The Turtles Knew

Vacation-ending illnesses are setting in. I've been headache-depleted and queasy for days, and today Tess was complaining of the same thing - she said it was like when she was in the car, only she wasn't in the car. Which describes the feeling I'm going through exactly. Janneke has got the same thing, and it's icky. But it didn't really keep us down.

I went out and bought a paper again this morning, and there were several really cogent items. The first was an article about the "spiraling crisis" of beach garbage in Puerto Rico. THANK YOU! It's not just me! Apparently in 2004, a scuba club did a garbage pick-up and got 174,000 pounds of garbage off a certain set of beachs after a holiday weekend. And this year, they did it again, to see if a number of public awareness campaigns had done any good. And they got twice as much garbage.

An editorial called for the police to step up and start fining people, since the people appear not to be prepared to do the grown-up thing on their own. Of course, it's difficult to catch someone in the act of leaving garbage behind - all they have to do is look about themselves for policemen before they drop it, and once they're ten feet away, who's to say whose garbage that is? You'd have to catch them on video. Police representatives, when interviewed, estimated that they had given out between $1000 and $4000 in beach littering ticketing last YEAR. At $250 a ticket, that's....let's see...carry the seven....Between four and sixteen people. Not exactly breaking their backs over this one, are they? And of course, estimates are all they can give, since they "don't keep statistics on that". Which is the biggest bull!@(#*!@ excuse ever - Look it up! Can't be that tough! It's called a spreadsheet.

There are garbage cans EVERYWHERE. They are well-maintained, emptied every day, lined with black plastic bags. At least every 50 yards at the top of every public beach I've been to in Puerto Rico, there's a garbage can in perfect working condition. That is not the problem.

Me, if I were grand poo-bah, I'd ban all food on the beach. Hand out tickets for possessing food items on the sand. That's easy to catch people at, and would get the message across pretty clearly. I'm sure I'd be a wildly popular politician, particularly at bonfires.

Another item in the paper said that yesterday, on Condado beach, the beach two blocks from our house, there was an unexpected hatching of sea turtles in the middle of the day, from a spot where they weren't known to have laid eggs. The people on the beach ushered them to sea, and when an Environmental Agency truck showed up, they took 20-some still-unhatched eggs from the nest and put them in a cooler, and started to take them away. The people gathered there protested, and were told that the eggs would be re-located to a spot less heavily touristed. But the folks apparently raised a ruckus and refused to let them leave, claiming that this was a lie and that they actually planned to sell them. (The eggs are considered by certain insecure hairless half-man troglodytes to be a manhood enhancer.) The police were called in and arrived by the dozen, polished to a gleaming sheen, and in the end the eggs were put back.

All this just behind our house, on a day when we were lolling about at el Escambron. "If that was right where we usually swim," I told Janneke, "I'm going to be really mad."

Janneke hit the road for a 10:00 AM meeting with the person we met on the bus whose father was a Russian cartoonist. Remember her? The meeting was actually with her husband, and Janneke was fascinated. She's been researching him since, and seems excited about the possibility of some further study, for some colleagues if not for herself.

While she was away, the kids and I played "Shop", where they arrange everything in their room in categories as if it's all for sale, and I come through and pick through it and decide what to buy. I pulled one of those dirty teacher tricks where I made them do all the thinking for me, by just saying that I was really into Africa, so I'd buy anything in there that they could show me had to do with Africa. Between all the categorizing and arranging to be done pre-shopping, totaling up the prices, the haggling, and the re-set so that someone else can be the shopper, that game can go on forever. Thankfully, though, Janneke came home, which broke their concentration, and I was able to escape in the confusion created by a smoke bomb. Utility belts, man. Can't say enough about them.

Lunch, Tess to sleep, Quinn and I to the beach.

Where it turned out that the turtle story had happend about 150 yards from our usual spot. Argh. I did see some folks gathered there and took some pictures of the news crew and hangers-on that came to interview people about the incident, but I'd give a thousand of those pictures to have seen leatherback turtles thwapping their way seaward. Ah well.

Made another pyramid. Quinn, while I did that, sculpted a really cool Darth Vader in the sand, which was a kind of bas-relief deal that didn't photograph as well as I would have liked. But it's below, you can check it out. The queasiness and overall malaise chased us off the beach around 5:30, and Janneke bravely cooked up supper for us. We snuggled and talked snakes after supper (Tess brought them up), then played Dominoes. Quinn won the first game, and we started a second. The kids were a bit squirrelly and whiny going to bed, but in the end it was just me and Janneke, sprawled out on our bed, watching John Stewart highlights on the computer in the air conditioning. After ten minutes, Janneke said, "I feel a lot better."

I glanced over toward the room where the kids slept, and will be going to hell for what I said next:

"I know what the problem is. It's them."

We laughed. But I'm still going to hell.



It's bigger. It's badder. It's...Another pyramid.
I put Quinn in the same spot to show the size difference
between the last one and this one. I poured my soul into it.
Lots of folks took pictures. I mean, hey, if I can make just
one person's life better, it's all worth it. I'm not in this
for the glory. It's really all about the kids...



Quinn's fort against the waves. He sat there quietly,
narrating some grand story to himself, for a good
half hour. Love that sensitive little boy.



Quinn's Darth Vader. Appreciated by fewer - not
too many people were floating directly over it.
The pelicans probably thought it was awesome.



Tess clings to my neck. I'm calling for
a nail clipper.



The folks gathered around the turtle birth scene.
The orange fencing now protects the turtles.
Or, you know, shows the poachers where they are.



The TV crew.



T-shirt of one of the people interested in
being filmed.



Kids warm up - no matter how warm the water, in the
wind, it's a cold thing being wet.