Noche Buena en Cabo

    As the title suggests, I spent Christmas Eve in Cabo San Lucas.  (Noche Buena means Christmas Eve, btw)
    It was originally home to the Pericú people but today is a massive tourist attraction.  When you first leave the pier, vendors and people advertising tours come at you from all directions.  They have kind faces, calling you "amigo", and offering you toothy smiles.  It's almost regretfully that you must tell them: "lo siento. Ya tenemos un tour", in your heavily accented Spanish.
   We didn't have as much time in Cabo as we did in Mazatlan or Puerto Vallarta, but it was time well spent.  We docked just before noon, and watching the Norwegion Star pull into port was a treat.  We had to be sent ashore via tender boats-to my extreme delight and my father's dismay.  He's easily seasick, you sea (haha!).  But I'm not.  I love the feel of cutting through the waves and sun on bare shoulders. 

Getting into the tender boats. (I'm the one with the blue backpack)

 I thought of an Elizabeth Taylor quote I once heard as we neared Cabo.  My memory butchered it, but I didn't have the luxury of google then.  

"You can't possess radiance, you can only admire it."

   We had an hour to kill before our tour of downtown Cabo, so we walked along the pier, directionless.  Just outside of the duty-free shopping area was a tented market.  A flea market.  A golden opportunity to practice my cringe-worthy Spanish.  And I did, although I didn't end up buying anything.  The vendors were very kind, with the good breeding to tell me-untruthfully-that my Spanish was very good.  Someday I'll go back to Cabo and actually buy things, but bargaining is the fun part.  

  Our tour guide was a good humored Mexican named Armando.  His English, although hardly perfect, was very agreeable.  He took us to a church:

La iglesia de Cabo San Lucas, circa 1700s

and what used to be a commercial tuna fishery.  Cabo used to generate revenue as a fishing town, but now all the fishing is for sport.  Indeed, the world's largest marlin tournament is held in Cabo.  

  After our tour was over, we bid farewell to a still beaming Armando and left to find the location of our glass-bottom boat ride.  It wasn't hard; the pier isn't where you necessarily have to worry about getting lost in.  Downtown is perhaps a different story.  But I digress.

   The glass bottom boat ride was probably my favorite part.  The waters surrounding Cabo are very clear, and fish came right up to the bottom of the boat.  The tour guide told us laughingly that he had rubbed guacamole to attract them.  I still don't know if he was serious.  

The view from the glass-bottom boat ride

   The sun had begun to go down before our ride was finished.  The surface of the water was stained orange and red.  It was something I've never seen before, something I can never forget.  The ocean spray dried on my arm, leaving behind tiny salt crystals, each perfectly formed.  Beautiful. 

  There was a smell, as we neared Scooby-Doo Rock.  (Don't ask me what the real name is because I don't know.  That's what the guy called it, and that's what I'm sticking to(: )  Anyway, it was kind of salty, kind of decaying.  It made my brother sick, but I kind of liked it/couldn't stand it.  There were a number of sea lions calling to each other and swimming about in the water, sunning themselves on the rocks.  I guess I just assumed they were the cause of the odor, but I've seen sea lions before without encountering that smell.  One of life's mysteries, it would seem.  

   A lovely, sunshine-y day.  I wish you could all go there, because even though people call it "California-Mexico" it's still deeply rooted in history. 

The Sun and the Sea

    I keep a personal journal and I was going to write this in there but then I thought: Why not blog about it?  So I am. The pictures were taken by my father.

    My family and I just returned from a 7 day cruise along the Mexican Riviera.  I never used to understand why anybody would pay so much just to eat and shop and dance.  I didn't see why people didn't just fly directly to their destinations and spend as much time as they wanted exploring and hiking.  I'm still not sure what other people's reasons are, but mine is the ocean.  I miss it so much now that it's like a physical pain.  

     I live in California, and beaches are hardly scarce here.  But there is nothing like the rocking movement of a ship cutting through waves.  You can go outside any time you like, and hear the roar of the sea, feel the salty spray, squint into the sun.  I filled half of a new notebook with the things I thought of as I stood there.  Some of the things I wrote are silly, and some quite profound, I think.  But some never got recorded and are lost to me forever.  Technically they're still swimming around in my brain, but I'll never be able to remember them again.  
    What impressed me most about the wide outdoors was not the sea, but the sun.  My father and I woke early on the first day-Monday the 23rd-and went to the 13th deck to watch the sunrise.  It was bitterly and gloriously cold.  An exerpt from my journal:

The sun was magnificent, a great flaming orb that left a golden pathway to it, as if to say: "Come find me if you dare!"  I have never been so moved as I was then, by that sun.  I fancied that if I looked closely enough, I could see the sea mirrored on its fiery surface.  
The sun is very proud.  Its ascent is defiant, almost haughty.  "Admire me, revere me, worship me if you will" the sun says from up high "but I will continue to rise and set even if mankind did not exist.  If every clock in the world broke, I would be unaffected.  At least then you silly humans would see that I am above time, which is after all, a manmade thing."-about an hour later, from the Blue Lagoon Restaurant.

