Fear & Loving from the Beginning

30 April 2016

Well I’m all up in it now. I’m really a diver. And diving regularly.

It’s funny how a change in your life forms.

First a thought comes into your mind as a distant, particled sense of something, then it gradually coalesces into a visualization, then becomes an affirmation, then a determination.

I have now reached the point I intended in 2013 when I was in Houston. Yet it is its own new starting point.

I’m an Open Water Certified Scuba Diver and a Level 1 Certified Freediver.

This is the heart of it. I’m doing it. But now there is so much more to learn, know and do. Pretty excited.

A thought: It would be great if I could decouple my worry for the whole world from my experiences, at least in the moment.

‹›‹›‹›

I guess a precursor to the thought of becoming a diver must go back ten years or so to that hot afternoon I stood at the water’s edge on the Texas Gulf Coast. My son, who was only 8 years old at the time, was playing in the sand behind me. The wild, undeveloped end of East Beach in Galveston was empty of people. Green duckweed shoots poked out of wet mud flats. Sweat pierced our pores.

The sea was flat as glass. No wind, a rare, extreme calm day on the usually unsettled Gulf. A drop of clarified sweat pulsed out of my underarm and ran down my side.

At that moment I sensed something:

The sea was going to change; the sea was going to rise.

It was so calm.

A punishing force was out there, coiling and tensed, this growing bubble of pressure and tension unseen beneath that calm surface.

The sea’s changes were going to harm us even while we harmed the sea possibly to oblivion.

Two years after that I realized I needed to move my body beyond the Texas Gulf of Mexico, who I had known most of my lifetime.

I was not forsaking the Gulf, my first love. I was expanding.

I knew I needed to go to a more tropical area, bluer clearer seas, where coral reefs were the center.

I did not personally know the corals.

I was only aware that the ancient, incredible life forms known as corals were in trouble, things were going to get worse, and they might not last 100 years more, due to climate change and ocean acidification along with the impacts from overfishing and other pollution.

I knew I needed to know the sea like I had had come to know the already-devastated Great Plains.

I would start to know the sea on a whole new personal level, I would tell the story of what it means to be alive right here, right now, and I would explore what that tension at sea level and in the oceans is, that tension of our times.

And now, in May 2016, here I is, as we used to joke in NYC way back when.

In South Florida I am learning things I never knew, and things I didn’t know I didn’t know.

28 April 2016
Morning dive.

Dive Log 12:
Broward County, FL

“Earth departing.” © J. Manos

I would never admit it but I can be a Big Babie who needs lots of attention. At the same time, I can be a stone cold soldier who sometimes mistrusts attention.

So I just go diving. Diving def takes care of personal stuff. At least for the moment. And you usually feel better, even after you have to come back to land.

© GPRC

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

© J. Manos

 

The seas have been calm for several days in a row now, and I grabbed a quick morning snorkel dive, swimming out solo to the edge of where the corals start.

What I call “the rough country” that emerges out of the clean sweep of the underwater sand plains.

Underwater sand plains. © J. Manos

Look who I met. A Gray Angelfish, who was hanging out behind an encrusting coral with a sponge growing on top of that.

Gray Angelfish. © J. Manos

Can you tell I’ve been taking coral ID classes? My dive partner Kareem and I have both been studying so we can get good!

Encrusting coral on rock with orange sponge on top of him. © J. Manos

It’s funny how, once you are below the surface, it’s so interesting that you always think you can stay longer, you want to stay longer, well past the point the CO2 burn in your body starts.

Just a lil longer…

Stay.

© J. Manos

 

Hmm something to be aware of once I’m farther down than just 20 feet. 20 feet is just a few kicks upward.

What will happen when I get really good at freediving and go deeper?

IF I have this feeling when I’m 60 feet below, or 80 feet, or 100 feet (!) (which I want to achieve within a year) …

If I have that feeling and don’t listen to my reason, I may drown.

I don’t fall easy, but I fall hard.

Later a friend asked me, “How far did you go?”

I said I swam out past the line of depression and moodiness, hah.

We both laughed.

“Water clouds.” © J. Manos

24 April 2016
Late Saturday night/early Sunday morning
Dallas, Texas
3. a.m.

I couldn’t sleep… woke up and went outside… industrial area freeway frontage where this hotel is located…  needed to go get water…  I know – but the tap water was making me not feel good so I went down to the gas station to get Ozarka spring water, where all the danger of late night has store attendants barricaded behind thick glass and sliding transaction trays.

Water is all I drink.

Nighttime…

Earlier I had finished a keynote conversation with Karenna Gore onstage at Earth Day Texas.

As I stepped outside I noticed that humidity had arrived. The last couple days had been bluebird; no clouds. Dry. Breezy North Texas prairie winds. Spring. Not hot yet.

The humidity had opened up the smells of the leaves of the live oak trees and the cottonwood trees’ bark. I was acutely aware of that change, and those smells. I knew them.

Daytime April Dallas cottonwood tree outside freeway hotel, I-35E. © J. Manos

I wondered how many people are bodily aware of the weather’s little details that tell part of a larger story.

Then I started thinking about this Op Ed in Saturday’s New York Times. [Excerpt below.] This chief meteorologist is basically sharing that all the knowledge we’ve had of Earth and Earth’s processes from the last several thousand years will be upended as the climate changes and new unstable processes assert themselves.

My creative designer has two young kids.

My son graduates from high school in a few weeks.

I thought about the kids. They will know a physical world far different from the world we grew up in. While we knew an America that was far different and changed (damaged) from its original indigenous state before settlement, basic things like climate and sea level and seasons and the way plants and animals acted became understood and taken for granted. Scientists, governments, institutions (Columbia University holds one lease that goes to the year 3000), and the public assumed these basic things would continue.

I remember as a kid in the 70s my first reading of something in a newspaper about “global warming” but it didn’t seem real.

It wasn’t until the 90s in NYC that I had my first personal thought about it. On a very warm winter day I was hanging out with my fellow drug dealer outside his apartment building on the Lower East Side. We stood there shooting the shit as we watched cars and trucks booming off the Williamsburg Bridge exit onto Delancey Street.

Image from “The French Connection”

Outside in January in NYC in t-shirts. He was a very book smart and news-wise drug dealer, even if he sometimes lacked common sense. He loved to watch the History Channel, and Blade Runner repeatedly. He grinned, his New Orleans mustache uplifting off his black American Louisiana lips and said, “I kinda like this global warming.”

Now… .bleh.

“A New Dark Age Looms”

By WILLIAM B. GAIL APRIL 19, 2016

Excerpt from an Op-Ed Published in The New York Times.

“IMAGINE a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.”

“William B. Gail is a founder of the Global Weather Corporation, a past president of the American Meteorological Society and the author of “Climate Conundrums: What the Climate Debate Reveals About Us.””

6 April 2016
North Miami

I walk to the gym in North Miami and these trumpet trees are dropping their yellow leaves and it keeps reminding me of late October in the Midwest or New England. Or the cottonwoods and aspens out West, which are exactly yellow. Yet it’s blazing spring in South Florida.

Falling leaves up in the colder parts of the country always come with a year winding down and your thoughts about how another year is passing. You wonder what you missed, as the dry leaves curl up, rattle on the pavement, and the bare tree branches scratch against cloudy skies like cemetery yards.

Chill wind.

© J. Manos

On some of the oldest trees up in the Midwest, the oaks and maples and hickories, you may notice a few human lifetimes in their roots, born when the American land had not too long ago been taken from wilderness to settlement. All the death – and life – between.

As I walked down this street path over dry fallen spring flowers, which would bear the bright sun the moment the clouds passed, it occurred to me that some people who had always lived in the American tropics would have a reverse reaction to what we have in the autumn-cold, deciduous parts of the country.

Dry falling flowers not leaves off just-bloomed trumpet trees blooding hot the spring. The days are light later. People are horny and playing their music. Your own body and life is ready for the heat and heart of the new year. This is it now.

© J. Manos

3 April 2016

Dive Log 11:
In the open ocean about 4 miles out from Riviera Beach Marina
Off Palm Beach County, FL

The boat was rocking hard enough. I could barely hold on with one hand let alone pull my fins on with the other. Spray hit me in the face. Sitting at water level at the back of the boat I finally got them secured and let the boat toss me into the white froth.

Trying to pull fins on and get off boat. © J. Manos

The water churned me outward several feet

First immersion. © J. Manos

I shoved my face below the surface to look.

There it was. At last. The Deep. There, sprawling below me. No end in sight.

This is what it looks like in person.

First look into the deep. © J. Manos

The very depth strumming a royal blue… traces of violet. The magnifying clarity of the water like sharp vision, like a world questioning what is reality. It’s all what you’re in at the moment.

My body was in The Deep.

What is going on under all that water?

And yet, this was only 423 feet. My mind worked to visualize the bottom. There was still a bottom down there. Somewhere.

Other students holding on to the spaceship. © J. Manos

I began swimming toward the others. They were holding onto the floating dive rig, which looked like a jointed spaceship with three red and white ring buoys connected in the water by PVC pipes. Instructors Matt and Rodman had gone in first to assemble it.

