The Hammock Papers: Dispatches from the field

16 August 2010

Dispatches from the field

From my sister ...

Monday, August 16, 2010 6:10 PM
Subject: Sand Tiger at False Cape

Went into work today expecting a quiet day because I WAS suppose to dive, but the trip was called. A day of paperwork really….until I got a call. The Stranding Center got a call about a shark on the beach. My day was hot, sweaty (I think I lost 15lbs in water), stinky, full of giant flies that could carry off a small child, and a total blast.

This female shark stranded with a circular Frisbee around its neck…amazing. She had a septic ovary and a really nasty bladder so I think she was already sick when she got tangled in the frisbee. She must have come close to shore to get easy food….her gut was full of spot and menhaden. She probably swam or nudged the frisbee in the water and it went on her neck. It wasn’t on her long and she definitely would not have been able to get it off without breaking her jaws. She probably tried to get it off in the shallows by rubbing on the bottom. In the tough surf over the last few days probably got washed up and floundered. No matter how it happened, the frisbee probably didn’t actually kill her but it didn’t prevent it either.

B

Necropsy

Removing the liver

Thanks Buff .. be careful.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL