Pics from Tybee Trip, August 2008

Here’s a Tybee Island boardwalk with bright umbrellas. I went for a walk on the boardwalk under the full moon later that night, when the beach was nearly deserted and the pier held a cluster of night fishermen:

*****

Cockspur Island Lighthouse

This pic was taken during a water tour I took yesterday. You can see by the high water mark that this lighthouse isn’t accessible by land during high tide. Our tour guide says peoples’ boats float away sometimes when they ground their boats at low tide and think they’ll poke around the lighthouse and then row home.

*****

We took a very fun dolphin tour:

That’s a dolphin fin in the distance.

Our tour guide had worked leading dolphin tours for seven years and told me that in all that time she has gotten hardly any good pictures of dolphins. Not because there’s none to see, but because they are so hard to photograph.

The Tybee coast is positively swarming with wild dolphins, but they mostly stay underwater, and you never know where to aim your cam for them until they appear. They’re busy hunting, and their priority is food, not being pretty for your pictures.

They’re easy and lovely to watch, but hard to take a pic of. I realized I was spending the whole tour snapping crappy photos and not watching the animals hunt and swim, so I put my cam down and just enjoyed the rest as an observer.

Wild dolphins rarely leap out of the water and they don’t make a sound other than splashing and the hard slap made when they smack the water with their tails to stun prey.

There’s no Flipper chatter, no dancing on their tails and hardly any jumps above the surface. You will see hand-length, gleaming silver-white fish leap out of the water as they flee from a hungry dolphin, and you will know a dolphin is underwater there, cruising for his dinner.

You see dolphins taking a breath with their blowhole, and you see them arcing through the water with just their slick backs showing:

You do see their faces and dolphin noses (they were bottlenose dolphins), but only briefly.

They are beggars and come to boats for handouts:

Some will jump up for fish just like Seaworld dolphins. But if you get caught feeding a wild dolphin, the maximum fine is $20,000 and your boat can be impounded.

Nonetheless, I saw three dolphins cruise boats for food and one fisherman offer two of them some fish and pat them on the head like cats when they leapt up for their food.

Here’s our cool tour guide who really seemed to like her job. (Can’t blame her.) All the kids had to wear lifejackets:

*****

Here’s the view of Little Tybee Island from Tybee Island:

Tybee Island isn’t quite an island. It’s separated from the mainland by the Savannah River on one side, the Atlantic on the other side, and marshes the rest of the way around. You could probably walk to it from Savannah but you would need waders, a few hours, and a buttload of energy to slog though the saltmarshes for hours on end.

Tybee surf:

The first two days we were there it was rainy and gray. Rowan and I couldn’t take staying in any longer (a stupid idea, in retrospect), and went to the beach even though it was cloudy.

We went for a walk on the shore, hoping for sun:

We got our wish and in about 45 minutes the sun came out at last! I went for a swim but just got beaten up by the breakers and got out.

Tides in Tybee are intense, with high tide seven feet higher than low tide.

****

On the left below are Heather and Ben who got married on Tybee last July, and who got us all together again for a vacation/anniversary. Heather is one of my best friends. On the right is Ben’s friend, Jimmy:

Heather on the beach in her new bikini and ballcap:

Rowan on the beach being Rowan:

Goodbye Tybee Island! See you next year!

Missive From Tybee Island: Thirty Sand Dollars and Sexy Silk Skirts

The rain eventually quit.

Dying for a walk and a swim and a day outdoors, Rowan and I went to the beach on a gray afternoon. We’d waited all day for sun and couldn’t take it anymore.

We walked by the jetties for an hour and I wandered into the surf, too rough for swimming. You could get in the water safely, but the waves were rough and sucked and jerked and slammed you all around, ripping at your clothes, ducking you underwater and yanking you backwards with barely time to take a breath.

After about 45 minutes, the sun finally won its battle against the clouds. It’s been sunny ever since.

We played on the beach all day yesterday, from just after breakfast until nearly dinnertime. I learned my lesson about sunblock, and will come home with a few angry red burned spots.

Note to readers: if you are going to wear a shirt to the beach because you are fair, which is not a bad idea, put your sunblock on, all over, before your put your shirt on.

Your shirt, when it gets wet, will hang differently and the 1/2 inch of skin around your neckline with no sunscreen on it will get a proper baking unless you have sunblocked yourself before you put your shirt on.