Freediving Level I course, 2^nd Day. Test day. Open ocean. Certifying our aptitude to allow breath-hold diving down to 66 feet below.

First day, yesterday, we had been in the classroom, and then the pool, learning the physiology and basics of freediving, which is very different from scuba diving.

Level 1 Freediver book.

Freediving is athletic. No tank, no equipment: Just you, your body, the ocean, #onebreath, and God.

Yesterday In the pool we dove into the 12 feet to start stimulating our mammalian diving reflex, then practiced the safety techniques, and how to rescue somebody who has loss of motor control or a blackout.

Then we practiced static apnea, which progressively trains you to hold your breath under water while staying still. (Vs. dynamic apnea, which is holding your breath while moving.)

First one minute, then two minutes, then try for three.

To prepare for a breath-hold dive you do several forced exhalations, then “breathe up” – full diaphragmatic breathing. It’s very meditative.

You have to avoid hyperventilating, which is dangerous because it reduces CO2 in your body and the urge to breathe, causes the body to burn oxygen faster, raises the heart rate, and decreases the flow of blood to the brain, thereby greatly increasing the risk of blackout during the dive.

After your breathe-up, you take one last big breath, and go under.

In the pool test, you submerge your face in the water while your dive partner starts the watch. He taps you at the timing intervals. You signal ‘ok’ with your finger.

My friend Kareem from Antigua took the course with me.

New freedivers: heading out to sea for the open water Freediver Level 1 test. © GPRC

With static apnea tests, you do all three breath-hold tests consecutively, so as to keep you in your “zone”.

Kareem pre-equalizing before a descent, while another new diver works his way down the rope in the background. © J. Manos

I know how to calm my body down, and lower my heart rate at will. At least on land.

In the pool I managed to hold my breath for the full 1, 2, and 3 minute sessions no problem.

They said to expect diaphragm contractions at some point (which is the body’s response to rising internal CO2 levels) and just work through them.

Onset of that condition can be a major inconvenience, from twitching to whole body shakes, but thankfully I did not get them. At least so far!

They were a little surprised I held my breath that easily.  So was I.

We’ll see next time.

I said: I’ve experienced enough pain and struggle in life that I’ve learned how to breathe through shit. We’re all stronger than we think we are.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Holding onto one of the dive rig ring buoys the swells pushed us up and down, tried to throw us around.

On the surface after a dive. © GPRC

Up north in New England a storm system was dumping nearly a foot of snow; its outer edges were blowing wind and waves down south.

Rodman, one of the instructors, dove down to about 12 feet and pretended to black out.

I dove after him, grabbed him under his arms, and began swimming upward to get him vertical, at the same time pivoting to his side to hook my left hand under his armpit and push my right hand under his chin and over his mouth and nose to be sure no water got in.

I brought him to the surface, laid him out on his back and supported him from beneath to make sure his airways stayed clear of water, while removing his mask and tapping his cheek or blowing across his face to “wake” him up.

Below us they had dropped 25-pound kettle bell weights tied to 66 feet of rope, which equals 2 atmospheres under water.

Woman’s foot, my foot, and 25# kettlebell weights 66 feet below. © J. Manos

I stared down at them. They seemed so far away. Different intervals were marked on the rope by tape.

It was exciting and unnerving.

We practiced free immersion first, breathing up, holding our last breath, then pulling ourselves head first down the rope.

The water pressure. The density of water. That is probably going to be one of my biggest challenges. Water is 800x denser than air.

I had trouble equalizing, and you can’t force that – ever – or risk barotrauma to the middle ear.

Equalizing, through the Valsalva maneuver, involves pinching the nose closed and gently blowing out to release the pressure inside the closed air spaces of your head.

I did not like pulling myself down the rope. It felt unnatural. I wanted to just kick down.

Florida Freedivers instructor Rodman trailing me as I work my way down the rope. © J. Manos

Next we practiced the formal freediving, where you don’t touch the rope at all.

You breathe up, either holding onto the buoy, or lying prone on the surface.

Then you pre-equalize, knock your snorkel out of your mouth, and bring one leg to your chest, which causes you to jackknife downward.

Upside down and arms overhead, you do one big breaststroke, then kick downward in wide strokes, equalizing every few feet. All this is designed to conserve maximum energy.

It was hard to relax with the ocean conditions being so rough.

But at last I got to practice apnea in the ocean like Afrodite does in my upcoming novel Her Blue Watered Streets. Now I see how she did it!! 🙂 Though she was better than me. At least for now!

I was still having probs equalizing.

Water is so dense that you feel this ringing pressure squeezing your head’s airspaces.

But if you equalize successfully, you’re clear.

Kareem, my freediving partner, looking down at me from above as I begin to ascend. © J. Manos

I tried several descents toward the 66 feet depth mark but still couldn’t equalize well enough, and only made it to 34 feet.

I had really really hoped to get to 66 feet on my first real dive. Man I hate to fail at anything.

Kareem ascending. © J. Manos

I also didn’t feel like I could hold my breath that long, knowing that I still needed to come back up to the surface. But yet I had held my breath easily for 3 minutes in the pool!

One time, down below, I wondered what was it like to not be able to hold your breath any longer and the surface is still way up there. I’ve hardly gone deep.

Guess I just wasn’t in my zone.

Couldn’t get that zen. Was just trying to stay alive in the sea conditions lmao.

“Yes how may I help you?” 🙂 © GPRC

If I left the buoy and tried to breathe up floating face down, soon the rolling water pushed me too far away.

Holding on to the PVC pipe spaceship. © GPRC

You could hear the dive rig spaceship creaking underwater as it was pushed and pulled by the swells.

Coming back up to the spaceship and trying not to hit anybody. (Also including pre-surfacing shallow depth exhale.) © GPRC

One of the plastic PVC arms suddenly broke from the force of being tossed around. I watched a piece of that plastic pipe drift away.

Inadvertently we had just added to the ocean’s plastic pollution problem.

This is the wave that did me in, pushed me over the edge. #puke #smh lol © J. Manos

My gut heaved and I flung my head to the side, throwing up.

Ugh puking is such a sick feeling. Puking in the water while being in the water is odd.

I’m such a protective clean eater and non-drinker that I can’t remember the last time I threw up.

Luckily I hadn’t eaten anything so while Rodman said I was “chumming” for the fish nothing really came out.

The spasms gradually calmed to manageable levels while the others finished up their testing.

Anyhow, we passed Freediving Level 1.

Kareem finished up. #passedthetest New Freediver Level 1 © J. Manos

J finished up. #passedthetest New Freediver Level 1 © GPRC

The boat came for us, and one by one we fought our way to get back on board.

The boat had a hard time approaching.

Normally a boat should have its engines turned off before you get near it. But the captain had to maneuver. The first mate tossed me a red ball attached to a rope, and pulled me in.

Although the propellers were under the boat somewhere I was still all afraid I was going to get chopped and screwed, and I don’t mean Houston rap.

Once on the boat dripping like a half-drowned seal with my head over the side I sat on the floor and threw up again several times. Just heaves.

The heavy diesel fumes of the boat did not help.

Holding on as another wave comes. © J. Manos

At one point I felt so sick I had another transferal moment – imagining the world so overcome with pollution and sickness that there is no coming out and it keeps going until painful death consumes you. Where you just get so sick you die.

It’s a pretty miserable forsaken feeling. I guess we could say we’re doing that with climate. (And BP did that to millions of marine lives who were sickened and killed by the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf, with infections, ruined lungs, heart defects and other ailments still occurring today. The spill stretched across 16,000 miles of coast.)

It was such a relief to come out of it. Inhale clean air. Not feel sick.

I thrive to be healthy. I want health for everybody.

Speaking of which, I dream of a world without loud polluting motors… Not only the noxious fumes, but why are they still making motors so loud?

Industrial noise pollution is one of the other things I worry about, and not just because it stresses my sensitized ass the hell out. It affects all kinds of marine life, in addition to people.

Sound travels far underwater. They say that listening equipment can hear engine noise even in the deepest parts of the ocean now.

Make clean and quiet boats already! It’s 2016! Make clean and quiet engines everywhere already dammit!!

I hear the U.S. Navy is investing in ship quieting technology. Check out this important “Towards Quieter Seas” article.

I hope it spreads worldwide quickly.

I reflected on the fact that I had been in 423 feet of water for the first time.

Hadn’t really had time to be scared. There had been so much going on just holding on and doing the tests.

As we got back to shore I realized that all that time out there in the pelagic blue water, the true blue, we had not seen a single fish.

Not a single animal underwater, other than ourselves.

J descending. © GPRC

23 March 2016

President Obama’s historic trip to Cuba was pretty exciting. It felt like all this history opening up into the future.

Obama is the first sitting U.S. President to set foot in Cuba in 90 years.

Hopefully this trip is the beginning step toward improving the lives of so many people – everyday citizens stuck in an embargoed economy, jailed dissidents, families split part – and also the sea.

Image: Google Earth

In America’s national consciousness Cuba seems so physically far away, as if the island country is somewhere way out over the horizon in radical leftist Latin America rather than 90 miles from Florida. Shit I could ride my bike there in a day if it was land.

