December 21, 2007
“It’s turtles all the way down” (Sagan or Hawking?)
The morning to leave the Cabo beaches is always a sad time, but made less so this time because of the coming weeks in Puerto Morelos on the Yucatan coast, with Crescent, William, their unborn first, and the turquoise Caribbean.
I walk down to the beach to take pictures of the sand; coarse-grained, speckled with a few shells, but mostly eroded and eroding granite, with pink and white feldspars, white and grey quartz, and miniscule amounts of amphibole. It’s coarse sand, stacked high into a winter berm with a different gradient every year. This year the berm is so high and the ocean-side so steep, that from the top you cannot see clear to the crashing waves on the west side of the arches. I don’t swim here, gravity rules in the undertow and I am neither that courageous nor stupid. The sand is marvelous though, as it rasps pleasantly against the toes and heels, deep and permeable, golden and shining in the early morning sun.
An arc of about 30 people, open to the sea, stands on the berm slope, about half way down the beach; are they watching whales? Not in that configuration. I get closer to see the small dark ovals between the arc and the water, no more than 2-3 inches long, with flailing flippers and tiny heads, and it is a hatching of baby turtles from the protected nests on the upper surface of the berm. Mama turtles had dug those nests out of reach of tide, surf, even storms. Possible only a hurricane-driven storm surge and massive waves could breach their sanctuary and wash away in a single rush, all their effort of climbing this surface, digging their nest, and then laying hundreds of ping-bong ball size eggs.
The stronger waves run far up the sand and catch the nearest babies in their froth, and we see leathery backs and little flippers flip and flop until they are either washed out with the undertow, to be seen no more, or are left behind in the damp, to await the next life-giving surge. In the meantime, pelicans cruise the surf line, but perhaps they have already breakfasted this morning, as they do not seek out the tender hatchlings. The statistics tell us that about one in one million baby turtles survive to adulthood, a life span nearly as long as that of a healthy human.
We are quiet and awe-struck, cameras clicking, videos purring, as we witness one of nature’s extraordinary adventures in procreation and survival.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Wave Form
It illustrates motion, time, and lives, and it lives within us with every breath. In the raw presence of ocean waves, the cyclic and repetitive but ever-changing nature of existence shows up in the wave form. At Cabo Pulmo on the southeast coast of the Baja peninsula, the waves batter themselves against the granite and coral shore, eroding minerals and shells alike into coarse pink sand. But the shoreline slopes are shallow and inviting. Further west, by the famous Arches of Cabo, the beaches slope dangerously fast creating a powerful backwash or undertow and swimming is risky. I am inspired anew by these shores, this time to create new labs for my winter 2008 on-line Oceanography course...with still photos and videos of the way the incoming waves interact with the slope and shape of the shoreline.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Ripples in the Ceiling
Monday, December 10, 2007
Cabo Pulmo, Baja CS
This time the floor is over my head…a rippling ceiling of pale blue and white, delicate as a petal. I float and paddle quietly, the 2’ chop moving me in every direction. I have only snorkeled a handful of times, but for the first time I am comfortable with the fit of the mask and the reassuring air flow through my snorkel. Under water, my breathing is slow and steady but loud, I sound like a Darth Vader here! At Mermaid Beach I drift over the sandy, rippled bottom, and the small fish roaming the shallows in their bright colours are oblivious of my presence overhead. I have been entranced under the surface in the past, but have never felt this comfortable. I took the “shortie” wet-suit off, not needing it for warmth, and as it turned out, I didn’t need it for buoyancy either. I floated and floated.
At Mermaid Beach, on the headland that forms the southern lip of the Cabo Pulmo cup, under the omnipotent power of the waves, the eroding granite has formed fantastic, organic-looking shapes that could, under the right tequila, appear to be flowing and rolling! There is so much geology here to contemplate…the opening, transporting rift that forms the Sea of Cortez (5-10 million years in the making, to date) has also pushed up a mountain range on the east side of Baja, and along with the granites and their inexorable exfoliation, are benches and flats of former seafloor sediments, and popped-up pimples of volcanic cones. I have much to do with maps and books ahead of me…it appears that after nearly 6 years of travel to, and interest in, Baja, I can design some projects for personal research interest, for my Oceanography courses, and perhaps, just perhaps, for other visitors like myself.
