—Jim Dodge

***

The American Fisheries Society annual meeting starts in Seattle in a couple of days. I will be in attendance, and am bracing myself for an onslaught of these stories. I worry that “I once saw an echo with a target strength of almost -12 dB re. 1 μPa at 1 m!” is not actually that impressive to most people. I suppose I will just have to fall back on my natural modesty.

These big ones feed sharks.

—Gary Snyder

This made me laugh out loud when I read it. I’m almost through my book of Gary Snyder poems, moving on to Wendell Berry next. Any other old hippies I should be reading?

For Ruth Sasaki

This realm half sky half water,
        night black with white foam
        streaks of glowing fish
        the high half black too lit with
        dots of stars,
The thrum of the diesel engine twirling
        sixty-foot drive shafts of twin screws,
Shape of a boat, and floating
        over a mile of living seawater, underway,
        always westward, dropping
        land behind us to the east,
Brought only these brown Booby birds that trail
        a taste of landfall feathers in the craw
        hatchrock barrens—old migrations—
        flicking from off the stern into thoughts,
Sailing jellyfish by day, phosphorescent
        light at night,
        shift of current on the ocean floor
        food chains climbing to the whale.

Ship hanging on this membrane infinitely
        tiny in the “heights” the “deep”
        air-bound beings in the realm of wind
        or water, holding hand to wing or fin
Swimming westward to the farther shore,
        this is what I wanted? so much
        water in the world and so much crossing,
        oceans of truth and seas of doctrine
Salty real seas of our westering world,
        Dharma-spray of lonely slick on deck
Sleepy, between two lands, always a-
        floating world,
                I go below.

M.S. Arita Maru, 1956

(Hanging above is a half-model of a wood-strip canoe my grandfather built.)

My grandparents got this picture a long time ago, and it was arguably the first satellite image I’d seen of anything, ever. I thought (and still think) it’s so cool how you can see the sandy shoals underwater looming up out of the blue, and the way the beaches and spits appear so elegantly smooth. As I learned later, that smoothness, so unusal in nature, is due to the transport of sand alongshore by waves running up the beach at an angle, wearing down points and filling in bights. The smoothest parts of the Cape are the outer shore of the arm, most exposed to the North Atlantic swells. The roughest parts are in the sheltered west side of Buzzards Bay.

The sandy ocean beaches of the Cape, and the rest of the Eastern U.S. too, are in their way as spectacular and awe inspiring as the giant cliffs of the West Coast. The latter stand up against the waves until they are undercut and collapse in huge landslides, taking out sections of California’s Highway 1 and other beautiful, geologically ephemeral roads. The former let the waves crash over them, shifting back and forth with the dunes receding, advancing, and receding again from season to season, dropping a few beach houses unceremoniously onto the beach every year. Standing on Nauset Beach, looking east, you are eye-to-eye with the ocean in a way you aren’t on a Pacific clifftop.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone—I hope yours was as full of good food and good company as mine. Those who are observant may have noticed some subtle changes in the website; I took advantage of a few slow hours to install and customize new WordPress theme. This allows me such extravagances as a tag cloud and other widgets in my sidebar. I have also updated my blogroll for the first time in the eighteen months since I opened shop, hopefully offering a more complete picture of what fills my RSS feed these days. Thanks to all of you for giving me so many interesting things to read and think about.

I’ll sign off with a poem by Wendell Berry, read out loud this evening by my uncle James. I hadn’t heard it before.

We clasp the hands of those that go before us,
And the hands of those who come after us.
We enter the little circle of each other’s arms
And the larger circle of lovers,
Whose hands are joined in a dance,
And the larger circle of all creatures,
Passing in and out of life,
Who move also in a dance,
To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it
Except in fragments.

My freshman year, in our required Introduction to the Humanities course, one of our assignments was to memorize a poem—any poem. This one was mine, and it’s been a favorite since then. It steps so cautiously around “the just proportion of good to ill.”