Caution: this info comes with a couple cuties

Animals have half the answer.

Snowy egret wonders what
you're worrying about.

They don’t worry, plan, or stress about abstract possibilities; they live in the present moment only, heeding past lessons but not dwelling on them. That’s humanity’s gift, and its curse. Our humanity, or at least our brains, is toxic to itself.

So take the animal’s half answer, and give up the worry, fear, and anxiety of these giant brains, but take humanity’s gamble and replace them with the positive potential of those big squishy lumps. Maybe that’s wisdom, maybe it’s compassion, peace, or oneness. Whatever else it is, I bet it’s Love.

And now that I’ve purged that train of thought that occupied me during my shower this morning, we can about animals.

Sea lions under Santa Cruz Wharf

West Cliff Drive’s swooping strip of strolling sweetness is anchored at one end by the Santa Cruz Wharf, which stretches just far enough into the chilly water to make swimming around it an impressive accomplishment.

Under the far end are platforms whose original purpose may have been as docks, but which are now property of the sea lions and elephant seals, who snooze down there in giant puddles of themselves. You can hear their barks for miles, especially on a still night.

Just west of the wharf is the calm inlet where surfing schools take hordes of wetsuited newbies out on their giant spongeboards to learn. It looks like a ton of fun. Next time…

I imagine a substantial portion of the lesson is spent warning them not to paddle too far out, because then they’d reach Steamer Lane. A world class surf spot, if the waves at Steamer don’t kill an inexperienced person out there, the other surfers will.

Surfers are generally a high-spirited lot, but man oh man, do not get in their way when they’re doing their thing. Apparently when they stand up the tranquility runs off them faster than the saltwater.

           

That's a small wave for Steamer, but enough to catch.

     (Jack O’Neill invented the modern wetsuit and leash at Steamer…and lost an eye out there. No, I’m not kidding, and no I don’t know how.)

Drifting among the surfers (and probably amused by them) are my personal favorites, the sea otters. I find few things as relaxing as watching an otter lazily paddle around with the ease that speaks of utter comfort with one’s surroundings.

And because I know you are thirsty for factoids, sea otters are the largest species in their Family, which includes weasels and badgers. Yes, it’s a swimming badger, so don’t piss it off.

I wish I had pics but my lens isn't that good. http://carinbondar.com/2010/
11/this-weeks-cool-biology-job-sea-otter-population-ecologist/

You may already know they use rocks to break prey like abalone or urchins off their perches and break open the shells, making them one of the few animals to use tools. But did you know they have a little pouch of skin under each of their forelegs where they hold food and their chosen rock while they’re swimming around? Me neither. And according to Wikipedia, they prefer to use the one on the left. Because if you’re an animal that amazing, you’re allowed to have eccentricities.

They are also rare among sea mammals in that they don’t rely on blubber to stay warm, instead they have the thickest hair in the entire animal kingdom, with nearly one million hairs per square inch. Yes you read that right. Even with hair that thick, the water out there’s a cold place to live, so sea otters eat 25-38% if their own body weight daily. Food can be digested and passed in three hours. And no, I’m not going to make a joke about Indian food now.

You're welcome. http://www.tumblr.com/
tagged/sea%20otters?before=18

And just in case you didn’t realize they’re adorable, they will sometimes hold hands while they sleep. Not enough? After hours of being groomed, a baby otter’s fur is sometimes so fuzzy, fluffy, and full of air that they “float like a cork and cannot dive.”

Every so often you can see a whale spout in the bay, though it’s hard to tell them from wind-whipped white-caps sometimes. Gray whales swim closest to shore, and March is the peak month for their northward migration. There are also humpbacks and blues out there, the latter being the largest animal to ever live on Earth.

Of all the living things in the oceans, which would you say are the most popular? Who sells the most posters, stuffed animals, and tickets to Sea World? (No, not Great Whites, though yes, we have them too, though you’ll never see one.) What marine species gives humans the strongest, immediate, and instinctive sense of reverence and joy?

You can always tell there’s a pod of dolphins when the people on the path stop, stare, then smile.