That was the first snorkel drop. The second one was at a banquet-table sized sea stack littered with lounging sea lions. The stack was being power washed by the incoming swells, but we went in anyway. Seven or eight sealions were flopped on their backs, heads hanging over towards us, like large, dark, slick and graceful children hanging over their bunk beds. Two came and went in the waves, and we dropped below the surface to watch as they twisted and spun their way around the rocks, nosing into crevices for snacks. A sudden stream of bubbles tickled the top of my foot in its ungainly flipper. Their element, my visitation, brief but sure of my place.
In the wider open sea, after a long bumpy run, our leaders pointed into the opaque blue and shouted “school of jacks”. And indeed it was. The hook was in, the bait was swallowed, and I was over the side in an instant. It took a few minutes of circling around, bum at the surface, head and limbs pushing against the water, before I saw them…but once I did, I doubt I’ll ever forget it. Individually, the fish (a type of tuna) were about 2’ long, 6 inches high in the middle, with large white-ringed eyes, and a flash of sliver from turning fin or belly as they swirled and streamed by the hundreds…maybe even thousands, beneath me, sometimes deep beneath and only presenting a blurry moving substrate to my peering; other times racing toward the surface but always turning, twisting together, in the same way as starlings in the Autumn…the unspoken, mysterious language of communion that drives flocks and schools and shoals into their choreographed frenzy.
And the cap of the day is a home dinner with Camille, then a flan in the restaurant, complete with candle and Happy Birthday in Spanish and English from the waiters and cooks. She is 34 today.
Cabo Pulmo, Baja CS
This time the floor is over my head…a rippling ceiling of pale blue and white, delicate as a petal. I float and paddle quietly, the 2’ chop moving me in every direction. I have only snorkeled a handful of times, but for the first time I am comfortable with the fit of the mask and the reassuring air flow through my snorkel. Under water, my breathing is slow and steady but loud, I sound like a Darth Vader here! At Mermaid Beach I drift over the sandy, rippled bottom, and the small fish roaming the shallows in their bright colours are oblivious of my presence overhead. I have been entranced under the surface in the past, but have never felt this comfortable. I took the “shortie” wet-suit off, not needing it for warmth, and as it turned out, I didn’t need it for buoyancy either. I floated and floated.
At Mermaid Beach, on the headland that forms the southern lip of the Cabo Pulmo cup, under the omnipotent power of the waves, the eroding granite has formed fantastic, organic-looking shapes that could, under the right tequila, appear to be flowing and rolling! There is so much geology here to contemplate…the opening, transporting rift that forms the Sea of Cortez (5-10 million years in the making, to date) has also pushed up a mountain range on the east side of Baja, and along with the granites and their inexorable exfoliation, are benches and flats of former seafloor sediments, and popped-up pimples of volcanic cones. I have much to do with maps and books ahead of me…it appears that after nearly 6 years of travel to, and interest in, Baja, I can design some projects for personal research interest, for my Oceanography courses, and perhaps, just perhaps, for other visitors like myself.
That was the first snorkel drop. The second one was at a banquet-table sized sea stack littered with lounging sea lions. The stack was being power washed by the incoming swells, but we went in anyway. Seven or eight sealions were flopped on their backs, heads hanging over towards us, like large, dark, slick and graceful children hanging over their bunk beds. Two came and went in the waves, and we dropped below the surface to watch as they twisted and spun their way around the rocks, nosing into crevices for snacks. A sudden stream of bubbles tickled the top of my foot in its ungainly flipper. Their element, my visitation, brief but sure of my place.
In the wider open sea, after a long bumpy run, our leaders pointed into the opaque blue and shouted “school of jacks”. And indeed it was. The hook was in, the bait was swallowed, and I was over the side in an instant. It took a few minutes of circling around, bum at the surface, head and limbs pushing against the water, before I saw them…but once I did, I doubt I’ll ever forget it. Individually, the fish (a type of tuna) were about 2’ long, 6 inches high in the middle, with large white-ringed eyes, and a flash of sliver from turning fin or belly as they swirled and streamed by the hundreds…maybe even thousands, beneath me, sometimes deep beneath and only presenting a blurry moving substrate to my peering; other times racing toward the surface but always turning, twisting together, in the same way as starlings in the Autumn…the unspoken, mysterious language of communion that drives flocks and schools and shoals into their choreographed frenzy.
And the cap of the day is a home dinner with Camille, then a flan in the restaurant, complete with candle and Happy Birthday in Spanish and English from the waiters and cooks. She is 34 today.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Cloud Floor to Baja
Saturday, December 01, 2007
A dawn flight with Camille to San Diego and Baja
The landscape of cloud beneath our flight has hidden the world far as the eye can see. It is as solid as snow. We could step outside this plane at 30,000 feet and slip right through.
The lonely top of Mt. Rainier pokes up through the cloud floor into the blue dawning; then a sister cone follows, Mt. Adams perhaps, the north side is not concave enough for St. Helens.
Finally the hard chariot of the sun beams a red shaft into the smoky window and the day has been birthed. We transit the west coast of North America in flight from winter, to the sun, sea and desert of Baja.
A dawn flight with Camille to San Diego and Baja
The landscape of cloud beneath our flight has hidden the world far as the eye can see. It is as solid as snow. We could step outside this plane at 30,000 feet and slip right through.
The lonely top of Mt. Rainier pokes up through the cloud floor into the blue dawning; then a sister cone follows, Mt. Adams perhaps, the north side is not concave enough for St. Helens.
Finally the hard chariot of the sun beams a red shaft into the smoky window and the day has been birthed. We transit the west coast of North America in flight from winter, to the sun, sea and desert of Baja.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
New Home, New CD...
Such a year..could I ever have imagined such a year as this? Finger surgery (still a huge problem playing the harp!), selling my Seattle house, switching from classroom to on-line course teaching, moving to BC, living and loving the summer months here, Fall travels in Ireland and the Mediterranean, and through it all, recording and editing a new cd...with dearly beloved friends Shiho and Ann...together we are ShAnLi, and the new cd of kotos, flutes, and harps respectively, is called Tethys, and will be in our anxious hands by Dec 1...the day I leave for several weeks in Mexico with 2 of my 3 gorgeous daughters!
Wot a life, I tell you...a time of change, transition, re-balancing, re-discovery of boundaries, re-uniting with family and landscape...
So if you're still reading this, you're as much an explorer as I, and I look forward to posting a few pictures and adventures from Mexico in a few short weeks!
ps - there are some stories to go with some of my tracks on Tethys...see the comment below if you like!
Wot a life, I tell you...a time of change, transition, re-balancing, re-discovery of boundaries, re-uniting with family and landscape...
So if you're still reading this, you're as much an explorer as I, and I look forward to posting a few pictures and adventures from Mexico in a few short weeks!
ps - there are some stories to go with some of my tracks on Tethys...see the comment below if you like!
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Home(s) Again!
