may have fought for the winners in the Revolutionary War (still confirming). And his ancestors came from England. (More to come after the DNA is complete).

Second is the power of  social networks to access additional, related facts nearly instantaneously. My dad, aka Big Art, and I had spent the previous 5+ years trying to piece together rumors, family legends, a bit of travel to the continent in an effort to verify anything about our heritage. The we logged on to Ancestry and used the other trees to quickly piece together draft documents, immigration papers, and baptism records we had not otherwise found. suddenly, our knowledge was no longer in a silo.

Third is the burgeoning business of DNA. 23andME  tipped off a fascinating journey in mapping the human genome. With the simple swab of a cheek, I will be able to confirm not only who we are related to, but also what anomalies I may be exposed to. Sergey Brin of Google realized he prone to Parkinsons by mapping his DNA this way. I can’t imagine what I am prone to. But with the results, there is likely undeniable truth to my ancestral claims, whatever that might be.

But perhaps the biggest point for me is this: like it or not, we eventually become our fathers, more or less. That is perhaps why I have been so fascinated with the Visualize Health/SelfAwareness project, where connected devices inform us of the health and wellness trends of ourselves and our loved ones. Through the power of Web 2.0, Social networks, and DNA we can all know what our baseline data is, as well as the trend. It’s up to us where to go with it.

RollFast WingDing: One sweet ride

I learned a few things about entrepreneurship from my buddy Dave Buckenheimer and my RollFast Wing bike — but bear with me first: this is a hell of a wipeout story. Let’s start with our Moms.  Both were from the laissez faire school of child rearing, as in… break your arm falling on the swing? Get bit by the bunny in the pet center out back? Burn yourself making a funeral pyre for some unlucky ants? All fine, just be home for dinner. It’s amazing how much we learned by simply breaking, bleeding, and wailing our way through our play-filled youth. Bike wrecks were the highest form of this adolescent art form and Gailey Boulevard, a steep switchback that ran from our house down into town, was our particular proving ground. It was also where Dave lived.  One afternoon,  I called and let Bucky know I was headed his way;  he said he’d meet me at the bottom. I hopped on my trusty Wing Ding Rollfast and hit Gailey full steam.

The Wing Ding was my go-to bike. I liked its simplicity. It had only one speed: fast. And it could brake really well, allowing me to execute perfect fishtail skids. Gailey had no traffic whatsoever, making it a relatively safe ride. The only wildcard in the equation was pig iron, a waste byproduct of the steel mills downriver in Pittsburgh. Sometime, somewhere, someone saw fit to cover Gailey with this metallic stuff, vaguely reminiscent of blown glass beads, Generally smooth to the touch, some of it was sharp as a blade if cracked. This would become meaningful very shortly.

I was halfway down Gailey by now, although the Wing Ding was nowhere near top speed, mainly because the loose pig iron made me plenty careful in the hairpin turns. Trees zipped by, I passed the last of the four homes and picked up speed after the last of the hairpins. I was running flat out when I saw Bucky near the base of the Boulevard. He had a weird look on his face: a dropping jaw and the beginnings of a slow motion scream worthy of a Bruce Lee death sequence. He was pointing at something.  My feet locked into the pedals of the Wing Ding, my hands on the padded handlebars my brother had been working on lately. Garage Note: when a gooseneck handlebar is loosened to do custom work, you still have handlebars that can make a variety of turns no problem. But if you lift the bars straight up, they slip right out. Not an issue when you are working in the garage; definitely an issue when you are flying down Gailey Boulevard.

I actually thought I had a shot at pulling out of it. The handlebars were now high in my hands, separated from the steering column by at least a foot. But the wheel hadn’t turned at all and I was coasting below top speed. If the wheel stayed straight, another 20 feet and I could bail with minimal damage. Bucky was rooting for me to pull off one of the great saves in Beaver, PA Biking History.

