Sea Monkey See

Sea monkey do.

I'll admit freely that as I've approached fifty, and now turned fifty, I've been taking more self-portraits, trying to get some sense of what I really look like, what I really am like. (We all know the rose-colored or coal-colored glasses of personal melodrama and history.)

And while profile-pic games only take us so far onto the surface of things, we work with the tools at hand.

You may be able to see the water dripping from the camera in the close-ups (click, click) of a few of these shots; after immersion in salt water, the camera must be submerged for an hour or so in hopes of soaking away the salt crystals that could screw up the seals upon opening for recharging the battery and for downloading the pics. I'd been soaking the camera in a small plastic tub in front of this mirror and got the urge to play. Afterwards, I placed the camera back into the tub for further soaking.

I look at these goofy shots and, mostly, chuckle. What vanity to think I'm going to learn anything about myself in such an exercise, and yet there I am, clicking away in front of a motel room mirror after a long day of sun and salt.

Is that my father I see in those features? Of course, but what about mom? Hugh, yes, but . . . George? And, how many selves could I have? Which one (or two) is really me? (I am a Gemini.)

There's something about the camera shot that I can stop and look at that differs from the mere mirror. I am not sure what that difference is, but discovering that is part of the exploration, perhaps even more than capturing these glimples of self.

Sea monkey see. Sea monkey do.

Now if I were a real writer, I'd be working harder to capture these differences and these images in words. Or, so I can castigate myself. More likely, while I am a word-guy and story-guy, the visual world matters to me a lot more than I'd ever realized while growing up and, what, maturing. I've always had a good visual memory (which page is the poem on in the book? right-hand or left-hand side? Rembrandt or Vermeer? Which Vermeer?), but the story I've always told myself involved words, always words words words. Yet even as an excellent student, I tended (and tend) to look out the window. And my other medium is clay; sculpture is three-dimensional, like the best writing, right?

Anyway, while I was playing profile-pic games in that motel in Fort Bragg, I started thinking of how hard it is to convey specific outdoor experiences, in my case diving and kayaking.

I mean, the whole session on the closed-deck kayak, I felt as if I were in a bowl, a giant watery bowl, and no matter how hard or in what direction I paddled, I still couldn't get out of the bottom of that bowl. I can try to explain this by pointing to currents and wash rocks catching and diverting flow, but in my gut there just wasn't a sea "level"; the whole ocean seemed tilted on its side, slightly, just enough to create a visceral sense of imbalance and dislocation. Frankly, I loved it. The sensation was otherworldly, and yet quite common if you spend enough time on the water.

Professional photographers will emphasize the need for that straight horizon, but I must say I prefer sea-shots that tilt. They seem truer to the experience, but then I'm a diver and kayaker more than a hiker or landscape painter on the shore.

"Being grounded" carries a different freight for the boater. Seamus Heaney wrote a great passage on how the floaty boat-edness (my term) that he felt unnerved by came from the very buoyancy that guaranteed his safety. I'll have to look out his original words.

My quest over this summer will be to catch images that convey that sense of meaningful imbalance, that unfreighted lift of sea and sky. Somehow, I just haven't been able to translate via images those occasions when the whole world seems askew, seems tilting. Often, those heavy water sessions look tame to the camera, and there must be a way to figure that untamed feeling.

In the next shot, you can see the wave approaching, but it felt a lot taller than it looks. There are also the matters of mass and speed. This was a fairly mild, though energetic day, so I didn't feel in danger, but I also knew I was a bit of cork bobbing amidst far greater forces. (But that's also why you go out there.)

Perhaps in the close-up (after clicking on the shot), you can see the energy behind the texture. Kelp bobbing about, the waves were moving through; I felt like Sofia, my kayak, was half-horse in this session. More emphatically, the whole surface seemed (and seems) to loom over us.

When I first began thinking of this entry, I thought of the self-shots above as monkeying around, and then I thought of how much I've played with catching images while diving and kayaking for so many years.

I started with simple disposable "submersible" cameras and used them, effectively enough, for years and years. Above, you can see my amphibious Canon Powershot, and lately I've been using a tough submersible Olympus that I found in 25 feet of water off Maui last summer. I have some basic tools, and those tools ought to be enough to catch the sorts of experiences I'm after sharing. Yes, I could throw cash into equipment, but that's not my nature, and anyway it's a vision thing, not a limitation via technology, that matters here.

I need to figure out how to take my shots to get what I want; I need to learn how to shoot so that I can share what I truly see and, more importantly, feel.

Oh, I haven't quite got the words, but I'm throwing them out there in hopes that upon rereading I'll find and make better words. Also, perhaps some of my story here will prove more effective than I'm thinking now.

I felt compelled to share these images, these words, and that compulsion is parallel to what grips you playing on the water, in the water, and under the water. There's something about all that mass flowing that makes any pool session so obviously sterile, no matter how intense the workout.

Otherworldly, I've said, but perhaps I spend too much time away from the more raw forces of nature. Worldly, in the best sense? Natural.

Sea monkey see; sea monkey do. Just one of Mother Nature's sons.