It Takes a Village to Move to a New Apartment

/ˈdʒɛnt(ə)lmən/
noun

A person of superior conduct who, through the whole detail of his manners and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to others in such a way as at the same time implies, in his own feelings, and habitually, an assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to himself.
                                             -(principally Coleridge)

When I moved us from our old apartment to our new apartment - it was me who spent weeks on the phone and the email sorting out fees and inventories with the moving company. When a manager came to do a walk-through, it was me who was home to meet him and walk him through the apartment, valued inventories and massing lists in hand. 
           My husband happened to be home as well that day.  He was curled up miserably on the sofa with the flu - and when I'd shown the moving supervisor everything there was to show, he turned and away from me, walked into to the living room, sat down next to my husband and said "So. What are your questions?"
           My husband looked at him blankly. He pointed at me and said "Ask her. She's running this move."           
 The man looked at him, then looked at me and said "Who?" His face was genuinely confused.            
            While my husband goggled, the man nestled in close on the sofa and said "Right. Now let's look at the lists. Are you happy with the prices? Are you happy with the valuations? What else do you want to know?"            
            I walked out of the room and left them to it.

The men who actually packed us and moved us were an entirely different set of souls: kind,competent, splendid at what they did, and swift - rooms rolled away beneath their clever, competent fingers, vanishing into paper and bubbles and large cardboard boxes. It seemed almost cruel  to do what I needed to do to refined professional men like these.          
            "Um," I was obliged to say. "We've also got stuff in the bodega (storeroom) downstairs in the basement. There's boxes of books, bicycles, our christmas tree, and, er, um.  Very much Um."
The jefe (supervisor) of the moving looked at me with a raised eyebrow.           
            "There's this smell-" I hurried on before my nerve broke. "Last week a pipe broke in the building basement. The landlord won't do anything about it - we can't even reach our landlord. He stopped answering his phone sometime after the third call.  The water doesn't seem to have actually touched any of our things, and since we're moving today-
            We came down last night and looked through all our stuff, and it seems all right,  but there IS that, er, that smell.  I'm just telling you so you know."
           Down in the warren of bodegas in the building basement, it was cold and it was damp and it was was very dark. The sort of dark where you could imagine things moving  in the corners on tentacles, or many sets of skittering, articulated legs.            
             "Sorry about that," I said apologetically. "The light's broken as well. It's on a timer, but the timer snapped, and the building management hasn’t gotten around to repairing it yet."
            Outside the door to our own bodega, water dripped from a broken pipe overhead into a bucket at our feet. 
            Plunk. 
            It echoed. 
            Plink.
            The jefe wrinkled his nose.           
            "The building management won't touch it," I said. "They say it's up to the landlord, because it's outside his bodega, even if it is technically in the hallway, which is technically a common space. We came down last night and put a bandaid on it, but it seems to have started leaking through.  At least the super seems to have put down a bucket -"
            The jefe turned the handle of the door to our bodega and pushed.           
            "The door sticks," I said apologetically. "It's because of the damp, and I'm sorry about that - "
            The jefe leaned into the door and shoved. It gave way and he fell into the narrow slice of basement that was our bodega, and the smell hit us like a wall.            
            "That," I choked, "is much bigger than it was yesterday."
            Hand clamped over his nose, the jefe looked up and down the little room. A ripple of water ran down the wall from the ceiling and vanished behind a row of cardboard box on a high shelf.           
            "Lets have a look."  A voice said.  A crowd of curious moving men had gathered behind us in the dark hallway.  Breathing carefully through his mouth, a burly man squeezed past us, and wedging himself between  a bicycle and a pair of collapsible camp chairs, he chinned himself up onto the shelf and - 
            "Yeeeeuuuuugggghhh!"
            He came down hard.  Right onto the narrow steel stem of the bicycle, which  twisted wildly and dropped him onto us. He scarcely noticed. Shudders were passing through his body like waves - 
            I chinned myself up to look.The water ran only slowly down the wall, but in the cool underground the wall had burst out exuberantly in black and orange mould - fanning out like flowers the size of my open hand.  It was entirely revolting.
            "It's only running down the wall," I said weakly. "The boxes should be fine."
            The jefe, who had not seen the mess, nodded and reached for one. It wouldn't come. He tugged. The box wouldn't give. The jefe adjusted his hernia belt and gave one more pull-           
            And the box came away from the shelf with a terrible sucking sound -  
            The cardboard box had liquefied. There's no other word for it. The bottom half of the box had become a spongy mess of rotten wood pulp and blooming black subterranean flowers. It was the most organically repulsive thing I have seen in my entire life - and that life includes almost twenty years living in humid, sticky, perpetually decomposing tropical jungle. It was purely, exquisitely, comprehensively, horrible.             