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
“Home(s) again”
Such an elusive concept; I’ve been puzzling over various meanings and implications of the word “home”for many years, most recently after moving from a very satisfactory “home” in Seattle, Washington to my birth or original “home” in the interior country-land of British Columbia, Canada. They were both home. They were each home for different reasons, different lengths of time, with different people, and at different times in my life. This in itself is enough to make my head spin, but in recent years I’ve been giving relatively free rein to my wanderlust, using the ability of a middle-class Northamerican to travel and learn about other parts of the world: Mexico, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain…so while living out of suitcases during these adventures, I watch people at “home” in their world and culture, and while I feel like a visitor because I AM a visitor, I also wonder what makes their place home to them. Now I have returned again from travels abroad, but this time it is different…this time I am home in BC without a house (yet) to call home, instead of returning to a home (Seattle) in a land that was never mine to call home…see? It’s all a little vertiginous! Home has been where my stuff is, that seems to sum it up for me of late! And now I am reunited with my stuff at home in my native land, and it’s all different and new and familiar and wonderful and all I need now is a house in which to put it all…myself and my stuff!
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
There is a dusting of snow on the ground, perhaps not enough to accumulate, but certainly enough to lighten the insides of the rooms in my sister’s house, you know how that is. And 3 weeks ago today I begged to be brought “home” right after the cruise, rather than stay on in Spain as planned. So many boundaries were touched that week, so many limits came forward to claim a position of armament against my previously grandiose attitude of “if I can dream it, I can do it”. Not the least of these was an avowed avoidance of winter…but what did I find upon arriving at the airport in Seattle a week ago? I took a deep breath of the damp fall air, felt a gladness for the change of season, felt that the scene from the train of the hills around Malaga, citrus and olive orchards and spectacular geology notwithstanding was too hot and dry to entice me.
Now I have found a basement apartment near Salmon Arm, so I'll be paying for it today and moving in this week...eek!!! How DID that happen so soon! I have to tell you, I need to wonder about "be careful what you ask for" because I've been GETTING what I ask for and then finding that I've asked for too much...thus the early return from traveling. But "home", as elusive and slippery a concept as it is, is the engine on the train now and so that's what I looked for and that's what I found.
“Home(s) again”
Such an elusive concept; I’ve been puzzling over various meanings and implications of the word “home”for many years, most recently after moving from a very satisfactory “home” in Seattle, Washington to my birth or original “home” in the interior country-land of British Columbia, Canada. They were both home. They were each home for different reasons, different lengths of time, with different people, and at different times in my life. This in itself is enough to make my head spin, but in recent years I’ve been giving relatively free rein to my wanderlust, using the ability of a middle-class Northamerican to travel and learn about other parts of the world: Mexico, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain…so while living out of suitcases during these adventures, I watch people at “home” in their world and culture, and while I feel like a visitor because I AM a visitor, I also wonder what makes their place home to them. Now I have returned again from travels abroad, but this time it is different…this time I am home in BC without a house (yet) to call home, instead of returning to a home (Seattle) in a land that was never mine to call home…see? It’s all a little vertiginous! Home has been where my stuff is, that seems to sum it up for me of late! And now I am reunited with my stuff at home in my native land, and it’s all different and new and familiar and wonderful and all I need now is a house in which to put it all…myself and my stuff!
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
There is a dusting of snow on the ground, perhaps not enough to accumulate, but certainly enough to lighten the insides of the rooms in my sister’s house, you know how that is. And 3 weeks ago today I begged to be brought “home” right after the cruise, rather than stay on in Spain as planned. So many boundaries were touched that week, so many limits came forward to claim a position of armament against my previously grandiose attitude of “if I can dream it, I can do it”. Not the least of these was an avowed avoidance of winter…but what did I find upon arriving at the airport in Seattle a week ago? I took a deep breath of the damp fall air, felt a gladness for the change of season, felt that the scene from the train of the hills around Malaga, citrus and olive orchards and spectacular geology notwithstanding was too hot and dry to entice me.
