Animal Behavior: Biol 50b

(My apologies if you recognize my title’s quote, but it seemed appropriate and I’m not one to deny my past.)

So, camp is over and it’s time I actually sat down and, you know, wrote about it. This was not the original plan, but I’m going with the ‘better late than never’ approach, per my usual. I imagine that this will remove some of the charm and interest of it, but I went through the trouble of starting this newer version of the blog so I might as well use it.

Moving on to actually writing about camp….

Having completed the summer, I can now confidently say that this camp and my previous camp are two entirely different beasts that really aren’t terribly comparable. However, that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to compare them anyway.

My previous camp, where I was a camper growing up and I later became a counselor and staff person, was an environmentally aware Christian overnight camp with one-week sessions where all the campers were in the same age group. Volunteer counselors came for the week to provide in-cabin supervision and week-specific programming, while permanent summer staff took care of the constants such as cooking, cleaning, life guarding, and standard programming. The week’s schedule was determined by the deans of the session.

This camp was a nature-centric day camp where sessions could be either one week or two, and multiple sessions were held at once for different age groups. You and a co-counselor are solely responsible for all programming and child care duties for your session, though support was available in the form of previous lesson plans, a helpful camp director, and the occasional counselor-in-training. Normally, counselors are assigned an age group and that is whom they work with all summer, but this year was different. Due to several sessions being canceled on account of low enrollment, staff were regularly shuffled about between the age groups. I was one of the more frequently swapped counselors, working with four out of the five different age groups over the course of the summer.

My summer schedule ended up looking like this:

3 weeks of canoeing with 6-7th graders, the first session (2 weeks) culminated in an overnight camping trip on the Charles River

2 weeks of day trips around the Boston area with 8-9th graders, culminating in a two-night camping trip on Bumpkin Island in Boston Harbor

1 week of teaching about bugs, insects, arachnids, etc. to 2nd and 3rd graders on site

1 week of teaching about critters that build things to make their habitat better suited to them (beavers, birds, ants, spiders, etc.) to K-1st graders

(The remaining age group was 4-5th graders, who ended their two-week sessions with an overnight experience at our nature center.)

I hope to at least touch upon each week here, though I’m already forgetting many of the details of my first few weeks, so I may have to approach this with rather broad strokes.

Since I’m essentially starting over here, I figure it’s only fair to give you some idea of who I am. I’m a recent college graduate who dreams of a career in environmental education. I want to focus on experiential, hands-on, inquiry-based approaches to learning, and I was homeschooled to greater or lesser extents right up until college. I love nature, ecology, ecosystems, animals, plants, natural history, teaching, being silly, theater, dancing, biking, sailing, hiking, singing, reading, choreographing, playing piano, and a bunch of other stuff. I have a cat who lives with my parents, and I’d like to get another pet at some point in the next few years that can actually live with me. (I’ve developed an allergy to cats since I went to college, and my cat is too old to change residences anyway.) I’m thinking something along the lines of a mouse, hamster , or (if I’m feeling really ambitious) a hedgehog.

I am not an activist. I try to avoid politics as much as possible, and legislation makes me want to climb a tree and sing silly songs to drown out the rest of the world. I recognize that politics and legislation are excruciatingly important to the past, present, and future of the natural world at every level, but I can’t do everything and I’ve chosen to focus on the part of nature that doesn’t make me want to live in the woods and never come back to society again. I want to show people of all ages what’s in their backyard and make them curious to learn more. I want them to learn how to respect and appreciate the natural world, and encourage them to take steps to care for it as much as possible.

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned, I’m working at a nature-based day camp in New England for the summer. I have a long history with summer camp, but most of it took place at an over-night church camp in a different part of New England, where I was a camper, nanny, CIT, counselor, and nature director over the years. While I was serving as Nature Director, one of the nicknames I acquired among the staff was Amazon.  This was partially due to the fact that I had just played Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream recently, and the rest of it came from a fierce ultimate Frisbee reputation (implying that I played like an Amazon warrior). (Note: I’m not particularly good at Frisbee, I just play with a lot of… commitment.)