We slurped the sodden box out of the bodega and released it to ooze onto the floor of the corridor.  There, in that manky darkness, I sat and sorted through the muck, seeing what might be salvaged.  
            Plink. All through that cool creeping underground, the sound of dripping water ran. 
            Plink. Plink. 
            Plunk. 
            A moving man had gathered up the mass of seeping, dribbling, cardboard and was carrying them away to the trash. He had, I noted, gone back up to the apartment and broken into a packed box of kitchen stuff to find a pair of rubber gloves.  
            Another man - the man who had seen the flowers blooming on the wall - stood behind me and watched.  His breath was light and thready and his hands worked spasmodically, clenching, unclenching, clenching - and he was in my light. Gooseflesh down to my bones, I looked up to tell him to go away, that we didn't need two people knee deep in this slime - and I saw him, standing by my shoulder with the look of a man braced to stay whatever the cost - he had seen something he could not unsee, and he would not leave me alone with that horror. He had made up his mind to stay. It was the noblest thing I have ever seen.             
            His rubber-gloved mate trotted back from the trash, and with a shame-faced look at him, my friend knelt down beside me, scooping up armfuls of the mouldering slush too far gone to salvage. The wet weight of it was too much for him and he lurched forward - too far.  He lurched across the bucket and lurching, caught a single drop of water square on the base of his neck.            
            He screamed - a high, thin scream, and jumped, clawing at his back as he straightened,  and scattering slime from end to end of the corridor.            
            And no-one, not one single one of his workmates, not then, not later - not one of them laughed.

In fairness to the manager at the beginning of this piece - there are apparently other standards of behavior a man can play with.           
            During our renovation, I had sub-contractors who folded their arms and stared at the ceiling and hummed when I spoke to them- men whose eloquence miraculously returned the moment they were in the presence of another man, after I had gone and hauled some some other man away from his work to do my talking for me- men whose sudden return to eloquence consisted principally of how "I have been trying to explain to this woman how she just doesn't get whateveranythingatallthatshemighthavewanteddone. She just won't listen."    
            The reason I was crying in the hallway of my new apartment while a pack of divinely-inspired kitchen apprentices refused to leave when I told them to? They were waiting for my husband to tell them to go.           
             Last week I had to go see an insurance agent about a policy on the our place. I caught myself putting on a fresh shirt that exposed just a little more than usual of my rather meager assets, and brushing on an extra layer of mascara, and practicing a hair flip and a giggle. And I realized that I was doing this because in actual fact, if I act a little helpless and girly, our agent beams paternally and gives me slightly better deals.            
            I thought about it, and i thought about it, and I shrugged, and put on a second coat of lipstick. If you can't beat 'em, at least get 'em to give you a discount.

We try Venice. Venice is Charming.

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Venice. 

We took a noon train from Florence to Venice (260km, 2.5 hours) and then the Venice Vaporetto from the Stazione Santa Lucia to our vaporetto stop (3km, 1 hour).  Transport efficiency might vary between the ancient and the modern, but the slow Venice barge certainly has the best views; we hung over the side rail and gawped at the sun glittering off the boats and white bridges, and at the palazzos sliding sideways into the icy blue water.
            We had a room in a charming little residence on the edge of the Campo San Maurizio, tucked into the side of a narrow lane across a little white marble bridge, with a gondola moored to a lacquered post underneath - very Cole Porter. Our room was small and low-ceilinged, filled with a dim-underwater light, and stuffed to the gills with faux-antique wooden furniture, every piece carved and painted and brocaded and gilded until the surfaces were panting for relief.   Even the walls of our little room were padded, and covered floor to ceiling in a green and gold polyester brocade.  In the event of fire, we were instructed to tie the gold brocade bedcover into a rope and slither around the charming wrought iron screen that kept us from falling past the silver brocade curtains and out of our charming little picture window into a window box filled with perfectly charming geraniums.

We napped, briefly, in our little room on the golden bed, then we went walking and found all of the ways the local streets dead end into the water.  It took some time to outpace the tourist hordes and art-glass shops, but by sunset we were in a narrow maze of stone paved alleys that opened into small Piazzas or dead-ended into blue canals, with washing lines strung across the water.
           There is a quality of light here – it glitters over the canals and crooked streets, settling like a luminous, electric blanket over the white marble spans and the waterways.  The city has the soft, limpid quality of a fever, with heady currents and electric heat just under the surface.  Earth and water exist here in an impossible balance; the natural division between the two elements has broken down, become imperceptible.  Natural laws simply fail to operate - or be remembered - or have never existed to BE remembered.  Tall stone palazzos are built on top of the water, with the sea lapping halfway up the doorpost.  Stone pillars and stone archways lean crazily inward on each other; walls have an open relationship with the vertical - when I think about it, it is perfectly sensible; the foundations have no foundation; instead they rise and fall with the waxing and waning of the moon.
            We walked down narrow ways into the Piazza San Marco, where four separate chamber orchestras were playing in four separate corners.  We sat on a stone bench by the water and looked out at the night, and felt immeasurably pleased with ourselves.

