The Canoe Commuters of the CIA (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Canoe Commuters of the CIA (2019)

mensjournal.com

161 pointsmarymkearney88 comments

This quote from the original article by Robert Sinclair, the CIA analyst, is one of the most profound things I've ever read.

"What do I get out of all this? For a moment, I get to evade modern man's almost complete dependence on secondhand information....We have come to rely on what others tell us about the world beyond our narrow boxes.

"The canoe commute does give me a first hand glimpse of what is going on beyond the various manmade containers I inhabit. I benefit from regular access to information that clearly is unmediated."

PDF of original article embedded here: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/history-of-the-cia-...

Agree on the quote. I love that our house is bounded on three sides by 100 acres of undeveloped wilderness in Western NJ. In a two minute walk I can get away from houses, see the mountain park across the valley, hear the coyotes and owls, maybe spot a fox. At night, the stars are bright because we have no street lights here.

Humanity can intrude, but even that can be sounds from a bygone era, like the steam train blowing its whistle as it’s leaving the New Hope station across the Delaware from us. There are few sounds more warming than a train whistle echoing off of valleys.

By comparison it takes some getting used to driving into even moderate suburbs.

I read that airports grate on people because there's an omnipresent chance of something occuring that's completely outside of their control, and that possibility is therefore always in their mind.

Nature, for me, is the antithesis of that -- things move and happen in the physical rather than the potential. And that's relaxing!

One of our patio chairs was recently crushed by a falling tree limb, shortly after someone vacated the seat. Not so different!

>...an omnipresent chance of something occuring that's completely outside of their control, and that possibility is therefore always in their mind. Nature, for me, is the antithesis of that -- things move and happen in the physical rather than the potential.

Whether that angry grizzly bear is going to attack you or not is just as much out of your control as anything that happens in an airport.

Ah yes plane crashes are out of control. While earthquakes instead are completely under control!

Changing gates, changing flight times, longer than expected security lines, flight cancellations.

All fairly regular occurrences in an airport that travelers have no control over but must adapt to.

Earthquakes are much more rare, so not worth constantly worrying about.

... security policies changing (shoes on or off?), repeated "ATTENTION, BY IMMEDIATE ORDER OF THE TSA" announcements, people doing dumb things, people being rude, baggage getting lost, flights being overbooked...

There's a lot.

Most of the time it works out, but that was the point of the observation: most can still be pretty stressful.

> baggage getting lost

One way to make the airlines care more about your luggage and make it highly unlikely for them to lose it is to check a firearm as described in Deviant Ollam's famous talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfqtYfaILHw

Undeveloped and protected? Or undeveloped only for now?

Underutilized for the time being one assumes

In this case undeveloped. We Also have a lot of preserved land around us, but it is not ubiquitous.

Even then, preserved land can be tricky. A lot of State-preserved farms and lands were recently threatened by a project that was seeking Federal eminent domain rights. Federal ED would have wiped out the State level conservation.

Fortunately we were able to persuade the developer to give up (over the course of 7 or so year fight).

“One assumes”? I don’t.

“Underutilized”, that’s a notable word choice. It implies that the land should be utilized more? With whose interests in mind? Who decides? Over what time frame?

Talking about utilization in this way is a decent predictor of a libertarian framing. It is worth saying in tech forums that libertarianism isn’t the only political philosophy that includes market forces as a key analysis mechanism.

I prefer the study of political economy over traditional economics, because it admits a much wider lens of the underlying aims of a well functioning economic system. It doesn’t have to be economic efficiency as defined by a summation of individual utilities. That is only one mathematically convenient objective function; there are others.

Economics is a big tent. Economists have varying political philosophies. Relatively few educated economists hold idealistic notions about how well actual markets function to optimize a social welfare function.

But from what I’ve seen, relatively few outspoken libertarians rigorously challenge their assumptions about markets or the overall objective function. Many conflate a descriptive theory with a normative value system.

Yes, this is a long reply to a seven word comment. Why bother? Given the context around the thread, plus some consistent blind spots from HN comments, suggests to me that many here should go deeper and ask more questions about political economy.

Some big assumptions there chief

Thanks for the link.

The thing that strikes me most is how the writing culture was alive and well and indeed, the writer is gifted with a style that transcends the bureaucracy that surrounded him. For me, it's like paradise lost since I've said aloud that if Uber did boats, the slowest among them would be superior to any method on land in a city that judged from a plane is a snake's forked tongue of rivers surrounded by traffic on goat paths and train trestles that look like a motocross racetrack.

