Giant Pacific Octopus

The first octopus that I handled lived in the ocean about 7 miles north of Horseshoe Bay BC.  My old green 67 firebird was only about 4 years old at that time and I left it up near the top of the hill.  With its overpowered engine and light rear end - it could never hope to reach the bottom of the hill and return.  So we had to carry our heavy diving equipment over the railway tracks and all the way down to the ocean’s edge.  I was working for the Aquarium then and I enjoyed my work of exploring and understanding the underwater world before us.  I put all my SCUBA gear on making sure that my air was open and turned on.  There was just my mask to spit in, smear and fit on my hooded head so that condensation on the inside of the lens would not impair my vision.  It was warm outside and the gear was heavy so I stepped into the Ocean and merged with it as it began to find the open seams of my ‘farmer john’ wet suit.  I stood chest deep in the ocean at the base of a steep talus slope that ran from the rail tracks 200 m down to the ocean where I stood.

I looked down through my mask and Watched part of the seabed move.  I was surprised to see an octopus at my feet and, being the first in the water, I needed to prove an octopus was there in such shallow water.  I plastered the eight legged cephalopod onto my black neoprene chest and stood above the water to say 'hey look at this!'- Who needs to dive to see things here!  That was the first giant pacific octopus I had ever played with.

Later I learned that slurp guns and large syringes filled with chlorine were useful to tools to disgruntle, dislodge and urge octopus to change color and begin to move away.  I also found out that octopus can really only be handled if they are caught on the move because their suctioned hold is just too powerful to dislodge.  Their homes are usually quite far below low tide and are often marked by a pile of Dungeness crab parts – one of their favorite menu items.  If you can stir an octopus to move it can be easily bagged for live transport to the aquarium for holding or display.  Back then we used plastic garbage buckets with air stones bubbling to move them.  Now that I look back on that time I am glad that we were not looking for octopus to collect that day.  I so enjoy sharing with living things where ever they are – and then just to let them be.

The Wolf

                                                                                                                Google image - Wolf
In July, 1981, I slept on the banks of the Kitlope River. The river sand I slept on was 40 km upstream from the Gardiner Canal at the mouth of this ancient, natural watershed on the Central Coast of BC. I still remember that day clearly. I was far upstream on the Kitlope River in an 18' aluminum jet boat powered by twin 90 hp engines and carrying a full 45gal drum of fuel. The boat was heavy sitting in the water and it took a long time to get it on the step. We travelled upstream in the jet boat for several hours that day and penetrated well into an unseen and unfamiliar area of the river for us. I found myself in a large shallow (8" deep) side channel pond area that just offered no way out.


When a jet boat is on the plane it only draws a few inches of water but when it falls off the ‘step’ it draws about 20 inches. I lost the turn in a skid that grounded out as I was bringing the boat around to get back out into deeper water. The boat came off the step and stuck tight in the sand - like a hot match dropped onto cake icing. Not a flicker of hope to float. "Oh well, it is near mid-day, the warmth will melt the glacier in the headwaters and the stream will swell as it does every day. Then we can push it out the last 20 m or so of shallow water to the mainstem." The next time this hopefull thought finds my head another voice will knowingly add: "Sometimes it happens and sometimes not."


Our boat was sitting tight on the sand while we waited for the river to rise through the afternoon heat and softly float us back out into the mainstem. We waited but the river dropped more and more every hour. A headwater rain storm we never saw must have swollen the river in the early morning and granted us entry into the sandy side channel far beyond its normal hospitality. After we waited a while, it became clear that the daily rise and fall of this summer river wasn't going to float us out. We slept the night on the sandbar, in our waders. Two of us, a hundred miles from humans, under so many stars, in moist air.


In the early morning, the boat was still stranded. I don't know when it happened but sometime during the night a lone wolf silently visited us. We could tell that without any doubt. The unmistakable straight line track of a single wolf’s large paws paralleled river's margin until the point it reached us. Then, paw prints diverted to the impression of our bodies on the moist and wrinkled crush of sand where we had slept. We were sniffed with interest and then left alone in our sleep. I love the wolf and the way they forge straight lines across nature.

