Category Archives: Memory

Nostalgia, stories

Day 88 9/21/13: Wetsuits, White Sharks, & Whiskey

by in Animal Welfare, Diving, Inner Turmoil, Memory and tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The smell of wet neoprene has already joined the ranks of dusty hay, lilacs, and library bindings in my sense memory hall of fame. Evocative of pools–and soon the ocean. It’s been a week since I last used the wetsuit and it still isn’t dry. I suppose it doesn’t really matter since I am about to walk off the side of the boat into the ocean, but I find myself worrying about all sorts of things as I prepare to leave. My mouth feels slightly dry.  A byproduct of caffeine or Mild Terror?  I’ve packed ginger pills for nausea and a flannel sheet for the sheet-less bunk on board the boat which will sail from the quaint port of Oxnard, but I wish I had a little flask for whiskey.  Last week we read “Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor” in class and I’m not thinking of  sharks so much as the endlessness of the ocean, how border-less it is, how impossible it seems to me that people can actually create boundaries between national and international waters.

But I’d better can the poetry for now, and get on to more practical concerns like packing….and signing this petition to place covers on boat engines to protect great whites who follow cage diving boats in South Africa.

Day 81 9/14/13: The Eternal Gift of the Michelin Man

by in Art, Diving, Memory | 2 Comments

More diving lessons today. Better. I didn’t feel like a helpless tumbling astronaut as much, though I was eternally vexed by the task of detaching  the connector hose to my BC underwater. And putting on a wetsuit still feels like skull-fucking the Michelin man. But I felt so peaceful snorkeling across the pool,  watching the glittering light patterns on the bottom, broad wavering bands of light like David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings.

Why is art so often my first way into nature?

I felt happy that I’d grown a little closer to becoming a better swimmer.  Crossing the pool wearing my lovely blue split fins it hardly felt like swimming at all.  And how strange that a deep-seated fear of sharks should lead me to something so pleasurable.

Writing about struggling with the wetsuit-as-Michelin-Man made me think of my sister Janet. I can’t really think of a single thing that Janet feared.  Truthfully, she often had a bit of contempt for those who let fear paralyze them.  Janet was pure fire,  such a force of nature, that it was inconceivable to me that she would ever die. Continue reading →

Day 78: 9/11/13: On Shark Dreams & Shark Cages

by in Cage Diving, Diving, Dreams, Jaws, Memory, Pop Culture | Leave a comment

Today  in the darkness of the classroom, I remembered how pop culture is often a kind of vehicle for the spiritual, the sacred. It is easy to remember this truth in the realm of music, but easier to forget during things like movies involving killer sharks.

In the last fifteen or so minutes of “Jaws,” Hooper submerged in his steel cage, tries to escape the gaping, strangely feminine mouth and  battering ram of a body of the pursuing shark.  Students groaned as Hooper’s spear gun glided hopelessly away to the sea floor.  As the shark parted the bars of the cage and Hooper escaped into the sanctuary of a nearby reef, I said rather morosely, “I hope that doesn’t happen to me.” The class cracked up. I felt good not only because I’ll do anything for a cheap laugh, but because I sometimes remember: “Oh yeah, this whole project is culminating in my descent into the waters of South Africa in a shark cage!”

Often this truth flat-out horrifies me.

But today I started remembering my over twenty-year catalogue of shark dreams. I have been confronting sharks for years. Underwater, at the surface, sometimes flying through the air. But never consumed, never bitten or  tugged at, never even bumped or inspected.  I’ve watched for them at night, my binoculars trained on the dark water. I’ve lived in empty trailers on desolate beaches just to be near the seas where they swim unseen. So this descent into the cage, though foreign and terrifying in a physical sense, feels in some deeper, intuitive way, inevitable– the conscious version of the descent I’ve made for years in sleep, in dreams.