The fact that CIA was doing this at the time gives you a rough idea of how thoughtful they were and how the choice of time and place many Americans enjoy at work today is a feeble attempt compared to this magical existence. I can only imagine the organizational conversation that occurred to put this commute in place, particularly given my own experience with government and FFRDCs. To me, the improvement in cadence, community, and cognition is clear, but I doubt those views are widely held today. I know I'd sleep better at night if I rowed an actual canoe twice-a-day instead of a water rower.

;->

Uber has a boat service in London.

https://www.uber.com/gb/en/u/uberboat/

It's terrible - it is basically a bus on water and not a personal speed boat taking you where you need to go like you can get in Venice (I highly recommend a fast boat transfer from Venice airport! Beats the water bus and makes you feel like a rockstar)

This is fascinating. Thanks for the link.

I've never been to London but I'll definitely seek it out if I visit.

The picture on the page makes it look better than a bus on water - marketing FTW!

I'm guessing this has something to do with speed or wake limits.

The original article called it "perhaps the most beautiful piece of wilderness musings ever released through the FOIA."

That's hilarious!

The creators of the FOIA could not have foreseen the synchronicity that would stem from the collision of their lawmaking with Robert Sinclair's transcendent writings about commuting to the CIA within a few years of the FOIA's signing.

The fact that the same canoe commute involved bicycling, my own default commute mode, makes it even more heartfelt and resplendent.

"What do I get out of all this? For a moment, I get to evade modern man's almost complete dependence on secondhand information.... We have come to rely on what others tell us about the world beyond our narrow boxes."

Lightly reworded, this could be the first quote from an A.I. placed in control of a physical body.

The canoe club article version which is mentioned for being unredacted: https://web.archive.org/web/20211016001404/https://sycamorei...

> The canoe commute does give me a first hand glimpse of what is going on beyond the various manmade containers I inhabit. I benefit from regular access to information that clearly is unmediated.

How is information gathered while canoeing direct, while information gathered while driving isn’t?

I thought it was along the lines of, road signs and even the implication that the road you are on is going where you think, is information provided to you. Where in nature, it's a direct sample of the situation. Your deductions can still be right or wrong, but at least you can't be misled.

But I am also having trouble reading into that paragraph with certainty.

I've actually pondered this question a lot, while driving, canoeing, and otherwise self-propelling through the world. The closest I can get to it is, there's an embodied intelligence that's activated in the open air in our natural habitat.

Humans have remarkable powers of sensory perception outdoors, evolved over eons. Those skills can atrophy in modern built environments. We mostly use our big brains there, which aren't nearly as smart as all our intelligences put together.

But those powers come alive again, when exposed directly to the elements they've evolved to understand: earth, wind, water, ice, mud, weather, plants, animals.

It's true that we also gather lots of sensory input when, say, driving. It keeps us alive! But it's a recent adaptation, to highways, traffic, concrete, motors, metal boxes, compared to the elements we've evolved to perceive over many millenia.

I think you have the intended sense of the author: (~)unmediated reality forces the thoughtful observer into reflection.

~: there ain't no such thing -- everything we experience is mediated by [our particular] sensory mechanisms -- but arguably there is a baseline directly experienced human reality that being in nature reactives (for some).

Because in a car you are still inside a manmade container?

(And therefore everything filtered)

https://web.archive.org/web/20050322002947/https://sycamorei...

Obligatory paranoia quote

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director

Now ask yourself if that is not the case. Or I can tell you it is. The answer remains the same.

> I benefit from regular access to information that clearly is unmediated.

No experience is unmediated. There is always an interpretive apparatus attached to perception.

Ah, so being outside in nature...

Even "nature" can be deceiving. Lots of "green spaces" in big cities are equally planned, groomed and manicured into a vision that is projected into the space, as much as if not more so than their concrete and steel counterparts.

Reminds me of the occasional stories about people commuting into Manhattan by canoe/rowboat/paddleboard because they're fed up with the poor public transportation.

Something I've noticed more often these days is people commuting from New Jersey into Manhattan via electric scooter.

This is done by first going to Fort Lee, crossing the George Washington Bridge, then down the Hudson bike path to wherever their office is. They say it's faster and less stressful than doing the traditional bus or train + subway commute. I believe them.

There is also the financial benefit which is you get to avoid paying to cross the Hudson River, which is expensive whether you cross by car, bus, train, or ferry.