A Glacial River

                                                                                                                          Google image - Kitlope River back channel
A glacial river gives to my mind the picture of a strong muscled belly. One that moves in and out with the draw and push of steady breathing that rises and falls in a strong summer rhythm. A stream’s baseline rhythm is only broken by heavy rainfall events. Localized rainfall, upstream in the headwaters will swell the main stem while an overhead rain swells every little tributary nearby. In its soft summer rest, a river drops at night in the cool air and swells through a warm afternoon with cool green melt water. One needs to be aware of this pattern of rising and falling water - especially, when travelling by boat. It is one of those things that someone can warn you about but if the river ever catches you by surprise and takes your boat away or strands it high and dry in the wilderness, even just one time, then you will never, ever, loose this lesson.


Once you've figured out how to keep your boat safe and floating on the river while you are away from it exploring - then you might notice river's breath. A river breathes is downstream in the morning and upstream in the afternoon. Cool heavy air that slides off a glacier's back floods down the river's valley during the early morning. This is the pleasant morning "Out" breath. It creates a cool downstream breeze that carries the smell of bare rock and glacier dust just barely over the flow of cold, clear, green water. It breathes mist and dew onto the glass of a quiet morning dream. There are no bugs in the early morning air but fish hold in the clear morning water pointing with purpose into the current and unknowingly, into the valley’s wind.


The "In" breath changes everything. It draws the warm moist air from the estuary up the valley, changing the direction of the wind and carrying the rich summer smell of sun on marsh mixed with wet river silt. The kind of summer silt that sticks and stays slippery on the bottom of work boots and marks your clothes forever. Waves of insects fly and bite or nuisance in sequence as the valley warms. They come in waves, tied to loose schedules, first the deer flies, then black flies, then horse flies, mosquitoes and finally no-see-um's. Each species has enough time to be noticed and cursed. As the river breathes "in" this warm and scented air penetrates upstream and the river rises with melt water. Returning salmon begin to move up the swelling stream. Their nose into the current and the valley wind's steady watch at their back, never really makes their journey easier. I watch it all happen, just the way it is, trusting and certain in every moment, just like the belly of a sleeping dog. This harmony of nature touches something deep inside of me.

The Bear

The bear has always found me needing to notice it and offering my interest toward it. I have always lived under nature’s light and because of that have often met the bear. He is not, for the most part, what others have storied him to be. For most people, the bear is to be feared and can only smile with dangerous teeth and claws. The odd thing is that; for a meek and careful person I do not fear the bear any more than I fear myself. I respect him (or her) as a large, powerful and magnificent creature. However, in these present days there are many different circumstances of meeting a bear. 


The wild and natural bear expects to be admired and respected. They eat grass to distraction in the lowlands when they first wake and then move to higher elevations during the summer in search of berries and finally they settle in the lowlands where they store winter protein and fats that are brought to them by returning salmon. These bears have their own life and their own busy path to walk. They only ask for respect and space.


Garbage bears, however, know our smell and resent their dependence on us for food and sometimes for shelter near our neighborhoods. They have no choice but to trust us for their safety. They fear us and they need us. Like matches and gasoline those two things just don't ever find comfort with each other. Bears that live near people have seldom learned love from us... Draw care quickly from your mind when you meet these bears - because you never know what they see in your smile. You never know how they will answer your presence.

Killer Whale

Killer Whale
My earliest experiences with whales go back to the time when I was 4 or 5 years old and was sitting in an old reliable lapstrake (or clinker built) boat out on the ocean fishing for salmon with my mother and sometimes my brother. I remember the contented sound of the ocean waves against that hand built wooden hull. I remember all of the simple dreams that fueled the evening summer sun as it watched over us.

Occasionally, a pod of killer whales came through the area where our boat was. We pulled in our lines as the fishing was always over when such a thing happened. Even though fishing went flat, as salmon switched their minds instantly from predator to prey, the whales brought their own excitement and energy to the world we sat in. They seemed bigger than the life I knew but somehow seemed perfectly scaled and so naturally suited to the sea they lived in. When we returned to the land from fishing, people onshore always asked if we were frightened to have been among unconcerned whales on the open sea. It never occurred in my mind to be frightened of them. Being in the middle of the whales was always an exciting gift – a miracle in my life. It never never soared above the landscape of my mind that 10 years later I would become friends with just such a whale.

