Waving: Glacial Change in a Faster Than Light World

© text and photos MJ McGalliard

 

Since June 1^st 2013 I’ve been kayaking almost every day.  Since then I’ve missed about 10 days due to illness, family or work.  That’s around 1206 trips in the last three years.  (I’m not going to jinx it by saying when, but I’m on track to make 365 days in a row.)  At 1.5 miles round trip to and from the lake pulling my kayak on its little trolley comes to 1,809 miles on land.  Now that I add it up it’s no wonder I’ve had blowouts on the trolley tires and had to replace both.  I’m on my second paddle (the manufacturer doesn’t say specifically in the warranty that the paddles they make are not meant for breaking the ice around the dock, but they are emphatic about it on the phone) and have three kayaks- for the first time in a long time all of them keep the water on the outside after repairs and are usable.

The Fleet in dry dock.

I paddle approximately 1.5 miles a day which comes to the same as pulling the boat- 1,809 miles.  Put them together and you get 3,618 miles going back and forth and ‘round and ‘round, but not necessarily going nowhere.

At some point early in my back and forth travels I decided to wave at people.  I started to wave at people driving past, neighbors, the FedEx and UPS drivers, the letter carrier, people in their yards, people on the shore- in fact, I decided to wave at everybody.  Not a huge commitment when it comes to social change, but something nobody in this neighborhood seemed to be doing.

 Before I report on the results of my experiment, let’s look at the anatomy of a wave.

Originally, in anthropological terms, a wave was a way of showing someone you come across that your right hand is empty of weapons.  (A handshake has the same kind of history, but allows you to get close enough to strike with the dagger in your left hand that you are hiding behind your back.  Sorry, I’ve been reading a lot of European history lately and it’s beginning to show.)

Wikipedia says that- In physics, a wave is an oscillation accompanied by a transfer of energy that travels through a medium (space or mass).

They are both correct, but I prefer to apply the physics definition to the hand gesture- mostly because of that ‘transfer of energy’ bit.

When I first started waving at people most of them looked straight ahead and pretended that they didn’t see me.  After a while, though, when I didn’t go away and kept waving they started to wave back.  (Teenagers seem to have the biggest problem with a person waving at them, looking at me like deer caught in the headlights of life.  Perhaps if I texted?)  People in yards started talking to me.  Some even told me their names.  People sometimes stop their cars and depending on the weather say something like- “Gorgeous day to be out, you’re lucky.”  Or, if the weather is rotten- “I can’t believe you’re out in this!”  Then they bring up something about commitment.  Me being committed- either to kayaking or for observation.

But, this led to a further phenomenon- People started waving first.  A totally unexpected result.

I'm the reason MJ's boat drifted away, but that's another blog.

It would seem that my militant waving has broken what my friend Sharon Rose Miller calls “the ME bubble”.  And by that she means the people that bounce around this world completely absorbed, usually by a telephone or other device, but sometimes simply fascinated with themselves and ignoring everyone else on the planet.  A great number of them seem to frequent Costco, but that’s just my opinion.  Our society condones this behavior.  I’m not saying everyone should be all ‘Hail, and well met!’, but not running over my ankles with a shopping cart while tweeting that you’re in Costco pushing a shopping cart would be a huge step toward acknowledging the fact that there are other humans on the planet and in your immediate vicinity.

'BANSHEE' in winter garb.

My daily excursions have done me a lot of good.  Not only physically, but as a break from my increasingly digital world, and waving seems to be a big part of that.  I’ve noticed that when I wave I tend to smile and so do the people that wave back.  Moving those muscles in your face releases endorphins in your brain that make you feel better.

 

So, it would seem that I’ve made my corner of the world a little better place to be.  It’s not an Opie skippin’ down to the fishin’ hole, Mayberry kind of place, but things are different.  I’ve progressed from being “Who’s that guy and what is he doing?” to “The Kayaker” to “Our Kayaker”. 

All because of that appendage oscillation that transfers energy.

SWIMMING WITH THE (DEAD) FISHES

© MJ McGalliard

additional photos © R. Craig Sanders

I haven’t written about scuba diving even though I’ve been at it for about 9 months.  The big reason for this prolonged gestation is that I’m pretty bad at it.  Or, I seem to have horrible luck.  It is probably a little of both.