Well the radical leftist part is true. The dark side of that is both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were responsible for a lot of death and suffering. American pop culture idolizes Guevara without thinking deeper. Che t-shirts?! I’ve seen them all across the U.S.

But then, before we get on our high horses, we should know that the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship of the 1950s (see below), which Castro and Guevara overthrew in the 1959 Cuban Revolution, imprisoned and tortured thousands, and killed up to 20,000 people.

Smh back in 2003 I didn’t even know the real definition – or connotations – of leftist. In a Dallas Morning News interview I was quoted describing myself as a “leftist”.

It just flew out my mouth and raised eyebrows on people and funders all the way to Minnesota.

My stupid azz thought it was the same thing as just a liberal or left-wing person.

I’m a progressive who cares a lot about people.

Violence surrounds me on many levels and freaks me out.

~ ~ ~

It’s crazy how close our two countries, the United States and Cuba, have been. You know what I mean.

The breadth and scope of the slave trade in Cuba, and US involvement, both of which are little known, sucks your breath away. The Atlantic knew many boats.

In the 1898 Spanish-American War, the U.S. and Cuba became partners. As the war succeeded and Spain was expelled, the U.S. seized and kept Cuban land at Guantanamo Bay.

The U.S. supported the 1950’s Batista dictatorship, then turned on him and helped Castro’s burgeoning rebels with an arms embargo against Batista, then after Batista was overthrown, and a brief honeymoon with Fidel, Fidel railed against “Yankee imperialism”, the U.S. decided it hated Castro, enacted the trade embargo, and through the CIA invaded the Bay of Pigs then tried numerous times to assassinate him.

The big one — the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 –  nearly resulted in all-out nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

I often think about a last split second before impact in a car crash.

In that very last moment, all those bodies are still as alive and intact as they ever were, hearts pumping, veins flowing, all that.

Before the “October Crisis” of 1962, the human world had never come this close to annihilation.

But all people had to do was not push the buttons.

And we somehow didn’t.

Everywhere, people’s hearts and veins continued pumping, cities woke up, people went to work, birds (well the ones not hit by DDT) chirped, all that.

Now with global climate change we’ve already pushed a couple of the buttons. Hope we can stop the rest.

And pro-Castro Lee Harvey Oswald slaughtered President Kennedy on the streets of Dallas in November 1963.

~ ~ ~

On a calm day last May, 8 black and brown Cubans washed ashore in a little handmade boat of tin and wood. They had two wooden oars and a rudder made from a wood stick inserted into a cutout sheet of steel.

© J. Manos

I don’t know why I’ve sat on these photos until now.

The bottom of the rowboat was coated in a muck of water and black oil or tar.

© J. Manos

Something had leaked. It had to be toxic as hell. Their feet and legs had been marinating in that.

The small crowd of tourists and sunbathers who gathered and stood there staring turned me off. This one crazy white lady kept trying to shove red Twizzler licorice sticks at their faces.

© J. Manos

Yet as I passed by I lingered too, though much farther back.

The police, fire rescue, border patrol, showed up. All that.

© J. Manos

After their time on the Atlantic, the men had arrived in America with nothing but the clothes they wore. None had shoes. One had only a shirt and underwear, no pants. Another had only pants and a baseball cap, no drawers.

I felt like such a privileged First World King in my Adidas and Under Armour gear.

I’m not wealthy and most of my money has gone to my non-profit, but I’m sure not one of these men could imagine spending $25 on one shirt, even if it is “athletic fit”. They’d be like wtf is “athletic fit” anyway.

You can trust and believe there isn’t a Sports Authority in Cuba!

The sea that day had that low quiet roll where it only throws a hard wave onto shore at the last moment.

© J. Manos

I wondered about the day they first rowed out to sea. Did they leave from a cove. You know the Atlantic north shores of these islands have rough waves!

You know that Guantanamo, 500 miles from Havana on the dry southeastern coast and the placid Caribbean Sea, is not just a federal prison for terrorists and terrorist suspects.

Guantanamo Bay is a seized section of Cuban land and water that the U.S. uses for a naval base.

The island can be very mixed and multi-hued, but there are black centers. The town of Guantanamo is one of them. Afro-Cuban.

Jorge and Felix are from there. They are the two sports massage therapists I go to for hard, deep tissue relief on my year-long chest and bicep tear and shoulder injury. Either one beats my body out of pain for a while. Their education and expertise ranks with doctors here.

In the U.S. they’re only allowed to practice massage therapy until they get new schooling.

Cuba’s level of education, especially in health care, is very advanced.

Cuba’s medical teams led in the world’s on-the-ground response to the 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa. Liberia and Guinea.

In the 1700s aristocratic planters in Cuba complained especially about the die-off rate of enslaved Africans from Guinea.

A lot of the cod that were first caught off the once massively abundant but now devastated banks of New England and Newfoundland became salt cod shipped to feed slaves. Planters didn’t want to use any land for growing provisions. And the fish was poor quality. So many people died of malnutrition or starvation. Make that money!

And Cuba has had a vaccine for lung cancer for many years.

Cuba in all its contradictions.

Writing in the Dallas Morning News last August, President Obama said: “At the height of the Cold War, with Soviet warheads pointed at all of America’s major cities, President Kennedy rejected calls to hasten a confrontation many saw as inevitable. He argued instead that strong and principled American leadership was the surest path to a peace “based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions — on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements.”

Also last October, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, Cuba and the US agreed to a “sister sanctuary” relationship between Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and Guanahacabibes National Park to help fish migrating from Cuba as well as coral reefs in both countries.

As for Guantanamo, a recent Op-Ed in the rarified magazine Science called for the United States to “close the military prison at U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay and repurpose the facilities into a state-of-the-art marine research institution and peace park, a conservation zone to help resolve conflicts between the two countries … while helping meet the challenges of climate change, mass extinction, and declining coral reefs.”

Sunday evening it was raining in Old Havana as the First Family walked through the cobblestone streets and colonial architecture.

The visit almost had a brief magical feeling. I couldn’t put my finger on it, even as I objectively questioned, like I do, whether I was being manipulated by media.

Naah. People may hate, but President Obama has been the most exciting, accomplished and thoughtful president in my lifetime.

All of Cuba tends to grittily grab at our senses, pull at our edges.

Its colors, roughness, beauty, violence tied with ours, textures, humanity… we’re struck.

Photographers, artists and writers have never been able to resist.

In Florida, I don’t know what ultimately became of the 8 Cuban refugees. They were taken away by police.

© J. Manos

A lifeguard threw their 2 oars and rudder in the trash.

© J. Manos

Thursday, 17 March 2016

Dive Log 10:
Shore Snorkel Dive
Dania Beach

© J. Manos

So I bit the bullet and finally bought a GoPro…. got the Hero 4 Silver with the touch-screen on back, with a wrist mount and some other attachments. And yes I got a dive flag.

By the time I finished work it was really too late to get started…. low angle light… but I had to get it in.

Out in the water the viz was maybe 20 feet horizontally but vertically for some reason you seem to be able to see farther…

In about 15-18 feet of water I practiced snorkel diving down to the sand bottom. Soon I will be taking Freediving Level 1 training.

© J. Manos

Wearing a dive flag attached to your body by 20 feet of rope takes some getting used to. You know I have a fear of entanglement.

That school of a couple dozen ballyhoo halfbeaks found me –  maybe the same school from before? That would be very cool.

Here is my very first pic of fish underwater – well a frame grab from video.

Small school of ballyhoo halfbeaks who come find me as I swim outward.

© J. Manos

Hopefully I can get a real good pic of ballyhoos at some point.

Zoom of ballyhoo halfbeaks.

© J. Manos

In the water I found myself fiddling with the camera trying to make sure it worked, and not paying attention to the water like I should. You know I am the worst technologically-adept person this side of a toaster oven.

I swam just a little farther out, and stopped.

Bobbing on the surface out in about 25 feet of water, I relished how quiet it was.

You know, the ocean is sure much less intimidating when you can SEE underwater.  Think back to the times you’ve swam with your eyes closed. It’s just all this blind splashing, not knowing what the fuk is beneath you or happening.

Turning your back to the open ocean and getting ready to head in.

© J. Manos

It was a calm day but suddenly one loud wave crashed to the southeast of me, incoming.

That crash of waves. It unnerved me for some reason.

My thought for today was: Take it easy. Step by step.

I realized it was approaching shark o’clock.

Another thought came: What am I doing out here by myself?

I decided to swim in to shore.

Turning my back to the open ocean, I felt that gap, that unprotected stomach falling feeling.

Haven’t had that in a while. What is it when you turn your back to the open ocean?

I remembered my first piece for this blogstory: When I Left the Land, Something Bumped Me in the Water.

Been here 2 years. Now it’s really gearing up.

On the way back I met this scrawled filefish chilling all by himself between the ridges of the sand bottom plains.

Scrawled Filefish chilling by himself on the sand bottom plains near shore, where nobody bothers him.

© J. Manos

 

6 March 2016
Dania Beach, FL

Dive Log 9:
Shore Snorkel Dive

Like on the Plains, day to day weather conditions on the sea change a lot. Today was clear and sunny, after the rainiest winter since 1932, but strong northeast winds kicked up swells and whitecaps.

