On sequels

I had mixed emotions of returning to SE Asia and later Bimini’s Sharklab this past winter.  Eight months since I left from Singapore via Manila and I was back in Singapore on my way to Bali.  Like Manila, you aim to leave Bali as soon as possible.  If the bedbugs in Sanur don’t get you, the lying-to-you-face-and-smiling-about-it locals will.  Spectacular diving made up for the Philippines and Indonesia’s lackluster food – compared to Vietnam and Malaysia’s street eats – while men throughout the region with the same leery lineage had me second guessing.

Returning to two areas I’d previously enjoyed, I was reminded of Heraclitus of Ephesus that you can never step into the same river.  Amid my transient lifestyle with supporting tattered, water stained passport and scattering of friends, family and lovers around the globe I was surprised that I’d purposefully chosen to visit the same place twice.  

Feeling SE Asia’s pull through the previous summer coupled with the dissatisfaction I’d neglected significant pieces and places and feeling a homesickness for a place that wasn’t my home, I observed a rare place fidelity.  The diving kept me entertained as I climbed into Robyn’s wetsuit and followed her fin kicks all over Indonesia, the food in Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam made my tummy smile but I didn’t clichély “return for the people.”  

Quite the opposite.  There were plenty of people who legitimately could have held me in Canada.  A budding relationship with an are-you-real? man; a returning-from-where-I-wanted-to-go cousin; a previously incarcerated brother desperate to fall into a support net; girlfriends getting engaged, having second children, looking to sell their first home; a mother who, like me, cries at each parting.  

Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler’s “all you've got to do is decide to go and the hardest part is over” bounce through my head as I contemplate where I don’t know I’m going against what, where and who I’ve (temporarily) left behind.  

Attempts to adequately stay in touch are in place but exchanged emails and unreliable postcards home cannot rival the former ease of daily life.  Even if I chose to dive into the time consuming and frustrating Skype, all would continue to be a tease of the former intimacy enjoyed amongst friends and family.
 

Friend and fellow wanderer, Steph, celebrates the advancements in communication currency.  I, too, am pleased that I can chat online and mobile phones (that are financing a civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo) are more widespread than passable roads but I grieve the loss of travelers congregating in the common room with nothing to do until someone produces a pack of cards or, more likely, a box of wine.  

The wanderlust incest is still alive and evident as I bumped into a lifeguard from Bonnie Doon pool on Koh Pha Ngan the next bungalow over.  “Small world!” we exclaimed.  Boarding plane four of five to the other side of the world months later I’m reminded that the world, is in fact, still a very large place.  

Fifty-four hours from Bali to Calgary – the majority of those legs likely plagued by at least one colicky baby in the cabin.  WestJet’s timely April Fool’s joke of announcing child-free cabins was an outward expression of not only my mile-high and, if online forums are to be believed, many other travelers’ grievances.  My compliments to a girlfriend who drugs her children for air travel.  

While 15 hours of plane travel amounts to a considerable distance, the same cannot be said of non-air travel.  In the same hours required to cross the Pacific, Robyn and I traveled from Sabang, Mindoro to Sugar Beach on Negros and were still in the same country!  We took multiple boats, an airplane, a jeepney, a tricycle and numerous there’s-space-in-the-aisle buses.  

While I’ll likely be back in SE Asia – possibly as soon as this winter – I can’t prematurely predict the same for the Sharklab.  While the cast had changed from my previous stint in 2010, the spectacle had remained the same.  Collectively lured to Bimini by the possibility of a spectacle, the tears on the porch as I bid the stayers-ons farewell, were for the cast that had enriched my life.  I had arrived with the expectation of extraordinary experiences, and more than fulfilled, hummed Colin James’s “Just Came Back to say Goodbye” as I was driven to the airport to begin taking the long way home – where ever that is...