Granted even before electric scooters became common, you could do this via traditional bicycle. But you'd arrive at the office all sweaty, and most people don't have the luxury of being able to shower at the office, not to mention rampant bike theft. Plus there is an abomination of a steep hill going up to the outbound George Washington on your way back home.

When I lived in Philly, I first used the subway to get to work. But the commute became an oppressive reminder of daily inhumanity in the City of Brotherly Love. I had to make a change. So I tried biking to work, for two weeks. The next week I ordered an electric scooter. The scooter is smaller than a bike, more nimble, more portable. I would often overtake bikes on the flats, and it and moves up hills with ease. I carry it into the office and charge it at my desk. The ride to work and home is serene. Sometimes I stop along the water just to sit for a minute and enjoy some nature.

Now I'm a remote worker. I have a mild nostalgia for the ride home... no nostalgia for the subway. But if my office was somewhere with seasons, and I could paddle to work, I'd work weekends.

I lived on a boat in the SF marina for a year...

There was a guy that would commute into SF via a MASSIVE zodiac with (4) 600-HP engines and would do ~80MPH across the bay from Saucalito to the ferry building. He had a full time boat pilot, who he paid ~$100K/year (I asked) and he would make it from saucalito to SF in ~15 minutes.

He was a hedgie in FiDi...

As someone who has made the GGB commute all the way down to Sunnyvale for a time... I was super jealous of the fact this guy had that luxury.

Never mind the time savings, the manic, childish joy of turning 2400hp up to 100 every morning was probably worth every penny.

This is brilliant innovation. Minus the need to pay the pilot, surely you just diy.

Too much [re[ and tear-down, then re-prep etc...

That guy probably made $100,000 in a day.

I used to bike to work almost every day before working from home mostly. The key to not getting sweaty is to take it easy. You can leisurely bike, it is less effort than walking, and it isn't that much slower than biking with a lot of effort really. If you have a lot of hills or very hot weather this might not be enough and you should change undershirts at least, and at first it is hard to do if you are accustomed to putting in a lot of effort all the time. But it works better than you would expect.

The other part is to not wear a backpack and put it on a bike rack or in a basket, or just leave stuff in the office and drive or take the bus now and then if you need to drop off or pickup something bulky or heavy.

The scooters are everywhere now in London - both rentable ones but also private ones.

It is illegal to ride a privately owned one on the road or pavements/sidewalks here, but that doesn't seem to stop anyone.

I am all for it (apart from mixing with pedestrians) - seems like a great idea.

This is cool to see. I used to run past that island all the time whilst doing long runs on the C&O canal trail. I noticed the little ferry and always assumed there was something of interest on the island itself. I also never realized I was far enough north from the city to be directly across the river from the CIA.

On the CIA side of the river there's another trail (Potomac Heritage trail). I was always surprised that you could freely run in the woods there so close to the CIA but also that you could see no sign of their "campus" from the trail.

Full disclosure, I lived on the island part-time for 10 years. There's a stationary rope affixed to the mainland and to a tree on the island. You get there (and back) by pulling the little ferry hand-over-hand along the rope. It was my commuter vehicle.

There was a lot of unmediated information. :) Perhaps we passed each other on the trail.

The ferry dock.[1]

[1] https://earth.google.com/web/@38.95800982,-77.13235337,18.82...

Is it a trail filled with tears?

I spent some time in Basel, Switzerland recently where locals would travel via a lazy float down the Rhine. They'd tow along a floating "fish bag" which holds their clothes and equipment dry for the commute. Seems like a ridiculously pleasant way to start or end your day! I figure many cities in Europe do this, but I'm not sure I've seen it elsewhere.

I had to buy a Wickelfisch after seeing them in Basel!

I think the floating commute is a massive testament to the cleanliness of the river. I can't imagine swimming in a major city's river without feeling the need to decontaminate before heading into the office.

I’d go running up the tow path along the canal out of Georgetown and always wondered what the hell this random cable connecting to a barrier island (as seen in the photo) was for. I figured it was a camp or club of sorts. I knew I was approximately abreast of Langley but definitely never guessed at this.

At last I have closure.

It’s a very pretty area, and I imagine made for one gorgeous commute.

Participate in the annual Potomac Downriver Race, then you will get to have fried chicken and ice cream on Sycamore Island after you complete the race in your kayak, canoe, or paddleboard. It is a very fun day!

Not a commute, but fwiw: My freshman college dorm was across the street from kayak club storage, and a block from a river dock. Supermarket was two busses plus several blocks walking... but across the street from a river park. The river being one side of a bus-bus-river triangle. I needed paddling time anyway, so picture a kayak with a row of inflated garbage bags towed like ducklings.

