Lighten up

You can tell we’re transitioning from how to do the research to how to present it.  Here’s one way.  It is a drop-dead gorgeous morning, glassy.  I’m in the Catalina Express heading from the Isthmus, where they picked me up, to Howland’s Landing a little farther west, where we pick up 100 screaming kids from the camp. 

This is my most favorite stretch of ocean and coast in the world.  Bar none.  The water is blindingly blue.  The scrub and earth are shades of brown and green.  The swell is an intriguing mix that invites analysis.  There is only one yacht moored here.  on this Sunday.

But here I am trying to decide whether I should apply a 3 or 5-cell moving mean to our waterfront behavior data.  The WSN meeting in Monterey is looming large, and we’ve still not quite figured out our narrative. 

So, in my data/laptop obsession, I miss the quartz-filled beach at Howland’s, where we now lie, waiting for the kids to board.  I miss Frog Rock in the middle of the beach.  As a kid, I used to wait patiently for the tide to go up so I could jump, better dive, from as high up the 8-foot rock as I dared. 

I miss the quiet intertidal zone on the west side, where I, as a 7 year old, discovered crabs and anemones and tidepool fishes and moray eels for the first time.  And where I still remember how I once slipped on a slimey rock, sliding down 15 feet on my butt into a rock pool a foot deep.  I scraped my butt, I broke my toe, I drenched all my clothes.  It hurt so bad that I shit in my pants.

Now that was a bad day.

But today, the tranquility of Howland’s as these little 7-year old boys load onto the ferry, reminds me to chill out just a little.

I don’t know why I feel such a need to establish this research.  It is probably a variety of reasons. 

First, it is a SCUBA project.  I’ve never done one.  All my graduate student friends did this all their early careers.  Many of them have stopped doing it; it takes so much time and energy.  This is my chance to catch up.  There is a part of me that believes that you can’t really call yourself a Marine Biologist if you haven’t published data gathered with bottled air.  This is nonsense of course.  You can get data much more rapidly in the very same ocean if you restrict your observations to the intertidal zone.

Second, although this is only my second sabbatical (clocks have a tendency to reset when you shift institutions), this may be my last.  7 years from now I’ll be 64, and that’s pretty old for an ambitious place like Chapman to be granting a sabbatical request.  So, if it is my last sabbatical, let’s make it count.

There are lots of other reasons I want this sabbatical to work out, but I’ll list them some other time.