Jakobi and I went skiing at Cochrane’s last Friday. I tried to get tickets online and there was an issue that prevented me and when we go to the hill at 2:45pm we found out it was sold out for the night. But since they don’t check we decided to ski anyway. Three inches of fluffy white powder had fallen over the course of the day and we took 4 or 5 nice runs through silky smooth snow.
By 4pm the place was packed and going up the T Bar was an ordeal as it stopped 4 or 5 times each time up. We took a break for dinner at 5pm and afterwards the line was 1/2 mile long so we made one more run under the lights and headed home. There must be lots of people skiing for free as this can’t be the number of allowed guest under the Covid19 protocols. We decided that we will ski on Wednesdays at Northern Slopes and see if it is less of a madhouse.
Colleen and Kate went on an epic eight mile roundtrip ski on Saturday down Eagle Ledge Trail and up to the Hardwood Ponds where Colleen likes to ski. It took them 3 hours to get there and 2 to come home and Colleen’s thinks she has found us a good swim hole for the summer months. We spent the evening at Christine’s outside around a fire celebrating Imbolc. And Sunday was a disappointing Super Bowl with Tom Brady and Tampa dominating an overmatched Kansas City team. The hype of Mahones vs Brady didn’t lead anywhere and the halftime show was an overproduced underwhelming disappointment as well.
What I’m Listening to this week
I had this album, SANTANA Caravanserai, in vinyl back in my Cleveland years and remembered it was good so I found it in MP3 form and gave it a listen. When the label head, Clive Davis first heard it he told the band they were committing career suicide. If only $$$ weren’t what we measure genius by this album could have changed the world. It is a spiritual journey told through music and is incredible. I have been listening to it before sleep on headphones and find it takes me deep into sleep and dreams
Listening to Santana led me to dig out the first three journey albums before they found Steve Perry and made him their lead singer. Journey keyboardist Gregg Rollie and guitarist Neal Schoen were both in Santana and left after Caravanserai because they disagreed with the musical direction the band was taking. I had dismissed these albums back in the 80’s because they lacked Steve Perry and the Pop Rock sound that made Journey famous but now though they deserved a second listen. And I was right. The first Journey album sounds like it could have been the Santana album Rollie and Schoen wanted to make. Lots of awesome guitar and keyboard jams. Not something I was ready for in the 80’s but can really appreciate now in the 2020’s,
The Ocean In My Bathtub
I took a clay class with my fourteen year old daughter this past fall. We worked at tables wearing masks in an garage with the door open with three other families. While the others worked on bowls, boxes, pumpkins and Christmas ornaments I undertook an independent study to make four large pie slice tiles for the centerpiece of a bathtub bathroom wall project. The four 12 inch pie slices when combined create a two foot diameter circle divided along a vertical and horizontal axis. Surrounding it is a ring composed of eight arcs I made using a homemade form into which I poured a cement mix. Set in this mix are seashells and stones collected from beaches and streams from over 30 years of travel. Originally the shells and stones were to be randomly scattered but as I was working with them my youngest daughter made a whale out of three stones and four shells and I was inspired to make a turtle and liked the result so much that I decided to fill the arcs with figures from the sea. Circling the centerpiece is a ring filled with fish, turtles, sea birds, starfish, a shark, the whale and a snorkeler along with some random stones and shells.
I spent two summers building the house where my family and I reside at the base of a Vermont mountain. When we moved in the bathroom remained unfinished and I had spent this last summer building a shower stall, installing a sink and the biggest bathtub I could afford. I raised the tub off the floor enclosing it in a tile surround and cut a tall narrow window in the wall above one end of the tub so I could gaze out at the creek running through the hollow outside as I lay back in my bath.
Bath time for me is a sacred space, even more so now in a time of isolation amid the pandemic. I turn out the lights, light a candle, add some bath salts and essential oils to water, put my MP3 player full of Van Morrison’s catalog on shuffle and slip into the steaming hot bath. I am returning to the warmth of my mother’s womb and then sink deeper into the planetary womb of the ocean from which life emerged.