A Chilean FLIES

I’ve spent the last week with a good dose  of the winter flu – brain like porridge, limbs like jell-o, short term memory a bit like a bowl full of goldfishes (which ought to add up to something greater than the average goldfish, but, as anyone who has ever kept fish knows, ends up totaling slightly less than the IQ of the dumbest fish in the bowl - the one that tries to inhale straight out of the air stone and eat the plastic plants. Also generally the one that goes on an epic feeding binge the moment you go on holidays, so that the kind friend who agreed to feed the fish for you while you were away has to scrape small bits of goldfish innards off of the walls of the tank by day four.  After which you can never go on holidays again, because your friend has spread the word.) and I had absolutely no sensible alternatives but to curl up on the sofa under a blanket and watch the Olympics on the television.

            It was a real hardship, I can tell you. O, these terrible winter flus! 

            I watched the rowing, where the British woman’s pair won the gold by a country mile and the British men’s eight came so close to taking the gold medal from the Germans that the dear BBC commentator became so excited that he lost his voice almost entirely before anyone had crossed the finish line.

            I watched handball – which mixed up rugby with netball and ballet, and the water polo-  which seemed as destructive as it was enthusiastic, and fencing (Europe’s own home-grown martial art)- which showed me that I remember nothing from high school and college sports.  All I saw of the medal match in men's foil was a buzzing and balletic silver blur, and someone jumping skyward with a clenched fist and a yowl of triumph.

           I found that I preferred acrobatics over the team sports – events that pit the raw human body against gravity of the laws of motion, and break the laws and tell gravity to go Hang - and fly.

            So I watched the diving, where they offer slow-motion replays of exquisitely pointed hang-time and the moment where 40 km/h of human flesh meets the surface of the pool and Takes the Splash Underwater With It. 

            That’s magic.  Right there.

            I watched the women of rhythmic gymnastics, with their hoops and their balls, and the tiny girls on the vaults and uneven bars, and the trampoline-  Mr Tabubil and I watched the men's’ trampoline final together, and we found it a revelation.  We didn't do anything like that in our backyard in Tabubil when I was a kid.  (where that is defined as bouncing three stories into the air and doing two double pike twists, a plank layout and a triple somersault before coming back down again, landing precisely in the middle of the trampoline - X marks the spot - then going back up again another nine times.)

            But most and best of all, we watched the men's artistic gymnastics.  Not the team events, but the individual events, because here, one of the athletes performing in front of us had busted loose and soared free not only of gravity, but a stronger sort of downward pull.

            We wanted to watch Tomas Gonzalez – he of the blue and white leotards and the trim military mustache and the wide, white, smile.  And of Chile.  Incidentally, and almost in passing.

Tomas Gonzales competed alone for Chile.  At home he trained with no support (for want of an institution to support him) and no funding – until a benevolent millionaire stepped in and funded his endeavors privately.  Against a national mood of yawning indifference, he pushed himself to the very peak of his sport – and won himself a place in the finals of the Olympic Games.

            Now that he was there - now he was our darling – schools across Santiago marched their students into the gymnasium to watch one of their own compete in the Olympic finals of the Men’s Vault and the Men’s Floor Exercise.  They wore Tomas Gonzales moustaches painted on their upper lips, their teachers wore press-on moustaches made of felt, and a Chilean commentator in the Wembly Arena in London shouted “And here we have Tomas Gonzales– he’s about to perform in the – what’s he performing in again?” 

            She didn’t know. She hadn’t even put in the effort of finding out.  But she was wild for him –

We all were. He had taken our little coastal nation into the world. We cheered and gripped hands and hugged sofa cushions –

            I remember watching the live feed in 2004, when the Chileans Fernando Gonzales and Nicolas Massu  played against Germany in Athens for the Gold Medal in the  Men's Tennis Doubles - and won.

            The game was a long one, and intense - three and a half hours - up and down - advantage to Chile, then to Germany, then to Chile again - the Chilean commentator cheering, pleading, cajoling, begging the players, screaming himself raw - and finally - Bang!  Game point!

            We threw open our windows, and from all around us rose up a solid roar of sound.  People screaming, shouting singing, car horns blaring - from every apartment and house and street - there were more people watching in the square in downtown Santiago than there were in the stadium in Athens - we shouted and sang and hollered and whooped and banged the walls.

