Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Balancing Log

We had half a bottle of rum left and needed some coconuts so we headed to the beach where fellows use cargo bikes to bring loads of them to where main street ends into the beach. They use machetes to slice them right to the quick and then a straw easily slips thru the meat and into the liquidy goodness (an interesting cultural aside is that the word for this last layer of meat the straw is poked thru is the same word for virgin). We have to sip out mouthfulls of juice just to not spill the overfull nuts. Then we have to drink more to make room for the rum.
This is the most refreshing cocktail I have ever concocted and to be carrying it down the beach with our Mindfolds cocked on our foreheads is only dampened by the sheer weight of the coconuts. The green outer shells are hard as rocks and its very easy to imagine their weight only being slowed by a skull in freefall from a tree. El Capitan is explaining to the that they actually peel these monstrosities to get down to the brown frayed inner hulls that are more spherical and sold to grocery stores i've frequented.
We stroll and sit and sip and refill until the mixture hits the perfect taste which just so happens to be when we empty the rum into the nuts. And so are we, emptied into nuts.
The drunkness was coming on in waves that didn't wash back out to sea. After we reached the elephant who had been petrified and overturned by the tide, we hit our stride. El Capitan dashed his shell on a rock and wove a dance of gratitude to the coconut goddess with an offering up of the meat tossed into the insatiable sea. I just tried to chuck my whole 'nut into the waves, but only succeeded in throwing out my arm and watching the 'nut roll lopsided into the tide.










The offerings commensurated, we next found our selves at the Balancing Log...It was composed of a pair of driftwoods where a 20' whitewashed tree kept a decently flat line from dune slope to an overturned trunk that caught it between its now uppermost tendrils. The balancing log extended another 5 feet beyond the stump which brought into play twisting as well as the leverage beyond the fulcrum of lifting the heavier, longer end from the sand; And, we found, if performed well, lowering you gently to the sand.
We each walked it unfolded and did particularly well for carrying cocorum in our innards. I went first Mindfolded. Slipping the device over my eyes while I was already balancing over the widest section, stably set on the ground - so the feet knew what they were doing already - it was the rest of the body that became folded in confusion at the blackness emanating from the middle of my rum'o'nut and vision. Banking on my feets' solid notions of gravity I took off walking my tai chi steps of silent slowness with the left side leading as it is apt to do. I left my mind in shock of the darkness i flung it into and moved from my feet up, using the Centre and my arms to keep the momentum proceeding across the log towards the sea's loud waving. This worked to align me with the solid centre of the log beneath the solid centre of my feet until I came to a slight bend in the log which my eyes, i have no doubt, would have easily processed and I might have not have even consciously noticed it; but as it were, visionless, this little bend came upon me with all the suddenness of the floor falling out from under me. And I re-routed all my energies from balance to evacuation of the current predicament into the shifting, but soft, sands about a foot below.































We continued this, taking turns on the log with the non-balancing (or should I say simple-balancer for we are all balancing just about all the non-laying-down time, take a look for yourself) acting as Seer for the appearance of passerbys so as not to frighten them by our extrasensoric prowess and futuristic appearances (though we are all living in the future, its just that some of us don't like to admit it); and to take better photos.
As time moved the day around us and our antics pumped the cocorum thru bodies, my abilities faded and I never did make it as far as my first run. El Capitan, on the other hand, only progressed until he actually made it to the fulcrum stump Mindfolded!







This beget a new era of things to fear for not only did the stump's tendrils curl over the Balancing Log to create a foot obstacle, but the slow turning and leveraged raising of the log beyond the fulcrum moved it from a mostly 2-dimensional balancing act to a 3-dimensional ground-quaking out from under you carnival surprising of the folded mind. Beyond the immediate dangers of the log's movement was the imminent danger of dismounting or being spun off into the tendrils of roots when losing your balance at the fulcrum.
We never did make it to the end of the log Mindfolded as the leveraged twist & turn always broke the tentative balance we had worked to engender up to that point.
*** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
A note on the fantastic drink of Rum mixed with fresh coconut juice: Coconuts, David told us, work to detoxify the kidneys unusually well. As a consequence, mixing the alcohol with it actually provides a vehicle for more alcohol than usual to be absorbed by the kidneys. This can lead to problems. Do not try this at home; but call me if you are interested in trying it at the beach.

Southern man don't need me around anyhow

Woke today to southern rock blaring from somewhere. My left earplug had come out sometime during the night. I'm finding the brand (name unrecalled) has a plug life of approximately 2 weeks. But it is extremely good at blocking out sound until then; after that they start to wiggle out and the powers are entirely compromised by the slightest leaking. The music changes into some Elton John that I fortunately don't know the words to, but I close my eyes tighter nonetheless for fear of which Elton might be in the room with me; the musics that are now full of my awareness and Elton's got me hooked. The trick is now to figure out where exactly Elton's rocking it from and i've ruled out the room i'm in's ipod because my slightly unplugged left ear is feeling the shape of the sound as more linearly conical, coming thru a smaller space before widening into the room, not as emanating from within this room in a more spherical shape.
David's truck pulls away after a short bit, ruling out the car stereo. The music's in English so it must be from the house and i'm tromping down the handhewn spiral wood staircase and the volume is increasing and we're back to the southern rock guitar screeching and i finally locate a stereo system where it is on shuffle track #115 - mp3...so this pain could have lasted a good long while. I press stop. I go back to sleep.