And don’t forget sunblock on your lips, because you can indeed get sunburned lips. They don’t turn red since they are already pink, but they will get burned and hurty.

I’ve got that unpleasant prickle-pain on my burned shoulders that I think is from my skin dying. I think I will peel. Sigh…

I chose to play hooky from the beach today, as just the feel of the hot sun through my t-shirt on my sunburn is uncomfortable.

But I had breakfast with my girlies at Sunrise this a.m., a little beachside bacon and eggs joint, and then went shopping for postcards, sunglasses (don’t go into the surf without your dang croakies, either) and some sinus meds for Rowan, who felt like she was either coming down with a summer cold or having a bad allergy attack.

Well, vacation, a debit card and the presence of her girlfriends does funny things even to a science girl, and we left a Tybee tourist trap about $150 lighter when we all discovered Kariza Designs and bought ourselves gorgeous 3-layer wrap skirts made from old sarong fabric.

Here in a minute after I take the blog for a walk I’m going to wash dishes, straighten my room, write some postcards, plan dinner, eat lunch and go visit briefly with everyone down on the beach.

I am making a Flickr set of my friends’ tattoos and have to ask if I can get Maggie’s sea creatures and Patrick’s brand-new absolutely badass Pi tattoo, which I saw this morning and which is awesome.

Then I’m off to the post office and grocery store, then back homeyhome for a final roundup-of-leftovers dinner and a dolphin tour. The couples are splitting tonight for Friday in downtown Savannah, so the singles are staying in for, presumably, board games, smokes and mango-rum cocktails.

I really recommend Tybee Island. Our beach house is reasonably priced, restaurants are affordable, dolphin tours are $15, and there’s fishing, parasailing, history and lowcountry marshes, all 20 minutes from beautiful downtown Savannah, a city I really find romantic, appealing and fun (I am a total sucker for the South).

It’s my second time here, and the beaches are popular but clean and not crowded, the water is clean and sand dollars are EVERYWHERE. (Yesterday we saw two cute little yellow stingrays, too.) I have now taught nearly everyone in a 12-mile radius the art of finding live sand dollars in the surf, and me and Rowan and Jimmy found over 30 yesterday.

We put them back; we always do.

For those of you who do not yet know:

How to Find Sand Dollars at the Beach

Find a place where the water is deep enough to swim in and the ocean floor is smooth and not made ridgy by the breakers. Low tide is best.

Walk along, shuffling your feet as you go. If you feel something rough and hard with your feet, explore it to be sure it is not a crab and pick it up with your toes. The waves will try to drag you away, so once you find a sand dollar, try hard to keep your foot on or near it.

You may also kick over sand dollars on their sides embedded in the sand edge-on, so if you think you felt one and kicked it over, try to find it again and grab it with your toes.

You can play with a sand dollar as long as you want if you keep it wet and aren’t rough with it, which will break off its little spines. I think the tiny crabs you see clinging to it are crab larvae it has caught and is going to eat.

When you are done showing it to your friends put the sand dollar back on the ocean floor, ideally near where it was before as sand dollars live in groups, and where you find one, you will always find more.

*****

Off to nuke some lunch and try to find my peeps on the beach and take pictures of their tattoos. Tybee rocks and this was just what I needed. Wish you were here. Jen out.

Missive From Tybee Island: Rain, Cats, Dolphins, Rain

I am writing from the living room of our beach house in Tybee, where it has rained all day yesterday and today.

Right now it’s raining so hard you can hear it from inside with the windows closed. Half our party has departed for downtown Savannah.

As Rose and I drove in yesterday afternoon (a five-hour drive from the WNC mountains to the island marshes of the South Carolina lowcountry), we drove into clouds and rain. It’s rained all night and all day.

Back home we’re in a drought and here, when we’re all on summer vacation and dying to lay around in the sun, it rains.

There’s six of us here so far.

“Tybee” is a Native American word for salt, and the air here has that funky, salty tang that seems both clean and dirty. The water tastes like farts.

Yesterday we went out for dinner to a seafood place. It seemed more local-y than touristy, with crazy tattooed shaggy beach guys drinking beer on the rockers on the porch. Nearby was a seafood market where several feral-looking cats on the porch, thin but sleek, waited out the rain the way cats do, chilling out and grooming themselves.

I felt sorry for them, thinking they were homeless, but Heather pointed out that a seafood store was probably a pretty good place for homeless kitties.

