lunch bunch up and running

Our GEEP (Giles Early Education Project) group is so proud of this program. This launch is the 6th summer where we set up art/activities and books in the cafeteria where free lunch is being served. The only meal of the day for many of these children. 

When she heard that the County was initiating a free summer lunch program in a county where almost half of our children receive free lunches during the school year, GEEP‘s Lynn Hill set into action, and the Lunch Bunch was created!

GEEP spent the weekend of June 14th setting up two school cafeterias with every art supply you could imagine, also books, games and reading corners. Friday was my first day working a shift. Watching ‘our kids,’ seeing those hyper little ones with bug-bitten skinny legs, the sniff-sniffing of those pubescents who started out with us as 6 and 7 year olds, the little 6 year old who discovered she could paint (& REALLY could!), the super talkative teen mom with her two kids (& on her way to pick up her 2 step kids), that whole crazy mixed-up crowd we'd never know if it weren't for GEEP and, for our friend Lynn’s magnificent vision....
Watching all that nearly took my breath away.

june 1st

The monsoon seems in retreat. A stressful week, yet this Friday evening Rick and I sat at the river table sipping a minty cocktail and saw a scarlet tanager flitting by (red more intense, far brighter, than any cardinal) and then a bald eagle swooping over the river. The cedar waxwings were rising in (take-your-turn) cloud waves from our Juneberry trees to sky and back again. Every now and then there was the swoosh of a Baltimore oriole, those sun-breasted birds. The late afternoon lay long tree shadows over the impossibly green new grass.

I remembered this perfect poem to mark the first day of June:

Today
by Billie Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect, 
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze 

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house 

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage, 
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb, 

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies 

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking 

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table, 

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage 

so they could walk out, 
holding hands and squinting 

into this larger dome of blue and white, 
well, today is just that kind of day.

road reads

Because life here on the river asks so very much of every day, one of the best things about a vacation—no matter where—is time to read. I read two really good books (and am still working my way through THE POWER and a rare non-fiction, THE DEEPEST WELL) on the planes and train and buses.

My friend Mary recommended Mohsin Hamid’s EXIT WEST and I can’t imagine there’s been a better contemporary novel on the diaspora. The story of a young black robe-clad (pot-smoking, cussing, independent) woman and a vaguely religious man who meet and fall in love in an unnamed MidEastern city. The city could be Damascus, or Bagdad, or…. As the relationship between Nadia and Saeed deepens their city falls into darker chaos. The rebels and the government jockey for dominance, closing down the city’s power and food sources; loved ones are killed, snipers and informers roam the haunted city. At great expense and amidst terrifying dangers, the two lovers leave their city behind, exiting thought a door. That door becomes the first of several more doors throughout the novel’s narrative. In a time where almost everyone is displaced, Nadia and Saeed slip into a fantasy of refugee settlements, one after another: a beach resort where the signs are written in English, Vienna, a palace in London, and Marin California….. Other very brief stories, detailing societal breakdowns, different dangers, loneliness and love are interspersed with Nadia and Saeed’s story in this beautifully written futurist (both metaphoric and realistic) novel.  Catastrophe and an unsettling new order are all told in 231 lyrically sparse pages.

Then there was A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING, written by the multi-talented Ruth Ozeki. The novel was a fascinating exploration of “now,” its elusive meaning, the impossibility of being within the present while capturing the present. The story is set in Tokyo and on an island in British Columbia. It is a tale about an unhappy teenager and a middle aged writer and that writer’s possible ability to effect/affect actual events. Nature landscapes and their environmental threats, figure into the narrative, as well as contemporary Japanese culture and the practice of Buddhism. There is teen angst, marital angst and career angst. The Internet figures into the plot, as well as a charismatic 104-year-old Buddhist nun. Japan’s great tsunami looms, though it has already occurred. Which—now that I re-read the above—makes A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING sound like a challenging read. But it isn’t. The reader becomes intimate with the Japanese youth subculture, as well as with the eccentric community of characters on a storm driven island off the coast of Canada. Read it: cheer for the troubled teenager, urge the misplaced New York writer to keep the generator and her marriage running while she solves a mystery washed ashore in a plastic freezer bag.

home coming

To This May

by W.S. Merwin

They know so much more now about

the heart we are told but the world

still seems to come one at a time

one day one year one season and here

it is spring once more with its birds

nesting in the holes in the walls

its morning finding the first time

its light pretending not to move

always beginning as it goes

the sea of cortez - v

Whale, whale against the coming of the night…. 