I remember the fishing clothes that my mother used to wear and the gentle summer that surrounded us in that place. That cranky, strong-willed single cylinder engine was always enough to get us where we needed to go – into the wind or into the sea or away from the storm or out from the middle of the whales. That engine was a good and dependable friend that always seemed unafraid. It is amazing for me to remember how happy I was and how unconcerned I was to just be there. Somewhere along the way I learned to worry about the engine and the boat and the waves and whales and the children in the boat.

Anyway, a good many things came to me from the universe that I first met in that summer boat. I have built boats, I am a fisheries biologist, I learned to dive in the ocean, I came to love the ocean. I was one of the first humans to approach with caring, a killer whale and one of the first humans to touch a living whale. Later I would learn that ‘Killer Whale’ was the English name for them but really; it was a mistranslation from the Scandinavian name for them that more accurately meant ‘blubber chopper’ or 'whale killer'. That made sense to me.

Transient Killer whales can hunt like wolves in a pack and are well organized and social in that activity. I have watched them pursue and take down Grey Whales in the wild. Two whales on each pectoral fin, two whales on the tail and the last whale casting his body over the larger whale’s blow hole. I have learned through these struggles that life's grip is just as strong in a krill as it is in a whale until the time comes to lay down its well used body. Life is powerful beyond our words.

For the most part; killer whales I have known are salmon eaters. Their mouth is so very sensitive – I have watched them in captivity come up under a duck in the whale pool and take the duck or seagull into their mouth and swim around the pool underwater two or three times before coming up to the surface to open their mouth and let the bird fly away – in what was probably a very scared and bewildered state. When I think about it now, they should not have 18 year olds training whales any more than 60 year olds should parent children. Sometimes the differences between generations can be larger than the differences between species. I see the whale differently now than I did as a child but its miracle remains unchanged.

Along with killer whales I also worked with pacific white-sided dolphins, narwhals, belugas, stellar sea lions, harbor seals, sea otters and other marine mammals at the Vancouver Aquarium in the 1970’s. I have lots of memories of the specific personalities of the many animals I worked with and shared myself with. Some of these animals I connected with even more closely than our family dog.

I never realized until this moment just how much has come to me from the time I spent sitting in that boat during long summer evenings. I am grateful that my mother did not teach me to fear those things that I have so come to love. All the things I wondered about All the questions that brushed close to my heart have come to be answered over time in my life. I still find new questions every day but one thing that I know to be true is that Dolphins are social animals – in such a more natural way than humans sometimes are.

Spider Web

Spider Web

Fall has sealed the ground with heavy morning dew. Leaves are changing their colors so the frost can find them in play. And, after a full summer of practice, spiders spin their webs with grandeur. Have you seen one? Big and perfect at this time of year - as if they were made just for display. These spiders and their webs make me think of confident, solitary fisherman with their well used nets - their boats hidden near shore. During the early fall, morning dew sometimes strings itself like pearls along the sticky strands of web - outlining and fouling these invisible traps. Just watch one for a while and you may find a complete world within it. There is enough truth near a web to keep a whole cycle of life turning through triumph and tragedy without effort.

Spiders construct with 2 types of threads. The first threads are structural and radiate out from a center. These are the thickest of a spider's strands and are stronger than steel for their size. These structural strands are not very elastic and not sticky at all. Then the fabric of the web itself is traced around and around the structural strands in an increasing circle with a sticky thin thread that is very elastic and functions to absorb energy with out breaking in a violent but small scale struggle. With a blade of grass you can call the spider out. Tickle a strand, as if you were a struggling insect - caught in the web... Watch for the spider to sense life's argument against death through a single tending foot on the web. If the struggle is scaled just right then the spider will rush toward its web's promise. If the web becomes aged or broken or fouled by morning dew, a spider may eat its own web and thus carry it away to spin and set out somewhere else - for although spiders have eight legs, they have no pockets in their pants.

