I spent the last week of my short-lived unemployment in Provincetown, MA, one of my favorite vacation places ever. I haven't been there in several years, but it is still a lovely little fishing- village-turned-tourist spot, with great shopping and art galleries, and it is still thankfully as queer as a three dollar bill. Although the drag queens aren't as numerous as in the 90's, the make-up of P-Town has more gay people per square foot than any vacation spot I've ever visited. Which makes it an interesting place to spend a week, rain or shine. If it's sunny, there are an assortment of fun things to do at the beach, or in a sailboat, a kayak, or just sitting on the deck of your guesthouse reading a book and being surrounded by blue in every direction. If it rains, you can always shop or visit the many art galleries, and after your credit card has become dangerously close to its limit, there is Tea Dance, where you can drink and watch gorgeous young men dancing to techno without much clothing on. There are also gorgeous young women, but to me they seem to be getting seriously younger every year, although they are still fun to watch.
But Provincetown is a special place, and seems to have an energy that makes you stop and reconsider your dismissal of a Supreme Being. There is no way to ignore the way that the water sparkles in the sun, and no way you can't stop to admire the setting sun painting the sky and the harbor an amazing shade of pink.
I love to kayak on the harbor when the tide is going out, I love to look through the shallow water and watch the marine life on the bottom. It's interesting to watch the shrimp and crabs crawling around doing whatever it is that they do all day (I'm not sure what they do, but I'm sure it beats working at a desk for 10 hours). I don't really feel comfortable actually being in the same water as these creatures, I find them sort of creepy, but still, looking down from the safe distance of my kayak, they are great entertainment. As a foodie, I am always viewing these sea creatures either in a form that's ready for food preparation, or as the finished product that I must garnish and send out to a waiting dinner guest. Seeing these critters in their own homes looking for their own dinner is completely fascinating. On this particular kayak adventure, I felt adventurous and I paddled out a bit further. The water began to feel heavy, and I was having trouble making headway. I stroked harder, and as my paddle came back up out of the water, it projected this ball of grey matter out of the water, and over the bow of my rented kayak. EEEWWWW! I thought I had churned up some creepy remains of a medical experiment gone wrong, this thing I had flung up from the sea looked like either the biggest ball of snot I had ever seen, or some poor jerk's brain that he had donated to science and was not deemed worthy enough to remain in the collection to be studied. I realized that I had stopped paddling, and that a girlie scream was threatening to escape my throat. A moment passed and the kayak slowed to a stop. I peered down into the water and discovered that my tiny plastic rented vessel was sitting atop a bunch of jellyfish. I thought that maybe it was only the dozen or so that I could see, but as I gazed further out, I saw the evil things spanned the circumference of that rented piece of plastic for as far as I could see under the water's surface.
It was then that I let out a scream that came out of the very depths of that girlie place in my being, that place that is afraid of spiders, monsters, and most of all, creepy sea creatures that look like giant balls of snot.
Unfortunately, I was downwind of The Boat Slip, where Tea Dance was in full swing, and my earth shattering scream was drowned under the thumping of half clothed young men dancing to an annoying techno beat. I had to consider that between my middle-aged ass and the sting of a hundred poisonous jelly fish and certain anaphlatic shock that would result, was a mere piece of rented plastic that was beginning to teeter from starboard to port. I was energized by that burst of girlie adrenalin, and courageously drove my paddle into the great jellyfish metropolis, making huge strides towards shore, and leaving a wake of snot-like sea monsters behind me. I stroked that rented kayak like an olympic champion, and even drove it up onto the beach with a final powerful surge, so that I did not have to step out into the evil sea that I was trying so hard to escape.
Once on dry land, I walked in the general direction of the techno beat, and arrived at The Boat Slip and proceeded to down two large Cosmo's. I thought back to a post I had done before I left for Provincetown called The Invasion of the Slime: Part One. I remembered a particular passage that talked about the death from over-fishing of large fish like tuna and swordfish and the rise of the the bottom -eeding jellyfish since there is no more advanced species competing for the food supply.
Jellyfish populations are growing because they can. The fish that used to compete with them for food have become scarce because of overfishing. The sea turtles that once preyed on them are nearly gone. And the plankton they love to eat are growing explosively. As their traditional catch declines, fishermen around the world now haul in 450,000 tons of jellyfish per year, more than twice as much as a decade ago, a logical step in a process that Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, calls "fishing down the food web." Fishermen first went after the largest and most popular fish, such as tuna, swordfish, cod and grouper. When those stocks were depleted, they pursued other prey, often smaller and lower on the food chain."We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton," Pauly said.
I was thinking of creepy sea critters and looking out at one of those P-Town sunsets that was all pink and unbelievable and I thought that I could see the fingerprints of a Divine Being in the sand. I thought that the idea of evolution is some god's idea of progress, and here we are eliminating not just large fish, but other higher forms of life, human just like ourselves. The reasons we stamp out the things that sustain our own fragile biology are confusing and sometimes stupid. We attempt to pull in the large catch for profit, we destroy habitats because we are never, after eating the dwindling supply of nourishment, full enough, satisfied enough, we need more stuff, more space, we need more trees and sand to make summer homes and structures of glass. We have become predatory, not just of the fruit of this paradise we call home, but even of other humans, those of our own species. Our ape ancestors killed for food, but since we are so much more advanced, we kill for something much more noble, freedom and democracy.
I have enjoyed my summer vacation in paradise, and I am thinking of where I might travel next summer. While I would never choose to live in the wild places I have seen while traveling, I am grateful that they exist, and I have to utter a heartfelt thank-you to those people and organizations that work to keep these wild places wild, and these species, all a part of the Divine Creation, from extinction. Since I am now utterly afraid of the sea, crawling with creatures that we have fed and nurtured with our ignorance and neglect, I wonder what destination I might choose next August? It's fortunate that there now exist museums to sea life, such as Sea World, and that we can always go to Vegas if we want to see Venice, or New York, without the foul smell of the garbage, or the canals. If you like to snorkel, actually get in the same water as these scary creatures, you might be disappointed with the lack of places to view this rich pocket of marine life. If you have some extra pocket change you want to invest, you might want to get on board in the start-up of Snorkel World, the next big attraction for vacationers who miss the lush reefs of Florida and that great big dying thing called the Great Barrier Reef. We are losing the places we love to visit when we take that 2 week break from our mindless consumption, where will we go when there is no more reef, and the beach has become toxic?
Maybe finally, we will all go to DisneyWorld, and only then will we realize what a small world it truly is.