That fleeting hope was done in by a loose piece of pig iron redirecting my tire. That was all she wrote. The wheel lurched to a 90* angle that I was powerless to correct. I was ass-over-tea cups, still holding the handlebars, still clueless as how I got that way. My brother knew, however — he’d been working a chopper conversion for an upcoming Evil Knievel jump off the Spencer swimming pool, and neglected to mention the job was only half done.

Gailey Boulevard met me with all the hospitality one would expect of loose asphalt and scrap pig iron greeting an 8 year-old in shorts, a t-shirt and packing a lot of velocity.

According to Bucky, it was the most spectacular wipeout ever. I missed it:  my head hit next and I was out. Bucky picked me up and helped me to his house. When I came to, his sister Amy was using a tongue depressor to remove a piece of pig iron the size of a quarter from my knee. I passed out again.  We still practiced baseball that afternoon and when it got near dark, Mrs. B  gave me and the mangled Wing Ding a ride home.

Here’s what a mangled –but exhilarated — 8 year old can teach entrepreneurs:

1. Go full out on something you love.
2. Fail once in a while. It won’t kill you.
3. Get the h*ll back up and do something else, and let the scars remind you a bit.

Unlike a lot of kids today who are practically wrapped in bubble-wrap, we grew up active participants in life, with an amazing sense of adventure. That carries on today, informing my entrepreneur experience.  I only wish more kids- and entrepreneurs — would behave with the same abandon. Most of what I observe in today’s kids is an awful lot of video consumption and precious little actual contact with anything else.  If that continues unchecked, Video Thumb will become will be our main body part in 10,000 years. If anyone reading this is still around then, remember, you read it here first.

To laugh often and much...

Here’s a recent shot from an event I attended with my Dad, aka Big Art.  OK, it was my wedding.

He was dapper in his tux, danced like a dervish, and sported a head of hair anyone half his age would envy. And while a full house went silent listening to him recite his “favorite” Emerson from 72 years ago, very few that night knew the challenges my father overcame to get there, many of them health related. Honestly, their gravity cannot be overstated.

So, looking at this picture of us side by side (after that toast), I got to thinking something we all wonder about as time goes by. “What will I be like when…”

Could I visualize that progression? And if there are improvements I want to make along the way and goals that I want to prioritize, what am I doing now that will affect that?

And so, a concept being kicked around by a few different entrepreneurs began to crystallize for me. Millions have created avatars for Farmville, Mob Wars, and World of Warfare. Many medical professionals who want to do something better than battle insurance carriers for reimbursements. And the number of mobile devices measuring weight, Blood pressure, Blood sugar, heart rate, excercise, etc. are making automated personal health monitoring a possibility. Then there are social networks to provide the support necessary to keep us on track with our goals.

So…how about a social game that helps me Visualize My Health?

Maybe then we can see our real-life avatar progress as it incorporates the positive (or negative) benefits of our (intended) behavior. And we can course correct those behaviors along the way. Drink less (or more!): add 3 years. Quit cigarettes?: add 5 years! Exercise: see your avatar lose weight and look healthier. Eliminate stress: live forever, or at least long enough to dance at your son’s second wedding! I’ve seen some entrepreneurs peck around at this, but no one is hitting it right — yet.

My call to action?  More feedback on the idea. Is this about health first? Is this another social media game to play online, or on my smartphone?  Is America long on health aspirations, and short on goals and willpower (shout out to Covey’s Seven Habits #2- begin with the End in Mind) ? Love to hear your thoughts and recommendations below.

Megan... got me thinking

Not long ago, I was in the animal hospital with the last and most lively of my Rottweiler gang, Megan.

She was closing in on the happy hunting grounds and I was there to say when. Balancing dignity with a finances, even for canine care, is not easy. With each deferral of the inevitable came the bill; in this case about $1k a day for superior care and technology (I could have opted for more technology and cost, but kept it practical, at least I thought). When it was over, we spent more in the final four days of care than we did in the preceding 11 years. For virtually the same result. A wonderful experience with a great dog that gave us a ton of happiness and four days of pain.

