Bi-Weekly Topics for March 1, 2004
Sea Dreams
by Triks (London and the North)
I dream of the sea. Sometimes we go there. With my ball.
It is the biggest place I know
soft underfoot
moving under my belly
I can't outrun it - I run with it.
I am rarely still like this.
Here I am dreaming
and counting the seconds till my release command when I can get back in
and run past the waves
fly with my ball
sometimes it comes back
sometimes doesn't
sometimes I get it
sometimes they do
you can't fetch the waves
I try
I bite at them
out there
it's the place I like best
Read more writings on Sea and Ocean in Ecotone, the place bloggers' wiki.
Posted by Triks at 12:06 AM Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040401131044/http://www.airenet.co.uk/alife/2004_03.html
Child of Small Waters
By Switched At Birth
Herewith, my thoughts on the Ecotone wiki's topic for this date, OceanandSea. The Ecotone site is a facinating intersection for blogs of place. Stop by to visit and explore if you haven't been there before.
Regarding oceans and seas, I am a child of small waters.
The magnificence of oceans and seas unnerves me. I love to walk on the sugar white sands of Pensacola Beach, watching the crabs scuttle into their holes, picking up pastel colored tiny coquina shells to examine. But when it comes time for swimming, give me a cement pond, please, where I can see through the chlorinated water all the way to the bottom and the edges are no farther than I can gracelessly dog-paddle in any direction.
The last time I swam in the warm Gulf of Mexico was a few months before Buck and I were married, more than twenty years ago. It was a Sunday afternoon. We were frolicking like porpoises. Buck went swimming away from me in a fast line underwater -- just showing off, playing. Unbeknownst to him, his trajectory took him straight into the middle of a small group of women treading water and, low and behold, he surfaced in a school of nuns! The good sisters were having a day retreat on the beach, some in the water and others rowed up in folding chairs on the shore, wimples on their heads and their noses an impenetrable blob of thick white sunblock. They looked like big, placid sea gulls.
I am a true child of ponds, small lakes, streams and natural springs. As a young girl, I spent many early mornings and late afternoons into dusk sitting on the wooden dock of Lake Valrico in a rural area of central Florida near Tampa, where I spent most of my childhood and adolescence. Barefoot, a skinny kid in shorts, I loved sitting on that old dock, conversing silently with my mirrored reflection, dark fish shapes darting just under the waters' murky surface. The tree-lined shore on the far side of that small lake seemed a world away. In fact, my first piano teacher, Mrs. Medard, lived in a big white house nestled in those trees, not objectively far at all.
Mrs. Medard frightened me a little. She was formal, stern and seemed quite old to my nine year old self. She had a method designed to teach me how to hold my hands in proper alignment with the keyboard. Putting a quarter in the middle of the flat surface of the backs of both of my hands, she would instruct me to play some exercise. Inevitably, I would get rattled, jerk my hands to the side, and the coins would roll off, lost inside my teacher's grand piano. Thinking about it now, the logistics don't seem to work. I can't figure out how quarters could roll off my little child hands and somehow fall into the bowels of Mrs. Medard's piano. . . but it's my memory, and I'm sticking to it. I fear I must have bothered Mrs. Medard some, too. She died of a heart attack shortly after my lesson one Saturday afternoon.
Lake Valrico received my tears, both flash floods and the slow, constant drip from my eyes into the eyes of my reflection, in the weeks and months after my father died. Small waters have always been there to comfort me.
My thoughts are not grand, not oceanic. They meander like some brook, crossing fields, woods and swampy areas. Sometimes they submerge beneath the earth's surface, subterranean and cold.
Longleaf has a series of natural springs. They bubble up into a sandy stream bed. The water flows with the tilt of the land, through the forest of mixed pine and hardwoods, deep into the swamp where it is almost dark even in the middle of the day. Walking in the deep forest that borders the swamp, the treetops form a high canopy, and only a little light filters through in spots. It is one of my favorite places to wander. The stream is about two feet wide in most places there, with musical rills created where logs have fallen and formed makeshift miniature waterfalls. The most gorgeous ferns grow there, together with unusual plants such as Never Wet and even the occasional wild lilly, with startlingly bright yellow blooms. The damp earth is heavy, black and fragrant. Animal tracks abound. Wrenching "dry cork in a bottle" woodpecker sounds split the silence, and the beating of a large owl's wings may be heard.
It is a place of mysteries; of answers and questions.
I don't think I could ever get my mind around oceans and seas. But ponds, small lakes, streams and natural springs have a human scale that suits me. I can poke along our stream bed, exploring, watching the minnows dart from sunlight to shadow at my approach.