I did wonder if I should abort my dive. I was planning on a shore snorkel dive off Dania Beach to practice agility in the water.

Yesterday I bought a new mask and a dive flag. This new Evo Stealth low-profile mask is specifically designed for freediving (I’ve signed up for Freediving Level 1 training in a couple weeks), and you can also use it for scuba. It fits a lot better than that big leaky-azz Oceanic I had.

I was not going to abort. I knew I had to get out into the water.

Now that I was past that decision I sat on shore, not so much thinking about the rough conditions as absorbing them and all the elements.

When I was younger and just falling down onto the street I did not know that environment.

People assume otherwise but I wasn’t always streetwise.

Actually, at first, I was privately a little scared and out of my element.

But I just acted and walked like I knew, discreetly absorbing every single detail while keeping it moving so people wouldn’t know, and adjusted to each of my mistakes until I did.

Now I wear the streets like I wear my senses and skin. I have to get like that with the ocean.

I’d rode up to Dania Beach to this spot where you can get further away from lifeguards. I know they’re not cops but they sometimes make me feel like that.

Fighting the waves and blowing water like a whale when a crest overtopped my tube, I swam out to the edge of that darker blue water where waves mostly just swelled, the surface rippling and dimpled by the wind.

The bottom was visible. The dive flag was attached to a yellow rope which attached to a lanyard on my left wrist. It floated behind me. A downshore current had us drifting – me and the flag.

And a school of ballyhoo halfbeaks came around – many silver needles with eyes. I love them a lot. They were the only fish I saw. They don’t have eyelids and they look at you straight.

I love the open sand bottom plains of the ocean.

And the sleek ocean bodies of traveling fish that don’t inhabit reefs but randomly bullet through.

More on this later.

I didn’t even need to go out to the reef. I just hung out there in the open sand plains water as if suspended in mid-air, it was crystal clear blue-green water, and dove up and down to the bottom, practicing, practicing. It wasn’t that deep. Maybe 22 feet, maybe a lil more.

If I had gone just a little farther out … but I was already in the blue water a distance from shore, and alone.

I didn’t get cold because unlike scuba where you chill and glide I was exerting muscles and the cardiovascular system.

There must be a reason why so many obstacles have prevented me from scuba diving so far as much as I wanted.

I’m looking forward to becoming a freediver!!!

Unencumbered from equipment, and other people’s issues. Just athletic in the water.

I saw my increasing agility. A couple times I looked back to see what I must look like – I loved the performance of my legs and Mares fins.

You can see the sun from underwater, big and round and yellow-white. The water super clear.

Several times I placed my palms and forehead on the sand bottom as if out West.

I slowed my rise for air so I would suspend upright below, and barely break the surface as I expelled water from the tube and scanned the horizon.

Everything is so clear. Depression can hit anybody, but I wonder if it’s especially an affliction for highly creative people. Gotta swim through that.

On shore the northeast wind was blowing so hard I began shivering, dripping water as I carried my sand-gritted fins, flag, rope, and mask and walked the hundreds of yards back to my entry point and bike. Current had drifted me. I kept my black Aqualung booties on and they got coated in sand.

Seagulls flying low to lose some of that headwind.

Three different people asked me if I’d been fishing. I said naah. I’m a vegan.

I just want to see them.

In my building a very light-skinned Latina chick with a heavy accent said, “Yes. Fish they have the understanding of a 3-year old.”

I smiled, and not just because I was glad to see anybody ethnic in a building where I’m the darkest.

Actually, I thought, as I made it up to the 5^th floor, fish act more than just like 3 year old humans. That’s the wrong comparison.

Somebody once said that we shouldn’t expect animals to express themselves in language like we do but to think of a symphony.

2 March 2016
Hollywood Beach, FL

A grip of royal terns and 2 herring gulls stayed on shore, watching.

So a quick snorkel dive out from shore to take advantage of the flat sea after so many months of stormy weather. Highnoon swim.

I didn’t have a dive flag but decided to manage the risk. Everything in life is a calculated risk. I am so used to trusting my senses and my body. I just needed to get out into the water. It was so calm and quiet with no wind that I knew I would hear and see a boat long before it came, and adjust accordingly. The sea is open country.

I went out. Got to about 25 feet depth, the reef still a little way out.

Just a clean sand bottom. No fish at all yet. While a lot of fish hang around coral reefs and other structures, I usually see some high-speed travelers over open sand bottom. I love the bullet-bodied travelers.

The whistle of a lifeguard sounded once or twice in the distance but barely registered. He was blowing at somebody else. That shit is for other people. And anyway he was way back there on the beach. I was in my world.

I was almost out to the area where occasional boats come speeding through, following the shoreline.

I wanted to get out to the reef.

I heard a boat about a mile north coming down. I hung back, waiting for him to pass, before I would continue to the reef. Hadn’t been to this one yet.

I decided to do one more dive below to the rippled sand bottom.

I came up, clearing my tube and as I looked back toward shore I saw a bulge of water.

I’m sorry I have no other way to say this – suddenly a large, barrel-bodied, maybe almost fat white man in a long-sleeve white t-shirt with a red and gray beard and tiny black goggles punching into his puffy face was coming at me out there in the ocean. He stopped about ten feet away.

It was a little odd to see this human approaching you out in the water that close and that far.

All I could think was that he sort of looked like a walrus.

He was a pretty damn good swimmer.

Boy did he yell at me.

Water streamed down his face and out of his mouth. I couldn’t see his eyes past his goggles. His voice was petulant, and I don’t think I have ever used that word in a sentence.

“YOU CAN’T BE OUT HERE! YOU NEED TO HAVE A DIVE FLAG!!”

I paused before I said anything, checking things out. “You a lifeguard?”, I asked.

“Yes!” He kicked upward to lift his chest out of the water and show me the writing on his white long-sleeve t-shirt.

He looked back to shore. “They’re watching us right now! Without a dive flag you have to be where your feet can touch the bottom!”

I wanted to tell him I could make my feet touch the bottom. I’d just dive down. I hate being told shit. But I shut up. I knew he was right.

Petulantly he again said, “YOU NEED TO HAVE A DIVE FLAG!” then sideways lifted one arm all the way up like a jackknife and instead of swimming back to shore sliced northward. Excellent swimmer.

Maybe I shouldn’t have come off such a populated section of beach, where a lifeguard would be minding my business.

I began to head back.

Didn’t get to see one fish.

Later I thought about all the manatees who have been killed or had their backs cut up and scarred by boats.

But they are very slow, and not thinking about boats. They just want to eat shit and lounge around in their own world and think.

I’m about to take up freediving – one-breath diving – which is intense. Even scuba diving has a lot of danger. A lot of danger.

What didn’t I learn when I tore my chest on the bench press last March? I have automatically thought I can do anything physically, excellently, if I want to, beyond the barriers others accept.

I wondered about all these new areas of mortality I’m voluntarily placing myself in.

I just need to really, really be present at all moments, and study and practice so much that I know what I’m doing, even when there is a problem. I think I know how to remain calm in a situation. I’ll be able to handle shit.

I could just walk away right now from all these new areas of mortality.

I could stay on land, even go back to Texas full-time, and “be safe”.

But I won’t.

Everything is a risk. I can’t wait to dive deep. I’m addicted and have hardly started.

And there is something out there that I don’t know that the sea will teach me.

The definition of foolhardy does not answer the question of foolhardiness.

29 February 2016

I got all disoriented when watching the (otherwise great) movie The Revenant. You can’t turn a plainsman around like that.

THE REVENANT – USA (156 mi) 2015 – Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu – Official Site – 20th Century Fox

THE REVENANT – USA (156 mi) 2015 – Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu – Official Site – 20th Century Fox

Hugh Glass, the real life 1823 fur trader who in the movie is played by Leonardo DiCaprio, didn’t get attacked by a grizzly bear in dense, steep, forested mountains with raging rivers in winter, but way out in the hot August prairie grass of the Great Plains (present-day Shadehill, South Dakota). Except for a few sand plums and cottonwoods along waterways there was hardly a tree in sight.

Hugh Glass was attacked by a grizzly bear mother in hot August way out on the grass plains of what is now South Dakota, not in the steep forested mountains of the Northern Rockies in winter.

The land was so open he had to navigate by Thunder Butte dozens of miles away as he made his way toward Fort Kiowa.

Thunder Butte rising in the distance above the sea of grass plains of South Dakota. Copyright Fr. Tony Grossenburg

For several years, back when I was out on the plains, I sought refuge on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota from the larger rancher-hostility of the Great Plains, and also worked and stayed there when my non-profit Great Plains Restoration Council had a satellite youth operation run by Oglala Lakota folks.

As late as the early 2000s, Oglalas occasionally talked about this white fur trapper in the early 1800s who had gotten mauled by a grizzly bear, was left for dead, and put maggots into the rotting areas of his body to eat away his dead flesh before the dead flesh ate him, and then not only stayed alive but crawled and walked a couple hundred miles through the prairie to get to the U.S. government’s military outpost Fort Kiowa on the Missouri River.

Milwaukee Journal article, July 1922, 99 years after the grizzly bear attack on Hugh Glass along the Grand River in South Dakota.