Parting photos

Leaving sucks.  Whether from Bimini, Calgary, Chetwynd or Phuket.  While I've lamented the bittersweetness of returning to where you started it still stinks saying what is likely "see you never" amidst tears covered by sunglasses (a trick I learned entirely too late) to truly great friends.  

Farewells wished with good intentions to stay in touch, I'm at stopover 1 on The Long Way Home in Davenport, Iowa where my younger sister goes to uni.  I was truly impressed with the St. Paddy's show Kelly's down the road from her flat put on.  Outdoors tents housed local bands playing covers, green beer flowed from the copious and well-placed stalls while the generations of green-clad party goers danced through it all.  

Not unlike Red Deer, Davenport is a city.  An offensive, loud, bright city filled with cars, SUVs, motorbikes and all manner of tards driving them.  I long for motorbike-filled cities with no traffic lights, golf carts driven on the left side of the road, a skiff, a chicken  or even Bimini's party bus.  

  No bullsharks for the Italian film crew, but a pod of pelicans was interested in our bait and the scraps from the cleaning table.  

Shit Pit prep

 Some Sharklab be(a)sties

 

A wee nurse caught gillnetting

Working her up

The skiffs

Chris swimming from our boat to the Twin Vee with bait

 This is not a hammerhead but still a sizeable nurse

Jean preparing hammerhead bait

 

Sunset at the Beach Club

Leaving Morning sunrise

Bidding Bimini bye

Tomorrow I leave Bimini - again - and it's no surprise I'm taking the long way home.  Another global lap, five months away, assorted passport stamps, friends old and new and newly old and still I don't know what, who or where is home.

While too many of my friends and family are in the predictable process of "putting down roots" or "settling down" I'm coming to terms with my own place infidelity.  Rarely in the same place for more than six months I'm always struck on Relocation Eve and hit especially hard on Leaving Morning at just how truly hard it is to say goodbye.

(Un)packing bombs

As I call another place home, bear bangers are exchanged for quick-dry towels. Silk sleepsheets are traded for fresh caulks. Passports are temporarily put away as I search for my hidden PAL and supporting firearms paperwork. Duct tape stays out year round. Boreal plants and identifying books remember what sun is. Guide books to warmer places are stashed until needed again in seven months time.

Here's the inevitable mess of moving, packing and unpacking - however and where ever temporarily.

(Uni 2010 to Sharklab 2010)

(Orion tries on my sleepsheet prior to Scotland)

(Summer 2010 to U.K. 2010)

(London flat to Cambodia 2010)

(Chetwynd summer home 2011)

Peace out

"We'll be here when you run out of money," my woods manager told me in front of the full-time woodlands staff on one of my last days in Chetwynd as I excitedly described my fall and winter travel plans.

Keen to leave the Peace and later Alberta for Sun, Place Else before the dreaded S-word materialized meant saying several goodbyes to co-workers, friends and lovers. Otherwise even-keeled with my emotions, I am terrible and often dissolve into a blubbering mess when bidding farewell.

I misted up shaking my supervisor's hand at work, I unsuccessfully blinked back tears as I hugged my roommates, I couldn't form words as I held my summer lover one last time, I wiped my eyes on my friends shoulders as we wished each other well for the winter, I bawled uncontrollably driving up the hill that heads out of town.

Even though my transient lifestyle lends itself to frequent goodbyes, I still allow myself the pleasure of becoming embedded in the comfortable ease of daily life with those around me.

It continues to surprise me that I'm terrible at them given how often I do them.

The tears though aren't a bad thing, Marc from the Sharklab told me in the Bimini airport as we waited for our flight. They're an outward sign that a good time was had and that I genuinely cared about the people I spent time with.

Home?

It's a long and rugged road
and we don't know where it's headed
But we know it's going to get us where we're going
And when we find what we're looking for
we'll drop these bags and search no more
'cause it's going to feel like heaven when we're home
It's going to feel like heaven when we're home.