    Now we are back home, and I miss the rocking of the deck.  I miss the way the sun glittered on the surface of the water like a million sapphires.  I miss the bite in the air, and the salt.  I miss Mexico.  
    I still don't like the pounding, meaningless club music they insist on playing 24/7, or the excessive eating, but that's a small price to pay for the sea and the sun and the wind.  
    

“My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me.”

 ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A Fine Day For Sailing

   The sun had not yet risen over the horizon, and the air was bitterly cold.  Garthar Svavarsson was impatient to be off, for the tide was rolling in quicker than expected.  His men were already drinking. He didn't mind.  Drunk men made the best sailors.  He ran his fingers over his ship's smooth side, admiring the way oak changed seamlessly to spruce at the hull and ash at the prow.  Oak was Odin's wood, and very strong, but spruce floated easier.  The ash was for his wife, who was waiting for him in Hebrides.  Garther wondered idly if he would return to Sweden.
    The forest to the North of the river was gone.  The timber had been used to build his new longship. He resented the baldness of the land, the ugly stumps.  Still, it had to be done.
    His grandfather used to tell him stories of his youth, when the land was still densely covered with forests.  Many of the forests had been cut down for shipbuilding.  A single longship took an entire grove, and an army of them...Garthar shuddered.  But Vikings always needed ships, for raiding was a risky enterprise.  A good ship could last many generations, but not when hacked at with swords or burnt by angry peasants.
     Sweden, like much of the European and Scandinavian countries, was once heavily forested, but the coming of the Viking Era had meant the destruction of many old groves.  Sacrifices were offered by the hundreds to appease the gods.  Odin would not have allowed the felling of his oaks otherwise.  Even before the Viking Era, northmen had been skilled seamen, and their ships were the swiftest in the world.  They were slim enough to navigate narrow fjords, shallow enough for rivers, but equally as good on the open seas.  They were worth more than a man’s life, but they took a lot of wood.  Garthar’s grandmother was a druid, and she had mourned the loss of the trees.  Trees were sacred to the druids, who, it was said, had learned to communicate with dryads.  Garthar sympathized with her, but he was a Viking raider, and he needed his ships.  They were his livelihood.  

And so the forests were felled.  But not all of them. The sacred groves were safe, and his grandmother went there with her basket of offerings every afternoon.  

But there was always the need for more farmland, and any man willing to destump the fields could have all the land that coins could buy.  After the Summer raids, he might be such a man.  Then he could bring Kristen back to Sweden with him.  Garthar tried to picture it.  

His men were pushing his ship out from the sand and into the fjord.  It was a beautiful ship, he thought with pride.  It didn’t matter that the northernmost end of his land was now uncomfortably bare.  If he could have an army of such longships he would clear out all of Sweden.  It would mean more land for he and Kristen in any case.  

It is not known what Garthar Svavarsson’s fate was after his journey to the Hebrides.  He is thought to be the first Scandinavian to circumnavigate and live in Iceland.  It is not clear if he ever got his army of patchwork longships.  

In the years that passed, Sweden did indeed grow sparser in forests and thicker in farmland.  After the last Viking raid in Normandy in the year 1066, many took to farming.  The landscape of the Scandinavian countries-Sweden included-changed.  The rich forest topsoil was excellent for turnips.

It's Raining Outside

            It's raining outside.  The drum of water droplets drown out the world, the wind blows away, away, away.  
            I am not afraid of the cold, or the wet.  It's just that hot tea is so fitting, and a cup steams at my elbow.  I reach up to turn out the light and sit in partial darkness, listening to the howl of unseen beasts.  The light is too false.  It profanes the the atmosphere of gloomy chill.  So I leave it out and sip my tea.  I wish I could say that this silence affords my thoughts peace, but it doesn't.  
            Isn't that strange? I find that chaos is better for introspection, because your mind is forced to blaze a path through extraneous noise.  But not peace, not silence, not stillness.  Then your mind is startled by its own strangeness.  Or perhaps its just me that cannot recognize my own thoughts. 
            I feel so young.  I feel so vulnerable.  Perhaps the rain is like a great equalizer-I don't notice that it discriminates between the brilliant and lackluster, the old and young, the good and bad.  We all get wet, don't we?
            My head hurts.  I don't think people will like this post because it's nothing more than a stream of consciousness, and it doesn't even make sense to me.  But when do I ever make sense to myself?  I think the truly wise aren't those that know others, but those that know themselves.  I think the truly happy are those who have gone to the edge and learned to appreciate true sorrow.  What was that thing that man once said? It was something about skunkweed.  It was beautiful, something about the necessity of something as yucky as skunkweed to bring out the beauty of a rose.
           There are so many, many things I should be doing.  But I can't bring myself to review Calculus, or learn my new AP Spanish vocabulary.  I was very proud to be taking AP Spanish, but right now it seems pointless.  Stupid, even.  The rain doesn't care, so why should I? The rain scorns the school of men, and looks away from the fools that scramble for their fools' education.  It's so depressing.
            My bed is unmade, the breakfast dishes waiting sternly in the sink.  But my tea is only half drunk and the warm scent of mint dances across muddled senses.  
           Enjoy the rain, San Diego.