One of my duties as Nature Director was to instruct the campers on the proper sorting of their compost, ort (the technical term for non-compostable food waste), and trash. This topic possesses an incredible potential to be utterly boring, so I challenged myself to find a way to get the campers’ attention. My solution had two parts: First, I gave a brief talk at the first convenient mealtime explaining out composting/food waste policies (that was the boring part). Then, I let them know that a special guest speaker was going to be coming to present on the subject in the near future. At the next convenient mealtime, I dressed up in a ridiculous costume that was as Lady Gaga-esque as possible, a staff person gave me a grand introduction, and Lady Gaga came to perform for the campers. I had found an instrumental track for the song “Just Dance” and re-wrote it to be about composting. My version is called “Just Plants”, and the campers loved it. The headpiece I had created for my costume obscured my features enough that the little kids would spend several days trying to figure out who had been Lady Gaga, and some were only slightly skeptical that Lady Gaga herself had come to camp. I made a lot of mistakes, of course, and we had a whole lot of technical problems getting the sound to play over the dining hall’s speakers properly, but the whole thing was tons of fun. No pictures of my costume exist (both regrettably and thankfully), but here is a copy of my modified lyrics for your enjoyment. (I only ever wrote lyrics for the first two verses of the song.)

[Notes on the song: The composting/ort buckets were below the serving window of the kitchen at this camp. The ort (food waste) was measured at the end of every day so that the campers were aware of how much food they were wasting.]

——

Lady Amazon’s “Got Plants”

Got Ort
Compost
Cores, Peels
Oh, ey

I took a little too much food.
I was hungry, it looked good.
Where do I put the rest?
Time for me to digest.
Go to the kitchen, ask the windo, oh, oh, o-ow.

What’s going on with all of these buckets?
I love this dinner baby, but I couldn’t finish my plate.
Keep it cool. What goes in the compost?
I can’t remember but it’s alright, alright.

[Chorus:]
Just plants. Fruits and veggies.
Don’t waste your food!
Just plants. No fats or grease.
Don’t waste your food!
Just plants. No bread, oatmeal.
P-p-p-p-plants
Plants. Plants. Just Plants.

What if it can’t go in the compo, oh, oh ,o-ost?
Meat, Oil, Dairy, Eggs, and Bread? In my food, right.
Control your portions babe
Goes in the Ort, they say.
And it’s all getting weighed tonight.

What’s going on with all of these buckets?
I love this dinner baby, but I couldn’t finish my plate.
Keep it cool. What goes in the compost?
I can’t remember but it’s alright, alright.

[Chorus]
Just plants. Fruits and veggies.
Don’t waste your food!
Just plants. No sal’d dressing.
Don’t waste your food!
Just plants. No meat, dairy.
P-p-p-plants
Plants. Plants. J-j-j-just plants.

After a year of inactivity, I’ve come back to my animal blog with new inspiration. This summer, I’m working at a nature day-camp as a counselor/educator, and I thought it would be fun to document all the great little moments of learning, discovery, and laughter from the summer. I’m going to focus on the challenges of being an outdoor educator, the progress I make (or lack there of), the cool nature things I learn/encounter, and all of the adorable/hilarious moments that invariably happen when you spend your summer with campers. I will be leading canoe  day trips for the first few weeks with middle schoolers, and then switching to K-1 kids for the rest of the summer.

I have been spending my last few months working part-time as an environmental educator for elementary school field trips, so I already have a few things I can talk about. I’m not sure how often I’ll be posting, but I would like to average about twice a week. It would be great if I could have some pictures to go with my posts, but I’m not sure how feasible that will be, considering that I will probably have my hands too full to take the time to photo-document everything. Also, posting pictures of campers on my personal blog is not acceptable, so it would have to be exclusively nature photos.

Here’s hoping that this new start will bring lots of interesting and entertaining moments to my posts!

