A Lake in the Beartooths

I strip to my underwear and walk on warm rock to the edge of the lake.  My bare feet feel sandy and uncomfortable, embedded with small stones from the trail.  I step off the rock, into the lake.  Rocks are under my feet.  They are not smooth - relatively young rock not yet worn down to an eggshell surface by eons of water moving over them.  Perhaps they have simply sat at the edge of this lake for all of their life after tumbling brand-new from their mother, one of the mountains around us.
The water is cold.  I walk forward and deeper.  Shiver, as it reaches my groin and then I plunge completely in.  The water is clear, but tinged with brown, like weak tea.  I swim the freestyle towards the center of the lake and watch the floor drop quickly, then I am floating in space with nothing below me.  The sunlight penetrates the water in planes of light that reach down into the darkness of the depths of the lake, like they are reaching into infinity, swallowed by a void.  There is nothing beneath me.  Then my mind inverts, and suddenly it is as if the light is coming upwards from beneath me from forsaken depths, like angels from the eternity, like the Lady of the Lake, come to bestow me with Excalibur, Glamdring.  I turn my head to look away, because the light is maddening, but it is everywhere in the water, shining from some unknown point far below, always towards me no matter where I look.
I lift my head up above water and the quiet mountains and forest surround me, solid and impassive, a completely different world from the swirling nebula of light below.  I am caught between two worlds.  The air moves my wet hair and little waves lap my chin, but the chill of the light of the void wraps around my toes and ankles and reaches for my core.  It is invisible with my head out of water, but now that I've seen it, I can feel it as an emptiness below me.  An emptiness made of light, sitting below the surface of this lake.

Buses and rumbas

The long distance buses in Taiwan wake up their sleepy passengers by putting on chirpy elevator music on arrival.  Nowadays I wake up in bed with a particular rumba tune running through my head.

Today

I started to bike home from the zoo but it started pouring.  Oh, there's a little roadside shelter.  With a dog!  He wanted to get out of the rain too.  I think you'd describe this dog as rufous colored and knee high.  He regarded me skeptically.  I talked to him a little and tried to give him a piece of guava.  Dogs don't eat fruits.

It started raining harder and the rain was splashing into our shelter in a fine spray from the drops hitting the ground so hard and I guess the dog was getting wet because he crept a little closer to me, when I wasn't looking.  By now he was comfortable enough to devote himself fully to licking his own crotch.  After the rain let up a little, said goodbye to the dog and was on my way.  That was a pretty chill dog.

Today I started Wing Chun classes.  It cost 3000 NT, plus 4000 for two heavy black cotton shirts.  I spent over two hours doing the same two sets of movements.
1. Cross arms at about belly-button level, recross at face level.
2. Punch towards the center, open fist palm side up, rotate wrist inward in a full circle, retract, repeat with other arm.
I hope I learn something.  The teacher is Lo Man Kam and he's 70+ years old and a student of Yip Man.  The story goes that he introduced Bruce Lee to Wing Chun.  He's pretty active for a 70-year old.

There are termites on my (metal) desk.  They are crawling between the glass pane and the desktop, so I can see them, but I can't get them.  I pressed the glass enough to squash a couple, but they're stuck in there forever now.

Running around in the backwoods of Taipei

Today I climbed a small mountain and walked around its stone-paved paths.  I found a narrow set of stairs carved into the rock that led to a rusting makeshift gate barring way to more steps in living stone, up a steep jungle path.  A peek at a checkered window.  What's there?  I walked back down the narrow mossy steps, each one only big enough to accommodate my foot, sideways.  It was a small spirit's home.


I saw a small child climb up a rock perched over a drop off.  He made explosive noises, vague expressions of violence that I guess was his sense of conquest manifesting itself.  He climbed down.  Then he climbed up again and told his grandma that she had to see this.  There were mossy little steps carved out of the rock itself, worn down by people's feet.  I climbed up afterwards.  On top an indentation was carved to allow standing, and nothing more, no railings or safety nets.  As I gingerly made my way back down the smooth green steps, I wondered about children falling off the rock, down to the steps 3 meters below.  But it wasn't a real conquest without risk.

Before I forget

I must write things down before I do...  It seems to me a life unwritten is only preserved in its entirety solely by the fading memories of the person who lived it.  Also in bits and pieces scattered with all the people he has met along the way.  Families and friends.  Strangers, dogs, cats, trees, rocks... the sky, the ocean.

Back

We came rolled back into Taipei yesterday afternoon, coming down a long, empty and curving downhill through the forested mountains south of the city.  It was the best downhill of the bike trip.  It was a great bike trip.