Redwood Trees

I listened to David Whyte speak at Mt. Madonna in California. I love what I learned about redwood trees by watching them in the fog and soft air during the breaks we had. I like the way they stand so still in the quiet morning mist. I like the way that mist condenses on the leaves into large droplets that fall to the ground around the drip-line of the tree. I like the way that young redwoods spring up as shoots from the roots of the parent tree and form a perfect circle around it – right at the drip-line where the water, distilled from the mist, falls to the ground to nurture the new young shoots. One day the taller parent tree may be lost to lightening, disease or age and when it is taken back by the earth just a circle of trees will remain.  That is the origin of a grove.

It made me think of the questions that the workshop acknowledged. The questions that are rooted at our own edges of knowing and of comfort remind me of the circle of trees that establish around the parent tree – right where the edges of the tree that stands meets everything that the tree is not. One day the parent tree may be gone forever but genetically identical trees will remain firmly rooted at exactly the place where the parent tree's own raindrops imagined them. Just like one day we may stand in that place where our own important questions have already taken root.

September Morning

I don’t really remember my walk to the lake. I just remember the irritation of encountering unseen cobwebs on that early autumn morning – strong silken strands wrapping around my head and across my face all needing to be pulled away. Early September mornings are often like that at the beginning of a warm and dry day. Invisible cobwebs fastened between objects with care and designed to snare the last of summer’s insects. Part of life’s gravity is its need to survive winter’s night and to save the land from having to remember things like spiders from past years. Maybe the irritation was more the spiders’ at having lost their carefully crafted webs than it was mine at having to brush them away from my face. But some of summer’s last insects had unknowingly been given freedom for one more day of living by my passage along the path. I know that this season is busy for nature as she works thoughtlessly and automatically to create and rebalance and maintain the space for all life that can be accommodated and to open new opportunities for life that has the imagination and the will to experiment with its own survival.

It really doesn’t matter but the experience of walking through cobweb after cobweb dominated my walk to the lake that morning. Head down, shoulders scrunched-up and a walking stick raised ahead and in front of my face with all my attention focused on detecting strands of web across my face. Even that discomfort never kept me from arriving at the open margin of the lake. It just kept me from sensing the world beyond my own body. All this just made my arrival at the lake that much more special. This world has changed in 2 weeks. I am a lone human here today and that is different. The spiders have marked the trail with their webs so I can know that others have not come before me and I feel welcome here. Warmed by the sun and greeted by this natural place.


On arriving and standing still at the lake margin my head is freed to rise, my shoulders relax my bent arm drops from in front of my face and my attention is freed to take in this quiet morning scene. I notice the broad arrowhead of light floating weightlessly on the rippled surface of the lake. It extends from the water’s curved horizon in front of the mountains and tapers to an invisible point that seeks to speak with my heart. The light is like a floating shawl of sparkling diamonds shimmering with quiet excitement on the water surface. Just like the point on a compass - the light seems to follow me no matter where I move along the lake shore. The arrow-head of dancing light rests wide under the brilliant eastern sun and narrows to a simple and certain knowing right in front of my heart. It seems to know exactly where my heart is and I am certain that it would find me even if I turned away from the sun. I want to reach out to join it. It is such a simple thing to notice but there is much love in the world and so much beauty that rests calmly in this scene.


Looking across the lake I realize that I have been on the other side of those mountains before and so I know that the world’s beauty continues on and on beyond them – far past anything I have ever been able to imagine. The part of me that holds on to a sense of owning some aspect of my self is always frightened and a bit uncertain in the face of this infinite place. I am really no different than that branch on that arbutus tree up there above me. It reaches into the sky to find in every moment just the place at its very edge that it needs to be and in that instant knows where it must go next. Failing to heed that knowing could bring the end of its living. I am not really different from that branch growing with the tree – I am just where I need to be at this moment and I am listening to understand where I must go next. We need to feel excited with the taking of a step rather than hesitant to leave where we once stood. There is so much birthing and so much dying in a life and yet we still think of lines instead of circles. Perhaps that is what happens when we never get a glimpse of what may lay beyond our horizon.