Revenant means a person who has returned from the dead.

In the movie theater I kept asking myself where we were.

I know the Upper Missouri River starts small and fast high up in the mountains of Montana, descends down onto the Northern Plains, and travels east and southeastward until it flows into the Mississippi just north of St. Louis. The Upper Missouri was the main route of early U.S. explorers, military personnel, trappers and traders up into the Northern Plains.

Hollywood changes things up. That’s the film biz. I’m experiencing a little of that right now (but thankfully not too much 🙂 as my book Ghetto Plainsman is being transformed into a movie.

Once I decided the filmmakers had moved the starting location into the Northern Rockies, I went with it.

But then I got hung up on his lush grizzly bear fur wrap that was taken from the recently killed animal. That hide would’ve been stiff as a board with rotting pieces of fat and hair slipping and falling out unless it had undergone a long extended process of scraping, tanning (back then they used brains to tan hides) and repeated pounding, rubbing, and pulverizing to get the stiffness out after that.

Yet boy that pelt sure rippled with softness like on a merciless fashion show runway. Hey I hate fur coats.

I also got hung up on the character’s superman abilities to a.) not get any frostbite I mean lose his fingers to crusted blackened frozen death, b.) not freeze to death all those long subzero nights, and c.) not die from hypothermia in those frigid raging mountain waters, which would occur in a few minutes.

Just to film the scenes the actors and stuntmen had to use dry suits. Dry suits are a version of a wet suit used for diving in very cold waters.

Even in 72 degree water with a wetsuit you immediately start to lose body heat and if you stay too long you will begin to shiver. Stay a little longer and that becomes uncontrollable shivering, which is the first sign of hypothermia.

But ok I got over all that and when the river shot his azz out of those dense, steep, forested mountains and out onto the Plains, I was glad. That’s where the story is supposed to take place.

The modern Great Plains is ravaged, wrecked and impoverished, a landscape of loss and pain and bristling wires, so The Revenant’s moments out in open country rebreathing cinematically that wilderness grassland were thrilling.

 

The blue dusk, the wind and snowstorm, the nighttime fire, the buffalo.

It took me by surprise to see the mountain of buffalo skulls in the film, which comes from a famous historical photo, even if the catastrophic slaughter of the bison was still decades away.

Pile of buffalo skulls in The Revenant.

Bison skulls to be used for fertilizer, 1870. Actual historical photo.

When we finally made it to Fort Kiowa, somehow we were back in the mountains again and I was feeling like those people in The Blair Witch Project. As for the real Fort Kiowa, it was built on the low banks of the Missouri River in the middle of South Dakota about 700 miles northwest of St. Louis, not anywhere near any mountains.

I’m not sure why the U.S. named the fort after the Kiowa, who lived down in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, and had since way before American military contact and settlement.

In A Buffalo in the House, author Richard Rosen writes of the Kiowa in Texas becoming utterly disoriented on their ancestral open grassland once ranchers started stringing up barbed wire. I’ve thought about that a lot.

They only knew the land as a wide open sea.

Unlike the Lakota up north who retained some pieces of their native lands, Kiowa people as a tribe lost everything and were moved to “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma.

At Fort Kiowa in the film, the scene in the cramped room with all the drunk, stinky, dirty soldiers and fur traders partying and smoking with drunk “squaws” stood out because we haven’t really seen those elemental details of frontier life before.

~~~~~

Early in the movie you’ll notice the trappers and fur traders talking about trapping out the beaver, meaning killing them out of a location.

John Jacob Astor, detail of an oil painting by Gilbert Stuart in the Brook Club, New York. Owner of American Fur Company, first multimillionaire in America. Also longtime drug dealer; sold 10 tons of opium to China. His descendant John Jacob Astor IV died in the sinking of the Titanic.

The fur trade began the corruption, pillaging and destruction of the American West and its indigenous people, land and animals. Conquest and settlement quickly followed.

John Jacob Astor, America’s first multi-millionaire, made his initial fortune off beaver pelts with his American Fur Company in New York City.

When trappers would club the trapped beavers to death, sometimes the beavers would hold their hands over their heads before the blows rained down.

Astor’s fur-trading empire spread across the continent.

Astor Place in Manhattan, and Astoria, Queens, are named after him. The Astor Place subway station has beaver sculptures.

~~~~~

Years ago, on western Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where the Road to Red Shirt Table turned to dirt (it’s now paved), legendary Oglala Lakota woman JoAnn Tall dropped me off and, after hugging me goodbye, drove off in my 20-year old Toyota Corolla.

West of the Road to Red Shirt Table was said to be the largest remaining roadless area of Great Plains grassland.

Spring greenup was in effect.

I walked 8 miles westward, navigating by the sun. I wasn’t going anyplace specific. I’d find it when I got there.

JoAnn was a survivor of the 1973 Siege at Wounded Knee, where American Indian protesters (including herself) took over that tiny reservation town for 71 days, demanding impeachment of the corrupt tribal chairman Dick Wilson, as well as to express frustration with the U.S. government’s “failure to fulfill treaties with Indian people and demand the reopening of treaty negotiations”. She told be about those days.

JoAnn was approaching grandma status and had arthritis in her hands. She told me about the constant bullets, and the tracers and flares at night, and what it was like to hole up in the church at Wounded Knee, with no food, water, and electricity. All services to the little town had been cut off by the feds.

View, over the roof of a car, of a pair of armed Federal Marshals as they stand guard at an Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) roadblock during the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupation of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, 1973. AIM occupied the town, exchanging gunfire with local and federal troops, from February 27 through May 8, 1973, following internal reservation disputes as well as disatisfaction with the US government’s treatment of Native American peoples in general. (Photo by Peter Davis/Getty Images)

They were swarmed by U.S. marshals, military tanks, helicopters, machine guns, grenade launchers, snipers, and more.

It was the largest armed conflict on U.S. soil since the Civil War.

Church and Army Armored Personnel Carriers at 1973 Wounded Knee Incident, South Dakota Copyright Wamp-One

The incident brought national attention to the civil rights issues, poverty and injustices faced by American Indian people, some say for the first time ever.

In the constant shooting, two Indian people were shot and killed, one FBI agent was shot and killed, and one U.S. Marshal was shot and paralyzed. Several Indian people, and one black civil rights protester, Ray Robinson, disappeared and were never seen again.

Two armed members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) on horseback patrol along a street during their occupation of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, 1973. AIM occupied the town, exchanging gunfire with local and federal troops, from February 27 through May 8, 1973, following internal reservation disputes as well as disatisfaction with the US government’s treatment of Native American peoples in general. (Photo by Peter Davis/Getty Images)

At the 1973 Oscars, Marlon Brando refused the Best Actor Oscar for The Godfatherand had Indian activist Sacheen Littlefeather go up and speak instead.

