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:

Reason 382 for Not Sharing Your Smart Phone with Your Small Children

(Reason 381 being the friend, whose small niece, on deciding that she wanted to help the grown-ups with the washing up, dropped the first grown-up object she could reach on the kitchen ledge into a sink full of hot water and suds.) 

Exhibit A:

A man arguing with a receptionist in an office lobby, his attention divided by a small child pulling on his trouser legs and bouncing about with the energy of a demented flea. 
            Locked in awful battle with the righteous disdain of the Chilean receptionist in magnificent wrong but on her own home turf, the man slipped his smart-phone out of his pocket and proffered it downwards as a distraction for the sprog.
            It worked.  In fact, it worked astonishingly.  Her absorption was total.  However, the touch-pad didn't seem to be as responsive as the little girl wanted it to be.  Her brow furrowed, she regarded it - briefly, and then she stuck out her tongue and gave the whole screen a good washing.  To lube it up.

It being politically unwise to laugh yourself silly at behavior of a small child belonging to a man on the losing end of a front-desk skirmish, I skaddeedled.

On taxis and Being from Elsewhere

"Oh for - !"

"WOULD you - ?"

"Puh-leeeeze!" 

Seven times in the space of two months, I have made taxi-drivers cranky before I've even said a word.  They looked at me with expressions of extreme pain and forbearance, but there was clearly a cultural gap of understanding that left both of us bewildered.

            And at last - twice in the past ten days, the mystery has been made clear.

            On Tuesday last, I climbed into a taxi, shut the car door, gave the  driver my address - and he winced, and turned in his seat and said:

            "A gringo, huh? Yup. I thought so. So can you please tell me, why for the love of God do all you gringos slam car doors so (redacted) hard?"

            I had to sit and think about that one. 

            And I realized that yes, I suppose that I do. I pull the door firmly shut when I get into a car, and I slam it decisively shut behind me when I get out.  And I do it without considering relativity - there is no softer than, or harder than, or any other way to do it - there is just the Firm Shut Door.

            "It may be good manners."  I said, thinking aloud.  "There's not an intent of force as much as there's an intent of sound- an audible signal to the driver that I'm in securely, that I haven't left the door flapping, and that it's safe to drive away." 
            I thought about it some more.

            "Believe it or not"  I said. "I think that we think that it's good manners."

The driver digested this and rejected it.

            "It's like you want to break the latch or tear the door off it's (redacted) hinges or something!  It doesn't matter where you're from, for God's sake - you all (redacted) do it!"

            And that was that.

            When he dropped me at my destination, I opened and closed the door with the slowest, softest whisper of air pressure imaginable, and had to lean closely on the door to make sure that it was closed at all.  The driver gave me a grudging nod through the drivers side window and sped off with unnecessary vim.

            That was last Tuesday.  On the Thursday, as I was sliding into the taxi's backseat, before I'd opened my mouth or even touched the door, the driver threw himself around in his seat and hissed "Softly, softly, for the love of God close that door softly- what is it with you gringos, huh?"

            Which opens a whole different kettle of onions, because clearly I read as 'other' even before I open my mouth. (I need to wear pointier shoes.  More scarves.  Less blue eyeliner.  Do something, anything, with my hair.  Maybe?)

            Ever since, I have gone in and out of taxis with such careful tenderness and solicitude that five out of six times (and counting) the door hasn't shut properly and I've had to go back for a do-over: a sharp wave-off to the driver as he peels back into the traffic, a solid, snicking gringo slam, and wildly un-Chilean thumbs-up to let him know that we're all good now. 

            Unmistakably a gringo at 50 paces.  That's me.

Teenagers with Drivers Licenses

While walking home the other day I passed by two girls, both  of them blonde-ish, who were coming out of a store and examining the drivers license of the blonder of the two.

"No" she was saying, rather vehemently. "It DOES look like me.  When my hair is down, and it's permed and when I'm totally made up, I look EXACTLY like that."