Our ship pulled into the harbor of Cabo San Lucas midday on Sunday. Some of the passengers had visited Cabo ‘back in the day’ and were horrified. The powdery white sand and calm blue water still rim the island, but now they are crowned by a horizon of hotels. The dockside swarmed with greased tourists roaming the harbor with drinks in hand; competing sound systems dueled it out from crowded bars (“Wasting away in Margaritaville…”) hawkers hawked souvenirs. Sea lions gone lazy lounged on a lower pier. After the breathtaking solitude of Copper Canyon, and after our Sea of Cortez days where, other than a handful of small wooden fishing boats, SilverSeas was the only vessel in sight and we didn’t see a single building - the transition was jarring.

Culture Shock

From ship notes: “A five-story hotel complex at the edge of the harbor blocks the water view and sea breezes from the side streets.  San Lucas may soon be Mexico’s gaudiest tourism capital.”  A scary thought if you have ever visited Cancun and Cozumel. (I feel honored, ancient ,and anxious that I saw Cozumel when the surrounding water held a kaleidoscope of tropical fish and at night the unelectrified islands went dark.)

Sunday morning we finally saw a whale, a small orca dip diving not very far from us. Score! But the best was yet to come. Sunday afternoon we joined a group on a catamaran and circled the harbor.  About 25 of us took the Zodiacs over to the docks; once on board our own loud music was playing, we had drinks in hand and were mightily smeared with sun block. 

“All of those tourists covered with oil…"

Then…  then, as the boat took us out into the waters where the Sea of Cortez meets the Pacific, a pair of Humpbacks suddenly preceded the boat blowing and breaching. Each time one would breach and twirl its massive body into light and air, we would cheer and scream and hug like football fans when the quarterback makes that final touchdown in a tight game.
 

Humpback Whales Breaching off Cabo San Lucas

While the Sea of Cortez was a turquoise sheet of glass, the Pacific has been nothing but high rolling sea, passengers staggering around like drunks with nowhere to go. Not I. My first, ever, seasickness, I‘ve mostly been prone, as I suspect is true for a number of our fellows. Early tomorrow morning we disembark in San Diego for two nights with my sister, Gretchen, and her husband. But the first thing we’ll do is take our dear friend, Molli to lunch. She innocently showed the manuscript of Midnight Lemonade to her literary agent neighbor and changed my life forever.
 
Rick’s Fun Facts

The water in the Pacific Ocean just north of Cabo San Lucas is a place where Humpback whales breed and raise their calves, then begin to migrate north along the California coast during the Spring and Summer to feed mainly off Alaska.  Different from what Ishmael says in Moby Dick – “it is not down in any map; true places never are” – it was right there, a five minute boat ride away from the tourists covered with oil.  Unlike humans, the female Humpbacks are typically bigger than the males, but seemingly like many of us on the SilverSea cruise, they eat about one and a half tons of food a day.

THE END

the sea of cortez - iv the copper canyon

Friday morning, April 27th, just after 5AM, they loaded us all into 3 buses for a long 2 hours to the Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacífico railway station in El Fuerte and then a six hour train ride on El Chepe following the Septentrion River upstream, part of the amazing Copper Canyon.

On the Way

Working on the Railroad

Baskets for Sale.

Climbing...

We rode a puzzle system of bridges and tunnels on a railroad that was 90 years in the building. We would twist through a dark tunnel and then magically emerge into a different landscape. Again and again: arid desert deep gullies, the riverbed almost dry; then the canyon walls abruptly verdant with twirling-leafed bright small trees; later, tall (really tall, 10 feet?) thin canary yellow blossom masses crowned by what appeared to be cactus, pools and rivulets reflecting jade in the climbing riverbed; a pencil thin waterfall plunging (trickling?) maybe 2 thousand feet; chugging from dark to light into minty green light filtered through gigantic pines with long delicate thread needles; higher and higher through apple orchards, snowy with blossoms. At 2PM, almost a hundred strong, we spilled out for a late lunch on the canyon’s rim.

   Arrival.

Ain't no mountain high enough.

A new friend.

A Room with a View

Canyon Man

To the Canyon.

Copper Light

Ready for Breakfast

                   Halfway to the Stars

Saturday morning: whippoorwill to rooster, we rose to watch the sunrise. When the day brightened a small bird with a bright red chest and white-stripped wings teased (& evaded) Rick’s camera. We took a cable car across the canyon & emerged to Tarahumara family clusters, friendly dogs, a man playing a fiddle. The vastness, the scent of sage, the crystal air, music playing out over the magnificent vistas—all so impossible to translate by word or picture.

I would like to return, maybe shortly after the rainy season, to see the six rivers running full, the water falls really falling. How amazing it is that there are only 3 hotels along the canyon and likely not to be more. All of this splendor is owned by the Tarahumara who don’t want more buildings, don’t want a hospital, a shopping center… They want their language, land and customs to remain the same. The Tarahumara live high in the canyon in the summer and descend to the lower levels in winter, when the heights are cold and sometimes see snow.