Sacheen Littlefeather refusing to accept the Best Actor Oscar® on behalf of Marlon Brando for his performance in “The Godfather” – the 45th Annual Academy Awards® in 1973

~~~~~

8 miles west of the Road to Red Shirt Table I spent four nights. Man I was lucky it didn’t storm otherwise I would have been obliterated. High Plains storms up there are otherworldly with lightning, thunder and torrential rain, especially in late spring. It was May.

I didn’t really think about it too much. Not sure why. Just went on faith, just because.

Lightning at night on the High Plains can flash so violently for so long you can get temporary blindness.

It was sunny all 5 days. I only brought water, Emergen-C packets, a sleeping bag and a little daypack. I wanted to fast.

I slept in a prairie dog town on a thick carpet of buffalo grass. I thought I’d find something out.

Instead I found prairie dog killers from the invading Red Mist Society who had driven pickup trucks onto the supposed-to-be roadless grassland.

The Red Mist Society shoots prairie dogs to blow them up for sport. They have different names for the way prairie dog bodies explode upon bullet impact.

One afternoon we had a showdown. I had a pocket knife. They had high-powered rifles.

At some point toward the last day, I decided to paint myself with wet green clay from a drying creekbed. Not sure why I did a lot of things back then.

I completely covered my exposed brown skin. It dried and I became like a dusted, whitish-green ghost.

JoAnn was scheduled to pick me up on the 5^th day when the sun was at the highnoon point.

No cell phones of course. I didn’t even get my first cell until 2004.

As I was walking back, still a couple miles from the road, I smelled buffalo meat roasting along the rim of a cutbank.

The nearest house was probably at least 20 miles away. There was no human or human thing in sight. And you can see for a long way when you’re out to sea on the Great Plains.

I sat down for a while in the bright mid-morning sun.

It was a nice offer. I was fasting. I wasn’t hungry. I’d already been a vegan for several years anyway.

JoAnn met me at the road like we planned, using the sun.

A friend of hers happened to drive by on the dirt road from Red Shirt Table (JoAnn knew everybody), and told her later that she’d said to herself Oh look there’s JoAnn and a green man and kept driving like it was no big deal.

JoAnn and I laughed. It’s like that out there on Pine Ridge.

Congratulations to Leonardo DiCaprio, who just won his first Academy Award, for Best Actor, in The Revenant, and to director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won his second Best Director Oscar®. And we’re all thankful to Leo for his work to protect the Earth and people.

18 February 2015, Nighttime
Intracoastal Waterway, Broward County, FL

Tires screeched at the top of the drawbridge exit ramp. An SUV’s halogen headlights illuminated the stacked rows of black barrier barrels one moment before it slammed into them with a thud, bouncing back.

Going too fast or distracted he didn’t make the turn. The truck and anybody in there absorbed enough force to instantly be switched from forward propulsion to backward.

Halfway up the walkway my body sprang into motion then stopped, coiled in tension down through my calf muscles and Achilles tendons.

I quickly looked around – considering that soon a bunch of cops would be coming. What would happen? Would they pull me aside and search me, interrogate me, maybe plant something on me?

A sheet of shame draped over me for hesitating a moment. I began to move into action again. In the same second the SUV switched into reverse, backed up more, then drove properly into the exit curve and floored it down the ramp.

The impact had forced on the interior lights and it looked like they were stuck like that.

A middle aged white man in a polo shirt was learning over the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. As he raced past me I spread my arms out wide like “what?”

West Lake
Broward County, FL
6.5 feet elevation above sea level (leveed)
17 February 2016

I just saw a stingray close to shore in an inlet as I was cycling over to the Sheridan Street Starbucks. Seeing him made me very happy. Sometimes seeing a cool fish is all it takes hah!

His wings moved like waves. He rolled along, sticking his head in and out of the rocks that line the paved embankment. I guess he was looking for little crustaceans and whatnot to eat. His underbelly is white, and his top dust-brown. After I got some good pics and vid (with my iPhone – seriously it’s time for me to get a GoPro!), I went on to Starbucks and looked up “types of stingrays in Florida” online so I could know exactly what kind of stingray he is. It sure is time for me to learn the names of all the fishes and corals etc.

He is a Southern Stingray. They have pointed wings.

He was a young’un. His wingspan was probably not much more than 15 inches wide, and his length including barb and tail maybe 3 feet.

Say – you know rays are closely related to sharks and share a common ancestor from 400 million years ago, right? We better not screw things up now.

Also, stingrays have a “small hole behind each eye that opens to the mouth … and that “with the evolution of the jaw in the early jawed vertebrates, this gill slit was “caught” as jaws were formed over time and is still there. Ok.

Can’t wait till my next book Her Blue Watered Streets comes out. I think you will like it a lot. My awesome agent the legendary Marie Brown has it out at publishers now.

In this American novel one of the mysterious characters is a giant stingray who has been alive since the Middle Passage. He learned to stay alive by watching the world from his sandy ledge that hangs out over the abyss of the Puerto Rico Trench, which BTW is the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean.

16 February 2016
Broward County, FL

Woke up in morning storm darkness to hard rain, as wind whistled through cracked-open windows. The night light in the bathroom flickered off, then on again as a power station somewhere struggled. A message flashed on my silenced phone. I realized it wasn’t a text: TORNADO WARNING TAKE SHELTER NOW.

I live in a concrete building so I assume it’s secure. The balcony storm shutters were already closed. I wasn’t sure where I should go except maybe the stairwell. I got dressed, taking longer than I should because smh I wanted to look good should I get stuck out or have to climb out of rubble.

The tornado didn’t come. I popped my hood up and walked down to Deserted Beach as the storm calmed and rain just fell. This year we’ve been having lots of what they call “spells”. We were supposed to do my first kayak dive yesterday but that was out of the question.

The ocean this morning – that jade green under gray skies with bright white teeth waves opening and closing. I stood under the sea grapes as a last burst of harder rain came.

I wanted to go into the water badly but resisted. I was already wet. But I was in jeans and sweatshirt. And it was rough out there.

On the beach I was excited to see there wasn’t a lot of litter.

Usually when storms or wind come you see more trash.

I did see another dead balloon on a string. People don’t think when they release helium balloons into the sky. Sometimes they are memorializing grievously lost loved ones, and have no idea that in releasing balloons up into the sky they could grievously causing injury, harm and death to others once the balloon pops or deflates and falls back to Earth.

Tornadoes don’t usually just whirl you away like Dorothy and Toto, they’ll often kill by cutting and tearing you apart with debris.

That’s what ocean trash, especially plastic, line, netting, string, rope, etc., does to fish, birds, whales, dolphins, sea turtles etc.

I did find a piece of styrofoam with several gooseneck barnacles attached around it. It smelled like the sea and fish. Obviously it had been out in the open ocean for a long time. You know styrofoam is like diamonds – forever.

With their styrofoam ship stranded on Deserted Beach, the barnacles had died, shells closed up for good. I tossed the shit into the trash.

31 January 2016
Blue Heron Bridge, Riviera Beach, FL

Dive Log 8:
Depth: 24 feet
Encountered (highlighted):
Atlantic Spadefish
Yellow-headed Jawfish

What a difference a day and a dive makes!

How’s everybody hanging?

What a difference No Fishing makes!

Man I told you life was full of ups and downs, but we come out of it.

Going under gets you back up – you’ll hear many divers tell you that right there.

More people need to get into the water – I guarantee you will love more.

So, have you ever seen a baited fishing hook underwater from a fish’s perspective? Think about it – you can probably imagine that exactly in your mind’s eye – probably from cartoons and stuff like Finding Nemo. But have you ever swam up on a fishing hook, line and sinker in real life at the bottom of the sea??

G and his wife took me up to dive the Blue Heron Bridge in Riviera Beach. This was my second time there. Viz was much better.

First time diving in a full wetsuit – that 5 mil kept me warm. (A much appreciated gift from Cyrene in Albuquerque, a longtime funder and friend, who has stood by me and my non-profit organization and artist work for over 15 years.)

The waters around Blue Heron Bridge are filled with life because there’s no fishing, no netting, no “bugging” (lobstering), no taking. Meaning no killing pressure, no depletion. Animals are allowed to live out their natural lives as part of the ecosystem. All the abundance is striking. We’re used to poverty!

We need to set up safe places all around the world.

High tide was just after 1 p.m. We made it in time. When diving the bridge, you want to hit high tide because the clarity of the incoming water is much better, and you don’t have to fight the outgoing tide.

See – you learn all these small details about life at sea level. Only total immersion is teaching me.

Once we submerged into the Caribbean blue water we swam south to cross under the bridge. It grew dim and green, a Lost World willed to the living.

G swimming ahead looked like a horizontal astronaut in the shadowed green gauze, spearing the water with his light.

My breathing was much better this time. I wasn’t sucking all the air out from the tank real quick like my first few times. And no probs equalizing. #Progress.

Def won’t get complacent though. The test will be once I start going deeper and breaking atmospheres underwater.

Atlantic Spadefish schooling in the Lost World under the bridge.

A large school of Atlantic Spadefish, sheets of rippling foil, swam slowly back and forth, checking us out. We returned the gaze. G’s wife took lots of great pics with her SeaLife camera.

As we swam through to the other side of the bridge that’s when I saw the fishing line hanging down, along with a leader and lead weight and bare hook lying at the bottom.

At first I thought it had broken off some time ago and was just hanging there to entangle, snag and injure fish and other wildlife well into the future. My first instinct on land or at sea is to always remove fishing line.

G was looking at me from behind as my fist closed around the line. I had dive gloves on.

My mind slowly realized somebody was illegally fishing from the bridge up top. The little grunt fish hanging around had already “stole” the bait.

For a second I imagined what would happen if I yanked the line so hard the pole came out the guy’s hands.

Man that woulda woke his azz up. Haha he would’ve thought he’d latched into the biggest damn fish. And probably cussed and wondered about it for years.

We had good laughs about that later as we hosed down the equipment in G’s backyard.

