Baby green sea turtles hatch on the beaches of Baja California on the Sea of Cortez, hump their way toward the water, and vanish in the surf. They vanish for five years, before they return to those beaches to lay their own eggs. In his achingly lyrical Telling Our Way to the Sea, Aaron Hirsch describes how some details of their mysterious pelagic lives—those missing five years—were uncovered, with a surprising discovery.
You see, green sea turtles are herbivores. They eat algae and seaweeds and sea-salads when they’re observable in the Sea of Cortez. So when someone thought to run tests on the leading (newer) edge of a turtle-shell scute—the area where new shell grows—and compare it to the older back edge of the same scute, biologists were shocked. You can tell, from isotopes in the tissue, how far up the food chain an animal is—if it’s at the first level, eating plants, or if it’s eating something that’s eating something that’s eating plants. And these tests on the turtle shell showed that in its earlier, oceanic life, it had NOT been an herbivore.
I realize you’re not finding this shocking—but for the biologists who thought they “knew” this absolutely basic fact about sea turtles, it was an idea-overturning discovery.
I’m in the midst of a revolutionary psychological change myself—the shift from planning to move aboard a boat within a few years to… not. It’s hitting me in a hundred different small ways, how much I’d had that move always in mind. It’s shockingly still, now, inside my head, without the countdown always ticking down to that move.
As we approached home from an out-of-town doctor visit yesterday, my mind did another “huh. It’s HOME.” It never stopped being home, except (halfway) in my head, where I clearly had one foot out the door. (Does the mind have feet? Apparently mine does.)
I look around the house and see things I’d mentally tagged as “get rid of”—when we downsized to the boat. I realized today that we no longer have to look for a storage unit near the marina, for those things we neither wanted to get rid of nor take with us.
When Jon reminded me that my car is just about due for its oil change, it dawned on me that now we won’t have reason to sell it in three years. We’re close to paying the boat off anyway, but last weekend I mentally calculated how much more we can be putting into savings each month, once we’re done with both boat payment and mooring fees.
We mentioned to each other, this morning, that we can discontinue our search for a portable-sized wood-pellet smoker to replace Jon’s beloved Traeger onboard the boat. My carefully-curated boat-book-collection has been unpacked onto shelves in the house—and the titles I opted to leave behind for our buyer (Storm Tactics, The Capable Cruiser, The Offshore Medic) speak to the shift in what we foresee (and what we don’t) in our near future.
It seems I’m still “noticing,” a hundred times a day, in a hundred different ways, that we’ve made a drastic shift in our plans. We’ve begun to talk about sailing instead along Italy’s Amalfi coast, or the azures surrounding the islands of Greece… places we could enjoy without the lengthy sail to GET there.
One of the projects I’d begun with an eye toward moving-aboard-the-boat is digitizing all of my photos and journals into the safety of my favorite real estate,The Cloud. I haven’t made much headway on the photos—but I’ve already typed up nearly half of my 45-years’-worth of journals—and enjoyed revisiting these slices of my past, in no particular order.
As I transform half a century’s worth of Story to a format I can carry on the phone in my back pocket, I’m liking the idea of carrying my own autobiography on my back like the turtle. I’m imagining journals in rows of scrolls down my back, like the encasement of the turtle’s shell… the shape of me outlined by my past…. the shape of me so much moulded by my past.
Like Biology’s nomenclature of living things, my photo-and-journal organization has a methodology with an internal logic to it, the largest categories breaking down the periods delineated by my different names. Twenty-two years with my father’s name. Twelve years with my ex-husband’s name. Seven years with my late husband’s name. Ten years with my keeper-husband’s name. It’s easy for me to glance at a photo, or even read a couple sentences, and know in which segment of my life that artifact fits. They feel like different lives, almost, those different segments.
Yet I read a name, and the face (unpictured for decades) flashes into view in the full flush of a smile. I read these journals as I type them, and I begin to realize that they weren’t written by different Me’s—they were written by Me, in different stages and circumstances… and all of those episodes built to Me, now.
All of those stories fit to my back… but the shell of them isn’t a constraint . Even the turtle’s hard shell, where he carries his history, grows to fit his new chapters. We’ve made a fundamental shift… and the next chapter opens!
Kana's Chronicles 
A joy, as always.
LikeLike