~Hazel

This morning, I could not sleep.

That’s not true. I chose not to sleep. Found myself not-sleeping. I read my old blogs from Africa and for the first time in years—maybe ever—I missed it. I felt the moments in my bones. I find it odd that as I should be dreading this leave-taking, I suddenly miss the last one, two years late.

I lay in bed and watched the sky go dawn violet. I craved sensation. I craved a moment of significance. I suddenly remembered my only way of worshiping things. What my mother taught me on sleepless mornings. I got dressed and left, chasing the sun.

This is the hour beloved by birds. I followed the campus’s hillside to the rock slope by the water tower. Up and up. When I finally crested the hill, the sun was with me, peeking over the mountains, scarlet and hesitant the way it always is at the beginning and the end.

I am sitting with the wild things. I have been caught up in the lives of humans. So unstill. So untextured. The rocks are cool and granular. I do not know how they got that way. The crows are making clever noises to my right. The chickadees are chattering, and somewhere there’s a turkey chuckling gently at his wives. There’s so much motion in the trees that it’s confusing—the squirrels are so busy. All the voices and crackles and breeze. The sun rises. The rosy light turns green.

Without routine, I stumble. In the months after Africa, I was choking and confused, trying hard to wrestle out of a four-month break in my routine. But routine has swept me here so fast, I’ve forgotten what I’m missing. I worked my track into the ground hard enough that my vision’s tunneled. I have not worshiped many moments. I have not followed any sunrise.

I think of the people I love. All of them are comforting and known and here. I forget to treat their hands like sunrise. In two more days, the smile will be gone. Our particular, snarky humor. The way our group always rolled as one. We must have alarmed strangers. We were cohesive and odd. We are. We’ve grown like caught vines. We belong in the grooves we’ve worn for each other. I love them.

The scatter is coming. It’s practically here. My life here will end and we’ll part in directions. When will I notice? When will it hit me? Every day ends by the warmth of their eyes. My ridiculous tribe. You who made me.

The whole sun is up now and normal is here. I’ll go back to my room and I’ll sleep. In two days, I leave. This ends. We end. The leaving sinks in to my bones.

Over the past few weeks, swings have grown on my campus. Overnight, they emerged: simple red planks of wood hanging on long white ropes from sturdy branches of trees, anonymous and silly. They happened everywhere, eight or ten of them strung about my small school. After trying a few of them, I found that one, in particular, was a perfect swing—a bit challenging to start out on, but once it got going it would soar to the height of the big tree’s branches. I put stirring music on my headphones and smiled benignly at the amused stares of onlookers, closed my eyes, remembered my childhood’s afternoon school recesses. The upswing felt like flying, and the backswing felt like bowing to the sky.

I investigated the origins of the swings. The hands that made them, it turned out, belonged to a best friend of my best friend. Maayan always wears three things: a yarmulke, wire-rimmed glasses that owlishly magnify his eyes, and a camo-patterned army flightsuit. (It is very warm, he says. Besides that, he is the sort of personality that deserves a uniform.) I thanked him for a piece of childhood. He smiled and nodded.

I received an email the next day:

Subj: Operation Sail Away

To: undisclosed recipients

Agents,

You have all indicated interest in seeing or participating in the next phase of Operation: Red Swings. Here is your chance.

Tomorrow at 20:00 assemble at the back of the theater parking lot. I’ll be waiting in a red pickup truck with supplies. Wear warm clothing, but leave the balaclavas at home.

Details will be revealed on site.

Needless to say, this is to be a top secret operation.

Make sure you are not followed.

It had a post-script:

“It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.” – Eric Hoffer

We met in the freezing bitter night. Maayan, official in his flightsuit and a knitted cap, explained our mission: piled in the bed of his red truck were four triangular nylon boat sails, lengths of rope, winches. We would comb the campus for triangular threesomes of good fat trees, and string sails between them to make…something. Hammocks. Sculptures. Playthings. We would be covertly efficient. We would use the cover of night wisely. We piled into the bed of the truck, lying on the soft furled sails. As we drove off to our first possibility, I watched the cold constellations unwind by overhead, the stark black winter branches of trees. My cheeks grew cold.