The glazed tile pie slices that will grace the wall above the tub reflect the duality that is inherent in our planetary life. Awake/asleep, light/dark, night/day are all represented in my personal mythology by a tile in the upper left of a active dolphin leaping against a sky blue over a blazing orange sun and in a tile in the bottom right of a receptive dolphin beneath the waves rolled over on her back under a yellow sliver of crescent moon.
I don’t remember what drew me so to dolphins. My earliest memory is ordering a book about dolphins in second grade from the Scholastic Book Club. That same year my dad took me to a county fair in Upstate New York that featured a dolphin in a circular tank. I stood by that tank for an hour peering through the glass at the dolphin circling within while my dad tried to interest me in some of the rides on the midway. Eventually he succeeded and drew me away from the dolphin to ride something called the Round Up where we strapped ourselves upright along the perimeter of a giant wheel which then spun wildly simultaneously tilting us nearly 90 degrees. The ride ended with us both on our knees just off the midway throwing up between parked trailers. That was also the year the Miami Dolphins became my favorite football team went 17-0 and my father and I watched them win Super Bowl VIII at the neighbors because they had a color TV.
For the longest time my connection to dolphins was sublimated through the NFL team. I had winter hats, sweatshirts, bed sheets, curtains and pillow case emblazoned with the Dolphin’s logo. It wasn’t until I was 25 and in New Zealand that I encountered a dolphin in the wild. It was 1991 I was on a four month backpacking trip and was working my way up the Eastern Coast of the South Island. At a hostel I met some fellow travelers who told me about a dolphin swimming excursion they had taken in Kaikoura. I knew I had to do this.
I headed to Kaikoura and contacted the tour operator and booked a spot on the boat for the following day. When I arrived at the dock I was issued a wet suit, flippers and snorkeling gear. It was an open boat with eight other swimmers on board and a crew of two. When everyone was changed into their gear we headed out of the small harbor in search of a pod of dolphins. The crew told us we would be swimming with a species called the Dusky Dolphin and that we would most likely find them a few miles offshore. As we motored towards our destination I watched the South Island loom up over the sea as we moved farther away from the coast. It was an overcast day and dark clouds hugged the peaks of the coastal mountains.
After about 45 minutes the crew spotted a pod and motored into position. We could see a dozen or so fins breaking the surface a quarter of a mile away and as we approached they disappeared. The boat came to a stop and we prepared to go in the water. The crew told us we would hear the dolphins before we saw them and to be patient. I was the first one in the water. As I swam away from the boat I peered down into the depths. The water was a shade of blue I had never seen before and farther down the color became deeper and richer. Soon there were others in the water around me and I kicked to put some distance between us. As the crew had said I heard the dolphins first. A series of click, whistles and guttural noises floated up to me. No dolphins were in sight but I could feel them coming. I imagined a a pod of 10 or so dolphins would come into view somewhere close to me and I swam excitedly in circles trying to look everywhere at once but I was not prepared for what I saw.
I had no idea how deep the sea beneath me was until impossibly far down a few dolphins emerged from the blue. They were so far away they were tiny and suddenly there were not a few of them but hundreds and they were rising towards me becoming bigger and bigger with each passing second until suddenly they were all around me, beside me, beneath me, breaking the surface, leaping clear of the water over me. I was overwhelmed with playfulness and joy and found myself diving down the swim among the dolphins, turning over on my back beneath the waves to gaze up at them as they swam all around and then just as quickly as they appeared they were gone. I popped my head above the water and took off my mask and glanced around exchanging smiles with the swimmers closest to me.