Now I have found a basement apartment near Salmon Arm, so I'll be paying for it today and moving in this week...eek!!! How DID that happen so soon! I have to tell you, I need to wonder about "be careful what you ask for" because I've been GETTING what I ask for and then finding that I've asked for too much...thus the early return from traveling. But "home", as elusive and slippery a concept as it is, is the engine on the train now and so that's what I looked for and that's what I found.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Footsteps of the Ancients
Sunday, October 21, 2007, St. Tropez, France
11 am and I have stumbled into the end of a race! Adults have just finished their 16 km run through the winding narrow streets of St. Tropez, and the kidlets have just zoomed past me for their 2 km sprint! I cheer and take pictures at the finish line. The 2 Euros crepe is sweet and delicious, but both internet cafes I seek are closed. Well, that’s a good thing actually, it feels eminently sane to close some shops at least one day in the week, and I will find something tomorrow in Barcelona. Anyway, if one of them had been open, I might well have missed this bit of time on the Mediterranean shore…listening to the waves skitter across the coarse sand and pebbles, basking like a black-clothed lizard in a low, warm sun. And I can’t even record this, so all I capture is a picture of the hills and houses across the bay…nothing to DO but be here now!
Friday, October 19, Pompeii, Italy
Wonders abound! Somehow I did not connect this cruise and its itinerary (even though I’d seen the listing of areas and cities) with the exploration of ruins…but of course! Wasn’t the entire Mediterranean coastline the playground, battle field, and home land of a consistent and changing parade of cultures? In 79 AD the citizens of Pompeii, just inland from the lovely Bay of Napoli, had had earthquake warnings of something rumbling beneath their beloved Mt. Vesuvius, but its actual eruption took them completely by surprised. And perhaps we would even now know little about their response to it if it were not for the records of the Greek Pliny’s, elder and younger, uncle and nephew, who observed it first hand? As with Carthage, I’m inspired to back track and learn even the standard history, as I remember so little of it from school. So we walk and crunch our way over the lapilli that broke through the roof tops that were being restored from earthquake damage, we poke into the baths, the brothels, the bakery, the restaurants…and the ghosts of 2000 years ago drift and peer out at our motorized, digitized presence; some of us from an inconceivable distance half way around the entire planet. What an extraordinary thing is humanity!
Wednesday, October 17, Carthage, Tunisia
Welcome, once again, to an ancient world! This time it isn’t monolithic standing stone circles of 5000 years ago, it’s the ruins of the original Punic (Phoenician) Carthage, topped by more ruins of the Roman Carthage above. Bricks, mosaics, sculptures…Romans knew how to build what they wanted!
Tuesday, October 16, on board MSC Melody
3:30 pm, 3 hours out of Ibiza (Balearic Islands), on a course heading of 101° (nearly due east) for Tunis on the north African coast..
I am wired in many different ways here…looking north out a portside window at the horizon that bisects the tall windows of the pool/buffet area. Lunch is over, tea time is in half an hour and soon I’ll go get my harp to play for the new friends from Belgium. The Mediterranean Sea is navy blue, a color I noticed last night, and one I don’t think I have seen in nature before. In my ears the Tethys mix # 4 of harps, flutes and kotos washes over the background voices, child-shouts from the pool, and ambient music, providing a watery sound track for the moving sea before me. I have just downloaded the recent pictures from my camera of yesterday’s departure from Barcelona, and last night’s sunset…and the pictures I took are true to the majesty that unfolded for almost an hour as the clouds and sun danced their backdrop for the waves and wake of our passage.
Then as now, the waves are moving from the east and today I am grateful for that as my incipient sea-sickness is not so bad when we head into wind and waves, rather than broadside, and due to the cool, cloudy (occasionally rainy) weather today I am kept more indoors than I’d like. I am now keeping the acupressure bands on my wrists as they help more than I imagined, but I try to stay in view of the horizon. I got a Dramamine from the information desk just in case, but the captain’s party is tonight, I am going to dress to the 9’s and will take the pill only after if at all…the swells are bigger now, just in the 15 minutes of writing this. Best get below decks for the harp before they get any bigger…
Monday, October 15, 2007, setting sail on MSC Melody
The awe of the sea…the mystery beneath the deadly, beautiful surface…the lure of the horizon where the eye rests on its flat expanse…what lives beneath its opaque and long-lived nature?