I don't think I could ask for a better place for my first bike tour, or with better inhabitants.  People of all ages cheered us on, from cars and roadsides and other bikes.  A darkly tanned man sitting in a tiny seaside town with a child on his lap cheered as soon as he saw us come into view, like he was waiting for us there by the road.  Kids shouting in unison out of a sleek black SUV as we climbed a lonely stretch up a mountain.  I joked I was tired of saying thank you, of raising my fist in acknowledgment of a cheer.  But I don't think I ever could be.

Now I'm back.  I'll write more about the trip later.  It was a great trip and I'm glad I did it.

Biking in Taiwan

I am going to bike from Tainan to Taipei along the east coast with Brian.  The Cycling Life-style Foundation has provided us with a GPS tracker that will let YOU see where I am!

Look:
http://cert.cycling-lifestyle.org.tw/emap/rtpos.php?Phone=0975237437

Now you can track me like I track a bat.

Sun Yat-sen Memorial Park

This evening, I exercised in the park.  There's an elementary school that takes up a corner of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Park that leaves its track open for old people and kids playing basketball or smoking.  I did some weird kung fu exercises on the dimly-lit track that I normally feel self-conscious about doing.  Last time I did them, an old man told me I shouldn't do them because they're bad for my knees.  I felt ashamed to continue in front of him, so I left.

This time, there was a man spinning in the middle of the track.  He just kept spinning the whole time, and was still spinning when I left.  Maybe he's training to be an astronaut.

And so

My job ends.

When I first saw Turtle Island, I wanted to climb its mountains; to stand on the tip of the head of the turtle and look over the cliff and the crashing waves below.

That night, we caught the last bat to be radio tagged, frequency number 150.985; "985" for short.

Thus began six months of the radio tracking of four bats.  From the beginning, one was never found.  After a month, another disappeared.  Sometime in December the third died, but we weren't able to reach it until February.  In the last week of February, I concluded that 985 could no longer be moving, either.

Yesterday we climbed to get the last bat.  Or radio-transmitter, as it turned out.  Our worst fear, that the radio transmitters were killing the bats, did not turn out to be the case, at least in this instance.  We found the broken collar still attached to the chewed antenna on the slope of a gully that emptied into a sheer cliff.

It was not an easy climb.  A-Hong had to cut the entire way through, until his blisters cut open, while I followed with an antennae, getting it caught on every thorned vine I came across.  The grade was ridiculously and dangerously steep, and we had to clamber and pull ourselves up by tree trunks and plants, too often covered in spines.

So it's done.  The bat tagged on my first day is accounted for (the collar, at least) and I climbed something.  I couldn't really get a good view because of the dense undergrowth, but I saw the sea a couple times through the trees.  And I looked down into several drops at another jungle below.  My hands are covered in little cuts.

Mission accomplished.  Is this it?

Beijing

Beijing was cold and dry, and just like I remembered it almost 2 years ago.  When I arrived for the first time in Beijing, it was the tail end of the Chinese New Year, and firecrackers were still going off throughout the city like gunfire.  A dark cold night, wide abandoned streets, and constant popping and crackling were my first impressions.  We were hustled to a jiaozi guar, with an unfamiliar deformation of the pronunciation of the mandarin "guan," just like the word fuwuyuar, "server," that the old-hand students shouted at the top of their lungs for someone to take their order.  This was a necessity to get served in the human sea of Beijing.


It's still like that, of course.  The roads are wide and the sidewalks are paved with slate stones.  The whole city gives you the feeling that you are small within something expansive.  Things go on forever: the plain-like land below the city rails, the broad avenues, the airport terminals.  This is China that the Chinese histories celebrate - great forces of people, land and power.  Taiwan is cramped and trapped in comparison.  When the KMT moved the Republic of China to Taiwan in 1949, I think they left China behind.  The sweeping grandeur of Chinese history can only be played out on the mainland's landscapes, with its plains, mountains and deserts; not the claustrophobic jungles and precipitous mountains of Taiwan.


What am I saying?  I'm just saying mainland China's big, that's all.  And Taiwan's a funny place to call China.  Please don't take this politically, dear reader.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Alright, that was maybe four days ago.  That's alright.  Chinese New Year has been for me, basically, staying at home while it rains outside.  People set off fireworks for a while, but that's stopped, maybe because of the rain.  I remember when I arrived in Beijing at the end of the Chinese New Year, people set them off nearly nonstop to the very last day.  Maybe it's the rain here.

Chinese New Year's is a time for snacks.  This is because you have to go to your relatives' houses and sit around a lot, and then you eat snacks.

I had wanted to go biking and all kinds of stuff outdoors, but this rain, which has lasted about five days (about since New Year's began) has not abated.  I went to my cousins' house yesterday and tried to play computer games, but that mostly did not work, because computers never work in LANs, not any that I've met.  I have mixed feelings about going to my cousins' house.  Almost the whole family has some weird issues with control.  Especially with food.  My oldest cousin also worries constantly about traffic jams and rain.  It's all mostly benign, and done out of benevolence.  But it gets on the nerves, that's all.