I wonder what would happen to my experience of this place if I opened completely to the full depth of love that surrounds me without fearing for its loss. Standing on the ground in this place helps me remember that I do miss those I loved who left - but sadness is full compared to emptyness and it owns its own beauty like the shadows between dappled light that finds its way through lightly dancing leaves under a warm autumn sun. Everything seems to change when I hold a lens of gratitude in front of my heart. Everything passes from us and I was lucky to know them while they were here. So I offer this moment in my heart and instantly, I am less alone than I was a moment ago. Love is a bit like the sun's light and must be always there even when it hides behind a cloud or is away from a neighborhood on its regular mission half way round the world.


Light is as invisible as a vacuum to our eyes. It is able to pass right by with out noticing and without being noticed. Only if an object interrupts its path can it be ‘seen’. It seems the same for so many feelings - they are infinite and unsatisfied until they meet a surface to interact with.

There is beauty in this place and knowing that there is also beauty beyond its horizon of mountains puts me into ease. My walk back from the lake’s shore will be easy as all the strands are broken and all the voices quieted. My body is warmed by the sun and my spirit loostened by belonging.  The spiraling color of a big maple leaf marks the coming of fall and invites me forward to smell wisps of wood smoke tangled between trees by my house.

October Lake

I went back to Ruby Lake over the thanksgiving weekend with my boys, Ben and Will. The spiders and their webs that had held the forest in their strands two weeks ago were all gone. The webs had been eaten by their spiders and carried off into hiding for the winter. The weather has turned toward cool and the lake did not even try to make us think of swimming. Chester alone was anxious to send waves across the smooth skin of the lake as he pushed on for his ball. Just like last month, there were no people at the lake. The water level seemed the same but the world around the lake had changed.

As I watched Chester swim for his ball, I noticed that the waves he made with his body were so different from a boat. His wake was not smooth – the up and down straining of his head; the beating of his heart and the pulling of his front legs interrupted the smoothness of the ‘V’ shaped lines along his wake while the push of his hind legs under the water left concentric arcs that slowly expanded, retreated and diminished behind him as he swam toward his ball that drew him far into the lake.

There were no spiders to be found; the wasps that had so bravely buzzed me two weeks ago were no longer flying and richer colors had been pressed into the dry autumn leaves that smoldered abandoned on their branches. I noticed that in isolation from the world around them the water and the sky seemed unchanged. The first few pages of this autumn’s arrival have already been written, read, closed forever behind a bookmark of time and then set down on the forest floor like a memory resting on the shore of a watchful caretaker. Summer and early fall has ended and a new sleepier season has begun.

Mushrooms and toadstools were silently massed into groups or stood solitary on the forest floor. I wondered if they considered themselves lucky to have a large maple leaf land on top of them and cover them where they stood. When I noticed the mushrooms it reminded me that even after a tree dies it is still important to the forest as it circles back into life. Mushrooms appear for a short time in October and then shyly retreat back into the ground where they remain invisible to us until their time comes round again. I don’t pick mushrooms I just like looking at them. Besides, mushroom mistakes can be big ones. It has always been in my nature to expand successful experiments right to their limits – till something almost breaks…. like canoeing a river and continually seeking the faster waters until an error declares my limit and leaves me wet. It is one way that I learn but somehow I know that is no way to approach mushrooms.

I am reminded that my life is in constant change and transition just like the forest I walk in. The mushrooms made me feel a bit uncomfortable at first as if I was being given a warning that I must open to the new world around me soon and awaken to it or fall lifeless on the forest floor to rot. I am anxious to live more and learn more with the time I have here. I honor the process of death and rebirth in the forest and become clear about where I am now in my own circle of life. It seems wonderful that I just come to the lake to enjoy being here yet it always seems to be waiting with the gift of a new lesson to surprise me.