I would later read online that these are cats from a local colony a Tybee business has adopted. They are all spayed, neutered and vaccinated, and kittens are socialized in the offices of Captain Mike’s Dolphin Tours.

They spend the day laying around, playing in the sun and eating fresh seafood. All are adoptable though Coastal Pet Rescue.

*****

A tiny single bed with a rock-hard mattress will make you toss and turn for much of the night.

Cooking breakfast for five will get you a hug. You won’t have to do the dishes. Make more food than you think you will need, for while you are correct that unlike you, lots of people don’t eat breakfast, it seems things are different on vacation.

It does not seem to be too big a deal to see your friend, who slept in the living room on an air mattress, briefly wander the house in his boxers.

I was the coffee fairy this morning.

******

Not only is there rain the forecast all flippin’ day, there is a tornado warning today that started at 11 and continues until five.

Nonetheless, I plan to hit the beach.

I want to go on a dolphin tour!

Tybee Island Dreaming

I’m sitting in my office. The air is cool and the breeze coming in through the window is even cooler. It’s coming up on a time of the year I love, the transition from one season to the other.

Lives are transitioning too. Students are going back to school. I start back to college on August 19, but not until after I return from a six-day vacation on Tybee Island, Georgia. I am broke, but I paid for my share of a big beach house back in June. I’m going to the beach!

There’s nine of us going, including my girlies Heather and Rowan. Please picture, if you will, me and Rowan in these freakin’ adorable double beds, for that’s where we’ll be for the next six days.

We love the sheets.

Rowan says that we will turn the AC up high every night and spend the first 40 minutes of bedtime just laughing. And I think that’s exactly what we will do.

I have a confession to make. I’m not so sure I’m actually excited about this beach trip. I know this sounds insane, like not being excited about a $500 gift certificate to your favorite store. But I’ve spent the summer idling and worrying and trying to make sense of my life and career and wait I just now got excited about the beach.

Enough of the echo chamber of my head! While I would almost eagerly swap the trip for some exciting new writing gigs, a vision quest by the sea with my dear, dear friends is probably just what I need.

I’ve tried to make this blog an honest document of my life, to the point of revealing a few things others might have kept to themselves. I think I do this less out of a confessional streak than a deeper desire to be useful by describing one person’s life as it actually is rather than how I might want people to think it is, providing the service of a publicly examined life.

I love that line from Almost Famous where “Lester Bangs” says something along the lines that the only communication that really matters is what we share when we’re uncool. I could easily deceive you all into thinking I was more successful by playing up my successes and not mentioning my problems.

But that would be a fake account of a real life. I am the one broke and confused. I am the one unsure what to try next. I am the one who can’t decide what work she wants and who isn’t sure where to look for it.

I can’t help but hope/think that some readers, maybe even some prospective clients, recognize an honesty and a willingness to show things as they are, and the usefulness of any document that seeks truth over building a slick facade.

I know that my strength as a writer is that many of my word-portraits of experiences and feelings and moments are to the mind and heart what photos are to the eyes. I know sometimes words grasp the essence of a thing in a way such that the thing recreates itself in the mind and is recognized with a jolt like the crack of a bat, only silent and deep. I too feel that moment when I know my words grabbed part of the world in a net. My net.

This is a real life. This is a real freelancer’s life. It’s not always easy.

I know I need to exercise, be more disciplined, battle the remaining demons left in my life, the ones so huge I hardly notice them anymore, familiar as mountains. Those will be the final battles over which I have a measure of control because I am fighting myself. All the rest of my life’s big battles will be against the universe rather than myself and my weaknesses, sicknesses and worst nature. In many ways my problems are rooted in my refusal to be my own hero, and I am fighting my own ordinariness.

Anyway, look at me go. I started out trying to talk about a summer beach trip and took a sharp left onto the familiar highways of borification. I’m boring myself now. Somebody get this girl out of her head and onto a beach or something! Friends don’t let friends be single and functionally unemployed.

Truly, I am living my life in front of a computer screen lately and trying to make it interesting.

Beach house, I dream of this moment: It’s nighttime and I am walking from the beach to you. I walk a sandy trail blue with evening until I see that best thing, lights on in a house where I am known and welcomed. And I walk inside to those who are waiting for me.

I will be in Tybee Island for six days. See you next week!

Modern-Day Feral Child

I don’t recall seeing this story in any major outlet, but came across it visiting Waxy.org yesterday. It’s the story of a real-life feral child raised not in the woods of Romania but under the “care” of a neglectful parent in Plant City, Florida. She’s a sort of modern-day Kaspar Hauser, only far, far more damaged and neglected.

Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.

She weighed 46 pounds. She was malnourished and anemic. In the pediatric intensive care unit they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn’t chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.

Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.

Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn’t know how to hold a doll, didn’t understand peek-a-boo. “Due to the severe neglect,” a doctor would write, “the child will be disabled for the rest of her life.”

Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists. “Like an infant,” one doctor wrote.

She wouldn’t make eye contact. She didn’t react to heat or cold — or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn’t talk, didn’t know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while she grunted.

This story is not only disturbing and compelling, but extremely well-written and so thorough it references other feral children in history (helping the reader see what a rare phenomenon the child’s condition really is) and gathers relevant medical data on childhood brain development.

And it’s beautifully broken up into newsy, bloggy little paragraphs (easy on eyes that want to skim and jump) that always flow. It’s never exploitative or gratuitously dramatic. It just lets the story unfold, and even supplies a surprise visit with the hidden player in this story: the mother who raised her child without teaching her to be human.

Read the whole thing here from the St. Petersburg Times and staff writer Lane DeGregory. The story is new, but the child was taken from her mother in 2005, though I don’t remember any feral child stories from then…

Confessions of an Unemployed Writer

I’m thinking of changing the name of the blog. :0)

It recently occurred to me that my problem this summer isn’t so much that work has dried up (though that has certainly happened; things seem tough all over right now), but that I find I don’t really care that the work dried up. If I cared as this crisis was coming, I would have headed it off. But I didn’t. What’s going on here, I think, is not so much that I am out of work, but that I’m starting to realize I need a break from freelancing, or at least from freelancing as I have known and practiced it for the last half-dozen years.

I remember reading about a fairly established actor who took a break from acting to wait tables, saying it was honest work and the break he wanted from the work he’d been doing. I remember not quite buying that. But I buy it now.

For a long time now I have had a job with great cool points and spikes of lucre. It was unstable but it could also be a lot of fun, and I almost always got to be myself while doing it, which is something that matters hugely to me. But the freelance glitter is looking a little cheap lately, and I am wondering if I have placed too much attention elsewhere, when (as is so often the case), things worth paying more attention to have been right in front of me.

I am the first to admit that I am changeable. It’s why I love writing, because there’s always something new to grab my mind and gorge on until I am sated with the delicious taste of information, and the equally delicious task of distributing and sharing it. But I am tired of freelance goals that are so nebulous and large. Science. Documentary scriptwriting. Things that reach out into the world at large. Lately I am thinking about reaching out into the world writ small. Lately I am thinking more and more about writing for and about Asheville.

This poor blog is always in transition (science blog, college blog, personal blog, music blog, food blog…), because it is a hallmark of my nature that I always am, too. And lately I find I want to constrict my focus into something less floppy and nebulous. Into something that feels more useful, more real, even more local somehow.

Next week I’m applying to be a GIS librarian (a sort of science researcher and librarian) at the National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center here in Asheville, where my focus would be North Carolina earth science and local climate. The pay will not be anything like what I ordinarily command, but I’m starting to feel like a holdout, a snob and an idler for not seeking and taking appealing work because I’m used to the taste of a freelancer’s rates and the cachet of her cool points.

I applied to work at my local yarn shop because I frankly found the thought of downtown retail related to a craft I love more appealing than SEO and another conference call. I applied to work at a local organization hiring a writer/producer of science outreach material. I am about to apply for (freelance!) work as a craft book editor for a local publishing house, and have been paying serious attention to a friend’s repeated encouragement to pitch a knitting book to the publisher she edits for. (I am in the middle of designing my first wearables and tote bags, but that’s another story…)

And I’ve always got good old Blog Asheville, which I may well soon bombard with a series of articles on local things I just plain want to write about, like my two favorite West Asheville public gardens (the 1/4 acre Vance Elementary Peace Garden and Christopher Mello’s sculpture garden), local roller derby team the Blue Ridge Rollergirls, and why people don’t swim in the river in town (why????), but only in rural areas where I don’t know that there’s really a significantly different experience. I think about writing about these things and I perk up a bit, though I smell no money.

Only fun.