It took us many tries to find a suitable troupe of trees, but we did so, methodically and carefully. We found the right ties and tensions through trial and error. Maayan taught us all how to affix knots, how to crank the winches, until the wide white sail hung flat, suspended chest-height above the ground, shimmering gently in the frigid breeze. Timidly I swung up onto our sail. The trees’ bark whined protestations and held. Another and another of us clambered onto the sail, and we stretched out on our backs, suspended airily above ground, watching the stars.

“What the hell is that?” asked three drunken passersby.

My friend Tess flipped on her stomach. “It is a weather experiment,” she lied authoritatively. “We are examining the relationship between barometric pressure and surface tension. Would you like to try?” She slid off the sail and beckoned them graciously forward. They raised their eyebrows, shrugged, and piled on the sail, giggling like children. I glanced at Maayan. He was grinning softly to himself, proud of the laughter he’d made.

Before our next construction, we stopped by a coffee shop to warm our hands. I cupped a mug of hot chocolate and gulped it like water and savored the chatter of friends. It occurred to me to ask them a question I’ve been asking everyone over the past few months. I collect the answers to this question like marbles; I don’t know what I’ll do with them yet, but each new answer feels like adding a new color to something I am painting.

They gave me their attention. “Say you’re on the greatest adventure of your life,” I began. “You can be anyone, at any time in history. That doesn’t matter. All you know is, if you make it out of this alive, it’ll be the biggest story you tell your grandchildren. It’s that moment.

“What does it smell like?”

They exchanged the usual bewildered glances that people give me when I ask them this, then settled as they realized it was simply a weird question that deserves a weird answer.

“Cinnamon,” began Phil, my best friend, who has heard me ask this many times before.

“Grass,” chimed in Elisha, and thought a moment more before nodding. “Yes. Grass.”

Tess has a bit of a wicked, imaginative streak, and I waited hopefully as she chewed over her answer, knowing it would be good. “Baked rock,” she finally said. “Like in a canyon I visited, when I was little—rock warmed in the sun. And the smell it had after it rained, then.”

I smiled at that—the answers with just a hint of illustration are the best. I turned gently to look at Maayan, who had waited for last. He peered at me over the rims of his glasses, and for an instant I saw, in his twenty-something face, the face he would have as an old man.

“The greatest adventure of my life?” he clarified. I nodded.

He answered without another moment’s hesitation: “My wife.”

It was the perfect answer, unequivocally the best I have found. Without a word, I stood and bowed deeply to my friend.

Tess arched an eyebrow, knowing him, of course, to be unmarried. “‘Your wife’? Do you somehow know what your wife smells like?”

“No!” scoffed Maayan, grinning. He took a sip of his tea. “But I will.”

After oversleeping a bit, Tal and Megan finally got on their gear to go out for a morning snorkel. When we first got out we decided to visit the sailfin blenny we’d found the other day, and the eel who lives underneath it. We found the same rock, and sure enough, there was the blenny poking its face out of a hole in the rock. Tal saw the eel, but Megan didn’t; she did see the blenny do its ostentatious dance once more, however. After visiting these fish, we swam further out to where the sand drops off into deep water and the reef begins, and swam leisurely around, looking at the life. We spent a long time in silence, just watching everything happen. We really enjoy snorkeling together.

We headed inshore for lunch, because shore is really the only place to get food (Ralf may eat lionfish for lunch, but we prefer mac and cheese with random sauteed vegetables). Our random vegetable of the day was a carrot. It was delicious. We ate by the ocean, as usual. We understand your jealousy.

