Tuesday Morning Island Report

View of Middle and West Anacapa from East Anacapa Island and, in the distance, Santa Cruz Island

It was actually yesterday that I went to Anacapa Island. As a part of my continuing training to be a Channel Islands volunteer naturalist, I observed what leading a hike there entails. (Observed is not quite the right word since I still had to climb the 157 steps from the boat to get there.)

Some of the steps....

Just in case you're already making your Mother's Day plans for next year, a trip to Anacapa is an inspired choice. At this time of year, western gulls are nesting there and you can experience an apt description of motherhood. Depending on your particular take, you'll hear the gulls describe their experience pretty much non-stop by calling out OW! or WOW! every time you come close to a nest which is what happens with every step.

Gull describing motherhood (of course it could be a male since they look alike)

Mother's Day bouquet (Giant coreopsis, endemic to the Channel Islands)

Fancy nest with a little shade

Every white speck in this photo is a gull

Gulls eggs

Typically there are three eggs in a nest. Why three? Maybe because the fledgling survival rate for gulls on Anacapa is 40%. Maybe because when the Chumash people were stoping over there back when they traveling the islands, it was so they could harvest one egg from each nest without putting the gull population at risk. Yesterday my mentor said that if a nest has fewer than two eggs, a gull will often replace the missing egg with a rock.

In the next few weeks the island will be hopping with tiny puffball hatchlings and the gulls will be even more raucous as they protect their chicks.

Monday Morning Beach Report

Sometimes turning around and looking back is just as beautiful as facing forward.

And remember to look up.

Saturday Beach Report and Big News!

It's hard to say which was more beautiful today--morning or evening.

As for me, I'm now a certified Channel Islands National Park/Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary volunteer naturalist. I've loved this place since the minute I moved here six years ago, and now I get to talk about it on whale watch cruises and at community events. Eventually, I hope to get certified to lead hikes on the islands. And I hope that the islands will find their way into my writing.

Yes. This is a post about divorce.

Leaving is often a melancholy business. Ten years ago I left the Vermont Studio Center for the first time, and tomorrow I leave it after my second residency here. When I left a decade ago, I was newly divorced and happy to have cut myself off from the life I’d been living. I hadn’t yet established my new life, and I was free but also in a sort of free fall. I spent all of February here that year, and it snowed like it might never stop. I felt buffered by the whiteness as if I was in the blanched room of an asylum, taking some cure meant to heal me. The cold held itself against me, and I held it back, hoping for numbness.

I forgot all this until I arrived back here four weeks ago. And then during this very snowy March I felt these things come back into my body. Remembrances of this sort can serve as a gauge, and it was fulfilling to sense the needle tipping toward full this residency. I’m all right now. More than all right. But I wasn’t then.

Oddly, the Someone reached out to me while I was here---on a perfunctory matter of post-divorce business. That was a gauge too. Winter’s power over us can be absolute during a snowfall that shuts everything down. An adversary’s power can feel absolute too.