James Lane

I have been a Sailor nearly all of my life. As a matter of fact some of my earliest fantasies are of myself as a swashbuckling discoverer of a lost Island, becoming enmeshed in a secret society of beautiful alien cat people* from another planet. They (the cat people) decide that I am a perfect example of humanity and give me my own space ship with a really cool talking computer in it, a set of charts for the stars, a crash coarse in galactic diplomacy, and a really sexy tail. The cat people then send me on my way with my sword, my big black boots and my sky-blue sparkled cowboy hat to discover the Multiverse.

I hauled my first mainsail on a Hobie Cat when I was 9 years old and have been a pathetic sucker for this kind of incredibly expensive pain ever since. In 1985 I sailed from Corpus Christi, Texas to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil as first mate aboard Saul Sternberg's Bristol Herrishoff 63' wooden topsail Schooner She-La. A boat that I grew up helping to rebuild. I met Dena Hankins in the summer 1996 and we sailed off in to the sunset on 9/9/99 on an old wooden sailboat appropriately renamed (by us) the Sovereign Nation. In 2002 we made landfall in the East San Francisco Bay (Emeryville- Population 7,000) after sailing north from Seattle and wintering in Blaine, Wa. in the year of 2001. We then sailed south through the San Juan Islands of the Puget Sound with our bow pointed for the Bay in August of that year. After taking a rude offshore spanking all the way down the North American Coast in a boat that was too much for two people without a Monitor Windvane, we sold Sovereign Nation in 2004 to three sailors from the Czech Republic who sailed that beautiful old boat to the Croatian Adriatic from Marina Bay in October of that year (2004 that is).Today Sovereign Nation is sailing the Med under the name of Star Rover. Time is flying by now and change is happening all around us, suddenly we look off our bow and it is the top of 2007, Dena and I are accomplished Trans-Pacific sailors still sailing our blue-water proven 1989 Gulf 32 pilothouse sloop adequately re-named by Dean Hankins in 2002, The Sailing Vessel Sapien.

... John Barth once (or twice) said or wrote that he said what I'm about to brutally paraphrase: The weather, we can either celebrate it or ignore it, what other choice do we have? It's been a warm winter of revelations here in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.We are living on land in a box stuck between four sets of total strangers for the first time in many, many years and yet, home is still here where we are together and change is always good.

Photographer indeed,
I have been steeling images of the world around me and storing them on emulsified film and hard drive space, for the greater part of my adult life. I was the "Photographer" at my sister's 1979 wedding on a borrowed Cannon AE-1. At that time I was 14 years old and that was my first paying gig. In 1986 working as an intern for a some what reputable "firm" I shot the Denny's menu on an Omni 4X5 (between the years 1986 and 1995 if you were drunk or stoned at 4am in the USA and needed to get off the road, die or get busted, chances are you were on your way to look at some of my photography - they used my pictures for almost ten years and paid me a dollar a shot) but in 1999 my life changed when I photographed the Toys in Babeland on-line sex toy catalog all in digital right in their store in Seattle, Wash. It changed my life because of how inexpensive photography had become with the advent of pixilated digital imagery and the ability to easily compress then transfer those images on the internet! Almost overnight my specialty had become all but obsolete or better yet "Artistic and/or Obscure" with capitols both. I have shot so many horrible weddings, bar mitzvahs, stupid little kids' birthday parties and the like that I shudder to think of ever having to do that kind of thing again, but it is something I know how to do and I do it very well. I went to college for 7 years in the 80's with lots of different degree programs in mind but of course ended up earning an MFA in manual 35mm high speed black and white photography. For the past five years I have been documenting our on-going journey around the planet Earth and this project has led me to believe that the natural world around me is the only true example of mastery and to accurately document the events that take place in it is a beautiful and worthy endeavor. I have also always held that the ultimate human aesthetic comes in the form of marine vessels and their interaction with the natural world, the water. From 1985 up until 1999 I shot on (with very few exceptions) Kodak T-Max 3200 speed 35mm film using my trusty Nikon F-2T with an MD-2 motor drive that I literally shot pictures on until it (the camera) died. Ultimately it was the environmental concerns that inspired me to give up dumping toxic chemicals (from my many darkrooms) into our water supply so today I shoot primarily digital photography on my Nikon Cool-Pix 5700 and all of my processing is done with Adobe Photoshop 7 on my Sony Vaio that I plug into the bateries on our boat that are storing 12 volt electricity that we made from the sun.
So after 26 years I'm still haply exposing the world 1/500th of a second at a time, only now I don't have to destroy anything to show you.