Our days have developed a bit of a schedule: next was a boat dive from Bruce’s, with Ralf again this time (yes, lionfish died). We went to a site called Sharon’s Serenity, which is on the far side of Klein Bonaire, a bit more exposed to the open ocean than most of Bonaire’s dive sites. This means that not many people go there, so the reef was extraordinary; it also means that big fish passing through the open ocean will sometimes end up cruising by. In the first few minutes of the dive, Tal found a lobster, which was just the beginning of our cool finds. Ralf found a lionfish and speared it—this is nothing new. As he was engaged in this dark business, Megan spotted a huge, silvery fish—a type of mackerel known as a Cero—swimming by, beyond him. Megan especially likes these huge ocean fish, because she likes wondering what deep-ocean things they have seen; they seem like messengers from beyond. He moved on quickly, as if he had somewhere important to be. Another big fish find was a tiger grouper, found by Megan. Tal then found another lionfish, and summoned Ralf by banging on her tank (which makes a loud noise and attracts attention underwater), but the lionfish seemed to catch wind of the situation and escaped this time. While he was hunting, Ralf spotted an incredible diving treasure: a yellow frogfish sitting on a yellow sponge. There was a huge commotion as everyone caught wind of what he’d found; frogfish are kind of a big deal, rare and camouflaged and interesting to watch (there were no tires near this one). It was a big female, very well-camouflaged, and was either pooping or laying eggs—no one could tell. After so much excitement, Megan was getting low on air, and we turned around to head back to the boat. Both of us managed to find one more rarity each: Megan found a batwing coral crab, which she has never seen before in ten years of diving on Bonaire, so that was exciting; and Tal found a sharp-tail eel, a weirdly adorable eel that slides through coral rubble searching for shrimp. If you put your hand down in front of one, it will nuzzle your fingertips (try it sometime).

A cero, AKA a big mackerel.

We had our ritual after-dive snorkel following the dismemberment of our gear, though this one was shorter than usual (and we couldn’t harass any divers) since everyone was back on the boat already. Megan said goodbye to the ocean because this was her last dive before she leaves tomorrow: she does this by diving down and doing a few flips, and it’s a ritual. We rode back to Bruce’s, we washed our gear, and we begged Rishi to help us find another coconut. He said, “OK. I will. Don’t worry. Magic. Go away.” We did, and came back a few minutes later. The man had a shelled coconut waiting for us. He’s either a wizard, or an incredible tree-climber. Or both. Megan spent awhile photographing a parakeet in one of the trees by the gazebo, which turned out well.

A brown-throated parakeet eating from a fruit tree at Bruce's.

We came home, drained our nut, smashed it, and ate large quantities of it, just enough to slightly spoil our appetites for dinner (not really). Dinner was delicious; we went to a new restaurant that Divemaster Linda had recommended to us, and it was smashing. We were all greatly enjoying ourselves, with a slight hitch when Tal trapped herself in the bathroom and had to be rescued before she barreled down the door. Wendy heard her hollering, and Megan flew to the rescue. Tal was greatly appreciative.

After taking a short, breezy walk around Kralendijk, Bonaire’s main village, we came back home and have had a very wildlifey evening. The tarpon are here, as usual, and Wendy was taken aback by the light gleaming orange in their eyes (“Tapetum lucidum!” said Megan, which is one of her favorite phrases). The three of us—Tal, Wendy, and Megan—all watched, mouths agape, as two tarpon (one just huge and one truly gargantuan, so we named them David and Goliath) swirled about in the lights, occasionally turning on their sides and flashing bright silver as they chased fish. We also spent some time watching bats fly about the porch of our upstairs neighbor. This man, who shall henceforth be known as Batman, puts some weird tasty jelly out for the bats every night, and he sits out on his porch, listens to loud classical music, and takes photographs of the bats eating. Megan has been trying to make friends with him because she freaking loves bats. Batman is even kinder than we expected, and he’s lowered some of his bat jelly on a line from his porch to the level of our deck, in the hopes that the bats will grace us with their presence, but we don’t think they’ve caught on. We’ll wait here for a bit, hoping. (Literally as I was writing that sentence, the first one showed up, and started sniffing around the jelly. SUCCESS!)