Chorus from the Wailing Jenny’s “Heaven When We’re Home”

As I nurture my wanderlust, I’m continually confronted with what and where home is. Bouncing between travel, work and play, I look forward to going home – even though home is very loosely defined in my mind.

Going home from my current summer home of Chetwynd is going back to my hometown, Red Deer, Alberta, where my possessions are stored in an attic where my mother lives with a family. I don’t have the luxury of going back to the house I grew up in or a house that is even truly my mother’s. While I am more than welcome at that house, it doesn’t truly feel like home and there’s always a residual feeling that I’m a guest there.

More than geographic location, home is about feeling for me. Feeling welcome, secure and like I belong and am accepted there. I have been fortunate to have experienced that numerous times in a handful of countries. At the Sharklab on South Bimini, I felt valued and my presence welcomed and even occasionally sought after. In Mackenzie, B.C. my Canfor coworkers quickly enveloped me into their lives even though they all knew my time there was temporary. At the Ranch, where despite its now-condemned-for-health-reasons status, we relished passing the time together over beers, crib, campfires and conversation. When I was working my first field season in forestry in northern Alberta and it pissed rain all day, I anticipated being home from the moment my boots hit the gravel road where we parked the pickups – even if home meant crawling into a soggy tent. In all, I was deeply embedded in the comfortable ease of daily life with the people and environment around me.

Home then, is not one solitary location for me even as I am increasingly being surrounded by friends committing to life partners, offspring, mortgages and therefore their version of home. Just as Alice Sebold suggests varying views of heaven in “The Lovely Bones,” home is many things to many people.

For me, the pursuit of home is destined to be moving target as settling and being content in having made a home would mark the end of my passport stamps.

Peace in

After 10 days of catching up with family and friends, changing my ocean kit for forest gear, finally graduating uni and celebrating a birthday, I am set up in my very own room in Chetwynd, B.C. and sharing a house with three other working "professionals."

Departure downs

It's nearly time for me to once again roll on. After being minorly fucked over on my departure flight, I'm leaving Bimini on Monday.

I'm ready to move on, which is likely the result of 6.5 years of a dragged-out university degree. My uni terms were compartmentalized into four month segments and I seem to have developed only a four-month attention span.

The Sharklab further built on carefully controlled intervals.

We checked the gillnets every 15 minutes, changed tracking duties every hour, looked to first, second and occasionally third lunch to break up the day when on the boat for nine hours.

In my three months here, I was constantly awed by the diversity of the sea here, yet continually shocked and amazed at how filthy shark biologists are. I thought my summers working in the forest industry had exposed me to every rude comment imaginable, but it is outrageous what leaves, or occasionally enters, mouths here.

Conversations are quickly reduced to innuendos about sex and poo with remarks about sharks and food thrown in for variety. These four topics bind all of us together into a tight coagulation of what sounds like a gathering of the United Nations at a comedy club.

Amidst all the filth and occasionally trying tasks of manually clearing out the septic tank with shovels and buckets, being defecated on by pelicans and working through the night fishing for juvenile sharks over an entire tidal cycle in 20 mile per hour winds and sporadic downpours, assisting a PhD candidate collect her field research has been extremely rewarding.

Expectations more than satisfied, I have also learned and done things I would have baulked at in January such as accept a dinner party invitation from rowdy women claiming to be pirates driving a golf cart and consuming pink drinks, snake hunt and nearly daily handle sharks.

Five days left until I am back on Alberta soil and the rotating and often revolving cast of volunteers and staff along with a plethora of elasmobranches will ensure a second Bahamian stamp in my passport.

Course's work

The Sharklab celebrated Easter Friday by tracking juvenile lemon sharks in the day and joining the invading hordes of American holiday makers on the north island for night one of Junkanoo and excessive dancing in the streets and dock-side pubs.