11 am and I have stumbled into the end of a race! Adults have just finished their 16 km run through the winding narrow streets of St. Tropez, and the kidlets have just zoomed past me for their 2 km sprint! I cheer and take pictures at the finish line. The 2 Euros crepe is sweet and delicious, but both internet cafes I seek are closed. Well, that’s a good thing actually, it feels eminently sane to close some shops at least one day in the week, and I will find something tomorrow in Barcelona. Anyway, if one of them had been open, I might well have missed this bit of time on the Mediterranean shore…listening to the waves skitter across the coarse sand and pebbles, basking like a black-clothed lizard in a low, warm sun. And I can’t even record this, so all I capture is a picture of the hills and houses across the bay…nothing to DO but be here now!
Friday, October 19, Pompeii, Italy
Wonders abound! Somehow I did not connect this cruise and its itinerary (even though I’d seen the listing of areas and cities) with the exploration of ruins…but of course! Wasn’t the entire Mediterranean coastline the playground, battle field, and home land of a consistent and changing parade of cultures? In 79 AD the citizens of Pompeii, just inland from the lovely Bay of Napoli, had had earthquake warnings of something rumbling beneath their beloved Mt. Vesuvius, but its actual eruption took them completely by surprised. And perhaps we would even now know little about their response to it if it were not for the records of the Greek Pliny’s, elder and younger, uncle and nephew, who observed it first hand? As with Carthage, I’m inspired to back track and learn even the standard history, as I remember so little of it from school. So we walk and crunch our way over the lapilli that broke through the roof tops that were being restored from earthquake damage, we poke into the baths, the brothels, the bakery, the restaurants…and the ghosts of 2000 years ago drift and peer out at our motorized, digitized presence; some of us from an inconceivable distance half way around the entire planet. What an extraordinary thing is humanity!
Wednesday, October 17, Carthage, Tunisia
Welcome, once again, to an ancient world! This time it isn’t monolithic standing stone circles of 5000 years ago, it’s the ruins of the original Punic (Phoenician) Carthage, topped by more ruins of the Roman Carthage above. Bricks, mosaics, sculptures…Romans knew how to build what they wanted!
Tuesday, October 16, on board MSC Melody
3:30 pm, 3 hours out of Ibiza (Balearic Islands), on a course heading of 101° (nearly due east) for Tunis on the north African coast..
I am wired in many different ways here…looking north out a portside window at the horizon that bisects the tall windows of the pool/buffet area. Lunch is over, tea time is in half an hour and soon I’ll go get my harp to play for the new friends from Belgium. The Mediterranean Sea is navy blue, a color I noticed last night, and one I don’t think I have seen in nature before. In my ears the Tethys mix # 4 of harps, flutes and kotos washes over the background voices, child-shouts from the pool, and ambient music, providing a watery sound track for the moving sea before me. I have just downloaded the recent pictures from my camera of yesterday’s departure from Barcelona, and last night’s sunset…and the pictures I took are true to the majesty that unfolded for almost an hour as the clouds and sun danced their backdrop for the waves and wake of our passage.
Then as now, the waves are moving from the east and today I am grateful for that as my incipient sea-sickness is not so bad when we head into wind and waves, rather than broadside, and due to the cool, cloudy (occasionally rainy) weather today I am kept more indoors than I’d like. I am now keeping the acupressure bands on my wrists as they help more than I imagined, but I try to stay in view of the horizon. I got a Dramamine from the information desk just in case, but the captain’s party is tonight, I am going to dress to the 9’s and will take the pill only after if at all…the swells are bigger now, just in the 15 minutes of writing this. Best get below decks for the harp before they get any bigger…
Monday, October 15, 2007, setting sail on MSC Melody
The awe of the sea…the mystery beneath the deadly, beautiful surface…the lure of the horizon where the eye rests on its flat expanse…what lives beneath its opaque and long-lived nature?
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