Goodnight and goodbye for now. Megan and Tal are going to watch some of Fly Away Home, which is one of Megan’s favorite old movies, and tomorrow she’ll be on a plane home. Night!

In the morning, we honestly laid around. We worked a bit (on science—Tal answered textbook questions, and Megan read papers on dolphin cognition), and then Tal made the two of us lunch: grilled cheese for Megan and pasta for herself. It’s nice to have a chef.

Our three elders decided to forgo a dive for the day; Wendy had editing work to do, and Grandma and Grandpa came to Bruce’s and went for a long swim. Tal and Megan went for a boat dive by ourselves (rather, with Dive Master Awesome Bitch Linda and several other divers including Schrodinger Dave and his wife, Cindy, or something). We ended up boating over to Klein Bonaire, which means Little Bonaire—Bonaire is an island in roughly the shape of a comma or boomerang, and Klein Bonaire is a much littler island the shape of a period or ball that sits in the crook of the bigger island. It has beautiful reefs because it’s harder to get to Klein, which means that the coral is less spoiled (coral is very fragile, and the more contact it has with humans in general the less pristine it is). The reef was, as we expected, extraordinarily beautiful and full of fish, though we didn’t really see anything unusual or shocking. It was still wonderful, and interesting to dive just the two of us, though Linda was watching out for us. We did see two of the evil lionfish lurking under a coral head, and Linda did not kill them because she doesn’t have a spear like Ralf. They really are freakishly beautiful despite their devilry. We had hoped to find a frogfish, which is a type of fish that almost never moves in its whole life. It looks like a blob, and settles down in one place where it may be mistaken for a coral blob, and fishes with an angler thing on its head. Because they are so immobile, we can know where one is for months at a time, and some divers knew that there was a frogfish at Keepsake. When we got to the spot, however, there were some tires that seemed to be marking the place. This sent Linda into a furious rage. We never found the frogfish. Picture yourself as a three-inch-long immobile creature. You pick the perfect spot to spend your entire life. Then, some huge human comes along and drops a huge rubber thing next to your perfect spot. The light changes, the current probably changes, if they’re really, really dumb, maybe they even dropped the tire on you—we don’t know. But of course, you up and leave. When we got back onto the boat, Linda was irate. We don’t blame her. Human beings are idiots. Sometimes.

We dismembered our gear as usual, and hopped right back off the boat into the water with snorkel gear to harass divers (Cindy saw us doing this, and remarked, “They’re fish, aren’t they?” We were both proud of ourselves. We like achieving fish status). Divers having been roundly harassed, we popped back onto the boat and back to Bruce’s, where we rinsed off our dismembered gear, and jumped back in the water, again. Grandma found us a coconut several days ago (she’s awesome that way), and so we finally decided to throw ourselves on a local man’s mercy, because he owns a machete. His name is Rishi, and he’s worked for Bruce for as long as we can remember, certainly. He always seems very shy, but we found out today that he’s also very cheerful and silly; when we asked him to open the coconut for us, please, he said, “Sure. How shall I do it? With my hand? With my head? With my friend Edward’s head? With magic?” We said, “A knife would do fine, thanks. Can we watch?” He said, “No, go away.” We said, “Fine,” and skipped off. He emerged from the dive shop about a minute later with the shucked coconut—we were both surprised. Soon after, we headed home, and immediately fished a corkscrew out of a drawer and pierced our coconut. We got a good cupful of cloudy, tasty coconut water. Grandma told Tal insistently that cracking open the nut would be nigh on impossible. Tal was skeptical and slightly aggravated to be so doubted, so she took the coconut to the patio, held it above her head, and hurled it to the ground exactly once. The coconut split cleanly in half. Lesson of the day: never doubt Tal’s brute force. We had what may be the greatest snack on Earth (in Megan’s opinion): fresh coconut meat, a beer (for Megan), swiss cheese, and saltines. In front of the ocean, with good books. We win!