I love hanging on the sea bottom. I could just chill there on the sand or shells or pebbles. Of course I am careful to not touch corals or other creatures or plants.

Black-tailed prairie dog on the sea of grass plains west of the Road to Red Shirt Table, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota.

On the way back we ran into this little fish called a yellow-headed jawfish who stands upright and builds a burrow like a prairie dog. Seriously. Just like prairie dogs out West. Well survivors who haven’t been poisoned, gassed or shot I mean. You know some people say prairie dogs are so unusual and intelligent they’re aliens lol. With their “Roswell” eyes and the way they talk and build their cities they sure look it. Some people say fish are aliens too.

Yellow-headed Jawfish

This little jarfish had a very bright yellow head and pearly blue and white body with big black pop-eyes. She was about 4 inches long, or should I say tall.

So beautiful like all fish. Just clean and perfect.

She would look around, while standing upright on her tail, waving her little see-through arm fins, then go down, grab a shell with her mouth, bring it up to the top and place it onto the rim of the perfect circle burrow she was creating.

She’d stand there all happy with her big black pop-eyes, opening and closing her mouth. Then go back down and get another one.

Behind G’s place, we sat on lawn chairs after rinsing off the equipment and wetsuits. Massive organic collard greens grew out of a garden patch.

Like a thunderbolt of a good idea coming out of nowhere, G said:

“I wish people would stop eating fish for a year. I mean all over the world, Give them a break. Some time to recover.”

He eats meat, spears fish, and has dabbled in vegetarianism.

As the possibilities and opportunities of what he said sunk in, the activist in me just stared.

You know I am pretty good at getting people activated to do something, and to spread the word.

Hmmmm… Stay tuned. 2017 is going to be an interesting year.

At the end of our dive, as we got to the shallows and stood up into Earth’s first atmosphere, G said, “Back to Earth…”

Saturday, 30 January 2016

Always cool, compressed.

That was a halfway decent workout at LA Fitness on U.S. 1 in Delray.

So immersed in thought I caught myself leaning face down on my arms on the stretching bar of the cable fly machine. Smh. I’d forgotten I was in a public place.

One of my problems is I tend to automatically assume the worst from people. And usually it turns out not to be the case.

On top of personal stuff I’m daily bombarded by email listserves and news of things always seeming to get worse.

It’s 2016. We’re well into the new millennium now. Aren’t things supposed to be getting better? Aren’t we supposed to be evolving exponentially and catapulting into the future of exciting health and possibility by now?

Source: Miami New Times

A writer’s curse and blessing is being very visual, and receiving everything very viscerally.

I deal with trauma and PTSD every day.

Somehow I stay unbreakable and keep going. Life is rough, but you come out of it.

A writer’s mind hitches on details.

I’ve never read Moby Dick.

One night while walking along the orange-lit parking lot behind Deserted Beach – this stretch of shoreline that is left wild and dark with a tangle of white mangroves, palms, sea grapes, and grassy sea oat dunes – I overheard this one dude talking loudly to a Jamaican dude sitting on the bench.

Dude was tying his kayak on top his car and said he’d once gone to South Africa and fished for marlin and the fish he’d hooked was so big he “felt like Moby Dick”. My mind drifted to punctured healthy bodies.

That made me realize I had never read Moby Dick, this classic American book. So I went and got it from a still-standing Barnes & Noble. It’s 800 pages. In addition to the pursuit of the whale, it’s supposed to also deal with diversity in America – in 1851! By the way Melville sure is a wordy writer.

But on the first page, Ishmael says,

“Whenever I feel myself growing grim about the mouth … I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. … Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”

Aside from the dim orange glow of the lightposts lining the parking lot and jogging path, Deserted Beach is blessed in dark. Deserted Beach is only about 1/3 of a mile long, but it’s that deeper breath, that deeper inhale, on a longer run or walk of a couple miles of developed beach.

On the ocean side, it’s just the sand, the waves.

That’s where the occasional nighttime shark fisherman sticks his long surf rod into a pole holder in the sand, and where I used to like to swim at night before I put two and two together.

Recently, while on the paved jogging path, I thought I saw flames through an opening in the vegetation. I crossed a wooden walkway to investigate.

Star over the sea through the seagrapes and mangroves.

On the beach someone had placed a concentric circle of fat candles into the sand with two tall burning torches in the middle, flames moving like shadows. I looked around but never saw anybody at all. At first I wondered if it was Santeria but hell if I know.

In Atlanta a few weeks ago three attractive, well-liked same-gender-loving black men were driving on the elevated Buford Connector in Midtown at 3 a.m. after a party. The car went over the concrete barrier, tore out a swath of vegetation, and fell 50 feet upside down onto 75 North below. The top half of the Audi and them were crushed. One left two young sons behind, who were “the joy of his life”.

In the news clip, I saw the turn signal had gotten knocked on during impact because it kept blinking on and off as responders worked the scene.

One split second can cause irreparable tragedy. Be vigilant. The car was going too fast.

I didn’t know them, but many people I know on social media did. In fact, either our community is very small or just very connected because all across the country everybody knew somebody who knew them; even Don Lemon closed a CNN broadcast with a tribute. And the stories and photos of their lives floated out and away as the burial services came and went.

I kept thinking about that last moment upside down in the car, dashboard lights reflecting off their faces and eyes. Baseball caps, cologne, fitted t-shirts, sneakers or Timbs. Did they look at each other? And then silence. Just the blinking turn signal light.

Earlier today, while sitting in the car outside the UPS Store, I was talking with Fred Davie on the phone. We check in once a week. Fred is the Executive Vice President of Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and one of my most important friends and advisors. He shared that somebody he’d worked with in years past on post-incarceration re-entry issues had walked out into the front yard, put a gun in his mouth, and blew his head off.

He said: “I worked with him for several years, and not ever did I think he would be the type of person to do that.”

I was quiet for a moment. I said, “You never know what somebody’s going through.”

He was quiet for a moment himself. He was waiting on a winter ferry to Martha’s Vineyard for a quick business trip. “You never know what somebody’s going through,” he said with finality.

Later I reflected on the gun-in-mouth thing. Why that act? That sounds so violating. Why not just the temple?

As I was walking out of the gym, I saw a stack of these promotional cards. “A Charity Run To Benefit First Responders Who Suffer From Addiction And/Or Trauma.” I thought how I would love to include this population in the Ecological Health recovery work as my non-profit organization Great Plains Restoration Council builds its next structure, set to launch in 2017.

The world can seem to be filled with loss and trauma and chaos and violence.

But we keep standing. A friend just told me he has cancer in one of his eyes. He smiles and rides bikes.

What I have decided is life is better off alive than dead. With the indescribable fortune of being alive, having the gift of life, and the immeasurable good luck of a healthy, living, mobile and self-propelling body – something we can take for granted but which some people can only dream of – we have an obligation to be thankful and do something with that blessing to help others.

Our luck is so gigantic we might find ourselves saying, “There but for the Grace of God go I.”

Such a common thing to say we almost say it by rote.

But lately I have stopped myself from saying that.

Even though I am not a churched man, I am a prayerful man.

I can’t say that anymore because then it would seem like those in a wheelchair or stricken by cancer or no longer with us were stricken by God, that they had not received the Grace of God.

And I def don’t deserve to be spared any more than them.

As a writer and empathetic person I think of things from other people’s points of view.

I decide to force myself to honor my EXTREMELY GOOOOOD LUCK and keep it moving

After the gym I walked to Pei Wei to get some Thai Dynamite Chile Tofu and Broccoli, then stopped at Trader Joe’s on the return to the car. Dark outside.

The cashier, black woman from Atlanta, Buckhead area, smiled, her hair pulled back into a nice coarse ponytail. Natural and nice.

Again not acting right in public I accidentally leaned on the counter out of sheer exhaustion as she said “How are you?” like she meant it and as if we already knew each other.

She had that kind of lips-pulling-back smile where at first you think she might not have teeth but she had ‘em all just fine.

I exhaled, “Life is rough, but you come out of it.”

She said, “Aah. Yes. I’m gon keep that. Yes it is.”

I said goodbye to my momentary auntie and headed home.

Driving home with local Haitian-American artist Jbeatz, “My Superstar”, on FM 91.7.

15 January 2015
Broward County, Florida

Hey they’re not jellyfishes, they’re Portuguese Men-of-War.

Today, this afternoon, they’re out in force. The beaches are full of them. They are pretty beautiful but you don’t want to get stung. Even though they are not that big, their tentacles can stretch 20 feet, sometimes even up to 100 feet.

As much as I’ve swam in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, I’m lucky to never have been stung. The welt is supposed to be very painful, and in some cases the venom travels to the lymph nodes which hits you even harder. With all our weather it’s high season for men-of-war again.

Men-of-War live out in the Gulf Stream. They have no ability to propel themselves, or even want to come in to shore, but their azzes just float wherever the wind blows them.

During the winter months, when stormy weather brings heavy winds from the East or Southeast, they wash in.

1,020 stings were reported in Miami Beach in 5 days starting Christmas Day.

Check this out — did you know that each man-of-war is not a single animal but somehow 4 different animals all working together? The gas-filled sail, the tentacles which sting and snatch up small animals to eat, and the digestive and reproductive organs.

I have nothing to say except the ocean is weird.

I love how green the water looks under the gray sky. And the bright purple of just-washed-up men-of-war mixed in with green strands of seaweed and massive clumps of not-yet-rotting brown sargassum weed. I won’t think about the bits of plastic trash. I took this picture strategically in a clean spot so we could just feel the wild healthy ocean. Today I will just love the Atlantic and be part of thousands of years.

Here’s some recent info on Men-of-War if you want.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/fl-portuguese-man-of-war-20151229-story.html

http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/weather/theyre-purple-poisonous-and-on-our-beaches/npsnb/

