Category Archives: Environment

Day 61 8/25/13: Scuba & Swinburne

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Sketched portrait of 23-year-old Algernon Char...

Sketched portrait of 23-year-old Algernon Charles Swinburne, poet and author. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am a slow learner in nearly every thing. I am a fan of multiple examples, slow demonstrations and repetitive gestures.  For most of my life, this caused me a great deal of frustration and shame.  Now I don’t really give a shit. I’m happy to be taking extra diving lessons while the rest of the crew heads out to sea next Sunday.

I used to explain my general ineptitude at sports,crafts, handiwork, cooking, to the fact that I spent more time reading about things than actually doing them.

As a moody teenager, I  stayed on the sand with a book, using Swinburne’s ocean to deepen and transform the cold, black  waves of Plum Island, Massachusetts into something primal, maternal:

No wind is rough with the rank rare flowers;
The sweet sea, mother of loves and hours,
Shudders and shines as the grey winds gleam,
Turning her smile to a fugitive pain.

Mother of loves that are swift to fade,

  Mother of mutable winds and hours.
A barren mother, a mother-maid,
Cold and clean as her faint salt flowers.
(From “The Triumph of Time” by  Algernon Charles Swinburne)

Day 58: 8/22/13: Tern! Tern! Tern!

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Picking up trash can be downright addictive when conducted in a scenic location with a simpatico companion. Today Connie and I scoured Santa Monica beach, north of the Pier. As I approached the water, a dolphin surfaced and disappeared in the surf. Birds abounded—flying, floating, hovering. Connie knows birds and informed me that the white specimens expertly dive-bombing into the water were terns. The terns spun and fell out of the sky like nature’s kamikaze pilots.  When has basic survival ever been so fun? Do they ever get dizzy? 

We stood transfixed clutching our trash bags as several generations of wet, coffee-colored pelicans flew just overhead. I once possessed  a toy pelican eraser as a child. He stood about two inches high and dressed like a general with those fringey shoulder decorations, a smart cap and vague circles meant to suggest medals. I traded him to my friend Ria in exchange for a 1964 mint condition Beatles pencil-case and never looked back. But pelicans have always retained a certain absurd authority to me. Watching them land on the green waves, I almost felt like saluting.

Day 55 8/19/13: 10 Things I Did Instead of Studying My Dive Manual

by in Activism, Diving, Environment, God, Humor, Marine Conservation, Meditation, Shark Attack, Shark Conservation, Writing | Leave a comment
Shark!

Shark! (Photo credit: guitarfish)

1. Read about the swift but gruesome death of abalone diver Randy Frye in the waters of Northern California.

2. Watched a mini-documentary on technical diver David Shaw who died trying to retrieve the remains of another diver from the depths of a dangerous cave.

3. Meditated for 20 blissful minutes that were occasionally invaded by thoughts of decompression chambers.

4. Felt less alone after reading several articles criticizing OCEARCH’s machismo and brutality.

5. Marveled at Denise Levertov’s briskly paced poem The Sharks. 

6. Tried to do the dishes mindfully, but spaced out and started worrying about August almost being over, a reverie broken occasionally by hummingbirds.

7. Ate fruit

8. Thought again about Thom Knoles–of the failure of the stressed out intellect and how the expansive silence of meditation feels so nurturing, so full of presence.

9. Wondered for the trillionth time about the basic goodness or evil of mankind.

10. Marveled at the ability of writing to redeem boredom and to reveal the miraculous within the ordinary.

Day 52 8/16/13: Strange Bedfellows

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Inner Turmoil, Jaws | Leave a comment

Today’s action: Write to Sharksavers Board of Directors

OCEARCH at work

OCEARCH at work

Ugh. It’s so upsetting to me that Sharksavers (the charity I chose for the JAWS benefit), is supporting OCEARCH, an ultra-shady shark “research” outfit that uses brutal hook and haul methods to tag great whites often inflicting severe damage to the animals in the process. Their mission is suspect, (are they glorified fishermen or actual researchers?) their methods are barbaric and unfortunately they appear  sceince-y enough to be media darlings.

To learn more about OCEARCH’S macho “science” read this. 

(Thanks to Sarah Mucha & the Stop Ocearch FB group for the sample letters!)

Day 50: 8/14/13: Predatory Hijinx

by in Environment, Humor, Pop Culture | 1 Comment

Type C killer whales in the Ross Sea. The eye ...

In between learning more about volunteering for Sea Shepherd, I watched three videos of orcas killing great white sharks. 

It’s interesting to see how passionately divided the public’s sympathy becomes when two apex ocean predators face off:

ORCAS ROCK

That Shark is like I’m f*cked

Aww! I almost cried

F*ck Killer Whales. Great Whites FTW*

ORCAS Suck D*CK

Just Proves who the real apex predator is

I bet Free Willy wouldn’t have pulled this sh*t with a Megalodon

When I saw this clip of Orcas hunting sea lions, I couldn’t help but think of how Tilikum killed that mysterious “drifter” who broke into Seaworld for…what exactly? The thrill of an illegal swim? A strange and dramatic suicide? A misguided longing for communion with something wild, even if it meant death? I can feel an obsessive search for answers coming on….