I wanted to do it again. I put my mask back on and re-entered the ocean world. And again and again it happened. I would be in an empty ocean and then suddenly I would be surrounded by 100’s of dolphins. I couldn’t get enough of it. I was vaguely aware that the others had long since gotten back in the boat and finally the crew had to get my attention and compel me to leave the water. I could tell the others were a bit annoyed with me and I apologized as we motored back to shore but I didn’t really mean it as I couldn’t understand why they didn’t have to be dragged out of the sea like me.
I didn’t get a chance to swim with dolphins again until I spent a winter on the Big Island of Hawai’i in 1998. I was volunteering at Kalani, a retreat center in the Puna District and one of the reasons that drew me there was a black sand beach a quarter mile down the coast from Kalani where you could be naked and it was possible to swim with the Hawaiian Spinner dolphin.
That first winter I worked the breakfast shift in the open air kitchen and was done by 9am and would head immediately to the beach in search of dolphins. Kehena Beach was a sliver of black sand tucked between a small cove and 80 foot high lava cliffs. One reached it by descending a treacherous path carved out of the lava flow cliff. The surf there was often rough but once beyond the breakers there was a beautiful sandy bottomed cove approximately 30 feet deep where pods of spinners would often spend the mornings resting after their nightly hunt for food out in the ocean depths.
The Spinner dolphins of Kehena were smaller than the Dusky dolphins of Kaikoura and the pods numbered in the dozens rather than the hundreds but the magic I experienced swimming with them was the same if not better as this was not part of a tour but part of my daily life. On my off days I would head down to the beach before breakfast in hopes of catching a swim with a pod.
I got to know the other dolphin swimmers and soon met Teri and Gina. They lived in the neighborhood and came to the beach just about every day. Gina liked to take long ocean swims and would head out clad in a wet suit top with a mask and snorkel and swim out of the small cove and out of sight along the lava shoreline. Once her swims were done she seldom lingered on the beach unless there were dolphins in the cove. Teri who was older had been swimming with dolphins for years. She had just finished writing a book about swimming with dolphins that was for sale at the gift shop at Kalani and she taught me the basics. The cardinal rules was : Dolphins don’t have hands so it is not nice to try and touch them unless they initiate it.
I had seen several swimmers dive right down with an arm outstretched. This usually got them a visit from the dolphin police as Teri and Gina sardonically referred to themselves. That is how I met them. The cove was shallow which meant often the dolphins were in close proximity. I was able to dive down and swim just along the bottom belting right along with them. When I surfaced Teri and Gina were there and told me that the dolphins don’t like to be chased.
Back on the beach they introduced themselves and Teri told me that the best way to communicate with the dolphins was through emotions and visualization. Rather than lighting out on a bee line through the water to where I saw fins I should stay in one place and call the dolphins to me with my heart and my mind. And it worked. I would swim out and float above a nice sand rippled bottom and imagine myself surrounded by the pod and more often than not if there were dolphins in the bay some if not all would soon be around me.
Teri told me about the different groups within the pod. The elders, the adults and the juveniles. She had relationships with individual dolphins and the way she spoke about them was definitely spiritual. Early on I saw my first baby dolphin and soon began to recognize the adults and the juveniles. Small pods within the pod, chasing each other and leaping, would dart towards me and zoom past close by. These were the juveniles. Once a group of three swam directly toward me, when they reached me the two on the ends sped by on each side while the spinner in the middle leaped over me.
Occasionally I would be swimming lazily among a pod watching all the different groups zig and zag beneath me and suddenly there would be a large dolphin at me side and we would swim slowly side by side gazing all the while into each others eye. I never recognized individuals or developed relationships with any dolphins but Teri wasn’t kidding. Her connection with the dolphins was magical. One time I was swimming with her and a dolphin left the pod that we were slowly circling above and made straight up for her and stopped two feet from her mask and they stayed that way for a bit and then it returned to the pod.
The dolphins were often playful and Teri taught me the leaf game. We would enter the ocean with a large leaf which we would drop among the swimming pod. Two or three dolphins would break free of the circling pod and race to catch the leaf on a fin trailing it for awhile before releasing it for another dolphin to catch. If we could we would try and grab the leaf when it released but this was almost impossible to do as the dolphins were so swift.