So, why do I keep trying?

Well, it’s kind of like this- What if you had the chance to go up in space?  To exit the craft and float in the void, looking at the world from a new perspective?  Some of us would, some of us wouldn’t, and I’m the guy that would.  That’s what diving is, essentially.  Through artificial means it’s possible for us sweaty monkeys to experience a completely foreign environment, a place where our normal sense of gravity, motion and even up and down seem different.  A place where we can fly, filled with creatures that couldn’t exist where we live.

That’s my fascination.  Even on my worst dives it constantly amazes me that I’m there, under the water and breathing, seeing the three quarters of the earth that most people never visit.

And, there have been some bad dives, some scary dives and dives that pretty much didn’t happen at all.  For instance, last summer when it was hot I got heat stroke trying to get from the parking lot to the water in a 7 mm neoprene wetsuit, carrying almost my own weight in equipment.  I pretty much just flopped around on the beach until I could peel off enough layers to keep my organs from failing.  Equipment problems, ill-fitting apparatuses, horrible weather- an awful lot has gone wrong for me in my attempts to go under the sea.

I’ve been on 13 dives and only on half of one did I experience everything working, clear water and enough air left in my tank to enjoy it.  We’ve all read the bumper sticker, we all know what happens and, it seems, most of it has happened to me.

Most people would have had the sense to walk away by now, but not I.  I’ve written before of how much a water-baby I am, being on it, under it, in it, touches my heart in a way I can’t deny.  Even as I sat on the bottom of the training pool, I was hooked.  Looking up I could see the other divers at various depths and I realized this was a place of three dimensional movement, where locomotion was a matter of grace and I felt at home.  However, like that kid in fourth grade who really liked folk dancing, but was really bad at it, my enthusiasm knows no shame.  I will keep doing it no matter how much it hurts.  Like a junkie with a dirty needle, I just can’t help myself.

One of my first disastrous experiences happened on a training dive and has given me pause for a lot of thought.  As you might imagine getting people ready, with all their bits and pieces of diving gear, for an instructional dive in open water is a big deal.  Once a date has been set the dive happens come hell or high water.  That dive had both.  It was in the Salish Sea (Puget Sound) in February.  ( I’m not bragging here, where I got certified says less about my tenacity and more about not being able to afford travel to some place with warm water.)  

The specifics of the dive itself pale in comparison to getting out of the water.  Most of you can imagine a cold rainy day at a rock strewn beach, but instead of a contemplative walk and a cup of coco at the end of the excursion, there was a sewer outlet between us and land.  This wasn’t the really icky kind of sewer outlet; this is where all that water that falls on the street, sidewalks and parking lots, drains off of lawns and construction sites ends up spewing into the sea.  That day, while we were under the waves there had been a cloud burst.  Damp irony, that.  The outlet was between us and the stairs to the pier and it was roaring.  Strewn in front of it were misshapen boulders as big as frozen turkeys and twice as slippery.  We were exhausted, carrying well over a hundred pounds each and, quite frankly by that point in the day a little miffed at this final challenge.  We had to form the classic Boy Scout human chain to get across and it was much scarier than diving down sixty feet into the dark to see the octopus.

But, it got me thinking about, if nothing else the human capacity for justification and gleeful, willful ignorance.

The fella that used to live next door to us (his name was Mike) loved to spray his yard with various mixtures of poisons.    Mike used to complain bitterly about no longer being able to get DDT and other compounds thinking people have decided to leave in the chemistry set.  He even sprayed part of our yard one day while we were gone.  His justification was that if weeds grew in our yard they could get into his.  This somehow this worked with his Libertarian philosophy; in his mind he was defending his land by poisoning ours. It is really amazing how far some people will go to justify selfishness, but I digress.  When I brought up how deadly to all living things the chemicals he was spraying around were and how the lake that we all love was well, just across the street, he said, “Oh, what I’m doing isn’t going to make any difference, there’s not enough of it to hurt anything.”

Which was blatantly untrue, as he’s been gone for three years and still nothing grows over there.  But, a lot of people think that, that their tiny bit of pollution isn’t enough to hurt anything.  The key words in that phrase are A, Lot, of People. 

