Sea Life

It was immediately apparent that I had somewhere back in history, recorded no doubt in my genes, put a skin bag around a personal portion of salt water and went off to make a more private kind of life on land. That’s how my first days at sea were, such heightened awareness of the sea within, while in a not-at-all new relationship to the big sea out there. Here inside this body the fluids slosh with the tides, and it is only this fragile freckled membrane that prevents a total reunion.

I have been surprised by the big empty, the lack of life out in the big ocean, but I learned today that it is the equivalent of a desert out there; perhaps we should have seen some whales, but they would have been only passing through the great waters on their way to something else. Yesterday and today we are sailing through the something else, coastal waters, where life should be abundant.

Yesterday I saw four juvenile sea turtles, green turtles, but no adults, and today I saw a larger juvenile with a great scar on his head. The adults, I am told, are virtually gone and it takes a long time for them to mature, so there is a vastly diminished pool of breeding turtles. This brings to mind a cultural theater event I saw in Guilin, which took as its theme the mating and marrying rituals of the ethnic minorities in the ‘autonomous region,’ (not a formal Chinese province, as a nod of respect towards these non-Chinese peoples). There were gorgeous traditional dances and costumes, and one very elaborate community dance that is begun when someone shouts, “Hooray, these two are getting married, human life will go on for another generation, hooray!” I was so struck by the possibility that people would even consider it might be otherwise, but, when I consider it from the point of view of others, like sea turtles and tunas, who take a long time to grow up, well…I would love to hear them shout ‘hooray, these two are mating, and our life will be carried on!” And today, Sidsel and I pondered the recent findings that, at one point -- about 70 thousand years ago -- the human population was down to about two thousand individuals. Most people don’t know how close we came to never speaking -- much less writing, or making music, or herding, or farming, all things that happened well after that moment of coming so close to no ‘hooray!’

Today I saw a huge pod of spinner dolphins, having first noticed a sudden general commotion above the water, brown boobies and yellow-billed boobies flying in excited circles, and flying fish skimming low across the water. I noticed when a happy booby intercepted a shimmering fish-flight. Then I saw the dolphins as the ship plowed straight towards them and they peeled off, port and starboard, cavorting in the ship’s wake, jumping and spinning, at least a hundred spinner dolphins, and I watched for about five minutes as we passed each other. I was so happy to see even an island of abundant life.

The waters are thin on fish, and it is not just a romantic notion, they are fished out. You can see these clumps of murky wash just below the surface of the ocean, kind of floating islands that are made of shore trash that is submerged. I asked one of our biologists what the turtles eat. “Jellyfish.” And I had been seeing jellyfish. “Oh good!” I said. “Not so good,” replied Tatjana “because they think all the plastic bags are jellyfish….”

Evelyn is writing a very funny blog about what you learn about people when they are grouped together, eating Chinese food from a lazy Susan table. I was at table with her and I am one of the people, and it is funny as hell. Why don’t I write about that?

Well, hear this: the news about Canada Geese, gotten in conversation with our other biologist, Vic, is good. Canada Geese are fine, their population is hardy, if substantially rerouted in annual migration. I recently wrote a poem about the diminished number of them flying over southern California in the fall, ending with a rhetorical reflection that they may have found a new south, or a new way south. In fact, they have found both. How is that for good news? And I am so glad that I anticipated the possibility so I don’t have to trash the poem!