Highlights from the Middle East

Another idle Sunday in Port Aransas... No better time to organize the hundreds of photos I took while I was studying in Egypt, Turkey, and Morocco last winter! Below I have compiled a smattering of images that, to my inexpert photographic eye, seem to capture that whirlwind of an experience:

EGYPT

The streets of Cairo

Bussing away from the pyramids at sunset...

An ancient mosque in Cairo

Hot-air ballooning over the Nile and the Valley of the Kings at sunrise.

From the summit of the Sakkara pyramid. We were sneaky.

TURKEY

The Blue Mosque, Istanbul

Cruisn' the Bosphorus, one of my favorite places on earth.

Turkish DELIGHT

A ferry ride somewhere on the Aegean Sea

One of many prayers pinned to a wall next to a stone house where the Virgin Mary is said to have lived.

MOROCCO

My roommate and I, inspired by the lack of shower in our host home, shaved our heads with this result. (See my post "The Awkward Phase" to see how the re-growth process is shaping up.)

A village in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains.

Camel trekking in the desert. There was rain. What?

My host home in the Rabat Medina.

A man on the beach in Casablanca.

Dolly

It doesn't seem like a proper name for a whirling cyclone of destruction. Hurricanes don't let you braid their hair, they aren't cute, and they don't fraternize with toddlers.

OK, so Hurricane Dolly (currently rated as a category 2) made landfall well south of here, but when I woke up this morning with the deluded thought of running it was like God was whipping the world with egg-beaters. The door to our modest bungalow flew round on its hinges to reveal driving rain, flashes of lightning, and palm trees doing that spastic dance that I've only ever seen before on news reports.

Hurricane. Let us all take a moment to appreciate how wonderful this word is.

A joker-esque side of my psyche is so excited by the chaos that I can't even articulate, because heaven knows that Port Aransas could use some dynamite. Currently I'm sitting in my little office watching the drama unfold outside my window as I "work" on a presentation I have to give this Friday, but I long to run outside and dance behind all the weathermen that are surely out on the beach yelling into cameras. I want to stand at the tip of the jetty and raise my arms up as if I myself have conjured the tempest.

Don't worry parents and others who might be concerned--I do possess at least a shred of common sense. It's just... there's something about the elemental roar of this storm that calls me at once to feel like nothing but an insignificant blip in eternity and immortal and powerful beyond all reason.

Indeed. There's no conclusion. Bring on the storm.

"Port A," or, "The Strikingly Odd and Unusual"

When asked to describe my research stint in Port Aransas, I am often only able to come up with a single descriptor: "weird." The following is my attempt to articulate:

This little town known colloquially as "Port A" offers the options of dining, drinking, shopping, getting a tattoo, or some permutation thereof. The permanent residents number less than the student body at Carleton, but the population at least doubles every weekend. Great blue herons wander the streets and are given less attention that squirrels would merit, if there were squirrels here, which there aren't. The number of Hummers I see daily is roughly equivalent to the number of great blue herons. Simply being outside one is threatened by red ants, killer mosquitoes, sand burrs, and unreasonable temperature and humidity readings. I spend my days counting icky yet somehow awesome ocean bugs, wincing when disembodied stomatopod eyes float through my field of view. I have been given practically no guidance on my research, and yet somehow I conquer the lab for eight hours daily, usually finding something that I hope is productive to do with myself. No one suspects that last spring I declared a major in religion with a minor in neuroscience. I have read seventeen books since I've been here, and had a nasty case of what is assumed to have been Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. I've taken up the uncharacteristic habit of introversion. Most days I wake up before six to jog in the watery light of dawn and watch the brown pelicans perform elaborate line dances. I should be bored, and I might even have just cause to be miserable, but I'm neither. I'm perpetually amused by what's happening to me, and laugh at myself from a distance that, strangely, isn't unattached.

Yes, I could say all these things when asked what my experience in Port Aransas has been like, but, in most cases, "weird" seems to be sufficient.

Wandering

Last night, after I had washed and dried my face with my familiar purple hand-towel, my eyes caught the white flash of the tag and for an odd moment I was transfixed by the text printed there: "HOME Collections." I stood bare-footed in the bathroom contemplating this word "home" as it taunted me in all caps and boldface.

A few years ago I would have unhesitatingly told you that my home was where my purple towel's brothers and sisters are neatly folded, in my mother's and father's respective houses in Eugene, Oregon. My home was with my family, my friends, Amazon Park, Sheldon High School, and Spencer's Butte, where winter is drenching and vividly green and where plump blackberries blossom on the side of the road in late summer.