That's all that's happening now.  I went to Beijing two weeks ago.  That was nice.  I wasn't there long enough though.  All I can say is that it was really great seeing people I know there, and that it was kind of cold.  A dry cold.  I feel colder in Taiwan though.  It's wet and cold, and there's no heating.  It averages out to be colder here to me.

We are the arbiter of lives

January on the island, A-Hong noticed an osprey acting funny.  He saw through his camera that the bird never opened its right eye, and he decided it was sick.  We caught the bird where it roosted that evening with a long net (and a lot of personal danger to A-Hong); it didn't even try to get away, it was so weak.

The osprey had been attacked by another bird.  It couldn't open its eye because part of its eyelid was torn.  We did the best we could to remove the section of eyelid that was bothering it and put antibiotic ointment from my emergency medical kit on its eyeball.  A-Hong kept attributing the eye's recovery to that medicine.

Ospreys only eat live fish, so we had no way to feed it.  We could feel its breastbone jutting out like a knife, like on a chicken skeleton picked clean.  We had no way to make sure it would live to the next boat taking us off the island, to possible medical salvation at the zoo.  Our only choice was to release it the next morning.

So we did.  It flew off, for better or worse, into the wild.

I always wonder how much we should interfere with the lives of the animals we study.  Sometimes it is clear, like maybe this case, where there is no way an animal will live without interference.  But even then, I feel like it is still interference, for our own amusement.  We are only satisfying ourselves when we play with nature.  We saved an osprey (maybe), and then more fish die.  Is the osprey worth more than the fish?  Would we let it die for a "higher" animal?  How are we to decide what's "higher," anyways?  By complexity, cuteness, ease of transfer of favorable human characteristics?

But then again, what if we used more quantifiable methods instead of "cuteness."  Genetic diversity?  Importance of role in an ecosystem?  But these are still doing the same thing, on a bigger, grander (more grandiose?) scale.  We can't keep all ecosystems intact and ourselves with them.  So how do we choose?

Or maybe we don't.  Maybe nature is just nature and we are just stirring up mud by introducing our hand in it.  And it will settle back down, slightly different, but still doing the same thing.  Are we arbitrary arbiters, justifying intervention based on values that don't mean anything in nature?

The same processes of selection will continue to act on nature regardless of how heavily our hand plays into it.  One could argue that the species going extinct now are the ones that are less fit to survive in the new human-dominated environment.  And fitness seems to be the only rules that biology recognizes.  The rest, I think, is human sentiment.  We don't want to see biodiversity disappear.  We hope to find a cure for cancer in an undiscovered species.  Species deserve the right to exist (if I were a species...).  And so we create constructions to save certain things in nature.

But when we do the selection, we add all of our human subjectivity.  Who lives and who dies gets politicized, commercialized, and all the kinds of -izing that have to do with everything humans want, and not what nature wants.  But what does nature want?  Nature doesn't want anything.

We're just doing it for ourselves.  For our survival.  We're not going to give up all our technology and civilization to return the environment to a pre-human state.  But we also worry about the collapse of the natural environment that is familiar to us and the hardship it would be to our species.  We might go extinct too.

But something will live on.

I'm back again!

And apparently I was on TV while I was gone.  My mom saw it on YouTube.  That lady is my boss!





So like half the population of Taiwan, I've been on TV. And I spun in a circle.

Boats and bottles

During the winter, Turtle Island is closed to tourists.  Only one boat comes every 6 days or so, depending on the weather.  It is an old fishing boat, still strung with some of the giant light bulbs squid fishermen use to lure their catch.  The boat delivers fresh food and water to the soldiers on the island, as well as about 20 jugs of diesel to power the generators.  And me.

Everything comes off the prow of the boat, which they pad with a tattered bundled mass of rags and foam.  The boat nudges the dock perpendicularly, bumping along with the waves that gradually push the boat parallel, and the captain circles around and starts over again until everything is unloaded.  The soldiers drive a little truck up to the dock, which they usually start by pumping a crank inserted in the front like the old cartoon cars.  This has broken down, so now they cart the diesel back to the barracks on little trolleys.  The going is slow over the cobblestone walkway leading to the barracks, only three or four jugs at a time, lest they fall off.

Empty jugs are sent back to Taiwan on the boat, along with empty water bottles, to be refilled and returned in another 6 days.  The caps don't always fit on either bottles.  You often see the "new" bottled water with various colored caps, from tea and sports drink bottles.  The diesel jugs have saucer-sized caps that are more or less kept in place by a layer of shrink wrap over the opening.  This doesn't keep the diesel in.  We all get off the boat smelling a little of diesel.

And a Happy New Year

Welcome to 2010.  My resolution is to follow my dreams.  And to figure out what my dreams are.  That is life!

The end.

Taipei 101, 0000:37, 1 Jan 2010!

I made the time up.