Tarahumara Fiddle in the Canyon

Tarahumara Note (re: tours)

Canyon (how do you photograph 25,000 square miles?)

Rick's fun facts

The Copper Canyon region covers 25,000 square miles in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Mountains.  It was formed relatively recently as the ancient Farallon oceanic tectonic plate slid under the North American plate and pushed it upward.  Six rivers in the resulting elevated region in northwestern Mexico gradually eroded the upthrust igneous rocks and formed the branched canyon area.  The total length of those rivers today is 335 miles, compared to the 277 miles of the Colorado River in the US’ Grand Canyon, and the Copper Canyon’s maximum depth is 6135 feet, compared to the Grand Canyon’s 4855 feet.  The Grand Canyon was formed by an entirely different process; it resulted from the river erosion of much older sedimentary rock that was formed at the bottom of an ancient sea, and the bands of colors on the Grand Canyon’s walls are due to the colors of the stacked sedimentary rock layers.  Although some copper has been found in the Copper Canyon region, the copper color of the canyon’s walls comes mainly from the greenish lichen that grows on the rocks rather than the greenish color of copper carbonate that results when copper tarnishes.

The 70,000 native Ramamuri or Tarahumana people who live in the Copper Canyon region are descendants of the Aztecs.  During the Spanish colonization period, they were forced from their original lower-lying agricultural lands by Spanish settlers and moved up into the more rugged and less welcoming mountains where they primarily became subsistence farmers. Ramamuri means ‘the light-footed one;’ they are known for their long distance running ability.  
 

the sea of cortez - III

We have left the oldest river to come to the youngest sea.

This morning, early, the harsh coast peachy with dawn, we set out in the little rubber dingy for the mangrove forest of Isla San Jose. 

A strange green environment: shallow clear water running through the greenery, the flash of flying fish, an occasional sea turtle spotted, one huge sea lion stretching in the distance. 

The barren mainland, ridged across the horizon, made the morning look as though we were floating in a lagoon beside the moon.

Later, Rick went off for the deep-water snorkel to swim in the currents with sea lions. I stayed behind. While I love, love being in the water, I find the less encumbrance, the better. Still wish we could swim off our New River beach unbound by suits.

the 'elephant rock'

Yesterday morning was ‘at sea’ where Rick attended a gripping lecture on “plate tectonics” and participated in a lively discussion afterwards about acoustic wave propagation in layered media, while I read A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING*. Then we both attended a lecture (“Baja Blue”) by “The Crocodile Dundee” of Baja. He showed great photos and videos of his folks swimming with the whales, several species (& I’m beginning to think those videos might be the only whales we see), sharks and mantas. He spoke of the movement to protect this incredible natural preserve. His group trains former fishermen to be guides, trade in the hook for the camera.

In the afternoon we dingy-ed onto the rocky, steep beach of Isla Santa Catalina where I swam and Rick snorkeled by the ‘elephant rock.’  

Back to today (Thursday), we had a mid afternoon dingy drop off to a stunning white sand rimmed cove. We swam and swam in the clear turquoise water, figuring it to be our last swim.  

After a fine dinner, we are scurrying about to pack for our overnight (bus to train and 6 hour train ride) to the Copper Canyon.

It is amazing that we are about the mid-age range for the ship (is that possible?) but accommodations and support make it possible for the elderly and really not spry adventurers to snorkel and hike and completely experience this adventure. The old, deep pocketed and well traveled. Another planet away from Giles County.

*Tuesday I finished (Mary North’s recommendation) EXIT WEST, so good. Rick read it in a couple sittings and, after that and YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING MR. FEYNMAN; he is onto a 2nd collection of Annie Proux stories.

Rick’s fun facts about the geology of the Sea of Cortez

Geology is fun!  The Sea of Cortez sits atop the San Andreas Fault, the same fault that extends north into California.  The North American tectonic plate and the Pacific plate border each other here.  In the Sea of Cortez, the motion of these two plates perpendicular to each other results in the Baja Peninsula moving away from the mainland of Mexico, and that motion is precipitated by volcanic activity in the sea and the creation of some new oceanic islands, mainly composed of dense basalt.  Farther north in California, the plates move tangential to each other, so they scrape each other and this scraping causes earthquakes.  Other islands here in the Sea of Cortez are lower mass density granite continental islands, and instead of being formed by volcanic activity were formed by splitting off from parts of the lighter weight continental masses.  We have seen both basalt-based volcanically formed islands and granite-based continental islands so far on this trip.

the sea of cortez - II

It was still dark when we climbed into our dingy to motor over to Isla Partida del Norte, the first light rising as we beached. Most of the group went uphill to hike; a small group (Rick among them) waited for enough light on the water to justify snorkeling. Amazing that on this totally deserted island there were small piles of litter. As we waited for the sun to rise, Rick and I pushed up our ReNew The New sleeves and collected the bean cans, plastic plates and coke bottles. While the snorkelers did their fin waddle into the glassy pink water, I waited for a bit more sun. Two red-billed oyster catchers pecked along the shoreline (& I hope Rick got of photo of them). 
 

