With the sound of the sea hard on my heels

[sovay]

I dreamed last night of a sad, shy man with an elephant's head—less Ganesha than Joseph Merrick literalized—and an off-duty waiter who argued with me that I couldn't claim to like or dislike Chinese poetry until I'd read it in the original. When I fell back asleep, I dreamed about watching a version of "The Little Mermaid" set in a hydrothermal field, black smokers and whale falls and Pompeii worms, all mysteriously animated by Disney. Then I dreamed I had a fever, which was also the case when I woke up; I have had a very unpleasant cold since Tuesday, but I have nothing interesting to say about it. Have some photographs from Monday in Maine instead.



We did not have the worst directions in the history of Google, but we couldn't help noticing that following their slightly contradictory advice on exiting the Maine Turnpike took us to downtown Portland rather than Cape Elizabeth. Fortunately, the view from Commercial Street was lovely.




This was intended to be a photograph of fleurdelis28 in profile, but she moved. I had this problem with waves, too.


The stairs that lead up from the parking lot at Two Lights to the sea.




And the sea the stairs lead to.




I am beginning to suspect that I need a better camera for these trips than my mother's borrowed digital antiquity, but I tried to catch, anyway, what I love about the clustering of mussels and barnacles and seaweed: the sea takes over whatever it can touch.




fleurdelis28 and the Kittery Formation. She looks very much like the gulls that watched us from the rocks as we climbed, white and black and sentinel-eyed.








Somewhere in my head, all coastlines look like this.




And if you want to know why I imprinted like a ton of bricks on the Flying Dutchman . . .




I love the clouds that build up over the water. No one's painted them properly in at least a hundred years.


The stairs that lead down into the sea.




My mother looked over my shoulder as I was uploading this picture. "And that's," she said, "what Andersen's mermaids turn into."

Comments

[genarti]

Not at all; I grew up in southern Ohio and then in Vermont, both land-locked as far as oceans go. And my childhood vacations were primarily to upstate New York. Lots of lakes, but no oceans.

But I did oceanography camp one summer in Maine one year, and that's the ocean ecosystem I know best. I suspect the real reason, though, is that I'm a mountain girl at heart; I love seeing the bones of the land. All green and growing, covered in moss and trees and age, but with granite just below. Sandy beaches look too soft to me, artificially picture-pretty, even though those ecosystems are fascinating in their own ways. Rocky coasts are where sea meets land and entangles.

[sovay]

But I did oceanography camp one summer in Maine one year

Okay; that is very cool.

Rocky coasts are where sea meets land and entangles.

Yes. And Two Lights is full of their bones.

(I do not know if your icon is referencing the song by Carbon Leaf, but even if it's not, I approve.)

[genarti]

Okay; that is very cool.

I loved it! This was back when I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist, before I realized that that entailed a lot more plankton counts and chemical analyses instead of just being a career where I could talk to dolphins all day. I've learned that I adore science on a layman level, but I don't have the right kind of brain to do it on the day-to-day level of scientists.

But I still loved those two weeks of oceanography, just as the following summer I loved spending two weeks in the Shendandoah woods helping to survey trees and small mammals and such. I'm quite content to be a dabbler.

(And the icon is, in fact, referencing the song. You get bonus points for knowing it! I do like Carbon Leaf.)

[sovay]

But I still loved those two weeks of oceanography, just as the following summer I loved spending two weeks in the Shendandoah woods helping to survey trees and small mammals and such. I'm quite content to be a dabbler.

Hey, all hail the original sense of amateur. You did awesome things with your summers.

You get bonus points for knowing it! I do like Carbon Leaf.

Yay!