New Year’s Day, 1 January 2016
Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, FL

Dive Log 7
(snorkel shore dive, destination ¼ mile out)
Encountered: Nurse shark, trumpetfish, a school of ballyhoo halfbeaks, plus some other fish I couldn’t identify yet
Depth: 20 feet
Elevation above sea level: 9 feet – the beach is cut away sharply

Writing this at night. Hope you had a good first day of the year. I did a shore snorkel dive by myself out to the reefs off Fort Lauderdale and swam as far as the end of that pier in this photo.

I saw a sleeping nurse shark, a trumpetfish, and a whole school of ballyhoo halfbeaks who came around me all lit up by the sun. And this one jack-like fish who swam up to me with his electric blue tail lit up. Day was pretty cool. I practiced holding my breath underwater longer. ‪#‎tired

It’s sort of funny to think about swimming out into the ocean by yourself say a quarter mile and staying for an hour and a half, reliant entirely on your own body to manage the water conditions, no platform to grab or hold or climb onto, no floating device, no safety backup, not even a diving partner, just your fit self. And hang out as long as you want, see whoever you meet below, then eventually swim back. Did I tell you I’m a shark?

Can’t wait to go back. I could do this a lot.

Something I am really digging: the spans of absolute silence, your body merged with the water and the fish. Something about absolute silence free of motors, just the natural unbroken sounds of your body and the weather and the sea.

We haven’t had much sun since November, but today was party sunny, and below the clear blue-green layers of the surface the sun shafted downward like yellow warm mud to the bottom 20 feet below, which was about the visibility distance.

I repeatedly sucked in my last breath and dove head first down to the bottom; tried to stay as long as I could. I fight positive buoyancy issues a lot. My lungs need strengthening too!

Sometimes I just hung on the surface floating face down for minutes on end, watching everybody below, an occasional kick keeping me afloat.

For a little while, a boat was anchored out there, with a couple other divers. A light current was flowing northward and I swam far enough south so the current didn’t push me close to the boat.

I wore my new sharkskin fleece-lined shirt which is 1.5MM but because it was loose around by abs, I’ll have to take it back for a smaller size.

People with low body fat especially need this protection if spending a length of time in the water. It’s supposed to fit tight. I love having a fit body, but I often have a problem with finding clothes that fit good. Things are too tight in the shoulders, chest, legs and ass but loose around the waist. “Ethnic shape” doesn’t help either.

With diving, all wetsuit gear has to fit really tight in order to maintain and warm a thin layer of water against your body between your skin and the material.

The sleeping nurse shark on the bottom – she had slipped between some rocks and a coral formation, tucking her head beneath an overhang in her private sleepy darkness down there. I could only see her body. Maybe like a cat who hides her head behind a curtain and thinks she’s fooled you, even though you can see the rest of her body, she thought she was invisible.

As I hovered above her, with shafts of sunlight striking down through the water, she just chilled.

I think she may have been having a dream.

I almost dozed off, fell asleep myself. I could’ve stayed in silence.

Her sleek body flowed backward, waved in the current like a long tan arm.

She never knew I was there. I made sure not to wake her.

The people on shore, tiny from a distance I’d forgotten, didn’t know either.

3 December 2015

Blue Heron Bridge, Riviera Beach, FL

Dive Log 6
2-foot barracuda (my very first one)
2-foot Bahama sea star (starfish)
Rockfish – poisonous spines and serious camouflage
Big heavy body rainbow parrotfish – rose and green chalk color
Sheepshead – including one big one by the bridge leg, who turned his face as if smiling for a pic with his chunky human teeth cheeeese but prob curious what the hell that thing (me) was near him
School of little fish
Triggerfish

Dive Depth: 22 feet
Visibility: somewhat murky

Phil Foster Park beach elevation: sea level
Highest point elevation of City of Riviera Beach, FL: 13 feet

Dive 6 – So Dory is definitely black & was having a very large family reunion under the bridge. Finally got to dive again with a short break in the weather. G showed me the underwater trail under the Riviera Beach bridge. Ton of life down there. The bridge pillars look like a Lost World covered in growth and all these animals swimming around. Saw my first barracuda (small, 2-foot one), a huge 2-foot starfish & a lot more. Pretty cool.

Underwater you can hear & feel the bridge humming from traffic. Urban fish hanging out.

You know, it’s cool to be able to be with wildlife in the wild and they are not afraid.

You’ll hear me say this many times but I’m stuck on the way fish look at you. They are really looking you in the eyes.

There was this one large sheepshead hanging out in mid-water by one of the concrete bridge legs and he turned his face, staring.

I wanted to just hang there for a while but G kept it moving and my azz didn’t want to get left behind.

I also wanted to hear everything better, really stop and listen, but the sound of my bubbles obscured the completeness of all the sounds.

Underwater gives a sense of calm, but bubbles as you exhale aren’t allowed to be completely quiet. I have a very highly developed sense of hearing.

I can see how that would be another way freediving is a deeper penetration – where you can be silent underwater.

Right now, the Paris COP21 global climate change conference is going on. People say this is the last chance, literally, to stop the climate (and the world as we know it) from going completely off the rails.

President Obama was there for two days November 30th and Dec. 1st.

Even if they succeed on an agreement, which I think they will, it would only be the beginning, and still too late to prevent a lot of damage and disruption. But it does give some hope.

I was a little rusty, even a little nervous about getting my scuba technique right this time. The last couple times I had some issues with my ear pressure equalization and lungs.

But I got it.

Viz was not very good, and it was overcast, but we saw a lot. We ran into a rainbow parrotfish who seemed to glow with a chalky green and rose color.

Rainbow parrotfish. (Image grab from G’s GoPro video.)

G found a rockfish hanging out at the bottom, who I would have never seen. He was perfectly camouflaged like a piece of rock.

And we saw more of Dory’s cousins. Caribbean blue tangs. #love

I made my first investment in good equipment. Got a pair of nice Mares fins with open heel and Aqua Lung booties. Next I need to get a wetsuit.

I have so little body fat I get cold easy. I was shivering by the time we were swimming back.

º

When I first thought about coming here to South Florida and learning to dive, I did for a moment get cold feet – and I’m not talking about in the water. I did consider just not doing it. Not even coming, and just staying in my established comfort zone.

But each time it draws you deeper. I thought to myself, I’m going to dream about this tonight.

G drove us back down to the Delray Beach pool. I kept passing out in the passenger seat like a kid. G laughed and said he was like that when he first started.

In the parking lot, as G walked into the building, Ms. Kenya came out to her car after finishing up her lap pool swim. Middle-aged, blondish dyed locked hair, glasses, tiniest of tattoos on her upper right arm. She nodded at the Mares fins in my hands.

“It’s like an out of body experience,” she said.

“How deep have you gone?” I asked.

“20 feet. I’m fine right there.

“G’s gone down to something like 240 feet.” I didn’t say that 20 feet is all we did today, and 22 feet is the deepest my new azz has gone so far. Because I hope (plan) to do a lotttt more.

“OH WELL I WILL LEAVE THAT TO Y”ALL”

For some reason I then blurted:
“Going under is part of learning to love more now.
I love a lot, but the underwater world…”

“Yaass…” she said.

And when I got home I passed out face down on the (carpeted) floor of my bedroom. Alone.

In a moment behind my closed eyes, face smashed sideways on the floor, I saw the big sheepshead who I got close to today, all resplendent in his old school prison-looking threads and human teeth. And who I wanted to hang out with more.

You know how when you stare at a black-and-white striped or patterned image then look at a wall and still see that?

Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

22 November 2015

My wires were up, like we used to say in NYC

Night run been raining all day 3 miles afterward I swam even tho it was still technically shark o’clock

As I ran the only people out 5 giggling Asian chicks sitting on the Spanish wall in the last drizzle eating something smelling like onion chips and one blue-black brother with an unlit cig in his mouth riding randomly a squeaky bike

The wind and waves have lain down and it’s low tide the air is not moving that’s very rare. The after-rain beach smells like the wet body of a fresh fish. 
When I kicked off my shoes in the sargassum seaweed and peeled my 2 shirts off one tank the other Adidas fit I couldn’t tell where sweat began and the skin slick from drizzle and humidity. The back of my head itchy, a little napped up.

Tide so low I had to go a long way out to swim deep enough.

But something about tonight — I stayed where my feet could touch the bottom.

Though underwater I dove low enough where my chest and forehead could pray the bottom.

A faint rip current feathered at me I felt it. I saw it’s bubbles pulling outward in the green slate water.

I didn’t go.

2 miles south I heard the helicopter approaching my stress level rose but he didn’t have his spotlight on like LAPD ghetto birds over old Wilcox.

When he passed overhead in the black sky he didn’t have the slightest fuk anybody was down here but I still slipped underwater.

From behind the clouds the moon came out briefly and another man was down there on the white sand bottom doing exactly what I was doing.

My torn left chest muscle is atrophied with scar tissue inside and it drags against the dense water especially when I use breaststroke tho 8 months in I can’t talk about how stupid I was to lift that heavy and that low on the bench.

Remember one half second can damage your body for the rest of your life.

illustration of left pectoralis major from ePainAssist.com

Doc can’t fix it either— he said it would be like stapling 2 pieces of beef together. I’m a vegan. My orthopedic sports doc, a stand-up white man, talks shit and curses in plain English because he thinks I’ll understand better. He says it’s time to hit the weights again, progressively, and deal with it. Live with it. I’ve been banged and a little broken up here and there in this lifetime but never expected to have permanent structural damage.

Also my left biceps short head tendon does something weird in certain positions, pulled outward by the chest muscle tear and atrophy. It may have been injured too. Part of me is afraid it’ll snap. They say it won’t. And my pec has an ugly dent if I flex one way. It aches a lot.

Something about stepping into the dry tub still dripping and peeling your water-heavy shorts and boxer brief draws off your legs, bits of sand still on your thighs, and standing there for a moment, only the hall light on through the clear plastic curtain, before opening the shower head. Then water again.