We hung around for a few hours (reading, relaxing, napping, eating coconut very slowly), and eventually had dinner, which was a mishmosh of everything: asparagus frittata, ridiculous vegetable soup, and bread. And margarine (halfvarine to the Dutch).

Soon after dinner, Wendy, Megan, and Tal vowed that tonight they would swim with the tarpon that show up by the dock every night to fish in the porch lights. They showed up, on schedule, at about 9:00, and Megan was instantly terrified. We all suited up and descended the stairs to the ocean, keeping our eyes on the giant fish, whose eyes were gleaming red in the light. We pushed off the ladder into the water. It was very murky, dark, and cold, and at first we saw nothing—but then Megan saw a giant shape emerging from the murky water, and screamed her head off despite herself, which scared the tarpon away for a moment. Wendy said, “Where the hell is it?” and then shouted, “Oh my god, it’s right here!” This undid Megan completely, who scampered for the steps and out of the water; she vows to tackle her phobia again tomorrow night. Tal is irritated because she didn’t even see the fish, and since she and Megan have a standing bet on the tarpons’ size (Megan thinks it’s bigger than Tal; Tal says no way), it’s important that she catch a glimpse of it sometime. Tomorrow night, then. It’s gonna be great.

A bunch of tarpon. Megan thinks they are incredibly beautiful and runs like hell when she meets them in dark corners.

Megan was feeling a little shaken after so much screaming, but Tal made us all an incredible dessert: a milkshake with chocolate, peanut butter, hazelnut spread, more chocolate pieces, coconut milk, and shredded coconut. It was divine. Now we are here, blogging. And now we are done. Bye for now!

Megan overslept this morning. This is nothing new.

When she was done oversleeping, we all went for a snorkel at a beach called Windsock because it’s right across from the airport (every time a plane flew overhead, Megan thought we were about to be hit by a boat). It was pretty, and we saw some things—notably, a scorpionfish, which is quite poisonous and not particularly pretty (as opposed to, say, the evil lionfish), but they are hard to find and their camouflage is so impressive that they’re interesting. Also, when they swim, they stretch out pretty, textural red fins that look a bit like wings. Megan has been noticing over the past few years that whenever you see a motley collection of predators hovering over the rubbled seafloor—a group of coneys, jacks, trumpetfish, and hogfish, say—it means that they’re following an eel that is hunting, waiting for the eel to flush critters out of holes. This theory led her to several eels today, which no one else saw, so she feels a little insane but also like an eel-whisperer.

After getting home, Tal was in the mood to make sandwiches (she’s a wonderful person), so she made ham and cheese sandwiches for Megan and Grandpa (even though ham is against her religion) and grilled cheese for Grandma. She made herself leftover pasta. She is very industrious. Quick cooking tip from Tal and Wendy: always spread a little bit of mayonnaise on the outsides of your grilled sandwiches before you cook them to make them crispy. If you don’t like mayonnaise, we don’t care. You should do it anyway.

We set off in the early afternoon for another boat dive. On yesterday’s boat, there was a friendly Jewish-looking fellow named Dave who was wearing a shirt that said: “Wanted: Schrödinger’s Cat, Dead and Alive.” Megan remarked that it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, which may have been a slight exaggeration. Today before our dive Dave remarked that he was surprised that anyone got his shirt, so Megan set about explaining the Schrödinger’s Cat issue to Tal, who had never heard of it before. Tal, to Megan’s slight surprise, was actually interested, which delighted her. As we headed out for our dive (towards the boat, onto the boat, away in the boat), this precipitated a long discussion about scientists with umlauts in their names, and their various paradoxes and theorems. Schrödinger’s Cat was fully described, dead and alive. Next, Megan attempted to describe Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which she may have botched a bit because she doesn’t fully understand it herself. Much later on, we moved on to a discussion of Erdös numbers. Overall, it was a very sciencey, umlauty day. While we were busy discussing science and umlauts, a large brown bird—a booby, we think, which is funny—flew behind and above the boat, managing to keep up fabulously, and waiting for the boat to kick up whole schools of flying fish, which the booby then chased after. It was miraculous. At about 25 mph, in the middle of the ocean, we had fish skimming over the water on all sides, and a big beautiful bird hurrying after them. It was a ridiculous entourage.

