3-Meter Aluminum Discus Buoy

Smashed to smithereens. Or adrift afar.

Vortex of Trash the Size of Texas

Simone - she's the poodle dog - and I were talking. She was helping the little mite to express herself. The mite is from very deep down in the ocean, and she has a hard time with all this air and light up here, but the poodle seems to understand her well. The mite was talking about the Pacific vortex, or gyre, where she comes from: click here for a video of how the ocean works. I guess this plastic "glass" I am in was a candidate for the gyre, only it came up here in Seaside instead. Some great trash, to get out of the ocean back to its makers, to be a hospice for me as I am ailing. The mite lives on wood, which sinks to the bottom of the sea. She had been born down 2600 meters, and then hauled up by scientists, but she escaped just as they came to the surface, and rode the gyre out to sea, drifted in here. She must be specially adapted to have lived so long, her little legs - she has only 47 left - carried her here as ever fast as they could. Luckily, she and Simone made friends right away. Simone is so smart. The mite is "a mite" confused because she thinks these giant blue mussels are naturally found on the beach - not realizing it is just storms that brought them here, quite unusually. Here is a lovely photo of the mussels in their environment, before they were torn up and tossed up on this beach with the grandfather barnacles and plastic trash. The mite can't see this photo - nor for that matter can I until my eye grows back, but I think that you can since your natural realm is light.

Sea Daisy

Such a beauty, she is!

Some Walruses

Those curlews sure are hooked up. They brought me news from all over, such a palaver that I can barely clear my head of it - they seem to speak as a choir rather than as a single voice, and there are layers and layers and layers of information there. I was able to pick out this thread after thinking about it quietly for a while. Robbie rubbed me up from the tide line with his nose and put me in a glass of salt water - or a plastic of salt water, I should say, that he found on the beach. He then brought me up to the house in seashell and dumped me in there. The water is getting a bit cloudy, but I am grateful for the rest from all the scrapes and bruises. It's very rough and windy out there again today, with fresh water falling from the sky at a great rate. . . how I hate that! My eye is gradually getting better, too. I am growing a new one. I suggested to Robbie he grow a new arse since he is still having difficulty with his, but he just growled in a surly lairdish kind of way. The curlews, getting back to them, were going on about these walruses in the Chukchi Sea, how they are dying in the thousands of overcrowding. (Apparently curlews like to talk about world events, it's part of their flock behavior.) When Robbie stops dragging his bum around the carpet I'll get him to make a link for this event. We are alone here in the commander's house, a Boy comes in twice a day to walk Robbie and to check on the house. There are no other people around, so maybe we'll get a lot done while I grow an eye back. Being blind has made me listen intently, though, to the curlews and what they are saying, so that was a good thing - a new source of information. No word about the salmons in the Irish Sea yet. On a personal note, Robbie has a girlfriend. She showed him how to pick up a glass, or plastic, and to hill it full of water for me. She is very smart, a "poodle," chocolate brown. She likes to carry around a crab shell all the time, with a mite in it of some kind, a little tiny whisperer that lives in sand and, maybe wood, I think, although I am not sure, and water. Apparently he (or she?) travels far. H/she spoke of someplace called Gyre. I had some trouble making this out, it's voice is so tiny but it sounded quite civil. A kind of sea cricket, is how the poodle described it. In any event, they have become friends and perhaps we will be hearing more from the mite.

Great Blistering Barnacles

It so happened that the Grandfathers decided to take a dive this time, to help the small creatures and the young ones, and to mediate between the sea and the mammals and birds and swimming and crawling creatures. The very large clams, the very large blue mussels, and the very large barnacles sacrificed themselves to the wind and to oxygenated air, so that others could eat, and so that they not be cut to ribbons in the surf. All along the beach the houses of the grandfathers lay, in their great, crusted beauty. They were beautiful when they lived - exquisite when they lived - and they looked like angels when they died. The seagulls, of course, were ecstatic and ate like cormorants. I will show you pictures as soon as I can. Robbie will help me. He is having some problems with some worms from something he ate, so is a little distracted - an "itchy arse" he says, whatever that is. Seems to be dragging himself around like a salp on shore. Perhaps it was the rotted salmon he ate?

Some Trouble

When all the trees have been cut down,when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe,only then will you discover you cannot eat money. -- Cree prophecy

Kinda Stormy

While I was distracted thinking about a ten-mile-square raft of jelly-fishes in the Irish Sea, a gigantic storm snuck up on me. I tried to head to sea but the swells and the wind were too great, so I ended up jumping right over this Jetty. Lord, I thought my days were over. I am blinded, pretty much, by the ordeal and pretty scraped away but every creature was trying hard to live. The mighty fishes went out to sea, as ever fast as they could, but the sand-dwellers turned over and over and were worn away like so many old newspapers. Many trees also fell. There were great thuds we could hear in the water, even far out, as they went down, the shocks carrying clear through the storm and surge to even little me. Once I was over the Jetty, there was all this fresh water and debris to contend with, and out I went, with the offal and broken trees and bits of things, way out in the great sea-delta of the Columbia River, until finally I was able to begin to work my way back, behind the prop of a crab boat headed for Seaside. It took no time to come up to the beach again, with that swell, and there was Robbie, soaked through so that the little pink skin under his curls showed up wetly, his beard streaming salt spray and rain, barked hoarse. His people were OK, so he ran away and spent two and a half days barking for me, running to and fro. What a friend. I was grateful to hear his whistling bark, to feel his anxious snuffle on my perimeter as he sniffed and sniffed, "is it really you?"

This storm seems all out of proportion. There is another one coming in behind it, wetter and slower, I can smell it.