We needed a mildly wild night out after hosting a university elasmobranch course for five days. Kicked out of the lab for its duration, we were moved to an apartment down the road. We somewhat grudgingly took this minor inconvenience and made the absolute most of it. The volunteers often went out to help with their seatrips in whatever capacity we were needed - boat drivers, bait cutters and throwers, photographers. I helped out with baiting in 18 blacktips, and escorting the students down a mangrove-lined channel so they could hand feed juv lemons.





The second last night, I scored a dinner invitation that the others are still bitter over. Walking back to the apartment, a golf car pulled up and offered me a ride home - offering and accepting rides from complete strangers is normal and expected in Bimini. When I saw the driver and her three passengers had pink drinks in fish covered glasses, I knew it would be a crazy ride back. Stopping next door to where we were staying, the middle aged women invited me in for a dinner of steak, lobster, fresh wahoo, veggies and rum punch. The lobster or rum punch wasn't their cause of envy. It was the steak. Collectively, we haven't had steak in decades. I paid dearly for my dinner engagement the next morning.

Getting up hungover at 6:50 am to be at the lab at 7:10 am to set a vertical longline in the Gulf Stream on four foot rolling seas was the opposite of fun. The morning after a full moon has its perks though. Still stumbling and reeking of rum punch, I enjoyed these vistas.







Hauled up by hand, the 1800 feet of the vertical long line netted us three! tiger sharks.



The largest was 3.28 meters! They tied him alongside the boat so we could get in and snorkel with him.





I'm home in less than three weeks. Eeekk. It's going to be difficult to leave, but I am also eagerly anticipating my impending uni graduation and northern B.C. summer.

Motion of the ocean

The highlight of being evicted by American college freshmen on a springbreak shark course was my bed in our new lodgings that hung from the ceiling in a corner of the sitting room. Octagonally shaped, four industrial-strength chains suspend it as a paper mache bird with tasteful glitter accents looks on.



When not housing seven female biologists, the apartment is rented out to vacationing Americans and my bed is without a doubt a clumsy, oversized sex swing for the boozy, sun-burned holiday makers.

The volunteers' role for the course is one of support for the staff. We help out with the students' kick-ass sea trip as bait cutters and throwers, counter balance in the boats, hand holders, shark handelers, sous chefs, where ever we're needed.

Yesterday I helped out with blacktip baiting and lemon feeding. The latter I did little more than set an anchor and make rude jokes with the staff at the back while the students fed the lemons in a mangrove-lined channel.

I was pulled away from the calm of the channel and Jim, Jon and I started baiting for blacktips. While the steady high winds and equally large seas on the east side of North Bimini made this a difficult and queasy stomach inducing task we were quickly rewarded with 18 blacktips. One was even so kind to jump clear out of the water giving us a quick glimpse of its beautiful body.

I switched boats to help out with the blacktips. The Twin Vee is no Cadillac of the ocean, but she is significantly more comfortable than the 17' skiff I rode in on the way back. How I didn't spew is still a great mystery.

Moving house

Before coming to the Sharklab, I moved out of my Edmonton house. For just shy of three years, I shared 6608 with a rotating cast of more than 15 individuals and their various insignificant others, pets and irritating habits.

It was the house where I completed the final 2.5 years of my undergrad. It was the house where I created and nurtured lasting friendships. It was the house I unflinchingly called home amid my burgeoning transient lifestyle. I left that familiarity and comfort, even if it had only been for a while.

There was a certain finality as I walked out the door one last time as a tenant at 3 AM on my way to the airport in early January. I was no longer a student, Edmonton resident or a Canadian faking another good winter in the cold.

Below is the ugly process of packing up my room. Condensing nearly three years of stuff into one easy truckload was refreshing. While the majority of my belongings are in a garage at my mother's, all I have with me in Bimini is what I could carry.





Packed, cleaned and ready





My Bimini room is slightly larger than my Edmonton one was. Here, however, there's three more beds, no outside window and one lovely UK gal.



Inside my bottom bunk, complete with the provided privacy curtains drawn