As I stood in that torrent, my feet numb, my balance thrown off by the weight on my back, the clear and present danger of broken bones and drowning was crowded out by thoughts of Mike’s poisonous concoctions and just what the hell was I standing in?  Mordor’s runoff, a complex combination of compounds randomly made up of motor oil, lawn chemicals, and detergents and probably a dead dog or two washed into the city’s drainage system by thousands of tons of water.

Which gave me pause to think.

If I wash my car in my driveway and let the residue slide down the gutter and into the sewer like a foamy iridescent snake, I probably won’t kill the ocean.  But, if you and your cousins and your cousins’ cousins do it too, and say we throw in a few thousand Mikes spraying their yards with who knows what… Well, where’s the tipping point?  When does one more car wash or one more chemical lawn treatment combined with neighborhood Roundup tally finally form the toxin that will bring down life in the ocean?

I don’t know when the scales will tip as I doubt if we even have a clue as to how much death we pour into the sea every day, we could have passed the point of no return already, in which case, it’s been nice to know you- going extinct now.

What Mike didn’t realize (he was an avid fisherman, BTW) was that he might as well have been spraying the lake with his chemicals and I don’t believe even he would have done that.

All drainage from our civilized society if it doesn’t go directly into the ocean, goes into a river or a stream and then on to the deep blue sea eventually.  Things aren’t gone when they go down the drain; they simply become part of a bigger problem.

The insight I gained from this experience has given me a rule of thumb that just might help people see the light.

And, that is-

Unless you’re willing to get naked in a bathtub with it, don’t pour it down the drain. 

Not that hard to remember.

NEXT A CONVERSATION WITH LANCE, THE RELUCTANT SALMON.

MY PERFECT DAY            

To understand what makes a perfect day for me you should understand that a fundamental part of me has to do with water.  Sure, water makes up about 75% of my body, I’m as sloshy as anyone else, but running a close second is how I feel about water.  I love to be around it, on it, in it.

Even though I am of that generation whose parents believed girls should get swimming lessons and boys should be thrown into the deep end and “tough it out”, I was always the last kid out of the water, skinny, shivering and blue.  I think you get it, I’m a waterbaby.

As are we all, as we are reminded by Agnes Baker Pilgrim –

One day in early October, one day of perfect weather, one day of crystal clear water, one day that makes up my perfect day.  One day that made me think of perfect days, how lucky I was to 

 experience them and to leave me to wonder how many perfect days are left.

 I bought a used kayak some time ago (I know, I know it’s pretty silly that I have to have a “backup” kayak, but getting caught without one is dangerous to my health.) and have used it frequently in a lake, but I had yet to get it into salt water.  

 

It was one of those glorious days that seem to happen more and more lately, an incredibly beautiful, warm day at the wrong time of year.  What could I do, but play hooky, call a friend and head to the beach with two boats strapped to my little car?

What the maps call Puget Sound, we who live here are call— The Salish Sea.  The Salish Sea that day was very calm, not smooth as glass with all the dead calm that implies, but calm with tiny rollers that lifted your boat just enough to remind you that water supports us all.  So clear was the water that day, you could not only see the bottom out to twenty or thirty feet deep, but you could also see the nutrient stream that runs with the current parallel to shore.

And, in that eternally moving stream, jellyfish float taking it all in.

With the Olympic Mountains to one side, the Cascades and Ti ‘Swaq (AKA Mt. Rainier) spiffy in dark blue and pure white on the other, I sit on the peaceful water full of bliss and wonder.

Which was quite a change from that morning.  I read for a little while each morning.  It doesn’t matter what I read as long as I hold still until the cat in my lap has deemed the day started and I am allowed to move again.

That morning I was reading Wired magazine and staring at horrendous photos of thousands of shark fins drying in a Chinese warehouse waiting to be made into soup.  The fact that the fins are taken from the sharks and that they are then dumped back into the sea— was not the most horrifying thing in the article.

What shocked me the most was, “… the man-made causes behind what biologists call the sixth mass extinction— The spate of plant and animal losses that threatens to eradicate up to half of all living species on Earth within this century.”

And, that’s the thought that interrupted my perfect kayak paddle on that perfect day.  Half of everything living gone by the time the odometer rolls up to 3000 C.E.  I won’t make it that long, but I have friends and relatives with kids that might live as long as that.  What a heartbreak of a world we are handing over.

 

 

It makes me wonder how many perfect days are left to us.