Day 72 9/5/13: The Past Tense

by in Education, Literature, Memory, Shark Conservation, Writing and tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Today in shark class we marveled at the oddness of shark biology—the sand tigers’ practice of intrauterine cannibalism (unborn pups eat other embryos while still in the womb) and the unborn big eyed threshers that eat eggs from their mother’s uterus, a practice known as “oophagy.”  (I love the sound of that word–somewhere between “egg” and “oaf”).  We talked of Hawaiian and Aztec shark god myths and marveled at pictures of weird species like dwarf lanterns and goblin sharks.  I suggested we all convert to an ancient shark worshipping religion and walk around the campus in strange wooden masks.The class had the feeling of discovery and aimlessness that grade school classes used to have—“Oooo—look at this weird picture.” I guess my goal, if I had one, was immersion and delight.

I told the class that as a child I mourned the eclipse of “Jaws” reign by “Star Wars” in 1977. Since I lost my father last year, any mention of childhood summons him. My father was, after all, the person who took me to see “Jaws.”  Each memory threatens to pull me into  unknown depths. Even the well-worn stories are reframed by his absence.

Continue reading →

Day 67 8/31/13: Sharks, Shame &Oral Fixations

by in Art, Dreams, God, Inner Turmoil, Memory | 3 Comments

Preparing for my shark class, I started feeling anxious. Will I strike the right balance between fun and conservation? Will I inspire any one of my students to actually do something about the oceans?Regretting my unfortunate choice of textbooks, I felt on the verge of falling into a major shame spiral about my skill as a teacher, which inspired a kind of greatest hits medley of degradation.

For example,  the familiar domino effect of paranoia and self-loathing I’ve often felt in the course of romantic love:

I fear you will notice my hopelessness at chess, sex, sports, trivia, cooking, dancing, and abandon me. Exposure of my inadequacy will then lead to exile from the larger community, which sensing my lack of fitness, will leave me to perish alone like a deformed animal.

Or something like that.

Sharks evoke a curiously liberating kind of fear—the ring of teeth, the lurid jaw and cavernous throat are primal, immediate. The horror of being consumed by a large fish doesn’t ignite the tedious chain of psychological causes and effects that the proximity of an intimate relationship does.

My first therapist Joyce, was not only a beautiful ex-model who collected Jasper Johns drawings, but an astute Jungian. I’d always had a rich dream life. Lucid dreams. Even premonitions. I told Joyce that I’d dreamed of sharks since childhood, hoping she might seamlessly link my dysfunctional family confessions with some deep-sea mythos of the subconscious.

Instead she stared at my ragged fingernails.

“Well, you’re very oral.”

I  took exhaustive notes during our sessions.  The pens I wrapped my ragged fingers around were invariably dotted with teeth indentations, the caps deformed and squashed by my clumsy molars. As a child I obsessively chewed free library bookmarks, cupcake papers and lollipop sticks to awkward mush balls, a habit that evoked both pleasure and shame.

At the time, I felt disappointed at Joyce’s spare, more Freudian than Jungian response, but over 23 years later I feel grateful to her. Instead of spinning a narrative about submerged anxieties stalking me until I faced them, Joyce aligned me with the powerful creatures I feared.

In some strange way, she made me one of them.

Day 63: 8/27/13: “A Fin in a Waste of Waters”

by in Environment, Literature, Memory, Shark Attack and tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Today’s title is  a recurring line  from Virginia Woolf’s novel “The Waves.”

That line mesmerized me when I wrote a paper on “The Waves”  for my Woolf seminar in graduate school.  I love the desolation of it–” a waste of waters,” and though I’ve not returned to that book in many years, it persists in my consciousness, a potent symbol, a perfect fragment.

However, High modernism is not the only source for memorable reminders of the power of the dorsal fin.