I thought of Darrell who bathes in the river before every time I drive him for groceries and the popsicle headaches he says his January baths give him. But he never gets into my car without a river plunge. So I gathered up my Darrell courage and dove into the sea. I found the water wonderful. Icy, yes but electric exciting and silky the way I’ve never know seawater to be. I didn’t want to get out. And shouldn’t have. The very early morning breeze chilled to the bone. Rick & I huddled together for the dingy ride back and dashed to take turns in the hot shower.

Today was all about The Search for the Chuckwalla, a lizard known only to the Sea of Cortez. The ship took off for Isla San Esteban in the early afternoon and we hopped off our dingy round about 5:30 and made our way round gorgeous nesting gulls. Lots of cactus and, yes, the Chuckwalla. 

Another day without whales, but flying fish, dolphins, a gorgeous sunset booking our brave sunrise.

ReNew The New on Espiritu Santo beach

the sea of cortez - I

Why are we leaving? The question we asked ourselves the Saturday before the Friday we left for our trip to The Sea of Cortez. It was eighty degrees, as the easy sun sauntered the flawlessly blue sky it urged out the first redbud blossoms; the June berry and cherry trees were already in full bloom, the suddenly green grass begged for the sharp blade, and the wild flower walk beside lagoon peaked. 

Then Sunday came and the sky ripped open, flooding us with more than an inch of rain whipped by the suddenly cold wind. Monday night it snowed. Wednesday was a re-run of Saturday and Rick came home early to mow. Thursday was drizzly and chilly; Appalachia’s usual taunting striptease in reverse.

On the way—after Friday Park N’ Fly in Charlotte—a typical heart stopping American Airline’s event of - UH OH! Technical problems. We were stranded on a runway in Dallas for almost an hour. Rick made frantic calls begging Silversea not to leave without us. We felt truly foolish when we grouped in the Mazatlan airport with about twenty people from the same plane—all passengers bound for The Silver Explorer. 

We drove through a lot of poverty painted bright colors and boarded ship around two.

In our orientation lecture we learned this was the ship’s first trip to The Sea of Cortez (The “Galapagos of the Americas”) and was over two years in the planning; it would all be an experiment and adventure. 

Tides and winds are unpredictable; there would be the possibility of seeing 31 species of whales, more than 300 different types of birds (including the blue-footed and the brown-footed booby), snorkeling, hiking (watch out for rattlesnakes and scorpions), swimming off beaches only reached by boat. 

The Mexican government  (they have already arrived in a small boat with red lights flashing to ensure that Silversea Explorer is not violating any restrictions in this now heavily protected area) has reluctantly given this boat, with 120 passengers, entry. 

There is no ensuring there will ever be such an expedition here again. So, though I would be sorry for loved ones who couldn’t share this experience, I guess I am glad that the Mexicans are fiercely protecting their precious natural resources while Trump destroys ours. Especially considering all the damage wrought by the tourist trade in the real Galapagos. 

On this second day at sea, we have already attended two fascinating lectures on fish* and fowl—seen and to be seen—we have snorkeled, seeing eels and blowfish, ETC. and leave soon to ride the dingy (8 to a boat) round an island white with guano.

*Huge rays where the male courts the ladies by flinging himself high into the air and landing in a spectacular belly flop. The loudest slam wins the lady ray of his choice. We learned of the love triangle of the moray eel, which loves to eat lobsters, but loves more eating octopus; the octopus—as we all know—completely adores lobster. SO the eels allow lobsters to hide from the octopus by co-habituating (uneaten) in their eel caves. Guess what happens when the feckless octopus sees a cave full of lobsters?  The whale shark is the largest fish of the sea; it can be the size of our yellow school buses. The Sally Lightfoot Crab—in addition to being bright red, yellow and blue—spits at its aggressors. She gets an entire paragraph in John Steinbeck’s A Log of The Sea of Cortez (if only we’d known such a book existed). The fascinating lecture of the fish of Cortez was half informational and half Ripley’s Believe it Or Not. Lots of yucks at the expense of the amazing fish.

No sighted whales, but a playful young sea lion has been leaping around the boat and pods of dolphins cavorting nearby on both days.

From the Dingy

Dolphins leaping
sea lions barking
the late day sky
a smudge of sea birds
circling cactus
diving into
mother-of-pearl;
small stonewalled
dams holding
reservoirs of bird poop.