Images from Magdalena Bay

   We rounded Cape San Lucas at the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula yesterday around noon.  It was a little strange.  Houses, condominiums and hotels cling to the cliffs and beaches of the cape as thickly as intertidal life on the deserted beaches to the north.  We are happy though to be able to tie up to a dock, and to catch up on sleep and correspondence!  Tomorrow we head north for the first time since we left home. Onwards to La Paz, where we'll pick up Lindsay, Sophie, and friends for holiday-making. 

Snowy Egret, mangrove estuary

About a Boat

Okay, I can see why a blog about a sailing trip might eventually talk about the boat.  Circadia is a J120.  It is 40 feet long, 12 feet, three inches wide, with a 7 foot draft. It is a little unusual to cruise a J120--they are mainly known as race boats. She is fast and light and has an extendable bow sprit from which a spinnaker can be launched easily.  In high winds, like we had one night coming down the west coast of Baja, she just keeps on sailing, but tends to surf over chaotic seas rather than dig in as a heavier boat would.  I have to admit, I'm still not used to these kind of conditions and still feel like I've survived a near death experience...But back to the boat: unlike most race boats, the interior is pretty, (white, with wood trim) and comfortable.  There's a double berth in the fore peak and also aft.  The salon has cupboards and lots of book shelves.

the fore peak; note sprit (spinnaker pole)

 

The main salon

The Galley is small, but everything is in arms reach! There's a two burner propane stove with oven. We don't use the oven much, although lately, sailing in remote areas, Kim bakes bread. Our eating habits are a little different from home. Less red meat, more fish (which has been easy to get from local fisherman on the west coast of the peninsula).  Hardly any butter, lots of olive oil; very little sweet stuff, plenty of wine (which we loaded under the fore peak boards in San Diego).  We bought an ingenious little 12 volt fridge before we left the US, which to our delight is just tall enough for a bottle of white wine. 

Kim in the galley

Living in the Light

San Juan Capistrano, Edgar Payne, early 1900's

It has rained twice since we left Vancouver Island in mid-September. At first the blue skies were like drinking champagne every day. Eventually I longed for rain. Some mornings I would wake up and imagine the sound of the snapping shrimp under the dock was the light patter of drops on the skylight, but then I’d stick my head out the hatch and there was the San Diego sun, sometimes veiled with sea fog, but climbing resolutely out of it by mid-morning.
I used to love fall. You know that old “My sorrow when she’s here with me thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be…” But in recent years my sorrow moved in around mid-November and by January even she was getting kind of pissed. So I was pleased to check out of a whole winter of rain, which where I live would put everything under three feet of water if it didn’t run off or evaporate.
And it’s not exactly like I miss it now. It just feels weird. I start thinking about how much of what we are is where we come from. For instance, what would Neil Young have been like if he didn’t come from that town in North Ontario, where he had nothing to do but stare at the blue windows behind the stars? Would he have felt so helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless, if he grew up in San Diego?
Maybe Jesse Winchester, shivering in his Montreal flat, put his finger on it when he wrote that song to a lover, fled to California: “if you are never cold girl, who’s gonna keep you warm, you’ll take the sun for granted, you’ll run from every storm.”
Still I can see the appeal. I recently went to a show of California paintings from the early 1900’s. I don’t know what California painters are painting now, most contemporary painting seems kind of tortured, but back then they were called the California Impressionists, painting landscapes (which would be considered sentimental now) bathed in that gorgeous light. I think they were happy.


Monterey Cypress, Edgar Payne, early 1900's


Even the California poets seem less morose than most. Kay Ryan, the Californian who was recently named American poet Laureate writes:

“The Best of It”

However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.

I’m sure people suffer anxiety in California. Judging from the cosmetic surgery advertisements in local magazines, at least some of it seems to go along with trying to look as good as possible in skimpy clothes and the unforgiving light. But let me just say (except for perhaps the homeless men who seemed to inhabit every public bench, which is another, sadder story) I didn’t see much evidence of it.
Which brings me to my final question. Do we each get a standard amount of happiness? Do we either take it measured doses, as we might living in sunny latitudes. Or do we use it up in spurts, running on empty in our northern winters, and guzzling it down in the summer?
Me, I guess I’m too old to give up my existential angst very easily. It may have been doped by all this sunshine, but I can feel it, like some desert plant, biding its time, waiting for the rain.

PS

Circadia at anchor, Turtle Bay, Baja

We left San Diego a week ago and are now sailing down the west coast of Baja (which is long and mostly deserted). Many wonders along the way though: pods of bottle-nosed dolphins, estuaries full of northern breeding ducks, grebes, geese on their wintering grounds; my first ever sighting of a Burrowing Owl in the wild.
Plan to be in Cabo in a week or so…

An Idiot's Guide to Evolution

“You said you needed more space, more time. Whole dimensions!”

Protagonist to her boyfriend, who has broken up with her. (From a novel in progress, by a writer whose name I have lost, Banff, 1999)

I think there are some things that the human mind is just not capable of grasping: how almost 50% of Americans voted for McCain/Palin, how a remote control really works, and deep time.
I guess it’s not our fault, at least the time part. We’ve buried it under human clutter, roads, houses, malls, sports arenas. Inside them our clocks are set to tick away in bite-sized pieces. We think in fragments of the day, maybe weeks, months, sometimes, though we resist it (look how we ignore history and are in denial about the future) years.
There’s a clock in Strasbourg with a gear that turns once every 1200 years. That’s more like it! You could sit and watch that gear making its infinitesimal progress and contemplate time. Or maybe we should all wear a geological watch, along with our Timex. Then, while we were obsessing about how quickly our kids grow up, how much we’ve aged, or how there’s never enough time to do everything we have to, we could look down at our wrist and notice the millennial hand hasn’t moved.
O.K., speaking of time, you have things to do today, so, where’s this going? This, of course, is about the Galapagos. Because since getting back I am not in culture, but rather in time shock. There are some landscapes that pull us back into the flow of deep time. Perhaps even before we understood how vast time is, we have been drawn to them. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion (which I picked up in the Houston airport) the party of young people (including the sensitive, intelligent heroine and the man of excellent wealth and character she agonizes over) take the air in Lyme. They went to the sands, to watch the flowing of the tide, which a fine south-easterly breeze was bringing in with the grandeur which so flat a shore admitted.
It is as if certain places quiet our minds, give us a little escape from the relentless micro-timing of life. Places where the land is opened, where we can see its bones: seashores, mountains, volcanic islands.
In the Galapagos the landscape is still being made by an oceanic hot spot. Moving through the islands, from newest to oldest lava is like moving through time, on stages where everything is laid out clearly for us, so that there is no way for us to misunderstand: here is the land, the sea, the tides and currents, here is the life that has arrived and been fashioned through time to thrive here: an idiot’s guide to evolution.
Still it takes mental effort to comprehend how a perfectly ordinary cormorant becomes flightless, sporting tiny stubs of wings, how an iguana, unlike other self-respecting lizards in the world, takes to the sea, its face becoming pug for grazing marine algae, its nostrils spritzing brine from glands which extract the extra salt from their blood.
For some people the effort seems to be too much. Here in the US nearly half the citizens (I would guess the same half that voted for McCain) do not believe in evolution, but rather that the world was created by God, in something like its present form, within the past 10,000 years.
This strikes me as odd. The world didn’t come to an end when we found we weren’t at the centre of the universe. The faithful simply re-arranged God’s cosmos and carried on.
I guess it’s harder for us to give up on ourselves as God’s special favourites than earth being his special planet.
Darwin knew what his theory meant. And he was a reluctant messenger. He waited years to publish. He lost his own faith. But he found consolation in the elegance of what lay spread before him and wrote “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
As for his fellow man, he wrote in a letter to the zoologist Asa Gray, “I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.”
I'm thinking a pair of boots this colour some day. Maybe the next time I'm in Montreal--that wonderful Greek boot maker (Imperial Boots) on rue de Bleury....

Obamaland

We arrived back in San Diego from Catalina just in time for Obama's election speech. And what a wonderful piece of work it was! There is a palpable sense of relief here. Most of the people we know are Democrats. Interesting aside, along the vein of "differences between Americans and Canadians"--Americans say "I am a Democrat" where as Canadians would say "I vote Liberal, or I belong to the Liberal Party". (Another aside, our friend Tracy was shocked that one of our major parties called itself the Liberal Party--liberal is a charged word here, somewhat like socialist.)

I think people here of all (two) stripes are happy the election is over. We are only sorry that Sarah Palin has faded back into Alaska and the spoofs have come to an end.

I'm off to the Galapagos Islands, leading a trip for Hidden Places and Maple Leaf Adventures. See you in a couple of weeks.

Images of Catalina Island

Catalina Tiles













together but apart, waiting for the tour bus.


detail, Bronze door, Wrigley Memorial

The "Casino". Actually a movie theatre and ballroom, built in 1928.

The Company of Women

Tile Mural "The Casino" 1928, Catalina Island

I read the other day that a UK magazine recently canvassed its readers for words and phrases which women use (and which men would be unlikely to use). They included: pilates, body image, book club, empowerment, emotional intelligence, kitten heels, and pomegranate.
I went through the list carefully. I have to say I believe that I have used each of these words myself lately with the exception of kitten heels. Though I did note the reference in something I was reading.
I love my husband. I also like him; I find him quirky, funny, and interesting. We share many passions (beyond our endlessly absorbing children) including sailing, hiking, birding, reading (maybe minus poetry on his side), and music (minus Wagner on mine).
Before we left for this year away, the most common question women asked me was “are you nervous about spending so much time together?” At first I was surprised. It seemed like our lives were so busy, especially before we left, that we didn’t get enough time together.
We have been gone for 6 weeks now. And here’s the thing. I’m not tired of his company. Sometimes I need to be alone and so I just take a day off, go wandering, or painting, stop in a café and scrawl in my journal for awhile.
But last week I spent an entire morning lost in blogs, reading about the joys of Clairol Cream hair dye, a great thrift shop coup (which included a pair of plaid mules with kitten heels) and the anguish of failing to conceive after the last of many IVF attempts. As I sat at the computer, tears streaming down my face, I realized what I was missing—the company of women.
While in San Diego I have the temporary but perfect yoga class. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m short on women, but I feel like I could be the best friend of anyone in the class. We could go out for coffee, talk about jobs and children; then we would discuss books and the last great movie we saw, and maybe, eventually share some secrets. But of course the women in yoga have their own lives and mostly they rush off after class to their busy days.
Which leaves me to blogs. I always seem to come late to technology, being preoccupied with pre-industrial crafts. So if you know this already, read ahead. But blogs are amazing. I first started reading one regularly, the wonderful materfamilias writes. What entranced me was how the medium conveys the rich texture of ordinary life. Not that Materfamilias is ordinary—I can unequivocally state that as she is the only blogger I follow whom I actually know. Through her blog I have found a community of stylish, clever, worldly, anxious, ardent women. And, conversely, I feel the presence of my own community of women (because, let’s face it, it looks like “blog” is one of those words women are more likely to use than men) when I think of them reading my own posts.

Blogs I follow:
Materfamilias Writes
La Belette Rouge