Man On A Beach

What luck! I met the Man On A Beach! He's an anonymous filmmaker who travels the coasts of Great Britain asking strangers one simple question: "What does the beach mean to you?"

Check out his excellent website, manonabeach: Journeys around the coast, to watch my answer.

Click here to visit the Man On A Beach website.

Here's the backstory.

On Sunday afternoon, I found myself fogged in on a northern Scottish isle. Here I was in Kirkwall, a town of 6,000 people and far more sheep and cows. I was supposed to continue on to the remote island of North Ronaldsay, population 65, but a white blanket of fog was making the journey impossible.

"The fog started on Thursday," the friendly Loganair employee explained. "No flights since then. Everyone who was waitin' took a ferry this mornin'."

"When's the next ferry?" I asked.

"Tha's just once a week," he told me. Darn.

"Well, you're from here," I reasoned "What does your intuition tell you? Will the fog lift soon?"

"Haven't seen fog last this long in two years," he replied with a bright smile. "So the intuition's useless!"

Four public bus rides, a full hostel, one Scottish chicken curry, and one Bed and Breakfast later, I woke up in Kirkwall to bright sunlight. The B&B owner had been right: easterlies had swept out the cloud. Our flight was good to go.

In the airport, I met my fellow passengers: an English couple who travels near the sea, a German birder who appreciates the avifauna of Sri Lanka and Scotland, and a man carrying nothing but snacks and his phone with a fuzzy microphone attached. This last individual turned out to be the Man On A Beach. He's camping in Kirkwall for a week and taking day-trips to the remote beaches, hoping to conduct an interview on each one. Serendipity at its finest.

The smallest flight I've ever taken.

An eight-seater propellor plane with one pilot.

We flew over a handful of gorgeous green isles, dotted with sheep and ringed with stone walls.

The North Ronaldsay Airport.

"Ewe are here" -- believe it or not!

A needle-felt mural in the airport shows North Ronaldsay's unique breed of seaweed eating sheep. (More on them later.)

North Ronaldsay: windswept cirrus in a big sky.

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When Our Gods Take Us Back: A Western Podcast and Epiphany

Blast from the past! My work from Semester in the West, a Whitman College field program I completed August through December 2016, has been published on the program's website.

Click here and scroll down to listen to my podcast, "A Lethal Take On Conservation."

It's an eight-minute journey with three conservationists who have come to terms with a paradox: sometimes to save a species, we must sacrifice an individual.

Click here to listen.

Then click here and scroll to watch the public reading of my epiphany, "When Our Gods Take Us Back."

The essay imagines the Sixth Mass Extinction through the lens of Diné (Navajo) cosmology.

Click here to watch.

They don't show up in the video, but this epiphany reading was paired with a slideshow of images from the semester. I'll include them here, and you can view them with the video as you like.

While you're on the website, I highly encourage you to listen to the epiphanies and podcasts of my fellow Westies. These people are articulate, compassionate, insightful, and a whole long list of things I admire. Every single one of their epiphanies gives me shivers. Seriously. Check them out.

Signe, Griffin, Sophie, Willa, Amanda, Hunter, Abby, Maggie, Thomas, Gardner, Kenzie, Evan, Hannah, Grace, Rachel, Elizabeth, Maya, Fields, Emma, Sarah, Ysa, Collin, and Phil: you've changed my life. I miss you, and I am thankful for you.

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And So Begins A Beautiful Summer

This summer I am delighted, honored, and freakin' excited to have a National Science Foundation-funded research internship at University of Washington Friday Harbor Labs.

How did I get this opportunity? Listen close all you undergrads, both present and future: apply for an REU (Research Experiences for Undegraduates) or two. Or five (like me). Or ten (if you're that dedicated!) Yeah, the odds are slim and the competition is stiff, but the worst that can happen is you don't get the job. And the best that can happen is, you do!

Months before the internship began I was already making friends over e-mail with my groovy (as he would say) mentor Nick and my bitchin' (as she would say) lab partner Anna. Being from Missouri, Anna needed to fly into Seattle and I was graced with her presence a few days early. I got to play tour guide!

We hit up all the best local sites (Theo's Chocolate sampling room, Gasworks Park, The Essential Bakery) but this trip was particularly fish-themed with the Seattle Aquarium, Pike Place Market, and an extreme low-tide at Carkeek Park. We didn't even have time for the Fish Ladder at the Ballard Locks!

We found lots of cool things at Carkeek, like this (ironically very small) Big Skate (Raja binoculata) stranded in an eelgrass bed. At the end you can see how fascinated the kids were by this "baby sting ray."