            Tomas in London didn’t win a medal.  But we wept anyway.  The man without a team won himself fourth place in both events, right up amongst the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese and the Japanese - the men who came with teams and had whole nations shoving them along from behind (or hauling from in front, willy nilly, in the case of the Chinese.)  He said that he was entirely satisfied,  that to have made it into that company meant as much – or more than - a medal, and his splendid smile said that he meant it. 

            We agreed whole-heartedly.  A Chilean had Made It.  We basked in the glory that he brought us, and the more perceptive among us offered up our apologies and granted the glory to himself alone.

            The cynical might read this story as a parable,  and wonder what will happen to Tomas– and the future of gymnastics in Chile -  when he comes home. 

            We can do all that later, if we need to.

            Let's raise our glasses, and our cheers and our open admiration  to a genuinely extraordinary man: a man with a gift, and more than a gift, a will, a will  that carried him all the way to the Olympic Games.  And made a whole nation sit up and take notice.

Cuttlefish Cargo Cult - Day 5

In 2011 I went diving with the Australian Giant Cuttlefish.  In 2012 they did not come back.  In a spirit of cargo cults and magical thinking, we’re going to have a week or so of cuttlefish:  perhaps, if we wish hard enough, a critical concentration of photo and video will bring them back from wherever they have gone. 

I didn't get chilled after my icy dive -  we waded out of the water and traded our neoprene suits for flannel pajamas and wool sweaters and fuzzy hats, and we sat in the sun and drank thermoses of hot tea and climbed into a truck with a heater in the cab and by the time we were back in town we were warm as toast.

            It was all very civilized. 

            Under the water, on the other hand -

            Nature is red in tooth and claw, and here is the juicy stuff, all of the blood and sex and hormones and raw unbridled passion that makes for Grand Opera and even grander daytime soap-opera (because you can show the exciting bits that get edited out on stage and replaced by Arias and Extreme Death Scenes)  and is exactly the sort of thing to make the three hearts of every wandering cuttlefish feel a pang, and make him - or her - want to come home for the winter.

Here, a Stalwart Male is Attacked By a brave Challenger who Wants His Woman.  See him - Flushed with Rage - Fight Back! 

Here, two Alpha Male Types are Locked in Awful Combat. Who will Prevail?

And here, at last, the video you've all been waiting for:  A violent attack - only centimeters from a Rocky Niche where a Rea Man defends his Harem of Females.  They Love, they Fight, they Consummate their Passion - all for the camera! There is no editing, folks, it's all Real, and it's all Here - exclusively on Tabuilgirl. 

So - Hsst!  Hey!  Cuttlefish! You-all!

The water is icy, the tourists have all gone home, and the sea-urchins and sea-stars are flourishing while you're away, so there's an all-you-can-eat buffet laid on.

Will you think about it?  Please?

There's not much else I can do from here.

Cuttlefish Cargo Cult - Day 4

In 2011 I went diving with the Australian Giant Cuttlefish.  In 2012 they did not come back.  In a spirit of cargo cults and magical thinking, we’re going to have a week or so of cuttlefish:  perhaps, if we wish hard enough, a critical concentration of photo and video will bring them back from wherever they have gone. 

 


I had more fun underwater than I had when i went diving with Dr Tabubil- which is saying something because that first time I was bouncing off of walls for a week on the memory of it. 

            That first time, I was entirely under the control of Tony the dive master.  He held my hand as  we stood against a stuff current, and as well, my buoyancy was out of kilter - I was either heading for the roof or bouncing across the sea-urchins on the bottom.  This second time, I was rather more on my own -

            One of the Melbourne ladies had her open water certification - she was buddied with one instructor, and the other two of us were buddied up with the other.  My tourist-buddy had a problematic dive-vest -  an air bubble on one side sent her tumbling in counter-clockwise barrel rolls and I was waved off to join the big kids while our instructor returned her to an even keel.  In water as clear and as still as this it was rather like sitting at the bottom of a 10 foot swimming pool so therewas no danger, and without anyone's hands on my own, I started to find the hang of things, and learned to float -

            And I dug it.  I really dug it.  I'm an original tropical water-baby, and it felt just the way swimming underwater should be - without needing to come up for breath, or being tied to the surface with a snorkel.  Just me and the water - the way it should be, all comfy-like and giving.

            To a point.  Swaddled in neoprene, weighed down by lead shot, breathing through straws out of a glorified great soda-siphon strapped to my back, I didn't belong half as well as the cuttlefish all around me. 

Look at this one - see him fly: 

They were all around me - for every cuttlefish that I saw, if I paid attention and looked a little harder, noticed there at least two more - hiding in the weeds.  When one emerged from under a rock, two or three would be tucked in there behind.    

