Stingrays

At 5:00 a.m. the Pacific Ocean was onyx black, illuminated only by the small globe lights along the pier.

Stacey led the way into the water, advising, “Make sure to slide your feet along teh bottom. There are lots of stingrays here. They look like small bat rays, but they have a long tail with a stinger at the very tip, and they’ll zap you if you step on the It’s just a defensive mechanism – they don’t attack – but if you get stung, your foot will become as large as a football. If you slide your feet, you’ll stir up the bottom sand and scare them away.”

– Swimming to Antartica, Lynne Cox

image source

I remember now going to Mandurah one still, hot afternoon when all the fish were hiding from the white hot heat, and all that we hooked up were blowies and seaweed. You can’t relax completely when fishing – at least not this kind of fishing, on the rocks, by the river. You have to be alert at all times to the possibility. I am an impatient person by nature but something about fishing does calm me, allows me to focus my intensity down to a tiny nib, on the tip of that rod, angling for the tiniest change of the strain on the line. So I wait intently, my mind never off that fine point. But no bite, except for the infuriatingly strong tug of the blowies chasing my line near the surface. No bite.

Then this large diamond of dark water floats by , nearer, nearer, along the path of the great Swan River, but but it was too purposeful, too concrete a dream to be just a dark patch of rock. Besides, it was moving, much faster than shadow could, faster than the current. “It’s the ray,” someone said, and it was – a majestic glide of dark water, patrolling up and down the river in deep water. Moving so swiftly it was like a testellating shape dancing before the eyes, like a dazzling pattern that throws a different diamond into relief each split second, only real. You’re almost sure it’s an illusion – are more willing to believe the illusion, than the thing itself.

“Has anyone tried to catch it?” I ask, and almost immediately regretted my question. Everyone laughed at the evident newbie on the river.

“What would you do with it – eat it?”

I realized the profound bravado I’d just let show, the disrespect I’d expressed for the great ray. How could I, new to fishing, new to Mandurah, expect to catch, much less cook and eat the monarch of the river?

And besides, wasn’t it just cruelty, a callous greed, to imagine taking up that flat slab of a head for the sake of being able to say I did it – just for the sake of a good story I could tell friends, on the other side of the world?I felt a little like Job, being told to consider the Leviathan, the sea boiling like a pot.

The afternoon lazed on, and we tanned on the fruitless docks of the Swan. Fishless, we trooped back to the cars, sweaty and a little burnt, some of us, gulping from the big bottles of water we had hauled over and had been too absorbed to drink from, laughing at our empty handedness. But some of us were determined to get at least some action, to have something to show for the whole day spent in pursuit of invisible fish.

We packed up and drove ourselves to Freemantle, where the mighty Indian Ocean lapped at the great skull rocks, unobstructed for miles and miles, to try our luck there.

And I realize if you live in a place for long enough with an eye for beauty always staring wide open, you realize that the thing inside your heart for it has an ancient, ancient name – the thing growing inside you without your bidding – and that that name is love.

The PreHistory of Lake Michigan

My cab wove through the midafternoon traffic, tracing an arc along the frozen shore of Lake Michigan. On my right, the buildings of one of the world’s tallest cities stabbed toward the sky, steel and glass growing out of the Illinois prairie like modern incarnations of the grass and trees that once lined the lake. A thriving metropolis of nearly three million people, Chicago boasts and airport that was once the world’s busiest (it’s now second), with over 190,000 passengers a day passing through its terminals – including, on this particular day, me. This sprawling city prides itself on its dynamic, forward-looking culture – the “tool maker” and “stacker of wheat,” as Carl Sandburg called it. Not the most obvious place to come looking for the past.

The lake took me back in time, though – way back, before it was even there. Lake Michigan is actually a remnant of one of the largest glaciers the earth has ever seen. During the last ice age, the Laurentide ice sheet stretched from northern Canada down along the Missouri River, as far south as Indianapolis, with its eastern flank covering present-day New York and spilling into the Atlantic Ocean. When it melted, around 10,000 years ago, the water coalesced into the Great Lakes, including Michigan. Looking out the window of my cab, at the strong winds ripping across the expanse of ice reaching out from the Chicago shoreline, I felt like history might be rewinding itself. The ice age could have looked like this, I thought.

– Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Chapter 1: Mystery in the Map

image by Stephen Hudson from Wikipedia – Antarctic Ice Sheet

A friend of mine once spoke to me of glaciers – of the last traces of life in the Empty Continent (the only one left) – Antarctica. Of how it used to be green fields, and of how the ice has taken over, has left trace skulls and abandoned bacteria, of the tenacity of the last traces of life and also the cruelty of the emptiness – of pure abstraction, she said, like something by Bach.

And she also wrote to me (yes, I am a proud owner of a letter written in Antarctica!) about how the glacial pace of great change gave her hope, because the way that God works is skillful, is mysterious, is relentless, is slow – so slow that it tests our patience – but sure. Glacial change can harden the land – can make it so frigid, so cold that it cannot receive or sustain life. It makes the land barren. It begins a little by little – a little drop in temperature, a little formation of ice where water once flowed – but then before you know it, the land is white as snow, like the winter in Narnia – lasting an age instead of a season. And the opposite is true – what we are experiencing today – a little more methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a couple degrees’ temperature rise – oh it’s just a little, it makes Canada more livable, it gives deserts more rain – it drowns the Venetians (who know they have had it coming for a while), it drowns New Orleans. The levees break, the city weeps and leaves yet another Atlantis, yet another mythical advanced city wiped out by pure geography (helped along a little by unsustainable technology…).