After being at the lake today I stopped by the plant nursery on my way home with Ben and Will and bought a variety of bulbs to plant in my garden. I invited their flowers to greet us in the spring as I placed them into the soil. I will remember how it felt to hold their dried and hardened kernel in my hand when I planted them in rich soil. I want to be there in the spring to welcome them and to enjoy them and to know that my hand touched them just as I will be touched by their emergence. I am ready to arrive into this new season.

Living

..."We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world--temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. Once in a while one comes on the other kind--what used in the university to be called a "dry-ball"--but such men are not really biologists. They are the embalmers of the field, the picklers who see only the preserved form of life without any of its principle. Out of their own crusted minds they create a world wrinkled with formaldehyde. The true biologist deals with life, with teeming boisterous life, and learns something from it, learns that the first rule of life is living. The dry-balls cannot possibly learn a thing every starfish knows in the core of his soul and in the vesicles between his rays. He must, so know the starfish and the student biologist, who sits at the feet of living things, proliferate in all directions. Having certain tendencies, he must move along their lines to the limit of their potentialities..."

Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1951

I have practiced biology for years and still deeply enjoy this passage. It leaves us longing for our passion to run with the ideals of our youth - wholeheartedly into our own grown up reality. I remember when I first held these dreams like a new lover and when my personality, my being and this profession first met and began courting. I look at life and biology now from a point well along the path I chose and am happy to realize that I am still alive and moving ahead; guided by the same love and respect for life that I had back then when I started. I am amazed to know that after all these years and all that I have seen and learned; I still hold the wonder of a child in my heart for life in all its forms.

I can’t help but reflect on this passage by Steinbeck: First of all I notice that they sat casually when they spoke. It reminds me of when we as students used to sit on Friday afternoons in the pub at university and scatter truths like chickens with the philosophical wands of our youth. Then I noticed where they sat. They didn't sit on a soapbox, and it wasn't just an orange crate - it was a 'crate of oranges'. The crate full of oranges led me to think of a collecting bag full of specimens – plucked fresh from the tree of life or drawn wet and salty from the ocean floor. All people that have come to know in their hearts that life streams a river of light through every living, breathing, growing form and that all living things are connected by the same energy that knits the universe together also knows death in their hearts. Donald Peters' woodland painting (above) clearly shows this thread of life that knits all of the animals with the seasons to the sun and to each other in a circle of life.

All of us who are now biologists, as young children (and sometimes as older people) have caused suffering and destruction to life. Perhaps it was in ignorance, perhaps it was inadvertent, and perhaps it was, in our judgment, intended to help. Whatever the reason, some of us even in the very act of committing these crimes against life, could hear a cry of outrage deep inside of us - hollow from our belly. In hearing this cry and in knowing this truth, we are freed to feel our love for the singular wonder of life's energy in all its diversity of forms. In this knowing, we are no more important to the universe than the butterfly that passes by us on its’ mission. It seems strange but through our diminished sense of self and our expanded awe at life we can for the first time truly become great - just by being alive.

This passage also reminds me that all of us, as biologists or bakers or butlers, need to feel things and to find our 'self' at the core of our being to truly live and to learn and to know. We can never find life by observing the pickled bodies or vessels that life courses through. Life is long gone by then. It tangles in the branches of my reasoning that there is just too much energy in life to simply be traded for the cooling of a body when life leaves its vessel behind.

So, I am glad the author sat these people on a properly packed harvest of fruit. I believe that each and every one of us sits upon our own harvest of life – inadvertent or otherwise. Everyone; biologists, healers, and Holy men have all trespassed against life. I remember discomfort as a child watching ants suffer under the sun’s concentrated heat focused through a lens. I remember the pain of learning that flight may be lost to butterflies just by touching their beautiful wings. So often the crime is one of ignorance. It is the other tortures like shooting, clubbing, crushing, or pickling that man can practice with impunity against so many vessels of life that claim the "dry balls" and separates them from those of us that bow to life. Who can do such things to the creatures that we live with, and not hear the voice of outrage that comes right from the core of our soul? Once we stop hurting life and pause to watch with wonder and awe we may find ourselves able to listen more carefully and even to hear the gentle song playing deep within as it rises to join a chorus from the universe.