            The females seemed to be shyer than the males - these photos invariably show a male in technicolor display shadowing a female in her reddest 'I am NOT happy' drag:

This particular instance is a little different.  Here the male is in full furious panoply, and the female is playing it soft and quiet and blending into the scenery.  Check in with us next time to find out why!

Cuttlefish Cargo Cult - Day 3

In 2011 I went diving with the Australian Giant Cuttlefish.  In 2012 they did not come back.  In a spirit of cargo cults and magical thinking, we’re going to have a week or so of cuttlefish:  perhaps, if we wish hard enough, a critical concentration of photo and video will bring them back from wherever they have gone. 

 

The previous cuttlefish post didn't have much to interest the cuttlefish  - it was about things that were going on above the water.

Into the water, then.  We were five on the dive - two instructors, myself, and two lovely young women from Melbourne visiting Adelaide for business purposes, who were driving the 8 hours to Whyalla and back to Adelaide in a day so that they could do the dive.  We kitted up, walked down the refinery fence-line into the water, winced on account of the seriously cold temperature of the water, followed the fence out until we were chest deep, and we put on our masks and dipped below the surface. 

            And there the cuttlefish were - hundreds of them.  Just hanging out.  Swimming languidly around the rocks, you know?  As they do.  Loitering, paying errands, going visiting, courting, mating, laying down their eggs underneath the rocks, and  flashing our cameras with multi-spectrum shows of interactive color gradation.

            The cuttlefish are terribly inquisitive about us-  as much as we are about them, I suspect.  If you float still, just above the bottom , they'll come right over to you.  We were told not to let them come closer than 2 inches of our bodies because they will bite - on spec, just to see if we taste any good, I suspect.

            Immediately on entering the water I came across a very large feller - not so large as the giants Dr Tabubil and I saw on our dive - perhaps only two feet across.  I stopped to take a photograph - as one does - and as I focused, less and less of him was fitting in the frame.  He had decided to come up and say hello.  I had an awful lot of trouble with that all through the dive - half my photographs are blurred and out of focus because the subjects were determined to be on the other side of the camera, sort of the way a really determined labrador retriever will try and say hello  by seeing what the back of your head looks like on the way over the top from the front. 

            Back on shore after the dive, while I raved about one of my closer close encounters, one of the of the other girls laughed and said  "I saw that! I was trying to get your attention - while you were looking at that cuttlefish, there was another, smaller one sheltering in the curve of your knee!"

A curious cuttlefish looks in:

And draws in his arms in consideration:

And now, a taste of cuttlefish home life.  Here a  male guards a female while she lays his eggs under a rock.  As she emerges, he makes his position clear and rippling patterns begin to flare across his mantle:

Cuttlefish Cargo Cult - Day Two

In 2011 I went diving with the Australian Giant Cuttlefish.  In 2012 they did not come back.  In a spirit of cargo cults and magical thinking, we’re going to have a week or so of cuttlefish:  perhaps, if we wish hard enough, a critical concentration of photo and video will bring them back from wherever they have gone. 

 

In 2011, I went dove twice, the first time with my sister, Dr Tabubil, off of Black Point, near the Point Lowly lighthouse. We saw dozens of cuttlefish - enormous ones, fighting and flaring as they went through their seasonal mating.  The second time, we didn't have to dive off of Black Point, humping our gear down an escarpment and over the rough sandstone to the water. The winds were in our favor and we were able to dive right off of the beach at Point Lowly - pull the van up to the shore, sit on a wooden deck while we geared up, then follow the fence line of the Port Bonython Natural Gas Refinery right down into the water.

The gas refinery was quite large on our local radar at that time -

            A few weeks prior to the dive, when the craze for planking  was at its height, two young employees at the gas refinery had taken photos of themselves planking right across the mouth of a flare stack. 

            These geniuses were proud.  They circulated those photographs far and wide.

            Have you heard of the Darwin Awards? The purpose of a flare stack is to flare – as needed, which means randomly, and without notice. These two young idiots were high-odds-on gold-medal Darwin Awards contenders.

            In this particular instance, the idiots got lucky and missed the medal - the stack did not turn the subject of the photo into extra-crispy, but if there was ever a case of ‘have your belongings in a box and be off the property in thirty minutes’ this was it.  And in a town as small as ours, where the industries (mining and large-scale agriculture) revolve around familiarity with heavy and dangerous machinery, certain public voices were loud against the prospect of two young louts being considered responsible enough to wield so much as a spanner by any employer between Port August and Port Lincoln. 

