I received this message from Paul Schot today:

Hi Allan,
Great to read your blog! This alternative route looks wonderful. Pity your bike is letting you down but very loyal to keep it and continue bouncing . Didn’t you once ride down this coast on a bike with a dog in a basket? Enjoy the ocean views and keep on blogging! Just don’t spend too much time behind the I-pad, these things drain too much precious moments from our lives. Ride on happy cyclist, ride on!!
Hug, Paul

Paul currently lives, I think, in Amsterdam, but he could be anywhere in the world. Paul is for me the living embodiment of “we really have no idea how our actions will affect others”. Here’s my story:

In 1990 I was temporarily living at my mother’s house in the San Francisco Bay Area. We had just laid my dad to rest, and I had just met or was about to meet my wife Johanna. The townhouse development in which my mother lived was primarily a commuter home base for working adult professionals, so there were few kids living there. Paul and his sister were the only ones, and I befriended Paul, who was eleven at the time. Paul and his family were from Holland, and Paul’s father was a shipping executive. One day I learned that Paul’s father had left the family, and they would soon have to return to Holland. Paul was pretty devastated by the sudden breakup of his family.

So I took Paul backpacking for a week in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I had gear enough to share, and planned the trip. Paul had never seen mountains or wilderness before. He complained about everything age-appropriate: the climbing, hurting feet, the backpack weight, but he made the trip. We soon went on our separate ways, and I didn’t hear much from him for a number of years.

I looked him up maybe ten years later, and I learned that that week had completely changed his young life’s direction. He had become a climber, and then gone to work with Greenpeace Holland. He sent me links to pictures and stories of his arrests for hanging huge antinuclear banners on the cooling towers of nuclear power plants.

Here’s one photo, taken off the web from 2003:

The caption reads: “Greenpeace campaigner Paul Schot scales the dome containing the pressurised water reactor at Sizewell B nuclear power station, near Leiston, Suffolk, Monday January 13, 2003. Nineteen Greenpeace protestors earlier entered the building and say their action is to highlight poor security at Britain’s nuclear power plants and their vulnerability to terrorist attacks, not to tamper with the power station’s operations.”

Since then, that awareness has remained with me as one of the most significant things I have done, as it is a quintessential example of “we can never know how our actions will affect another’s life”. If I ever write my life story, his story would be a chapter

And again we lost touch for some years. Shortly before leaving on this trip I found Paul again and asked about his life since then. He told me in reply:
“My god, well in a nutshell; I have climbed very intensively in my early twenties, while working for Greenpeace on an irregular basis. I didn’t graduate but decided to buy a sailboat. Which i did, and in the following years i fixed the boat up and taught myself how to sail, while doing the occasional odd job to pay for the lifestyle. Then when I was twenty seven I left Holland to sail around the world. The trip would take me seven years and i came back last summer. I am thirty five now!

And I now work as a freelance industrial climber. Actually I am on an oil rig in the middle of the sea right now. A lot of people don’t understand how an environmentalist can work on oil rigs. But I see that differently, I got tired off just pointing the finger at big corporations. Its too easy we are all consuming fossil fuels for just about everything. Most of our production methods are unsustainable. Our overconsumption is just ridiculous and its better we look in the mirror instead of diverting the blame at companies who produce what we demand for our parasitic lifestyles. I would happily compare my co2 footprint with any one.”

And that’s my story about Paul; I hope that you, dear reader, found it worth your read.