*FTW= For the Win

Day 49: 8/13/13: 7 Recent Wins for Sharks

by in Education, Environment, Marine Conservation, Shark Charities and tagged | Leave a comment

New protections. New sanctuaries. Check out these 7 Wins for Sharks! 

Meanwhile, I’m back to my restaurant letter writing campaign with a little help from Sharksavers.

Day 48 8/12/13: Two Blocks of Sea

by in Activism, Environment, Marine Conservation, Shark Charities | Leave a comment

Today I went to Santa Monica for a beach clean up, but I must have got the details wrong since I couldn’t find anyone there. No loss. The air felt nice. The ocean looked a little bit wild. My friend Jen and I picked a bit of trash here and there and waited out the traffic over beer and sweet potato french fries and talked about the writing life and our fathers who are both gone but who loom large in memory.

At home again, late with homework to do, I still wanted to do something about sharks. Since I’m going to South Africa, I decided to go donate Two Blocks of Sea to the great whites of Dyer Island, a rich nature reserve. The stretch of water between Dyer Island and nearby Geyser Rock (an island home to 60,000 Cape Fur Seals), is also called Shark Alley, a treacherous stretch of sea familiar to anyone who watches shows like “Air Jaws Apocalypse.”   I felt moved by the language of the donation form: 2 Blocks of Sea to the Great Whites of Dyer Island.

On a recent architecture tour in downtown L.A., the docent talked about a guy who purchased “air rights” so he could build skyscrapers. Air real estate. Two blocks of sea. I imagine some cut-away science text book diagram of green-blue water and a curved ocean floor.

Measuring the sea seems like trying to measure time. In November, my father will have been gone a year. But what does one year even mean? In a few minutes, I walk two blocks in a city that is both utterly foreign and oddly familiar. A thousand memory fragments surface and dissolve. Time is scrambled. What does a shark experience in two blocks of sea—the electromagnetic fields of distress, the rise and fall of tides?

Sharks don’t strike me as nostalgic creatures, but I wonder if they experience that confusion of memory when they move through some well-traveled stretch of open oceans only to discover it strewn with a ragged web of nets, or find a channel once plentiful with fish, strangely, suddenly empty.

Day 44: 08/08/13: Cranky Quint & The Horror of Gill Nets

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Jaws, Marine Conservation, Pop Culture and tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Here is a rather candid remembrance of Robert Shaw from Jeffrey Vorhees, who played “the doomed Alex Kintner” (a.k.a. boy on the raft) in “Jaws”:

“Everyone filming it here was really nice, except for one guy, the old drunk, Robert Shaw. He ignored the island kids. They would have baseball games and cookouts for all the extras and kids on the island—-all the actors would show up, except for Shaw. He wanted nothing to do  with “The Island People,” as he called us. As a little kid, I would go over and talk to him, “Hi! How are you today?” He would just glare and say, “Just go away.” He was always drunk, just a mess….”   From “Just When You Thought it Was Safe: A Jaws Companion.”

Hopefully a small donation I made to ban gill nets made the ocean a little safer for sharks. Here’s the deal:

Each year, California drift gillnets kill more than 3,500 thresher, mako, and blue sharks as they fish for swordfish. The bycatch rate of sharks – as well as ocean sunfish, marine mammals and sea turtles – in California’s drift gillnets is the highest of any fishery along the US Pacific Coast.

Day 40: 8/4/2013: Shark Angels in Santa Monica

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Shark Charities | Leave a comment

After spending the afternoon at a popular seaside tourist destination, I have one, single burning question:

How can shirtless men wear backpacks? Don’t the straps pinch? What about sweat? I’m no fashion maven, but that look is just…WOW…not..good….

Anyway, I had misgivings go to an aquarium. It seems somewhat hypocritical to protest the circus and then support so-called “aqua-prisons,” but Julie Andersen of Shark Angels was giving a talk at the Santa Monica Aquarium and so I paid my five bucks.  The little shallow tank of leopard  and swell sharks that allows kids to touch them, sort of bummed me out, although one of the leopards actually lifted (her?) head out of the water when I approached and I made eye contact with her.

DIGRESSION ABOUT THE AWKWARD DAWNING OF SEXUAL KNOWLEDGE: As a child, of course, the New England Aquarium was mecca to me. I loved the circular tank with the snuggle-toothed sand sharks. I remember once buying a postcard of a sea otter in the gift shop of the NEA in 1976. Otters can stand on their hind legs, and this guy clearly had an erection, captured in the lurid sort of messy color of the old 60s/70s postcard. “He has a hard on!” shrieked my sister’s friend Denise. It was the first time I ever heard the term.

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