With a pocket full of pecan halves, a tangerine and a native plant reference guide, I enjoy my small adventure at the water's edge.
11:29 PM in Longleaf Preserve | Permalink
Poem
By Sea Hear
This poem is my first contribution to the Ecotone project.The topic there today is OceanAndSea...
* * * * * * *
Whales beach with bleeding ears
in places they've rarely been seen.
Fleeing naval noise, aural atrocity,
sonic attack.
Unimaginable assault, irreparable rips
in the fabric of Creation.
Our seas - while we are here -
being blasted by brats
testing
the limits of our times.
Loud orphans drowning out
Ancient lullabies of the Sea.
Their unholy sounds
wreaking havoc upon
Ancestral calling.
This armour brings damage
to our home.
There is no defence
for such killing.
Sunk treasures of knowing
in liquid depth echoes
of navy hearts beating:
Waiting to be heard.
* * * * * * *
# posted by jaihn : 5:32 PM
Source: http://seahear.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_seahear_archive.html#107816250944301234
Sea/scape
By P.
MELBOURNE, FL.
It was 2 o’clock in the morning and my sinuses were killing me.
Almost exactly three years ago today, I had flown to Melbourne for a conference. Intoxicated by 75-degree air in February, I had left open the door to my hotel room’s porch, to savor the exotic experience and listen to the surf, 80 feet down and a hundred yards away.
But now, my sinuses, affronted by air travel and appalled by mildew and unaccustomed seaside moisture, had thrown up the barricades in open revolt, and it was hard to breathe, let alone sleep. I had to close the door.
But before I dragged it shut, I stopped to look out. Far below me, the lights of the hotel faded across the tawny sand to the surf, which was an uncertain line of gray in the dimness. To my left, clusters of hotel and apartment lights attenuated beside the shore till nothing remained but the more-or-less-regular sparks of streetlights along U.S. 1A up toward Cocoa Beach. Beyond the surf, dim sparkles hinted at moving water, and beyond that was only the deepest, purest black I can remember ever seeing. Above, a haze gave back the lights of the shore as a gray-blue and faded away to the invisible horizon, where the sky was as uncompromisingly black as the water. No stars. No passing ships. Not so much as an airplane.
Against such darkness, the brilliant shoreline seemed puny. A light wind covered any hiss from the surf, but a heavy thud …. thud … thud … carried to me. (I wonder now if the frequency of the waves changes with wind and weather, or if it’s a function of the saltiness of the water and the shape of the bottom -- whether hurricane waves crash at the same frequency as those I saw, but a much greater amplitude.)
It was a scene to make you feel -- well, I didn’t feel small, but soft and ineffective. I remember the chorus of a Shape Notes song came to mind:
The Earth and sea shall pass away, and the…e…e …e old rolling skies.
It’s a great old song if you disregard the words. I hummed it to myself. The unpleasant feeling in my sinuses reasserted itself, and I remembered why I stood there. I closed the door, turned on the air conditioner and went for the decongestants.
Eschatology comes easily after midnight, a thousand miles from home, when one is wearing only pajamas. Processed air and chemicals put me readily back to sleep.
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/Sea.html
Ocean Water
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
"Water is good for taking away your troubles. The ocean is best because it's big enough for all of them."
--My Cousin Susan
"On any given morning, the caffeine levels in the Puget Sound spike at around nine."
--Oceanographer Dave
Two random thoughts for the Ecotone Wiki's March 1 entry on Ocean and Sea.
Posted by Pica at March 1, 2004 09:52 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/03/01/ocean_water.html
Sea stones
By ever so humble
I went for a walk by the sea this afternoon and found these sun-warmed rocks on a bench. Scoured and broken off the tops of mountains, carried a few feet a year in glacier ice, dropped on a rocky coast as the ice retreated, tumbled smooth by centuries of stormy North Atlantic waves, they had been chosen by a beachcomber from among thousands of similar rocks and placed on this bench where I happened upon them. I knelt to take a picture.
Bright blue skies, no wind, air temperature almost 50 degrees... I felt a little sunstruck and woozy with the simple beauty and unusual warmth of the day. The flat calm sea was a mirror for the sky; everything was blue, blue, blue as far as my eyes could see. I felt I could sit stone still, soak up the sun's rays, and gaze at the infinite horizon... until the tide came in.
Our coast is rocky, our ocean is cold. Skies can be leaden, clouds laden with rain. The wind bites and howls. In March, storms from the northeast will hurl seaweed high with seaspray and toss battered lobster traps and roll boulders over dunes and rocky embankments into the middle of Route 1A, Ocean Blvd. We see this because we can't stay away; we must go look at the ocean during or after a storm. The craziest people surf in it, elated by the elemental; their wetsuits make them look like slick black seals with bodies just a little too slender and limbs just a little too long.