My favorite time were the early morning swims before a lot of people showed up. I remember one memorable swim on an early morning when I had a pod of dolphins to myself. The pod which contained about 40 dolphins was about 100 yards off shore and in a rest state swimming in a big slow circle. I joined the pod swimming lazily with the dolphins as they rose and sank. Dolphins sleep half a brain at a time with a couple of outlier dolphins fully awake looking out for the rest. These watchers approached me when I joined the pod and swam alongside me for a circuit or two as they gazed into my eyes, an obvious intelligence looking back at me, before they swam off again and took up their positions.
I timed my own dives and ascents to match the dolphins and tried as best I could to find a steady rhythmic pattern for my breath not an easy task while breathing through a snorkel. I continued to swim in big lazy circles above the pod and the dreamy mental state of the dolphins combined with the cyclical rhythmic rising and falling made for one of the purest meditative states I have ever experienced. I don’t know how long I was out there but when the pod gradually awoke and made their way out of the cove and I caught a wave back onto the beach there were a lot more people spread over the sand and it was obvious that I had missed breakfast.
Kehena was probably best known for it’s Sunday Afternoon drum circles and on weekends the beach was crowded with locals and tourists. Dolphins were rarely around on a Sunday afternoon but sometimes they were. The dolphins were there in the morning before it got crowded and I had enjoyed a long swim with them. It was a beautiful sunny day with an inshore breeze and a swell from the south. The surf instead of menacing was welcoming and lots of people were out catching waves; body-surfing and boogie boarding. The dolphins moved a bit farther out but didn’t leave and did not mind the ones who made the effort to swim out and be with them. More and more people kept descending the path to the black sand beach, it must have been a peak tourist time on the island and people were spread out everywhere on the sand and back along the base of the cliffs.
The drum circle was more than usually inspired and grew large; participants thomping together sticks of driftwood and lava rocks to the beat. The drums were jamming, whales appeared beyond the headlands and the dolphins were suddenly riding the swells in close. The drums quickened the beat, the whales increased their spouts, the waves proved epic for the body surfers and just beyond them heading in three dolphins leapt out of the water side by side in a circus arc then turned 90 degrees and leaped again right in front of the beach. The beach had been awed by the first leap and at the sight of the second erupted in cheers. The third time they leaped the beach was mesmerized and by the time the dolphins completed a fourth leap while rounding the bend back out to sea it was madness on the beach. Everyone hootin’ an hollerin’ the beat reaching impossible rhythms the beach awash in the immaculate glow of an infinite moment. We stayed at the beach late that day reluctant to leave walking contentedly in the setting sun back to dinner at Kalani.
I’ve had many memorable swims over the past 20 years that I have been visiting Hawai’i. When I studied Hawaiian massage with Auntie Margret at Ke’e on Kealakekua Bay in 2001 a group of classmates and I would start our day with a swim in the bay with the resident dolphins. One of my classmates was a young Hawai’ian woman from Oahu who would swim topless among the pod her long black hair streaming behind her and a radiant smile on her face. Fifteen years later in that same bay I swam out with my eldest daughter, then ten, to swim with a pod of dolphins. The last two times we were in Hawai’i we camped out at the beach at Ho’okena where pods of dolphins would often spend their mornings swimming in the bay. Mornings before breakfast I would snorkel out over the reef to the large expanses of sandy bottomed bay and begin my day with a leisurely and meditative swim with a pod or two of dolphins.