Mindlab is more than just experimental, its about results!

Just achieved a phenomenal feat of dexterity, and have blown my own mind in the process. After a deep 45minute Qi Kung session, i sat and started juggling to Dead Can Dance's - Into the Labryinth. I juggled the 3 yellow 'have a nice day' smiley-faced balls we got in Mindo, for 11 minutes. [End seriousness.]

Fishing

The fishing trip was to start at 9am with us dropping the lobster nets on the way to the fishing spots.
This, of course, did not occur. Beach time worked its relaxations over and then though I woke at 8am and was ready by 9, 10 rolled around and David was still not back from the farm. So I went to breakfast; skipped the cheese and loved the bread. I do need to replace the calories I've not been getting from all the alcohol i've not been drinking during these days. The calories are lacking but so is the extreme activities (though an ocean swim for an hour is quite the workout...and I miss Shifty, the old bike, is sitting in Marietta feeling as ansty as I, no doubt.)
So I fill up with my second Ecuadorian breakfast and wonder why I am eating an out-of-schedule meal before getting on a small craft to sail the choppy seas for hours, but logic hasn't stopped me yet. The gang's all back and up and ready to start something, but instead of fishing, I watch them make breakfast. So much for the early start.

At the beach we help to roll the boat down to the sea on logs, rolling it over the pair until the back one spits out at our ankles, jumping it and stopping it with feet, then dragging it back up by the ropes tied into grooves cut into the logs on which we roll the boat. Each log rotation moves the boat 5 or 8 feet forwards with everyone pushing. But even I can see its merits over plowing sand with the hull.

Then the cowboys came; and their cows claimed that stretch of beach in a very convincing manner. My delicate sensibilities rejoiced that we had already gotten the boat into the water and didn't have to barefoot it across the cow trailings.
It ends up being seven of us in the 15' boat, along with piles of nets, cooler with ice for the fish and beer to lend critical mass necessary to keep the ice colder longer. Our backpacks were in mega-ziploc bags to waterproof the contents; I had not expected to be getting that wet.
After pushing the boat out deep enough to engage the motor, we busted through the breakers and that put us into bobbing across the yet-to-be waveswells, where every time the hull of the boat cut into the swell a thick foamage of seawater would sting my skin and soak my clothing. This plus the cloudy day's winds brought me to chilliness so when we stopped to drop the lobster nets nearby Shark Cove (I suppose lobsters would find a banquet under the mannerless, slob sharks)
I had to take my shirt off to dry my skin, which is when the sun came out to burn my sunburn. So I took a hint from the desert folk, while El Capitan took to Invisioning the sun. David was translating that the boat over there was oystering, and the tube over the side was an airhose that was connected to a pump on the boat that sent oxygen somehow to someone on the ocean floor who was stuffing them into bags. The real fishermen took to laying out lobster nets and this required slow motoring as the nets were untangled which, contrary to high speeds that continue a rhythm of breaking through every wave, let the swells have their way with us while moving horizontally across them, lending an up and down swaying to the side-to-side swelling and dropping. This multi-axis noodling of my inner ears led them to be downright uncooperative in providing my stomach with the proper coordinates for Down so it knew which way to push the breakfast. We stopped shortly thereafter and that settled things.

















(The fishermen in Shark's Cove!)