There was a pause, as the less-blonde considered the logic, and then the blonde-er suddenly wailed "But my hair was up in a ponytail and the bouncer wouldn't let me in!"

Sometimes the stereotypes just write themselves, don't they?

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.

Pancake Tossing

Mr Tabubil is making Dutch pancakes (savory, not sweet), and has been showing off his pancake tossing prowess.

            He seems to be a little out of practice. The lead-up is great, but the follow-through is kind of drippy.

            I removed myself from the kitchen, on the premise that a female audience wasn't what his frustrated testosterone needs right now.

            I am hearing much macho grunting and assorted aaarrrgghhhHHH! noises, so I shall stay out for a little while.

(Mucho sniggers).

La Ensambe Serenata

Yesterday was a public holiday in honor of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.  Chileans don't generally pay too much attention to the honorees of their many public holidays.   When a gringo asks, they shrug and say that they're not entirely sure, but ISN'T it nice to have an extra day to spend with family?

Chilean work days are very long, and I can't imagine that anyone worth the honoring would mind being remembered in happiness and family rather than by name. 

On this particular long weekend, we were taken out by a group of musical friends to La Maquina  (the Machine) a small club in Providencia to listen to la Ensamble Serenata.  La Maquina is housed in an old, high-ceilinged Chilean house.  Room dividers had been knocked out and floor levels now vacillate around an unspecified mean-floor-level.  The walls have been painted ochre-red and hung with large papier-mache carnival masks: one of the men in our party whispered to me that with the ochre color it was a VERY Valparaiso sort of club - and now I will have to go down to the coast and do the midnight-till-five club scene there, just so I can find other places just like it.  La Maquina was bold and cheery and squashed in with far too many tables, just like all the best clubs in every city everywhere. We were a large and cheerful party and had a large table right in front of the corner of the old house that had been roped off for the band.  

As he passed around the menu,  the proprietor of the place bent his head to ours and whispered that machas were available - not on the menu, but happening back in the kitchen for those in the know.

Machas Parmesanas are a very Chilean dish: surf-clams baked in their shells under a layer of parmesan cheese,  and cooked until the cheese is brown and crispy around the edges.  They are served by the dozen, on a plate swimming with a rich, cheesy broth, and they are always accompanied by with a basket of bread-rounds to sop up the juice.

To repeat, this club is called La Maquina, and it is situated at Seminario 65 in Providencia, Santiago, only 500-odd meters from the Baquedano Metro Stop. I note this, not in passing, but because the machas parmesanas that they serve here are some of the best machas that I have ever eaten - the sort of meal where you inhale the meat and lick the shells clean afterward and fight to sop up the broth - double dipping and be damned- until the plate is clean and shining and everyone has had almost enough, but not quite, so that you need to order another plate.  And possibly another one after that.

We sat at our cheery, squashy table and ate machas and drank red wine and weirdly de-natured strawberry daiquiris, and music happened all around us. La Ensamble Serenta counted  a flautist, an oboist, and a percussionist in a corner with all manner and sort of drums and cymbals. There was an acoustic bass guitar, a man with a perpetual and dreamy smile who alternated between an acoustic guitar and a mandolin, and Senor Claudio Acevedo, the band leader, who played nine instruments over the course of the night  - from maracas to a Bolivian charango and a squeeze-box, as well as two guitars, one of which was strung with something that made the sound come across all silvery like a harpsichord.

They played music that combined Caribbean Latin rhythms with Andean scales (for those not familiar with Andean Music, listen to El Condor Pasa, one of the most internationally familiar songs in the genre), lifting all that was best of both and fusing bright percussion with the minor chords and melancholy flutes so that toes tapped while we sat still and LISTENED. 

At intervals, the percussionist stood and became a tango singer.  He had a deep, dark, caramel-colored voice, the sort of voice created to be heard with your eyes closed and your hand wrapped around the hand of another listener, but he carried so much emotion outside his voice that closing your eyes was a terrible waste of him - his hands reached up before his eyes, his face twisted with pain and his back was racked with it, and we sat with our eyes wide open , eating and drinking his story until the very last ululating note.  As the evening passed, songs grew looser and toes tapped harder and people were clapped and rocked along with the music, and then, suddenly, after and hour and a half that had passed like a breeze, Senor Acevedo announced that they would sing their last song - and they did - and then they bowed and put down their instruments and left the building by the back door.