If you want to check out other things that I've done , said or written that I am particularly proud of please just click on the hyperlinks in this graph.

I am also an avid Cyclist and I haven't even owned a car since 1994.
In fact I believe internal combustion engines that burn petroleum fuels are killing this planet and everything on it.

...I also believe we all know it.

So about twelve years ago I asked myself what I could do (as an individual) now while technology and industry struggle to produce alternatives that move people and products without losing money and killing the world at the same time.
... And my answer, I do what I can I ride the above machine.
I was also inspired by the fact that I lost my drivers license for the first two of those past 12 years in a freak red Volkswagen accident that ultimately cost me four thousand bucks to get back. I'm happy to report that I let my last Washington divers license laps and ended up just getting a token Calif, drivers license (so's I can stay "lagit" and drive when I have no other choice) when we sailed down here in 2001. I did use the above rationalization (you know the losing money and killing the world part, I had to to convince myself that I was a whole man without a cool car wrapped around me) for ultimate justification, overall I think it a healthy decision.
(...convoluted?)
(...Hmmm.)
Anyway, my mom tells me that I started riding a bike without training wheels when I was only 4 years old and by the time I was 12 I was ranked #2 in my age group in the Texas State BMX championships. As a matter of fact there has only been one short time in my life that I didn't have a bike but hey, we all gotta grow up.
Right?!

(In the year 2000 I blew out, or rather herniated a disk in my neck** riding my super kush Trek Y-22 full suspension mountain bike. My physician, Dean [yes Dena's father] told me to either give up the bike or go recumbent. I went recumbent and let me tell you, if I can help it, I'm never going back to riding a "Neck-Breaker" again.)

My bike is a super-tricked-out (meaning, totally patched together out of necessity) 1999 Linear-Sonic SWB-USS (short wheel base, under seat steering) recumbent that I have broken and had welded back together with different "design improvements" (finger quotes inserted by insecure author of present story) five times now, making this poor bike the bastard son of three different recumbent bike designs. Ok, if I was going to build a recumbent bike it would be like this (pictured above). I believe we (upright monkies with thumbs) already have the means to travel the world at our finger tips, the fact is, we discovered the entire planet Earth without the internal combustion engine and I believe we can discover the meaning of the word civilization without it as well. That's only the political reason I ride a bike and by far the most insignificant. The main reason I ride my bike is because it keeps my body in shape and feeling good and no matter where I go people freak out at how cool I am flying by on my creaky little chair,

The two most profound revelations of my adult life have to be:
1) All technology fails.
2) Sovereignty is simply a mater of the eloquence of your declaration.
Or rather, I am free because I say I am.

Dena and I also built and maintaned the GravityFeed website(2003-2005).
If you click on the picture above (or the underlined hyperlink) you can see that site.
Although the Gravityfeed turned out to be one of my all time greatest heart-breaks there were so many things I did there that I will allways be very proud of, so please check it out...

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Sapien? Perhaps

2005 Folke Båd Regatta at the San Francisco Yacht Club

*I stole the cat people thing from Kilgor Trout's "Venus on the Half Shell" actually, or rather, supposedly written by a guy named Kurt Vonnegut. Being as though Kilgor Trout was a character in many Kurt Vonnegut novels, I believe it's a safe assumption that Kurt Vonnegut wrote Venus on the Half Shell but I don't really know for sure who wrote that book. I do know that I liked it.

** When I was 18 years old I dove off a 15 foot cliff into 12 inches of water above a sandbar that was supposed to be a little closer in than I thought it was at the time. I broke my neck in two places (C-2&3). I healed up ok (cuz-o-the-fact I'm a superhero and all) but it's not hard to see the cause and effect relationship between my broken neck and a herniated disk in my C-4 vertebra 20 years later. Right?!