One sunset evening at Ho’okena in 2016 a whale spent half an hour teaching her calf to breach out in the bay. I have captured this moment and the aloha that is Hawai’i in the upper right glazed tile pie slice on my bathroom wall. Against a yellow sky containing a small round orange sun a whale breaches the blue sea in the right foreground while the volcanoes Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea and a few black sea birds aloft linger in the background. Opposite that tile in the lower left is a nighttime scene of the Turnagain Arm in Alaska. A sliver yellow moon hangs in the star filled black sky above the ice covered peaks that ring the tidal inlet as a couple of snow white belugas make their way up the Arm.
I never got to swim with belugas in Alaska but I like to think I ran with them. I lived 12 years in Alaska and spent one summer camped out on Bird Point which juts out into the Turnagain Arm about 10 miles North of Girdwood. The Turnagain Arm has some of the highest tides in North America, up to 40 feet on a new moon. The Arm is shallow and carved by myriad channels by which the Arm fills and drains as the ocean tries to reach the moon on a spinning Earth. At low tide these channels flow through exposed tidal flats which in the winter are often littered with large chunks of ice stranded on the strand as the water recedes. These same flats are flooded six hours later as the incoming tide overflows the channels. At high tide a standing wave called the bore tide flows in over the flats in a line of froth trailed by screaming seagulls feeding on the fish pushed to the fore by the swell.
My camp was right beside the Arm. When the tide was in there was water to the shore. When it was out the water was in a channel on the far side of the arm and an immense tidal flat of gray silt stretched out before it. I loved the changing dynamic of the tides, low and high moving through different parts of the day. In the long Alaskan day when the tide was low I would wander out and explore the flats. One had to be careful for the gray silt while mostly solid could dissolve into a quicksand with an unbreakable grip if sunk into unaware, These soft squishy spots were mostly in the many small capillary channels that seemed to branch off endlessly from the main channels and were avoided.
I knew from experience that the bore tide at Bird Point appeared about an hour and twenty minutes before the posted low tide time and I liked to run out on the tide flats to meet it. The first sign of it was usually a far off line of low flying birds squawking over the incoming wave. Once spotted I would head off running over the flats towards the incoming wave which was usually about a foot or two high advancing over the tidal flats. I would sprint up to the face of it and turn and run parallel to the advancing front for a bit before reversing direction and running just in front of the wave. Being out in the middle of the Arm with the wind in my face, the sun bright overhead, the Seward Highway a distant line at the base of the Chugach Mountains, very much alive and in the moment, I often ran barefoot and naked.
It was a thrill, the incoming sea, the riot of bird noise, the empty flats before me ringed by the 3000 foot peaks of the Chugach Mountains on the East and the Kenai Mountains on the West. If able to I would try and meet the wave as far from Bird Point as possible in order to get a longer run. And in my imagination just beyond the head of the incoming wave, pursuing a school of shad caught up in the tidal flow would be a pod of beluga. Once or twice I would stop running and let the wave overtake me, flowing around my legs and past me just below knee level. I never let it get more than a five or six feet beyond me before beginning to run again quickly emerging out of the wave onto the exposed tidal flat which was just as quickly submerged behind me. When done right the run ended just in front of Bird Point with a leap up to a higher level of the tidal flats as the wave crashed against the small cliff behind me and was contained in the larger channel until it too was overrun an hour or so later by the irrepressible tide.
In my bath beneath these tiles I return to those waters both in Alaska, Hawai’i and elsewhere. I like to think clouds are the ocean dreaming and that the falling rain or snow piling up outside my bath window were part of a wave I rode or the water dripping from my body as I emerged from an early morning swim in the sea. Enveloped in the warmth of the bath I feel the pulse of life that thrums through the one planetary ocean. I wonder if there is a common ancestor shared by humans and dolphins and marvel at the lack of communication between such obvious intelligent species and try to see what we as a species are not seeing to have no apparent point of commonality. The chaos of the past year suggests that as a culture we are not sailing on the right tack. Soaking in my own bit of ocean I try to see past the duality governing our time on Earth to the place where all is one, where we are not divided against ourselves and the other intelligences that share this planet with us, my bath time a prayer that we can see our way through to such a place.
