timepiececlock: (Ahiru & Fakir text)
On Thursday I went to Santa Catalina Island with my family on our sailboat (36'), which might get sold this year. Catalina was pretty, with a very cute little tourist town, and apparently an enormous herd of buffalo, though I can't say I saw any from the harbor.

I saw dolphins on the way to the island. Big, fast, gray ones; a pair of them fishing. They swam under the boat and dove in and out of the water off to the side of us for a minute or two, before swimming away. This made my weekend; I haven't seen dolphins since sailing in Monterey Bay, at least 5 or 6 years ago.

It's hard to be anything but stupidly happy when looking at dolphins. They really are as cool as you expect them to be. By logic, there's no wild animal whose mere proximity should bring you unencumbered joy and the potent urge to jump up and down and squeal like a child one quarter your age, but dolphins can do that to you. I'm of the opinions that dolphins would do that to most people, if they ever got close enough. Even hard-bitten criminals would be forced to shoulder their semi-automatics, flick their unfiltered cigarettes, and mutter, "Jolly good show, eh? Anyone got bread or somm'at we can toss?"

And they would talk that way, too. Around the dolphins.
timepiececlock: (Ahiru & Fakir text)
Eliza Brock


Nantucket Girl's Song


Then I'll haste to wed a sailor, and send him off to sea,
For a life of independence, is the pleasant life for me.
But every now and then I shall like to see his face,
For it always seems to me to beam with manly grace,
With his brow so nobly open, and his dark and kindly eye,
Oh my heart beats fondly towards him whenever he is nigh.
But when he says "Goodbye my love, I'm off across the sea,"
First I cry for his departure, then laugh because I'm free.




Picked up my brother's copy of In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Wahleship Essex, and finding the first 20 pages to be well-written and interesting. I don't usually go in for non-fiction, but the cover caught my eye, and my brother was intending to lock it away in the attic anyway. I practically rescued it. It opens with general history of the island of Nantucket, MA---which I'd never heard about before---the whaling capital of the world for the 18 and 19th centuries.

I fell in love with this odd little verse, written by one of the local women to describe the 3-years-away, 3-months-home marriage cycle of whale hunters, and how the women of the community, in the absence of the men, adapted to the lifestyle of being the primary governing forces of the town.

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