Is it true that the water’s deeper there by Harrin’s Sand & Gravel by Carrier Park? If you know, speak up or you shall force me to shave legs and don swimsuit and find out for myself and then tell you all all about it…

Maybe summer dragged because it took me two months to realize I had no appetite for anything in my usual workload. I knew I didn’t quite feel burned out, just unmotivated in a wholly unfamiliar way, as anyone who knows me I love and live to be and feel useful, busy and engaged.

I like being an implement. I like producing. I like working all day the in fields of the mindscape, so finding myself lazing uselessly around in its outskirts all summer is not me at all, and no fun. It’s not a rest or a break. It’s bloody uncomfortable and energy-stealing.

I wouldn’t say I’m dropping out. I’ll be a writer until the day I die. It’s my first, best thing and a fundamental part of who I am and how I interface with people and the world. I am, however, open to trying new things.

As soon as I figure out what they are.

Summer Tomato Sandwich II

OK, I fried the tomato this time, and yes, this sandwich is worth blogging about.

Here’s the recipe (Word doc).

Summer Tomato Sandwich

The tomato sandwich is a Southern favorite eaten only in summer, and only with really good tomatoes. A classic recipe is white bread, summer tomatoes, mayo, salt and pepper. I made a new version today with what I had to hand and really liked it.

Possibly Heretical Nouveau Appalachian Summer Tomato Sandwich

Ingredients:

Slice your tomato how you like it. (The whole point of the sandwich is the tomato, which should ideally be homegrown, red and ripe. Meaty and juicy rather than mealy and chambered. Deep orange-red rather than pink. If you don’t have access to a tomato dealer, hit your local farmer’s market.)

Toast an onion roll. Cut whatever cheese you have around into thin slices.

Put the cheese on the toasted roll while the roll is still warm.

Spread the other side of the onion roll with mayo. Top it with tomato. Generously salt and pepper the tomato.

Optional: Fresh spinach. Fresh basil.

This was a very tasty light summer lunch! Should have taken a pic… (Burp.)

Can You Guess Where My Accent Is From?

From the Language Trainers Group (via MeFi) comes a fun, weird listening game guaranteed to stump you: Can You Guess Where My Accent Is From?

It’s 16 short movies of people from different countries reading a line or two of poetry. You listen and are prompted to pick from a menu what country you think the person is from. For extra hardness, you are sometimes asked what CITY they’re from.

As a former theater person and dialogue coach who has taught and performed accents, I consider myself an accent hobbyist with a very good ear. And this little game totally sank my battleship. It’s a fun and very difficult challenge, and really demonstrates how big the world is and how many different ways there are to talk.

Even in one city! My own hometown has all kinds of accents. I’m “from here” in the sense that I’ve lived here for 30 years, since the age of nine. I have such a strong Southern accent that I am occasionally misunderstood and gently teased; up north I sound different enough to attract attention for my Southern grammar as well as my accent. But I sound nothing like the people whose families have lived here for 100 years or more. Dialect diversity is incredibly varied and complex even, I think, within a single town. And the world is a Babel of language, accent and dialect. Far more than I will ever hear or understand.

I was honestly almost absolutely clueless about some of the accents in this quiz. Could barely place the continent. What a fun, weird, cool, enlightening little game.

Can You Guess Where My Accent Is From?

HINT: Watch every movie a few times before clicking on “Answer It.” Once you click you can’t replay the video any more. Many of the accents are really hard to place, so listening a few times helps.

Be warned, this game is a stumper! I got just a few more than half right…

Cool note for fellow word-pedants: You can only have an accent in a language you weren’t raised speaking. Otherwise what you use is actually a dialect. In other words, I don’t have an accent at all since I speak no other language than the English I learned from the cradle. I do, however, have a manner of speaking informed by multiple regional dialects, particularly those of Western North Carolina. If I learned Russian, then I’d have an accent, and speak American-accented Russian.

Which brings home a favorite point of mine: That everybody has an accent. It’s usually just a question of how familiar mine is to you, and what television has taught you my way of speaking means about me.

Adobe Flash player required.

Eclipse Wedding

AP Photo, Marat Gubaidullin

“A bride watches the total solar eclipse through smoky glass in the western Siberian city of Tyumen on Friday, Aug. 1, 2008, with Troitsky (Trinity) Orthodox Monastery in the background. An enormous swathe of western Siberia was submerged in darkness Friday afternoon as the moon completely blocked out the sun, enrapturing huge crowds of Russians and foreign tourists.”

Note to self: This is the best wedding idea ever.

BTW fellow North Americans, Southerners and WNC residents: Look what’s happening here on August 21, 2017.