Then we got to drop our lines. The second or third time I let mine drift to the bottom I got a great tug and slowly brought up a sharkish looking creature the length of my forearm. El Capitan is laughing "You caught a shark," and i'm thinking, now they're Really gonna be after me, and David is saying, its a Manta Ray, or some kinda ray, and the fishermen are taking it off the hook and its being really not happy, until they drop it into the sea and its gone looking for something other than shrimp on a hook. Being somewhere in the hundreds of Nautical Feet (that's measured with sea legs) from shore, the swelling waters kept the boat at a continual bob, which wasn't unpleasant. The real fun occurred when a wave broke that far out and we had to throw ourselves onto the wave-side of the boat so it wouldn't flip.
The only thing caught over the next few hours were those waves, though we did routinely lose our bait to nibblers and bottom dragging. We passed the grande cerveza around the boat and each got a few swigs per beer. Every other bottle or so we'd wind up the lines and motor over to another spot to try our luck, because the skill was getting us nowhere. This meant getting wet for 5 or 10 minutes and not quite drying out over the half hour of catching nothing again. This made for a dermally painful routine. A few casts into nothing-yet El Capitan hollers "Oh! Whup. Here we got something now." The line he's tugging on is taut and David is laughing, "that's no fish, its a rock."
"But its pulling back." The rod was in an arc towards the water. "That's the current pulling the boat away." He starts telling the fishermen 'he's got a rock' in spanish and everyone's laughing, because we are exposed to all the elements under this noonday sun, ocean wind and saltwater, the beer is successfully keeping the ice ready for any fish we might catch and the anchor's made for catching rocks, not shrimpbait. Without oyster-walking there is no telling what he had on that line out at Shark's Cove, but the line popped free, the bait was gone and it was suggested we motor on out of this current where the fish find it harder to feed in the faster waters.
Its around this time in the afternoon when the cold spray sun temperature differentiations all over my skin have sunk deep enough to meet the beer throwing a party in my stomach where i've feared to put but a few crackers into but for fear of the continual sway of this small boat. As we were first motoring out David asked us gringos if we got seasick. El Capitan talked a picture of the three-dimensional gyrating a small airplane swims thru and what level of more disconcerting it is compared to the ocean's rocking. All I can say is "we'll find out. Never been in a boat in the ocean for any real length of time."
Breakfast steadily became a retroactively worse idea as the day rocked by. When the swaying infiltrated my digestive tract giving the sensation of movement to part of my body I should not feel move, I would first take a technique from the Fold and close my eyes to concentrate my balance into my limbs in contact with the boat so that the whole of the rocking sensation would be dispersed into the hardness and lifting away of the wood seat, the moisture and pressure when swayed into one hand's support or the other or the intertwined twists of gravity swerving my spine at many intervals up and down it where my crown is being tied to my base with cables of energetically lubed inter-reactions i've been winding each morning around my breath.
If that didn't suffice and the swimming of my insides persisted i'd move into a focusing technique i've been augmenting in my juggling practice [more on this later]. Picking a spot on the horizon and laying all my attentions into viewing it. Pretty much the opposite of the previous technique, but the Mindfold has me pivoting around sight these days. Between the distraction of feeling into, and focusing away from, my gut worked to keep my fluids rolling in the right direction.
As we swung around another cove with no fish and only two bottles of beer in the cooler, we came upon the fishingest boat i've ever sidled decks with. It was about 50' with large sails and anchored in the cove's lapping shallows. It had 6 or 8 hand-dug canoeish boats laying crosswise across the deck walls with the central one still holding a man hardened by 10,000 days on the open ocean who was manipulating the intricacies of fishing line amongst a variety of slicing, grappling and yanking devices stained into rust with the salts and bloods. Maybe it was the salts soaking into my skin or the sun's deep heat in my blood, but my eyes were drawn and tunnelled to this man who could crack pescidian spines with those worn out hands whose wrinkles of prunage didn't need his eyes to guide the lines thru the metal's rings. The fishing lines mended themselves thru his hands.
David was chattering across my headtop to the most literate-looking (is that a wrong statement? [i've opened the blog so anyone can comment this is a great chance!]) man on the vessel and I couldn't follow it between my mind's magnetism to the hard fellow's simplicity and ducking the canoe tips overhanging their boat's walls while trying to keep hold of one to assist our rudderman in hovering our craft within the boat's orbit so the dialogue that I had completely lost the line of could continue. But I picked it up again pretty quickly as a ring of fish was handed across to our boat and numbers were being tossed through the air. I was asked if I had any cash, small bills on me. I lied, "nope, didn't bring any money with me on a fishing trip." Why did we pay for to rent (that's how my mind shortcuts spanish, not conjugating, infinitive is such a great concept) for to rent this boat to fish, if we are only to purchase freshly caught, extremely large meatful fish?
It takes all the sealegs El Capitan has to get to his ziploced pack and dig out his wallet, to find he had broken the $10 into lesser bills and so David had to pry off a couple of fish from the ring to hand the fish back with the cash and a bottle of our beer. But our cooler needed the room, I rationalized, and we drank the last bottle on our way to the next batch of fishless waters.
"Okay, I got something this time,"
"Another rock?" David asks just to get a laugh out of the crew, but we can see the line is bobbing and weaving with a life of its own and he gives it a tug to set the hook into fishflesh. After a minute of reeling against the zigzagging line he pulls out a fish the size of, well, smaller than a breadbox; but it was of an edible variety so it was unhooked and tossed on the boat deck to suffocate to death while flopping around for water and spritzing its torn gills' blood around.
El Capitan says to me, without looking at his vanquishing foe, "Now I remember...when we used to go fishing we always threw them back."
The last thing reeled up from the depths was on a straight line simply unwound from a spool with a hook and bait, no rod or reel, by one of the crew. It was a puffer fish, the kind that pushed Homer so far as to listen to the Bible; as they were dehooking it it puffed and bloated making the flaccid skin pouches that dangled from its body into points growing in some pie-based ratio with its belly. To avoid the spines the crewman had to grab it by its eyesockets pressing the balls into the poofy head to gain purchase and yank the hook from what might be its 'lip' or 'cheek.' It got tossed back.
The sun had been behind the clouds for the last while which gave my lobstering skin respite but kept the moist chill sinking into my bones so it was delicious to call it a day.
As we were using the log system to roll the boat up the beach, David returned from taking the rods and tackle back to the house and killed my landlubbing with the words "the cistern is empty. We are out of water until tomorrow." The warm shower I had held onto through all those gallons of cold oceanspray sank away from me into the depths of imagination. It was replaced by the sobering cold water of a neighbors outdoor rinser.