            The Port Bonython Gas Refinery has turned out to be something of a boon for the cuttlefish.  Explosive security concerns require that you keep a hell of a wide berth around a refinery,  and the water along  the shore here is shallow enough that their loading jetty stretches more than two kilometers out into the gulf.   The refinery has a null effect on the local marine-scape, and what with the security buffer zone on shore and out on the water, a rather large stretch of shoreline has been marked off from fishermen and recreational divers, and gives the cuttlefish something of a break.  No sanctimonious cuttle-fishermen here.  Just us, on the other side of the fence-line. 

Cuttlefish Cargo Cult Day 1: Here's to the Cuttlefish!

Almost exactly a year ago, just before we left Australia, I had a second opportunity to go diving with the Giant Australian Cuttlefish.

            The dive happened a week and a half before we left Australia, when I was in a rather busy period of my life.   I have always intended to talk about it, because that day dive was, if anything, even more extra-ordinary than the first dive: the sun was shining and the water was clear and there were exponentially more cuttlefish out and about than when Dr Tabubil and I went diving-  but what with the move, and then one thing and then another, the photos have been languishing on my desktop for the past year and I haven’t found the moment.

            And then a couple of weeks ago, Australian friends sent news that made my cuttlefish images very topical indeed.

            For those who aren't aware, the Australian Giant Cuttlefish is the largest cuttlefish species in the world - up to a meter across, and the coast of the Spencer Gulf in South Australia, where I lived, is a place very special to these animals.    

            Those unfamiliar might read my post HERE and explore its own attendant links, or if you're in a hurry, you might just read this quick summary.  And then go look up the BBC documentary series 'LIFE' (2009) and check out the episode 'Creatures of the Deep.'  (after which you will want to go read the post linked above anyway, because the giant cuttlefish so entirely fascinating).

The nutshell:

The Australian Giant Cuttlefish is the largest cuttlefish species on earth.  They lead a solitary, leave-me-alone-and-to-hell-with-the-neighbors sort of life, but once a year, they come by the thousands to breed along a very small and very specific stretch of the coast along the upper Spencer Gulf in Southern Australia. 

Point Lowly, this little stretch of coast, is the world's only known mass cuttlefish spawning ground.  Just outside the coastal mining town of Whyalla, the sandy floor of the gulf gives way to a litter of sandstone slabs, built up with ledges and overhangs under which the cuttlefish can lay and leave their eggs.

            When they have finished breeding they disappear.  We have no idea where they go or what they do – all we know of them we know from this brief annual window of time and breeding behavior, and when they leave they vanish out of science and out of human knowledge. 

            Because of the scale of this breeding event, the Australian Giant Cuttlefish is a species that lives in a tenuous equilibrium.   An event that disrupted the breeding colony would have a huge effect on the viability of the whole species.

When I left Australia, there were two threats to the cuttlefish. 

Threat the first:

 A large Australian multinational firm (BHP Billiton) wished to build a desalination plant for their inland mining operations, and they had chosen this same specific piece of coast to build it on.  The scientific reports are inconclusive to hypothetically optimistic – there is no direct evidence to indicate that an upsurge of salinity in the local region would affect the breeding grounds.

BUT:

The local geology of the breeding site holds nothing special for the desal plant.   A few kilometers in either direction across hundreds of kilometers of gulf coastline would have made no difference either way to the economics or feasibility of the plan.  When you are building around a species so special, so evanescent and so terribly unknown, in what sort of human universe would you want to take that risk?

            Local landowning interests had played NIMBY and refused to give up any of their sheep pastures, and the state-owned land that is this very special breeding ground seems to have been the only piece of coast that did not have someone in government willing to stand up for it.  Shame on South Australia.  When I left, the proposal was still, slightly, on the fence; the people of the gulf coast cared – even if their elected representatives didn’t, and there was some tenuous hope.

Threat the second:

When Dr Tabubil and I made our first dive last year, Tony's dive shop was a busy place:  on his sofa was a pair of Japanese documentary film-makers (if anyone knows who they were filming for or how to find the footage that they took, please let me know.  I’d love to see it) and at the back of the dive-shop, drinking coffee and talking in low, frustrated tones, was a team of bemused biologists and marine scientists.  The cuttlefish numbers were low that year – very low.  The winter drop in water temperature had happened more slowly than usual, and the cuttlefish had been coming  late and slowly.  And when they came, they had been much smaller than the average.  The scientists watched, futilely, and took censuses, and waited to see what would happen. And wondered why the cuttlefish that came were so small.

            That was 2011.  In June of 2012, two things happened. BHP Billion won.  The desalination plant is going ahead.   Huzzah for Big Businesses.  Huzzah.

            But it may not matter one way or the other.  This year, the cuttlefish did not come back.  The numbers at the breeding ground were low last year, but nothing like low enough to affect species viability.  The water conditions at the breeding ground have not changed.  Whatever has happened happened out wherever the cuttlefish go when they do go, and it happened extremely enough that within two years, an entire submarine ecosystem may be gone forever.