I had a chance to canoe to the office for 4 months. The place I was staying at was on the river and they owned canoes. I would pop out at the park, chain up the canoe, then a 3 minute walk to the office. Going to the office was downstream but going home was a workout at times.

Did you ever Canoe to work and then it started raining during the day and you had to Canoe home in the rain?

Yeah, thats what biking to work daily for over a decade was like.

LPT: Check your bike into a hotel baggage check with the bellhop, tip them $20 and they will protect your bike in their storage for at least a week, longer if you build a report with them.

I used to lock my bikes up at various high-end hotels in SF.

1. The millenium tower : ring the guard button in the valet port coche and they buz you into the garage near the dumpsters and they have a bike-rack-tree to lock your bike to, and its behind cams and security doors.

The intercontinental and the W hotel allow you to store your bike for a week. (make sure you tip well, and get the name of the host)

sometimes you need a bit of social engineering when you arent staying at the hotel - like a good tip... but also its just being amenable and friendly, and you talk them up first and tip at the end of the convo....

but you can do this with any large hotel, and so long as you tip well...

So come in and say things like:

"I am in town for a conference, and only need to store this here a day or two"

"I am checking into the hotel later, but I have to go to an interview right now" (Tip this one good (($20)) as it will make him less likely to get upset if you dont return the same day.

I have had so many bike components, and whole bikes stolen from me in SF, Santa Rosa, San Jose ubtil I learned this trick.

> going home was a workout at times

Like going to the gym after work to relieve the stress of the day!

Down the river, right after DC its the Naval Research Laboratory, in front of Alexandria. I worked there, and some crazy folks from Alexandria sometimes crossed the river in canoes to the NRL pier... That got terminated after 911, so they had to bike or drive all the way up around DC and down through Anacostia Air Force Base. Quite a much longer commute.

When an aunt worked there, in the 1950s, there was a boat from National Airport or thereabouts for NRL employees from Virginia. The boat wasn't very nice. It was an open boat, and in rainy weather, a sheet of plywood served to shelter the commuters. They were always glad when the boat was out of service and an Air Force boat replaced it.

This depends entirely on your city, but it is a rare joy of mine that my 20km cycle commute into the CBD has a national park, a reserve, farm land and if I stretch my legs an extra kilometer, a ride next to a river.

I can resonate with many of the stated benfits from the canoe commute, but I will say that even just the city sections are a huge boon to my feeling of connection over taking a car.

Too many car commutes to an office can feel a bit surreal, like your world may as well be fictitious.

I was half expecting this to be related to the death of former CIA director William Colby, who was found dead in a marsh near his canoe in Maryland after a heart attack.

"An attempt to hire former CIA director William Colby to lead a state of Nebraska investigation of the Franklin scandal failed in a legislative committee 4 to 3 vote. Instead, the committee appointed attorney Kirk Naylor as its chief investigator. A major figure involved in investigating Franklin told WMR that Naylor was the most incompetent person the committee could have found to lead the investigation. Colby was a Vietnam War colleague of Nebraska state Senator John De Camp, one of major investigators of the Franklin scandal. Colby reportedly was ready to expose the CIA's own involvement in the use of child prostitutes for the purposes of political and diplomatic blackmail. Colby died in a suspicious canoeing accident on the Chesapeake Bay on April 27, 1996."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUxDbgGbm9w

Same here, having learned of the Colby story (conspiracy?) recently from a hacker news link posted about the 1996 PC game "Spycraft".

https://www.filfre.net/2023/03/spycraft-the-great-game-part-...

I'd forgotten this story. Apparently it spun up a lot of conspiracy stories and theories about not-natural causes. Thanks for flagging this, it's interesting.

An enduring mystery: former CIA director William Colby's death in a canoe

https://apnews.com/article/b383af025d66de91e4688caf602e7253

Wow, there's a lot of CIA boating lore. This article also mentions the prior disappearance of CIA operative John Paisley from his sailboat in 1978, 18 years earlier: "Paisley’s decomposed body was found in the bay a week later, weighted down by two diving belts and containing a gunshot wound to the head. Authorities said it wasn’t clear if he was murdered or committed suicide."

>The Missing CIA Man

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/01/07/archives/the-missing-cia-...

https://archive.ph/hOhjA

That's a really freaky story. Merits a thread of its own.

--He was a senior CIA analyst of Russian nuclear capacity during the Cold War.

--Ruled a suicide, but shot in back of head.

