A Buoyant Idea

As a child in Michigan, John Pollack entertained himself by building tiny sailboats made of cast-off milk cartons or orange crates. At Stanford, he once constructed a crocodile-shaped boat out of cardboard and sailed it, sort of, across Lake Lagunita. But for 30 years, what he really wanted was a boat made of wine corks. Last summer, he finally got one.

With the help of a rotating crew of friends and family, Pollack spent 17 days in July navigating a 410-mile stretch of the Douro River in Portugal aboard a vessel built with 160,000 corks.

The two-ton boat was the product of a peculiar obsession that also drew in Pollack’s parents, who have dutifully collected wine corks since Pollack was a child. Solving the engineering riddles took years. After much experimentation, Pollack discovered that seven wine corks bound together form a hexagon. Expanding on this idea, Pollack and his friend Garth Goldstein, an architect, made two hexagonal discs a foot in diameter by strapping long rubber bands around exactly 127 corks at a time. No glue was used. The discs were stacked, attached with an elaborate rubber band system and formed into pontoons. These were secured with rock-climbing ropes down each of the pontoon’s six faces, then encased in commercial fishing nets. Volunteers helped build it in Washington, D.C., where Pollack, ’88, lives.

Pollack, a freelance writer whose clients include former president Bill Clinton, says he was treated like “a rock star” in Portugal following press reports of his adventure.

“I’ve been on a lot of great trips in my life,” he says. “This ranks right up there with the best of them.”

Miranda Rules

For four years at Stanford, Patricia Miranda took her lumps and kept coming back for more. The only female on the Cardinal wrestling squad, she was routinely thrashed in practice and in competition, but persevered. When she steps on the mat for her next match this fall, she will do so as a U.S. title holder and one of the best female wrestlers in the world.

In June, just one week after graduating from the Farm, Miranda defeated Hawaiian Clarissa Chun in a best-of-three match to win the 105-pound division in women’s freestyle at the U.S. world team trials and advance to the world championships in Halkida, Greece, November 2-3.

Miranda, who began wrestling as an eighth grader, has been competing in world-class women’s wrestling events since high school. Two years ago, she finished second in the world at 112 pounds. Her goal is to represent the United States in the 2004 Olympics, where women’s wrestling will be included for the first time. Accepted at Yale Law School earlier this year, she was given a two-year deferment to go for the gold.

Chris Horpel, Stanford’s director of wrestling, will coach the U.S. women’s team at the world championships.

Around the World in 14 Days

HERE'S THE POINT: Fossett landed safely in Australia.

AP Wide World

Alongside the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh and John Glenn, now enter Steve Fossett as a pioneer aviator. When he landed at dawn on July 4 near the dry Lake Yamma Yamma in Queensland, Australia, Fossett, ’66, became the first person to fly solo around the world in a hot air balloon.

This was Fossett’s sixth attempt—his fourth in 1998 nearly killed him when his balloon was torn to shreds during a thunderstorm and plummeted more than 28,000 feet into the Coral Sea. This time, after enduring 14 days and more than 20,000 miles in freezing temperatures and terrible wind, he finally did it.

Fossett’s adventure résumé also includes climbing the highest peaks in six of seven continents, swimming the English Channel and completing the 1,100-mile Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska.

As an undergraduate at Stanford, he was already testing limits. Spurred on by fraternity brothers in his senior year, he swam to Alcatraz and hung a “Beat Cal” banner on the wall of the island prison that had shut down two years earlier.

Fossett’s balloon capsule will soon be exhibited at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.—right next to Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis.

FOLLOW-UP

Here to Stay?

TIME FOR A RALLY: Students supported a policy change.

Linda Cicero

Stanford’s 40 Iranian graduate students and postdocs are a tenacious lot. As citizens of one of seven countries identified by the U.S. government as state sponsors of terrorism, they not only had to travel outside of Iran to get student visas—to Syria, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere—but also had to undergo background checks. Now, because of an April amendment to Immigration and Naturalization Service policy, if they leave the United States for more than 30 days, there is no guarantee they’ll be able to re-enter.

Reza Navid, a graduate student in electrical engineering who was scheduled to present a paper in Japan in September and then visit his home in Tehran, won’t be making the trip after all. Officials in Toronto recently told him they couldn’t process his visa renewal, as they had in previous years, and he says the risk is too great to leave the United States. “Most of my friends in the Persian community think we are stuck here,” says Navid, who estimates it will take him another five years to finish his degree.

Additional changes are in the works for international students (“Rallying Together,” Farm Report, March/April). President George W. Bush signed a directive in May to establish an interagency panel to set policies for examining foreign students’ fields of study, and he also has proposed that visas be issued by the Department of Homeland Security rather than the State Department.

It Takes a Village

GIFTED: Naiyomah's September 11 story inspired the donation.

AP Wide World

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been collected for victims of September 11, but none of those gifts was quite like the one orchestrated by a Stanford student last summer in a mud-hut village in Kenya.

The people in the Masai village of Enoosaen, where senior Kimeli Naiyomah grew up, had heard about a terrible event in America, but had few details and only a limited understanding of it. The village only recently received electricity. So when Naiyomah returned for a visit last May, they were shocked by his stories about “buildings that almost touched the clouds” crumbling to the ground, killing thousands of people. Naiyomah, who was in New York City visiting the Kenyan ambassador when the terrorist attack occurred, encouraged the villagers to offer a gesture of sympathy and support. A few days later, the gesture materialized in the form of 14 cows, donated from the small stocks of local herdsmen. On June 2, following a ceremony blessing the animals, the cows were presented to William Brancick, deputy chief of mission of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.

The size of the gift and the sacrifice it represented may be difficult for Americans to appreciate. Among the Masai, cows are sacred. “The cow is almost the center of life for us,” Naiyomah told the New York Times. “You give it a name. You perform rituals with it. It’s more than property.”

The donation also acknowledged the gratitude that villagers feel toward the United States because of Naiyomah’s educational opportunity here. Naiyomah plans to attend medical school after he graduates next spring, and says he wants to return to Masailand and build its first hospital.