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 43 08/07/2013: The Limits of Man

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Shark attacks evoke really conflicting responses in me.   It’s gruesome. It’s terrifying. It’s sad. Of course, I feel badly for the people who die.

But I feel equally sorry for the animals killed in retribution for the attacks, like the proposed slaughter of 90 sharks in Reunion.

Sharks are predators. Sharks live in the ocean. Sharks are one of the few animals that remind us that we too have a place in the food chain. Sharks don’t care that we work in offices, that we love our children,  or that we tend to view life with a keen sense of irony.  When they attack out of error, curiosity, or perhaps genuine hunger, they take from us not just skin and bone, but our particularity, our human special-ness. Sharks reduce us to  meat. Continue reading →

Day 42: 08/06/2013: On Feeling Small

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Today I posted a shark poem, but thought my actions aren’t really worth talking about. I’m so consumed with other work, I managed to just sign and share a petition against OCEARCH, a very “fishy” if you will great white shark tagging operation that claims to serve science, but is probably more about tracking great whites for the benefits of fishermen.

Then I remembered that this morning in my class at Sci-Arc, which is made up of international students, someone asked completely out of the blue (we were discussing the role of the architect and society), “What’s Shark Week? Why is it such a big deal here?”

My students don’ t know about my obsession, and suddenly in this architecture/ESL class, I was talking about sharks. I took the opportunity to give the grim statistics and balance the sensationalism of Shark Week with the reality of shark slaughter. It was a small moment. But I suppose that’s what this year is: 365 small moments linked together, some bigger and more important than others, but each of them some sort of step towards…what? Will I move beyond simply “raising awareness”? How can I inspire action and change?

I realize too that I like writing here every day. Even if it’s nothing more than a fragment. There is something about the “every day-ness” of it that I’ve come to rely on.

Day 42: 8/06/2013: Sharks’ Teeth by Kay Ryan

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Everything contains some

silence. Noise gets

its zest from the

small shark’s-tooth

shaped fragments

of rest angled

in it. An hour

of city holds maybe

a minute of these

remnants of a time

when silence reigned

compact and dangerous

as a shark. Sometimes

a bit of tail

or fin can still

be sensed in parks.

Day 41 8/5/13: Poems for Shark Week: Beach Walk by Henri Cole

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I found a baby shark on the beach.

Seagulls had eaten his eyes.  His throat was bleeding.

Lying on shell and sand, he looked smaller than he was.

The ocean had scraped his insides clean.

When I poked his stomach, darkness rose up in him,

like black water.  Later, I saw a boy,

aroused and elated, beckoning from a dune.

Like me, he was alone.  Something tumbled between us—

not quite emotion.  I could see the pink

interior flesh of his eyes.  “I got lost.  Where am I?”

he asked, like a debt owed to death.

I was pressing my face to its spear-hafts.

We fall, we fell, we are falling.  Nothing mitigates it.

The dark embryo bares its teeth and we move on.