This is very close to what we saw today: a brown booby waiting to pounce on lunch. What a ridiculous-looking bird.

Once we got geared up and into the water, our dive commenced. We meant to make it to the salt pier—the huge dock where barges moor up to take loads of salt, which are harvested on Bonaire, elsewhere, wherever. Lots of cool fish like to live under docks. Unfortunately, we were too slow to make it to the pier, and had to turn back. But still, we found a hawksbill turtle, and Tal found a lionfish, although she didn’t kill it like Ralf would have. She’s nice and doesn’t own a spear. Sadly. She says. At the very end of the dive (it turned out to be the very end, anyway), Wendy decided to drill Tal on some dive safety skills. This attempt went a bit haywire. Wendy approached Tal and made the hand-signal that means, “Hello there, old chum! I am completely out of air. We have about thirty seconds until I drown, so why don’t you hand me that spare regulator you’ve got and we’ll see how I fare?” (Diving hand signals can mean much more than you think). Or she tried to, anyway—she made the signal sort of wonky and wrong. Tal wasn’t quite sure what was happening, so in a spasm of confusion gave Wendy the regulator out of her own mouth. Wendy, apparently, then completely lost her mind, and handed Tal her spare regulator. (Neither of them, to remind you, was actually out of air.) The two of them, utterly confused and unable, due to water, to speak to one another, ended up bobbing to the surface, where Megan quickly joined them to find her two family members completely useless with laughter, and Tal shouting, “I’m so confused!” Once Wendy explained what had happened, Megan joined them in laughing, and vowed quietly to herself never to trust either of them in an underwater emergency. (Not really. They’re usually very capable.)

Tal and Megan had their now-ritual after-boat-dive snorkel (which involves swimming under the boat many times, and harassing divers). Then we headed back to Bruce’s. On the way back, Tal, to Megan’s extreme delight, asked for more interesting science factoids, so Megan explained how all of our atoms were originally in stars, where they were made out of lighter elements, and that every person’s atoms have been shuffled around so much throughout history that all of us probably have about a billion atoms that were in Shakespeare’s body. Tal digested this information for a moment, then put her hand on Megan’s shoulder, looked her in the eye, and said, very gravely, “I’m giving you my atoms.” Megan is pretty sure Tal is the funniest person who ever lived, even funnier than Shakespeare.

We also spent a while discussing palindromes. Here is our favorite: “Able was I, ere I saw Elba.” This is something Napoleon might have said had he had a penchant for palindromes.

We headed back to the apartment to ready ourselves for dinner with friends—a couple named Ben and Laura who are old friends with Grandma and Grandpa, and with Linda, who was our divemaster today and has been our friend for a very long time now. She is, to use a phrase that Tal and Wendy coined the other day, “an awesome bitch.” You have to be pretty awesome to achieve awesome bitch status, let me tell you. (Tal thinks Megan is an awesome bitch. Megan thinks the same about Tal.) Dinner was tasty and overpriced, but that’s OK. Linda regaled us with stories of her travels, most recently to Italy (everywhere in Italy, we swear), Amsterdam, and Eastern Africa. We went back to Ben and Laura’s house for delicious cake, and Linda continued regaling us with stories, this time about her experiences as the operator of a recompression tank (the thing that they put Bends-sufferers in. We don’t need to go into details, they were horrifying—but we enjoyed them nonetheless).

Now we are home, writing this blog, and we are about to go to bed. Megan will probably go outside to say hello to the ocean at least once more. Tal really should go to bed, because it’s nearing 11:30, and despite the advanced age of her brain, she is in fact only twelve. We keep having to remind people of this. Bye for now!