Thats when this came across my smartphone:

The New York Times Prime Number 197: The amount, in thousands of dollars, that the typical married couple at age 65 should expect to spend on uninsured health care costs over the rest of their lives, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. This total includes insurance premiums, out-of-pocket costs and home health care costs, but it does not include nursing home care. Including the cost of nursing home care, typical lifetime health care costs shoot up to $260,000, the center estimated.

Ok, people are not dogs. And vice versa. For one thing, people have a say in their care when conscious, while dogs can only rely on the incredible messages in their eyes. But for me, it leaves a good lesson in dong what is right, responsible , and sensible.

So whats it all about? In a word, hospice. For dogs and people.

It’s the ability to realize end of life and deal with it in dignity and balance. To live lives that are not based on the number of breaths we take, but the number of times our breath is taken away. And to not selfishly chase the “miracle “of a few more days at the cost of a lifetime of savings wasted. There is a wonderful hospice movement that continues to grow in scope and service in the US. I think it is important and deserves support and fostering.

Look, I know well the incredible boil of issues that is healthcare in America today. This is just one stab at a part of the problem. But it’s a good stab I think. Love to know what others think…

KFAC X features Maori island images... sorta.

I was sitting on my porch, listening to the water gurgle peacefully in the pool as it does when I don’t change the filter right proper. I tried to figure out how a fifty dollar bet could end up, years later, launching a small armada of kayaks and a charitable phenomenon. And that’s when I put two and two together.

Kayak for a Cause, the Foundation I founded with Scott Carlin, has been pretty well documented in the press- thank you very much Greg Matusky. But one story that hasn’t been written is this: things happen when they are ready to happen. While I prefer my destiny in my hands, crossing Long Island Sound in a kayak definitely puts that destiny somewhere else. How you deal with it makes all the difference I believe.

KFAC III and KFAC IV illustrate my point.

KFAC III was a death march on water. We put 8 boats in the water. It took most of us 6+ plus hours in withering heat. Some finished in 7+. Some did not finish. Most of us needed transfusions in Long Island. My arm was mummified from the elbow to the thumb, a condition that looks as idiotic as it sounds. (I pulled too hard with the right to compensate for an uneven paddle stroke). We retuned to Connecticut, mumbled a few goodbyes, and headed for home. And half of the paddlers did not- would not- do it again.

KFAC IV was different, you might say. We put 40 kayaks in the water. I personally knocked four hours off my time, and I was basically the middle of an amazing pack that ranged from 2:00 to 3:10 total time. We stuck together, we had a nice reception in Long Island, and we posed for pictures for the media. When we got back to Norwalk, we were treated to a lobster dinner on the beach and the luscious sounds of a diva named MORLEY and her band. We raised over $70,000, about 700% over the prior year. We thought that was a lot.

Since then we have put 1,5000 butts in kayaks and lead them across Long Island Sound. We’ve raised over $1,000,000 for charities tha support our community, environment and leasdership. We have an all volunteer organization of ~50 people to produce the event. And we have a blast doing it.

So, what gives?

Truthfully, it was just the tide, doing its thing both literally and figuratively. Before we hit the water, we caught some good swells. A committed volunteer organization* rallied around us and created our look, vetted charities, recruited paddlers, sourced kayaks and chase boats, arranged land transport, found entertainment, and managed donations. We let it happen, I’m proud to say, by answering most every challenge with simply this; let it take you. We were able to deal with near disasters like being short 15 kayaks at 05:00 and logistical challenges like returning 40 kayaks by land when they had arrived by sea. To match the swell of support on land, we let the currents take us at sea: we enjoyed 3 knots tides, both out of Norwalk and into Northport, with a 5mph tail wind to boot. It was fun.

Where will the tide of KFAC take us next? One thing’s for sure, we’ll stick to the spirit and fun of that $50 bet. And we’ll let the tides take us from there.