March 2002 Archives

The son of God threatens to rush the pitcher's mound.

Emmanuel plays "keep-away."

The Everlasting Light and the Quarterback Sneak.

Christ hooking.

The Prince of Peace kicks a girl in the shin.

The Root of Jesse swipes the baton from an unsuspecting kid.

So, well, my boss is out today, which means that I can procrastinate just a little bit longer on all the work I was supposed to do yesterday.

I've been battling apathy quite a bit lately.

This time last year, I was enjoying myself in Dublin, toasting St. Patrick's Day in some pub, drinking my weight in Guinness. I must say that this, my first spring without Spring Break, has been far less inspiring. While my boss was off skiing with her family in Colorado, I was stuck in the office transcribing focus group notes and waiting for something more interesting to do.

My boss should be back at work tomorrow, and I still don't have everything transcribed and summarized as I should. I spent a lot of time websurfing and skipping out early in the afternoons instead of working. At any rate, the pressure of having to provide her with some sign of what I've been working on should entice me to get more done tomorrow.

But the weather was lovely last week, and I spent most of my days bitter that I was stuck indoors with artificial light. And I've been missing Ireland and the incredible time Claudia and I had there, backpacking and sleeping in hostels and walking everywhere...

When we were in Dublin, Claudia suggested that we get our noses pierced to mark the occasion, but after a great deal of discussion (and some difficulty finding a safe and sterile piercing place) we decided against it and bought necklaces instead. But this idea of piercing my nose has been simmering for a year now, and I still want to do it. I mentioned it to Claudia today, and she was still interested, as well. I'm a bit concerned about the implications at work, although the university isn't really corporate in the least. I don't think anyone would mind if I had a small, inconspicuous stud. (Catherine might disagree. :) I'm more concerned, actually, with my family's reaction. I don't see them handling it well. My mom got really freaked out when I showed her my navel piercing when I was a junior or senior in college. I felt pretty awful afterward. So, what to do? I'm planning to wait until after Easter at least, which is my next scheduled trip home. And then? We'll see at that point.

In other news, I spent last night at a surprise party for a team member of mine who finished his dissertation. The surprise went off without a hitch (except that some coworkers took him to Posse East when they were supposed to be bringing him home. The wife of the lead coworker said, with just a bit of chagrin, "You put Chris in charge, and then you're surprised when they wind up at the bar?" I must admit I wasn't terriply surprised.), and the coworker was properly surprised and a good sport about the whole thing. I sometimes worry about surprise parties, because a lot of people don't like being caught off-guard or the attention it would cause, but this one went well, although I suspect he might've liked to have spent his evening playing backgammon instead.

I'm always shocked when I spend 8 hours at a party. Somehow, the time flies faster there than at work.

And so forth.

It's been six months since the most recent of the events which have changed my life indelibly. I spent the next several days wondering how people could do the menial, meaningless tasks they always did, in the face of such tragedy. Last night, with a good deal of trepidation, I watched the 9/11 documentary on CBS, and then I understood it better than I did at the time.

With the last six months have come changes, to the way we view the world, to the way we travel, to our sense of invincibility. Closure is a myth. Retaliation is a hollow gesture. I will never be the same person I was before the attacks of September 11th, but I'm able to go about my daily life as I'm expected to -- as every one of us is expected to. I can't ask for much more than that.

These are the words I wrote that day:

11 September, 2001

I want to wake up from this horrible dream.

I think that Catherine's teacher may have been the first (and last) to try to explain the second harvest to seventh graders, because that part was left out of all the history lessons and museum trips I ever got. I'd never heard that little bit of rumor.

I want to tell you about the sea turtles.

I was going to tell you about the vice president who leaned back in his chair for an entire meeting with his hands behind his head and talked and talked and said nothing at all. I was going to tell you about how I spent the last twenty minutes of the meeting feeling the underside of the fine conference table at which we sat, trying to divine whether it was made of real wood or formica. I was going to tell you that he never remembers anyone's name aside from his own staff, no matter how much or how closely he's worked with a person -- how he introduces himself every time he sees someone. But that's all I feel like saying about that.

I want to tell you about the sea turtles, and how, when I was eighteen, I had the chance of a lifetime to go see them.

My senior year of high school, my chemistry/physics teacher sponsored a project where we tracked sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. Each turtle was fitted with a radio transmittor tracking device, and we received data from a satellite that told us the coordinates of the turtle, as well as the depths it dove and the lengths of time it stayed underwater.

Our primary interest was in the Kemp's ridley sea turtles, the smallest of the sea turtle species, and the most endangered. They nest occasionally on Padre Island, but their primary nesting ground is still the playa at Rancho Nuevo, in Mexico. In the 1940s, a camera captured tens of thousands of these turtles nesting on the beach. They were so densely packed that you couldn't cross the beach without stepping on a shell.

And yet, over the next several years, the species was brought nearly to extinction. Locals stole the eggs from the nests because they believed eating raw sea turtle eggs would increase their virility. Shrimpers inadvertantly caught the turtles in their nets and left them with no way to surface, causing them to drown.

...which is all really just a long aside.

So I participated in this research project, tracked some turtles and their migration patterns, and was the only student to stick with the project until the end of the school year. Imagine my excitement when my teacher offered to take me to Mexico to see Rancho Nuevo for myself.

We left in June of that year, just after my high school graduation, and went into Mexico with a scientific caravan of sorts from the local university. It took a day and a half, but we drove to Rancho Nuevo. The route we took traveled through the Mexican countryside, dry and desolate and brushy like the ranches of southwest Texas. When we stopped for gas, children clamored on the front of the van, vying for the opportunity to clean our windshields, hoping for tips. And though they told me we were approaching Rancho Nuevo, I couldn't believe it until we crossed the final hill that overlooked the beach.

We camped out on the beach for a few days. I shared a tent with a graduate student who taught me about sargassum and saw more sunrises over the ocean than I'd seen previously in my entire life. And at the sunrise each morning, we'd crawl out of bed and climb on all-terrain vehicles to patrol the beaches. The time was called arribada -- roughly, arrival -- and the turtles were coming ashore in larger numbers as they nested. To protect the nesting turtles from poachers, Mexican soldiers patrolled on horseback, armed with huge rifles or machine guns.

We scanned the beach before us for turtle tracks to guide us to newly planted nests, and each nest we found, we painstakingly dug up, collecting the eggs in burlap sacks to be re-buried inside a fenced enclosure to protect from predators, human and natural.

And then, several times a day, we'd take a walk around the enclosure, inspecting the corralitos for signs that the eggs had begun to hatch. As the turtles broke out of their leathery shells, the fluid inside the egg would seep into the sand, reducing the volume of the eggs inside the hole. We could see it by the indentation in the sand, and we'd then help dig up the baby turtles and keep them in a tank for a few days, feeding them and allowing them to gain their strength.

And then, when they were prepared for their journey to the ocean, we'd wait for a clear night with a bright moon, gather them up, and carefully scatter them along the beach. Each hatchling, no bigger than a silver dollar, was pointed toward the waves. Some had a harder time finding their way. They'd turn and crawl in the wrong direction, only to have to be turned back around. Some made it into the surf -- a few never did.

Each one paddled mightily for such small creatures, struggling to overcome the force of the waves as they rolled upon the shore. Each one followed the light of the moon.