OUTTAKES: CANNIBALS

This outtake is actually from my earlier book, THE FRAGILE EDGE. A scene with the crown jellyfish made it into the final cut. The shipwreck musings did not.

"As always when underemployed at sea, I imagine which of my boat mates would make the best eating if we suddenly found ourselves adrift and starving, only to conclude the crown jellies would be tastier than any of us. As succulent as cactus. Though light on nutrition."

The fantastical painting above is by Julie Speed, whose work I discovered serendipitously online. I'm now a devoted fan. She's also got a delightfully subversive show opening April 1st at the Gerald Peters Gallery, 24 E 78th St, New York, NY, that's up for a month. Check it out.

 

The moon jellyfish below (relatives of crown jellies) are from here.

OUTTAKES: SISTER LANDSCAPES

(Satellite image of L'Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, by NASA's Earth Observing System.)

I never throw away any writing. Instead I dump all discarded passages into an "outs" file. This is left over from my film editing days when the outs bin was a treasure chest of previously sorted material that you knew was good enough to have wanted once, and maybe good enough to want again, maybe even better in a new context. On tight deadlines, my "outs" writing file has proven a lifesaver more than a few times. I love the feeling of recycling words.

Working on this blog, I've been going through my "outs" file more than usual and found myself saddened that some of the good stuff that really should have been included in the new book, Deep Blue Home, got dropped. Some of it I intended to reintroduce but lost track of. Oh, well. Here's part of one passage:

"The distinctive landscape of Newfoundland has nearly identical sisters on the far side of the North Atlantic. Separated by 2,500 miles of ocean, yet connected by oceanic rivers--the Gulf Stream and its northern reach, the North Atlantic Current--the heathlands of coastal northern Scotland and southern Norway nourish the same plants and animals as Newfoundland. What appear to us as disparate continents are inescapably linked by the circulating watery bands of the deep blue home."

The graphic is by Jack Cook at the Woods Hole Oceanagraphic Institution. It shows some of the surface and subsurface currents of the North Atlantic connecting Newfoundland to Norway. From the WHOI site:

"Colored arrows approximate two of the major current systems flowing through the North Atlantic, with red representing the warm surface waters of the Gulf Stream, North Atlantic Current, and associated flows, and blue roughly representing the cooler, bottom-flowing Deep Western Boundary Current."

You can see how the waters bring the landscapes closer together, carrying messengers in the forms of marine life, birds, plant spores, insects.

This Atlantic puffin, for instance, and the fish, could be from either North America or Europe.

(Photo by Erik Christensen, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

The enterprising puffin is actually from Faroe Islands. 
 
These landscapes, one in Newfoundland, one in Norway, look almost interchangeable.

 

Top: Lodalen, a valley in Stryn municipality, Sogn og Fjordane county, Norway. (Photo by Aqwis, courtesy Wikipedia.)

Bottom: Panorama of Gros Morne National Park, overlooking Bonne Bay, Newfoundland, Canada. (Photo by Tango7174, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Even the sheep have managed to cross the sea.

OUTTAKES: OCTOPUS BIRTHDAY

I have twice written a long and slightly comic love letter to Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the people I've had the good fortune to spend underwater time with there. A version of this tale has now been cut from two books. Sadly. I still harbor hopes it will find a printed home someday, somewhere. Here's a snippet:

"For the last hour, scores of baby octopuses as clear as rice noodles and no bigger than my fingernails have been hatching from egg casings attached to the mooring line and washing onto the dive step and crawling aboard in confusion. Feeling they deserve a better start, I have been collecting them from the decks and placing them back in the waves. Joining me in the small but seemingly important task is Nicola Chatham, an artist who, like me, is aboard Foundation One courtesy of the Great Barrier Reef Research Foundation, whose founders believe that painters and writers also have a role to play in protecting the deep blue home." 

Photo: Dana Point Ocean Institute

OUTTAKES: THE BACKSTORY

 
As usual in writing a book, a lot of good stuff ends up on the cutting room floor, so to speak. This outtake was hard to let go of, more so because I didn't write it:

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Dirge Without Music