A lot of the time they’re actually seeing porpoises, which despite an inexplicably lower popularity are still amazing animals. As a matter of fact, I suddenly feel a tad defensive on behalf of these remarkable cetaceans. Just because they didn’t get their own TV show when you were a kid doesn’t mean they’re boring, you know.

Dall’s Porpoises are out in the Bay here, and they are one of the fastest, most maneuverable cetaceans in the world. I bet they could alert the authorities, catch a crook, and save a drowning boy every bit as fast as that Hollywood show-off…

But who am I kidding, there is something about dolphins. The awesomeness that comes to mind is the “common” dolphin. Common? There’s a sunset every day too, but I still stop and watch.

There, that one's mine. Natural Bridges State Beach

This blogging thing is particularly enjoyable tonight, since I just learned that there are Northern Rightwhale Dolphins swimming around out there, which are a species with no dorsal fin. I wonder if they are sometimes mistaken for seals…on PCP.

And more! Have you ever heard of Rissos Dolphins? You have now. And why will you remember them? Because they can weigh up to 2,000 pounds and be 13.5 feet long. Now that’s a dolphin.

After that I almost don’t feel I need to mention the killer whales…

And to think, I started this post intending to talk mostly about birds.

Where I've been living and what I've been loving

With only a week left in the US, and less than that in Santa Cruz, I have reached the time for goodbyes.  I'm eating last meals with friends new and old, and savoring finite excursions in this fine town. (No, I’m not ready to say goodbye to the cat yet. I refuse! I will not go gentle into that good night. Do cats need passports?)

One of the coves on Westcliff

One of the pieces of Santa Cruz I will miss the most is Westcliff Drive, the road and bike path that wind for three miles along the coastline from Natural Bridges State Beach in the west to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in the east.

Nearly every picture I’ve posted since coming back has been from there, and in the last three months I have ridden and/or walked along it more days than not.

Benches carved with dedications are a great place to sit and watch the strollers, strutters, and stallers work their gradual way past low sandy cliffs and erosion-controlling rockfalls. A series of inlet beaches frame waves swirling into each other, tide pools scruffy with tenacious seaweed, and egrets grazing on sand crabs.

More about these guys later

Ice plant covers the slopes with its waxy spikes and martian flowers. There is a particular spot that is the favorite rolling spot of a particular pit bull, who thrashes on his back in pure canine bliss, long pink tongue hanging out the side of his muzzle. His owner is among one of the groups of middle-aged Santa Cruz men whose clothes and pot smoking habits remain unchanged since high school. (Santa Cruz is known for its “Peter Pan” style of adult manhood. It's one of the few places on Earth where a vagabond like myself looks positively mature.)

People go by foot, bicycle, roller blades & skates. There are skateboards, unicycles, and a daily segway tour at 3:00, whose participants demonstrate the appropriate level of embarrassment at being seen on a segway, though I've seen stone-faced people of all ages subtly sweeping back and forth in long curves, the way I do on a bicycle when the music, sun, and universe are all working in harmony.

It's a distinct sort of beautiful in the fog

Foreigners, Americans, and locals walk here, though the first two are much the same to the lattermost, in a town that honors and despises those who grow up here and stay.

(Santa Cruz is hard to leave, and some in the mob of those who come
for the university and never leave refer to it as “The Velvet Rut.”)

Expensive houses pack the nearby neighborhoods, but the front row with the view is nearly uninhabited. These must be among the world’s smallest multi-million dollar homes, and mostly belong to wealthy people who work too much to come enjoy them more than a couple weekends a year. One of them has installed fake hawk noises to scare pigeons off their roof, and it’s ridiculous enough to be more entertaining than annoying, though the squawking clashes with a beautiful sunset. The petulant egocentrism of the hyper-wealthy, on display.

But no one looks towards the houses, since the other side faces straight out on Monterey Bay. Just offshore the bottom drops off to a mile deep, but from there the Monterey Canyon delves an additional mile down, the depth of the Grand Canyon. So at its deepest, the bottom of the bay is twice the maximum depth of the Grand Canyon.

Given the geography hidden below it, the surface of the bay, for all its celebrated waves, seems eminently modest. But knowing what's down there makes the saltwater in my blood sigh in liquid awe.