--Not positively ID'd as him. Bunch of funny business with the fingerprints.

--Cremated, but the FBI kept his hands. Grisly.

--Had a high-powered CIA radio rig on his sailboat, and "documents."

--Good friends with a senior KGB defector.

--Live 9mm shells scattered about. No big deal nowadays, but it was back then.

I agree. I kept reading and felt like I was truly entering a wilderness of mirrors. The writer of that Times piece, Tad Szulc, was sui generis. He was connected to deep black sources.

>Tad Szulc, 74, Dies; Times Correspondent Who Uncovered Bay of Pigs Imbroglio

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/22/world/tad-szulc-74-dies-t...

https://archive.ph/szwTb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tad_Szulc

Those guys must have known each other. They were contemporaries. Paisley b. 1923, Szulc b. 1927. They traveled in the same circles. They were both really good at their jobs. The Paisley article had some deep CIA sourcing, and Szulc's sources trusted him enough to share.

They have access to the best maps.

These guys were well known in the DC paddling community. Back then the Potomac also froze over regularly, so they couldn't commute year round by canoe (now you could). Security restrictions eventually stopped the practice.

The river did freeze solid in January 2018. Skating from MD to VA was a peak life experience for sure. And seeing a guy ride his bike down the middle of the river.

There was a solid free ca. 1982 also.

Reminds me of this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-DLqc9Vplg

Honestly, if I was that guy, I'd put a description of that commute on my resume/CV.

For a SRE that's not a very reliable way to get to work

I am highly amused by this.

I lived in downtown Chicago for a bit, and did indeed consider buying a folding kayak to commute to work, since I worked in the Merchandise Mart where there was river access across the street.

I've owned/own folding kayaks. The problem is that they're really not all that quick to tear down or (especially) build up. IMO definitely not the sort of thing you want to do day-to-day. (The other issue is that these companies go out of business and it's hard to make significant repairs without parts.)

Oh, this is fun. Not familiar with the area I tried to check it out via Apple Maps on my IPad Air (3rd Gen) with iOS 16.3.1 and as soon as I switched to the satellite view my Apple Maps App closed. :)

Admiral Grace Hopper would talk about commuting by boat to Navy Yard, IIRC. Didn't know about this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2uls6iIEU&t=35s

A friend of mine lived on one bank of the river and worked on the other bank a short distance away. She bought a kayak to commute with occasionally for fun.

This reminds me a little bit of the main character in KSR's "science in the capitol" book series who goes semi feral in WA DC for a while, living in a tree.

It would have been utterly impractical given, as I recall, the distance was about 40 miles and would have involved a few portages around dams. (So probably more than 12 hours even at a pretty good clip.) But I live within about 1,000 feet of the (North Branch of the) Nashua River which joins the Merrimack River in Nashua NH and, for about 8 years, I had an office right in downtown Nashua.

The Silicon Valley version of this is the SF2G (San Francisco to Google) bike route. https://sf2g.com/

Instead of riding miserable Caltrain or driving the 101, biking 40 miles with friends is an absolute pleasure, even if you have to start pre-dawn to get in the office on time.

Sadly the Potomac River is not the cleanest place to be swimming anymore

It’s fine for swimming upstream of Little Falls. People swim in it all summer (and occasionally by accident in colder months).

It’s mostly fine below Little Falls as well, unless there has been a ton of rain recently.

Edit: here, in case you don’t believe me

https://www.potomacriverkeepernetwork.org/robert-dreher-urge...

Interestingly, there's an app for that now. Back in the day, the canoe commuters had to take their chances. https://www.potomacriverkeepernetwork.org/community-science-...

The CIA's location upriver is non-tidal, so it's clean-ish compared to the tidal waters of DC proper. DC's 19th-century sanitary sewers overflow into the storm drains when it rains. Yes, this is as gross as it sounds. DC Water is working on it. https://www.dcwater.com/css

Edited to add: One of the sewage outfalls runs directly from the White House into the Potomac River near the Kennedy Center. Make of that what you will.

Combined sewers is one thing.. I am also thinking of waste from industrial, military and paramilitary sites nearby

Yeah, ew, good point, that's nasty. Like the Avtex superfund site upstream in Front Royal VA. https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...

Makes you wonder about the CIA itself, doesn't it? I doubt they have EPA oversight.

I used to commute in a tiny rowboat, it’s the best start of the day you can imagine.

It's great that these commuters were able to have a rich spiritual experience and a little exercise and fresh air on their way to the Dulles Memorial Society For Sociopathy.

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