The cold Labrador Current runs down the coasts of Nova Scotia and Maine and spins out counterclockwise at the bottom of the Gulf of Maine, above Cape Ann, Massachusetts, 30 miles south of us. Even in the summer it can be too cold to swim. If the wind blows offshore, it skims off the top sun-warmed layer of water, pushes it east out to sea like a child's blown-away raft, and the coldest water wells up from the dark deep and takes your breath away. Your feet are ice blocks, your ankles feel like a toothache, you watch amazed as children dive under waves and come up screaming and wild. When their lips turn blue you make them come out, though they protest.
You go back to your chair sunk in the warm sand. Better to sit in the sun and watch, you think, because you are old and worn smooth and wise like a stone by the sea.
(Linked to Ecotone's March 1 topic OceanAndSea.)
March 01, 2004 | Permalink
Comments
'...worn smooth and wise like a stone by the sea.' How beautiful.
Posted by: MD | March 1, 2004 10:12 PM
My God, another poem written as prose. So beautiful I felt I was there.
Posted by: Denny | March 2, 2004 08:39 AM
Wonderful post & picture. Have you posted a link to this on Ecotone, the wiki for bloggers-of-place? The most recent biweekly topic is on Ocean & Sea, so this post would definitely qualify. You can follow the link on my blogroll if you've never checked it out...
Posted by: Lorianne | March 2, 2004 01:18 PM
I was shy about it but, Lorianne, you convinced me and I added the link. In college I majored in English and anthropology and finished with a degree in geography, so reading and writing about "where" has always held a fascination for me.
Posted by: Amy | March 2, 2004 07:18 PM
Happy to see you at Ecotone. I, the land-locked, sat this one out.
Yeah. Worn smooth. That feels about right.
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040401154214/http://everyday.blogs.com/humble/2004/03/_i_went
Secrets Of The Deep
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
A note for the Ecotone Wiki's entry on Ocean and Sea.
There's an excellent gallery of fishes and other creatures from the deep sea here. Do not view if you're prone to nightmares. (From Metafilter).
Closer to the littoral zone, giant crabs are invading Norwegian coastal waters. These crabs were originally from the Bering sea and Kamchatka and were introduced in the 1930s into the Barents Sea for food production. Following a population explosion in the 1990s, these crabs rapidly moving down the Norwegian coast, eating every fish in sight.
Posted by Numenius at March 2, 2004 11:30 PM
Comments
Those deep sea fish really do look like monsters of the deep - not at all the pretty fish we see darting in the shallower waters.
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/03/02/secrets_of_the_d.html
Bertha
By cirrus
Submitted as part of the Ecotone topic: Ocean and Sea
The car pointed south and rumbled steadily down route 95
We listen to the wipers clicking back and forth, fighting the pelting rain
At Providence, the wind roared up Narragansett Bay, buffeted our Sentra
We parked behind a dune, not far from Watch Hill
With a few steps through three-foot high beach grass we were there
There was no beach, the sea was eroding the dunes
We stood amidst the grass, our feet in the surf
The ocean in front of us, mean and nasty
Waves pounding on shore, the wind whisking the surface into a froth
She would be less than a hurricane when she would make landfall in a few hours
Nevermind the official status, we stood awestruck nonetheless
We're not alone, we're buoyed by a handful of others
Here, there, other spectators, everyone gazing at the sea
Not everyone stood idly by, surfers ventured into the churning waters
Each of us longing for a more intimate visit with this stranger from the Tropics
Each gust of wind, each new wave crashing, hightens our excitement
We want more, our souls stretching to feel the intensity
Around us on this stormy day, Bertha's energy ebbing and flowing
We're safe here, this storm won't topple our house or sink our boat
When we've had enough we'll be able to drive home in a warm car
Evening falls, our clothes soaked through
I point the car back north, the highway nearly empty now
The night is dark, the wind has subsided
I can smell the sea in the car, my ears can still hear the surf
And I hold on to the primoridal energy that Bertha shared on this mid summer day
For more on Hurrican Bertha in 1996, see this NOAA site
March 06, 2004 in Ecotone | Permalink
Comments
Growing up in Florida, I know just what you mean about the particular energy, smell, low barometric pressure, color and quality of the wind associated with hurricanes (and those long, deep rolling waves). I've been in homes when part of the roof was torn off and old oak trees jerked out by the roots. And the season will be here again before we know it.
Posted by: Beth W. | March 7, 2004 02:40 PM