This deep ocean conduit brings cold, nutrient-rich water into the bay and fosters the thriving kelp forest and marine wildlife that we take for granted by necessity, because fully appreciating it would take all day, every day, and druid robes besides. And they’d probably have to be made of kelp, which sounds heavy.

More on the wildlife in my next post...

I have a confession to make.

I confess, when I wrote that blog asking if I should go to Peru or Myanmar, I’d pretty much already decided the answer. I was just curious what you’d say.

For the language, the NGO’s, and continued exploration of South America, I was heading to Peru.

But then. I found myself looking for reasons to go to Myanmar. And not in order to feel like I’d given it a fair chance, but because I wanted to be convinced. The change already underway there was a compelling reason, but more importantly, Peru felt like taking the easy way. The easy way? No way!

So, Myanmar!

But then. I was drinking a cup of green tea after breakfast, looking at the giant wall-sized map of the world in the house I’m taking care of, whose owners are finishing up their round-the-world trip. Around the world?

Yes please.

Why skip straight to Myanmar, when there are oh-so-many places in between?

I researched round-the-world (RTW) tickets, and have found that they are much like Eurail train passes: a really good idea in theory but priced way too high by companies who think you won’t notice. Just in case, and they may well be cheaper for some routes, and offer other advantages*, I’ll share the results of my admittedly brief research.

       *The main advantage is that a RTW ticket would presumably satisfy that god-awful onward-ticket requirement that many confused countries are currently demanding. God I hate that idea. My plan is to book a flight in advance, though this will reduce my flexibility. Did I mention how much I hate the onward-ticket requirement? I’ll also probably fly between the capitals of SE Asian countries, which will deprive me of the quintessential traveler experience of border scams, but I figure I’ve seen enough of those already.

There are several options, but the biggest one with the most flights and airports is through StarAlliance. They have a trip-planner here which was the most fun I’ve had online since crossword puzzles. You get 39,000 miles to play with (though there are other options if you fly business class I guess) over the course of a year.

Rule #1: You have to end in the same country (but not city) where you started.

Tip #1: Don’t start in the USA! Americans don’t travel enough I guess, so a RTW ticket starting here costs much more than one starting just about anywhere else. Even Europe. It is cheaper to book your own one-way to Europe, then do a RTW from there, even if you don’t use the whole thing. And that way you get to stop off for some Belgian beer, chocolate, and fries, and that’s always a good idea.

Rule/tip #2: You only get 16 “segments”, i.e. flights, so try to fly direct, hub to hub, then fritter around by land from there. But you’ll probably want to return to the same airport where you landed in each country, because traveling on your own by land and flying out of somewhere else counts as a flight! Sneaky bastards!

But check individual flights before you book a RTW! Even using my fantasy itinerary, individual flights seem to be a fraction of the cost of a RTW. For starters, you can fly from Western Europe all the way to Istanbul for about a hundred bucks. Cross an entire continent* for $100? Awesome.

*For now we’ll pretend Europe is a continent. Socio-political cartography at its best.

And from Istanbul you have access to the network of budget Asian airlines. So instead of a RTW ticket, I’ll just go to Istanbul, and wing it from there. Pun pretty much intended, and only barely regretted.

I’ve already booked my first three flights…

I hope it doesn't come as a surprise

Yesterday I went for a walk on one of the dozen stunningly beautiful beaches a few minutes up the coast from Santa Cruz, where the majestic waves of the Pacific Ocean were roaring up close to the shore then getting embarrassed by a kelp audience and quieting down to softer white flows of water that slid humbly up the sand.

I was with one of the many friendly and kind-hearted Americans I know, comfortable in our conversations about what engenders happiness and a good life, Buddhist principles and finding the balance between individualism and community. As we walked the length of the beach, a couple tiny pieces of plastic caught my eye, since we have an admirably widespread aversion to littering that leaves our coastline impressively clean.  The only thing on the beach besides footsteps of humans and canines were little jelly caps of mysterious oceanic providence, but sure looked like mermaid slippers to me.