            And so, in a spirit of cargo cults and magical thinking, we’re going to have a week or so of cuttlefish:  perhaps, if we wish hard enough, a critical concentration of photo and video will bring them back from wherever they have gone.

            Given a large enough set of universes, nothing is impossible.  They’re curious creatures, cuttlefish.  Look at this one here – he found me, a long, dark-blue-neoprene-and aluminum-tank thing, floating a foot or so above the surface, and was moved enough not to run but to swim over to me and investigate. He came on and on and would have snatched the camera from my hands if I had let him.

Here’s to the Cuttlefish:

Ichthyotherapy. (Ich. And Fich.)

I have done something that I may have cause to regret. As a birthday present, a friend took me to a day spa for a session of ichthyotherapy.  Have you heard of it?  And if you have, are your alarm bells ringing, or did you find it fun and faintly ticklish and are you wondering what all the fuss is about?

            Ichthyotherapy is an elegant way of describing a piscene pedicure.  You put your feet into a tank of water and hundreds of little garra rufa fish - a sort of miniature catfish of Turkish origin - descend upon your toes and feet and ankles and strip you clean. And leave you well moisturized afterwards. And now - also afterwards, I find myself wondering- what was I thinking?

            I had plenty of warnings.  When I told my mother-in-law what I was going to be doing, her mind shut down.  I mean it quite literally - she was half-way through a step and her foot froze in midair and her mouth wavered about half-open and I could see the mental processes come to a gluey halt.  She couldn't even muster up the necessary muscle control to make a 'yee-urch' face.

            I love my mother-in-law very dearly, but if I ever want to throw a real spanner into her mental workings, I now know how to do it.

            Alba, a friend, took me out for coffee the afternoon beforehand and filled me with dire stories about  water-borne communicable diseases - Athletes Foot on all my toes and mobile Veruccas settling on all of the exposed skin surfaces while little fish nibbled their way into the blood vessels and let in the HIV and Hep C pathogens that would be swirling about in the water.  My skin rose in chicken-flesh and all my hair stood on end and I shuddered   Alba is something of a germophobe and when she saw that she had my attention,  she moved on from fish-spas to movie-theatre seats - by related ways of ringworm and head-lice transmission - and when Mr Tabubil dropped by to say hello, he found me pressed into the corner of my chair, hyperventilating and grappling with a bottle of hand-sanitizer.

            But Alba is a germophobe, and  I've never contracted ringworm in a movie theater.  And mi Suegra is Dutch, and the European landscape has been reasonably effectively neutered over the last couple of millennia - they don't have much in the way of wiggly things over there.  Neither fishy things nor wriggly things bother me particularly, and it was a birthday present, you know?

            So I went.

The ichthyotherapy happened at a manicure-and-pedicure joint in the basement of the Plaza Peru Parking garage (if you're still interested).  The 'Salon de Pesces' (fish room) was windowless and dimly lit, with soft-chiming music on the stereo, low japanese-ish benches around the walls,  a mini-fridge packed with champagne - and four glass tanks, lit from beneath and softly bubbling, filled with white pebbles and hundreds and hundreds of little grey fish.

            There were three of us doing IT -Ximena (who had had her birthday around the same time that I had), myself, and Ema, who was treating both of us to the experience.  We stood in a small huddle next to the tanks and giggled, nervously. (How very girly of us.) 

           I was up first.  At least - the others weren't volunteering.  An attendant washed my bare feet and delivered an orientation lecture:

            No foot wounds, please, no athletes foot, no exczma.  And no need to panic.  Seriously.  Garra rufa fish do not have teeth, they do not break the skin, they are not eating you - they are fed their very own fish food and when you put your feet into the tank they are simply doing what they do - foraging and sucking, and all of the dead skin cells will be hoovered away and a digestive enzyme in their mouths will leave your skin soft and supple.  And Very Important, when you put your feet into the tank, the sensation will be strange but you do not need to worry - the strangeness will pass and you will enjoy it, so please don't wig out on us, just relax and envision those bottles of champagne waiting in the mini-fridge behind you, okay?

            And all the time I was thinking "Yes, yes strange sensations, got it, of course it's going to feel a little odd, I mean it's fish, and how often does anyone experience something like that?"

            And when I sat down on a wooden bench and lowered my feet into my very own glowing white garra rufa tank, I was smiling up at Ema's camera and I wasn't paying quite as much attention as I might otherwise have been, and, dear reader - I shrieked.