Now, however, things aren't so clearcut. During the last year I've lived in rural California, in Minnesota, in Egypt, in Turkey, in Morocco, back in Minnesota, and now I find myself strangely stationed on a barrier island in southern Texas. A proud sliver of myself will always be Cinderella to the Oregon's glass slipper, and perhaps I'll end up back there one day, but the fact is that I have to stretch the conventional definition of the word "home" to refer to Eugene as such. I love Oregon and the people there, I trek there regularly for holidays, and my extra junk is stashed in my old room, but when I return I sometimes feel like I'm wandering through more memory than experience.

"Home." The black embroidery glared out at me from the tag. It spoke of loving stability and roots, of personal space and convenience and a cozy kitchen where it's OK to make mint tea at three in the morning and then leave your cup out... all things that have been practically alien to me for the past two years.

Am I homeless?

I'm not sure of the answer to this question, and, to tell you the truth, I'm not terribly concerned about the semantical answer. Yes, it's difficult at times, but, in exchange for the uncertainty, I'm as light as seagull bones and susceptible to the slightest breeze. I like that tomorrow could be anything and knowing that I can adapt. In a paradoxical way, I'm grounded in change. And, as she goes vagabonding across the galaxy, this frood always knows where her towel is.

Oops.

I was sitting, hunched over my dissecting scope as per usual, when Brad pushed open the doors to the dead lab and fixed his eyes on me. "It was you!" he declared. I am intimidated by Brad. He is tall and confident, does incomprehensible mathematical things for his research, and goes surfing during his lunch break.

My mind raced, trying to come up with anything that I could have screwed up. I drew a blank. "What did I do?" I asked meekly.

"You put seaweed in the trash can! The live lab smells like death!"

To me it had seemed perfectly logical to put the seaweed that had tangled up my attempt at a plankton tow in the garbage, but apparently sargassum seaweed contains an unimaginable potential for olfactory disaster.

Oops.

I was grudgingly forgiven--how is a young woman schooled in the great planes to know anything about the threat of seaweed in a trashcan?

I'm finding it harder to forgive myself, however, for the fact that I drank at least several amphipods today. I was sorting through my sample, putting the counted organisms in a beaker of water... or so I thought. It also so happened that my cup of coffee was right next to the beaker, and as I took a refreshing sip of morning delight I realized with a start and a gurgle that I was drinking much more than coffee and milk. Blech.

Thus is the life of a "research biologist" who actually has no idea what she's doing. I'm staying positive though. Several graphs that I created in Excel are boosting my confidence, and I found eight blue crab megalopae today, which is practically bordering on data.

And, although Port Aransas can lonely and inexplicably bizarre, the chocolate chip cookies have exactly the optimal ratio of chocolate to cookie. For the fourth of July I sat with some other REU students on the roof of the lab and learned that Texans do fireworks right as I confronted 360 degrees of mortars exploding like popcorn on acid. After I deploy my crabbie-catchers at sunsest, I like to dangle my feet from the pier and make wandering sounds on my harmonica while black skimmers graze the surface of the waves with their beaks. I have an enticing pile of books to read.

It could be worse.

Zoea, sea butterflies, and amphipods, oh my!

They are built: PVC cylinders, roughly 15 centimeters in height, with hunks of AC filter that look like an under-mowed putting green rubber-banded around them. These awkward contraptions are meant to catch blue crab megalopae. I've deployed them off the pier two nights in a row, hoping to entice the little larva's settling instinct... and caught one (1) Callinectus sapidus megalopae. Not exactly a propitious commencement to this project, but I haven't given up hope on my little crablets yet.

And the fact that I've only caught one blue crab doesn't mean that I haven't rinsed a wealth of amazing and entirely ridiculous life from my briny air-conditioning filters. Since I know practically nothing about zooplankton, the grad student that's been helping me identify the critters my "artificial substrates" have yielded invariably stifles outbursts of laughter at my descriptions of the ocean-bugs. "It looks like a clear tube of toothpaste with a gross worm inside," I'll say, or, "I found a chicken fetus with three huge horns!" I could spend forever perusing my petri dish, just finding shapes in the bodies of these alien organisms.

Below I've provided a petite potpourri of the barely-macroscopic menagerie that has become my domain. The pictures are of a crab zoea, a "sea butterfly," and an amphipod, in that order:

Today I tagged along on a sampling mission in the Mission-Aransas Estuary. For five hours the motorboat jolted across green water, huge blooms of cabbage-head jellies left shivering in our wake. There was a thunderstorm brewing over the western horizon, and I watched bolts of lightning hopscotch between nebula-esque thunderheads. From zooplankton to the ocean to the endless starry skies revealed by the waning moon... in that instant I saw the universe spread before me like a fabulous set of Russian dolls.

Ah, it is 9:00 and I must retire--I'm going to try to snatch up some of these elusive blue crab megalopae in a plankton net, and it just so happens that they only come out during the nocturnal flood tide. Thus I, a slave to the lunar calendar, have set my alarm clock for 4:19 a.m.