On September 25th, Ralph Collier, founder of  Shark Research Committee and author of the fascinating and disturbing book “Shark Attacks of the Twentieth Century”  will be my guest lecturer at Glendale College. I am a proud member of the Shark Research Committee and frequent reader of Pacific Coast Shark News,   Collier’s archives of detailed eyewitness descriptions of shark encounters (sightings, breachings,  bumped surfboards,  headless seals washed up on the beach or more rarely, full-fledged attacks) from California to Washington.

I could spend days scrolling through these accounts–which are both scientific and poetic, eerie and beautiful. A man diving near Refugio in Santa Barbara County  takes sanctuary in the kelp canopy after a 12-foot great white steals a freshly killed lingcod from his hand.  Two miles west of Refugio, a shark, “possibly a great white,” lifts a kayaker out of the water.  On a cloudless day in Big Sur, a two-foot high dorsal fin surfaces then disappears.

Phrases like “glassy calm” and “crescent-shaped bite” dazzle and terrify. Detailed, crime report-style identifications:  “blunt nose, 12-14 feet in length, grayish black” alternate with the ephemeral, and elusive:   “the shadow of the body was about 15-feet in length.”

These encounters, these observations are usually over in seconds.

The shark moves lazily or with the precision and speed of a torpedo, over the reef, out to sea. Or simply sinks and disappears.

Français : Aileron de requin. English : Shark ...

Français : Aileron de requin. English : Shark dorsal fin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Day 62: 8/26/13: Yum-Yum Yellow

by in Diving, Humor, Memory, Shark Trivia and tagged , , | 2 Comments
Swimfin Art Installation 99

Swimfin Art Installation 99 (Photo credit: Blue Genie Art)

If  I’m ever going to do something useful like count sharks for Project Aware, I’m going to have to get advanced diver certification.

Considering my innate spazziness with all things sport, this could take a while. But I invested in my future today by purchasing a pair of amazing swim fins from my dive teacher Greg Tash, at Aqua Adventures.

They’re split fins which means you can swim super fast without a lot of effort.

“What color do you want?” my dive teacher asked.

“Not pink,”  I said. “Not–”

“No yum-yum yellow?” he quipped.

Greg had read my mind as easily as he’d measured my foot.

I hadn’t heard “yum-yum yellow” since the 70s, when a popular theory proposed that sharks like brightly colored bathing suits, rafts, etc. This color-coded wisdom burned itself into my consciousness as did the following commandments:

Don’t swim at dusk or dawn

Don’t swim when menstruating

Don’t urinate in the water

Don’t swim near a sewage run-off (that one was pretty easy to manage)

Don’t swim alone

And if you do swim with a friend remember: You don’t have to swim faster than the shark, just faster than your buddy.

Check out Greg’s white shark cage diving video here.

Day 58: 8/22/13: Tern! Tern! Tern!

by in Activism, Environment, Memory, Pop Culture and tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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 21: 7/16/2013: Ocean Trash and a Murder Mystery

by in Activism, Marine Conservation, Memory and tagged , , | 1 Comment

While disentangling the umpteenth Disney princess-style Band-Aid from a tangle of seaweed on Venice Beach today, I remembered a dark, weird story that my mother told me. My mother only seems to know dark, weird stories, but this was a favorite. One 1940s summer day, my mother and her adolescent pals were playing on the beach at the Salem Willows after Sunday school when they discovered a suitcase jammed in the rocks. The suitcase was neatly packed with women’s clothes. One of the girls, Marjory (I think her name was), snagged a slip from the case  and put it on under her skirt.

Later, the police showed up at Marjory’s house. The suitcase belonged to a murdered woman whose body had been found at the Willows. I always imagined Marjory’s horror as the cop recited the grim facts and she felt the dead woman’s silky slip against her legs.

Today I collected a 13-gallon trash bag of miscellaneous crap from the beach, plus a smaller bag of recyclables. The weirdest thing I found was a pair of “falsies.” I hope there is a more lighthearted story behind these abandoned breast enhancers than Marjory’s slip, which by the way, I don’t think she ever relinquished as evidence.