On the way back we stopped by a locally owned and operated restaurant for a snack of fresh local calamari. We ordered the chicken and vegetable soup, and when it turned out they had quoted the Soup of the Day wrong, they gave us the tomato-basil bisque for free. America reliably has by far the best customer service I've ever seen. Then we returned to a town by the sea where an hour's walk along the shore provides good odds of seeing seals, otters, and dolphins.

I thought to myself "I really love this land." And shortly thereafter "one probably wouldn't guess that from my last blog."

So yes Lady America, you fair damsel simultaneously insecure and arrogant, wise and foolish, I love you. You are beautiful, noble, ridiculous, inspiring, disappointing, and at the end of the day, one helluva nice place to live.

Makuwa Lisa: Let's Set the World on Fire

Whew, that last blog was negative! Sorry about that. It's a beautiful day, with gorgeous sun, good music, and a delicious cup of tea in my hand, so here's a blog from my friend Lisa over in South Africa. I highly recommend her blog.


Makuwa Lisa: Let's Set the World on Fire: Something rare happened today in Kloof.   The sun showed his big yellow Raisin Bran face!   I guess if you want to live in a tropical p...

I am deporting myself. (And fair warning, a lot of sex talk.)

Note: This is not my favorite of my posts, nor typical, so if anyone finds it via Lisa's reblogging of my other post, skip this one and read any of the others for a better representation.

I remember thinking that eating in a restaurant or seeing a movie alone were the loneliest, saddest things on Earth.

Nothing to do with the blog, just lots of Santa Cruz pics.

I got over the first one many years (and many passport stamps) ago, but I had never actually seen a movie alone until this week. I wanted to see The Hobbit before he put on his ring and vanished…from theaters. So I biked into town for the Tuesday matinee.

I can happily report that I didn’t feel lonely, awkward, or out of place for being there alone. But I did feel lonely and out of place…in America.

The preview to the previews  was commercials, but fine, show me ads. But they showed this one. I don’t like linking to an advertisement, but in case you’d like to see what I’m talking about.

Ugh. More digitally animated baby humans and animals. Yawn through the pastiche.

But worse than dull, I find this ad irresponsible. It’s an implicit endorsement of a culture whose parents are too immature to talk to their kids about sex.

“Where do babies come from?” Asks the kid. The parents evade. Chuckle chuckle. Then the kid goes home and learns about sex from the internet. We have an entire generation (or two…or three?) who have learned about sex from pornography. That is a crime against ourselves.

Why talk to kids about sex even if it’s uncomfortable? Because otherwise they’ll get their sexual miseducation elsewhere. I presumably got mine from a 70’s era informative book of the “When a man and a woman love each other very much, they share a special kind of hug” variety, with drawing of the fuzzy pencil type that I associate with advent calendars. Illustration more appropriate to missionary handouts than the missionary position.

But I really got my info on the playground, which was cute in a clueless adorable way, but man oh man am I glad there was no internet back then.

Of course, neither kids not parents enjoy that process (though judging from my experience in college, Jews do a much better job of it) so my advice to parents: delegate the job to an uncle/aunt/godfather/godmother.

My family’s rather progressive-for-the-era plan was for our godmother to buy us a Playboy when we turned 14. Or as it 13? I don’t know, because years before that my folks caught us with a Hustler. We didn’t know why we wanted it, but we knew we weren’t supposed to have it, since sex was this big secretive thing that was the focus of 90% of pop culture, and that was good enough for us.

Part of America: urban gas guzzlers saying "B educ8d."

I am sooo tired of television, and our mass culture, performing for our weaknesses. And it’s not that I think I’ll find a country that does it any better, but it’s harder to tolerate when it’s your own. We fancy ourselves such cultural pioneers, but even after all these decades we’re even still fighting about gay marriage? Really?

Ok. Breathe. Thank you for letting me rant. I feel much better. Did you know you were a therapist? What do I owe you?

After my tirade played itself out in my head, I sat in the theater feeling out of place while everyone else cracked up. I deeply envy those who can just laugh at a cutsie commercial and not overthink it, I really do, but I can’t help it. Television, advertising, the media, all that stuff is way too powerful to waste on easy outs and inane fluff. And if I start thinking about the messages it sends women…my vision is already hazing towards red.

It’s enough to make me flee the country.

So I think I will.