            Not very mature of me.  I admit it, but the sensation was one of being mobbed.  Attacked and Swarmed and Overwhelmed - when I looked down, my feet were entirely invisible in a cloud of hungry fish, fighting for position and propinquity.  It wasn't hugely attractive.  They were long and whippy little things and  resembled nothing so much as a cloud of leeches.

            Ximena was next - and she screamed, and then Ema, who had a very very bad two minutes of it, and then the attendant, confident that we were not going to start gibbering, left us to gaze down at our feet and wiggle our toes and watch the fish pass under and between them and to giggle at the tickling.

            The absurdity and sheer strangeness of it all passed swiftly.  Soon it became fun.  The fish felt like a thousand feet with pins and needles, like a thousand Jacuzzi jets running all at once, and as their first competitive rush passed off the fish settled down to some serious nibbling and became almost - and then actually - cute. 

            Ema had purchased us a half-hour with the garra rufa fish, but the time passed and the attendant didn't come back.  The fish hoovered up their fill of us, and drifted away, and came back - and drifted away again- we waved our feet idly and watched the fish swish about to follow us, until we noticed that an hour and a half had passed - and in all reasonableness, we decided that we should probably come out.

            When we did, our feet were soft and emollient - and after an hour and a half in the water, there wasn't a single prune or wrinkle between us.

            "We need to do this again."  Ximena said.

            "Once a month."  I said.

            "We need our own tank."  Ema said.  "Who has a spare room for an ichthyotherapy  salon?"

We were drying our feet when the attendant came  back in.

            "But I haven't given you your complimentary massages yet!"  She wailed, and stared at us reproachfully.

            Ema giggled and she melted.

            "I forgot all about you."  She confessed.  "It's been a slow morning.  Won't you take your shoes back off anyway?  The massage comes included with the treatment."

While she rubbed our feet, she answered our questions:

            "How many fish are in there?"

            "There are about 300 in each tank."

            "Where do they come from?"

            "The owner imports them from Turkey.  Behind those curtains- " she nodded toward the back wall- "we have all the master-tanks.  We check the fish every day and rotate them in or out depending on how they're looking and how they're feeding.  We make sure that they're healthy and if we have to shut down a tank for a day or two, we do that."

            "Do your clients ever panic?"

            She smiled.  "Most people with fish phobias are weeded out before they come in here - it's pretty self selecting.  I've only ever seen five people come as far as the tanks and have real problems.   There was one woman - she came in and went completely gaga over the little guys - leaning down over the water and waving her fingers at the fish, and cooing 'Ay, que LIIIINDO, que PRECIOOOOSO - how cuuuute, how adoooorable, WHO'S a pretty fishie then?  WHO'S the PRETTIEST little fishie in the whole wide WOOOORLD?'   Then she popped her feet into the tank, and screamed, curled up around herself in the fetal position like a baby.  I spent 15 minutes holding her hands and rocking her, soothing her like a child, and my boss brought cups of coffee and cups of tea, and we talked to her and brought her back down from whatever place insider her head she'd gone to.  She was strong.  She insisted on trying a second time.  And she kept her feet inside the tank for 10 whole minutes, before she had to come out.  I was impressed. 

            The other four problem people -  well, they came in, saw the tanks, discovered that they had full blown fish phobias and went the full screaming wiggins.  We gave them refunds."

I went home entirely happy with my position in the world - and even thought of treating mi suegra to a session for her birthday next month.  My state of piscatorial bliss lasted all the way until this morning when I sat down to write all about it and did some preliminary internet research.

            And had my very own full screaming wiggins.  A cursory google search for 'fish pedicure' leads to several hundred pages of seriously inflammable headlines all screaming 'BACTERIA!  PATHOGENS!  HIV!  HEP C!  IMMUNE-DEFICIENT-PERSONS BEWARE!!!!'

            It was a good quarter hour before I could bring myself to read any of them.  It's not actually entirely terrible - the headlines are wildly alarmist, and the actual horrors lean heavily toward 'hypothetically plausible' and an 'extant, but extremely low, level of risk' and appear to be based on one rather nastily infected shipment of fish into England in April of 2011.  Even so, the most hyperbole-free, science-based article in the upper levels of google stressed caution and common sense:  the practice can't possibly be good for the long-term well-being of the fish, and the fear of athletes foot and veruccas is well founded.
            In a nutshell, I was a twit who didn't do any advance reading, and Alba the germophobe might have been onto something.   

            I can feel my feet breaking out in psychosomatic rashes all the way up past my ankles as I type.  I will be cancelling the repeat performance, and will look upon it simply as a splendid memory.  And I will feel spectacularly superior to the people in the google-image search who are shown in bikinis, smiling, and having a whole body ichthyotherapy experience.

            The brain just shuts down.  I can't even summon the muscle control to make a 'yee-urch' face.