And the protocol was all bent - the closing of a concert demands a hemming and a hawing and at least two encore sets before the performers leave the stage, and here they were - gone.  We couldn't be having with that at ALL. 

In Australia - and the United States, an ovation is a critical mass of personal appreciation- there is a hail of applauses, and individual volleys of 'Encore!' are lobbed back and forth across the room like errant tennis balls until the noise rises like a storm.  The Chilean approach is rather more collectivist.  A Chilean audience stands abreast, links elbows with its neighbors and chants "Otra! Otra! Otra! Otra!"  ("Another!  Another!") until something happens to its liking.  Eyes may be dancing and mouths may be smiling, but the collective Voice has an edge that says that there had better BE an Otra, or there will be Trouble.  There is more than the whiff of a football mob about it.

A good band will pay attention to the way the winds are blowing: after just enough time for a quick cigarette and a single quick hand of poker, the Ensamble came back from outside and stood again behind their instruments.  They played a long rolling encore piece, and then they put their instruments down and Senor Acevedo took up a microphone and presented to us, one by one by one, each of the musicians.  We clapped and whistled and howled and stamped - and from the back of the room, ululated even - for all of them.  The flautist took up the microphone and told us that the oboist had learned that same day that he was to become a father, and he held out a hand to the back of the room where the oboists wife stood blushing and smiling - so we clapped and cheered and ululated for her as well. The oboist took the microphone from the flautist and pointed to the table behind ours, where, he said, all of the men there were a group of oboe-makers from France, visiting Santiago for an oboe-fest.  He went around the table, introducing each of them  by name, and we stamped our feet and gave every single one of them a great big hand of appreciation as well.  And while we were all turned around with our backs to the stage showing our appreciation to the French oboe-maker in the far corner, the band dropped their instruments and scarpered.

But we weren't NEARLY done.  We howled and whistled and clapped and cheered and ululated some more, and then we put our hands to the tables and began to drum.  We liked the sound of that, so we put our feet to the floor and began to stamp.  the sound thundered and the high windows began to shiver, and we raised our voices even higher and chanted 'OTRA' until the ceiling rang.  It wasn't that - or ONLY that - we wanted more songs; we had been sitting still and mostly quiet all evening while the live music bent itself all around us and now we were primed and firing and we wanted OUR turn to move. 

The band seemed to understand.  As the noise grew and harmonics in the floor became a susurration underneath the roaring sound, Senor Acevedo appeared once more.

He lifted his hands.

           "Silence."  He said. 

We stopped.

            "We will play two more songs." He said.  "The man who is to become a father would like us to play Ventana a las Estrellas for his wife.  And then we will play La Columbiana for you so that you all can dance."

Ventana a las Estrellas (Window to the Stars) was a sweet, simple, sentimental piece.  We sat through it patiently, nodding to the music, and when they finished we slipped loose and exploded.

The Band-leader fixed a gimlet eye upon us.

            "Now stand."  He said.  "Find a partner.  And DANCE."

And the band played La Columbiana three times all the way through without stopping.

And we danced in the narrow spaces between the tables.

Mr Tabubil wasn't dancing - he was in a three-way percussion battle on the table with the bassoonist from the Santiago Philharmonic and the Director of the Universidad de Catolica Chamber Orchestra.  Behind us, the French oboe-makers were stepping rather more soberly than there rest of us, smiling faintly and taking tentative stabs at a salsa. Their  host, a round, teddy- bearish Chilean gentleman,  was jamming it up alone between the tables.  When he saw me dancing by myself, his eyes lit and he snatched my hands and we were OFF - spinning and twirling and stamping along with a six-piece Chilean Ensemble Band, and a three part percussion accompaniment pounding out our way up to the sky.