Letters from Lisa

Welcome to the online home of my Australia trip (July 16th - August 12th, 2005). Here you can find journal entries, photos, sketches, observations, and other random garbage treasures.

Journal posts are indexed to the right, for easy access.

My photos of the Ingram Island experience can be found by clicking here.

Cheers mates!

Welcome to Ingram Island!
originally posted August 2, 2005

Location: Howick Group, Great Barrier Reef, Far North Queensland
Population: 10

Ingram Island is a delightful, nearly undiscovered tourist destination located conveniently on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, easily accessible by converted trawler, passenger boat, or long-distance kayak. Its acutely polite and friendly inhabitants are eager to welcome visitors to experience their unique way of life and culture.

Accomodations
The island is equipped with a variety of amenities that create an atmosphere of comfort and luxury while providing the ambience of the outdoors. Accomodations available include open-air sleeping cots, featuring firm lumbar support and with an excellent view of the stars and constellations, and fully enclosed tents located in wind sheltered foliage with special ant-proof screenings. Dining is al fresco with a beachfront overlook. Toilets are conveniently located on the island’s coastal waters and feature magnificent views of the ocean, nearby islands and wildlife.

Due to the island’s strong community feeling, the prevailing custom of limited privacy will quickly become one of its many charms.

Dining: Food and Drink
Ingram Island cuisine boasts a sufficient variety to satiate the demands of the most discriminating gourmand. Breakfast consists of both hot and cold options, with tea (black and herbal) and french pressed coffee always on. Lunch buffet is virtually unlimited, and includes a balance of crispy and soft textures, including delicately crusted breads with your choice of toppings. Local delicacies include Asian flavors, imported meats carefully preserved in tins, and fresh caught seafood. We particularly recommend the stingray cakes, which can be procured at a highly reasonable market price.

The Locals: Culture and Language
Ingram Island’s small, close-knit population is a model of cross-cultural understanding and harmony. Two distinct cultural and linguistic groups co-exist peacefully, with their more or less mutually intelligible languages featuring a colorful array of vocabulary and idioms that will delight the linguistic enthusiast.

The locals are highly intellectual, as well as physically fit. They can frequently be seen honing their skills through a variety of games and exercises, including Jeopardy, Charades, Pictionary, Bocche, American Rules cricket, and island-indigenous aerobic exercises such as face plants and toe crunches.

Nature is highly respected and all care is taken to avoid infringing on the local flora through careless trampling, particularly the prized burrs that grow on the sandy walking surfaces. Similarly, sacred rock sites must be left undisturbed and undefiled by tourists’ feet.

Climate and Weather
Ingram Island is situated fortuitously in a rainfall-free zone, producing a delightfully calm, balmy tropical warmth. Occasional soft breezes and trickles of liquid sunshine provide a soothing counterpart to the strong North Queensland sun. The surrounding waters of the Coral Sea are cool and refreshing, with delicate waves lapping delightfully across the reef flats.

The tides are smooth and balanced, allowing for a wide variety of boating and reef walking activities with an almost certain chance of encountering an impressive array of wildlife.

Attractions and Sightseeing
Wildlife spotting is a particularly attractive option on Ingram Island due to its close proximity to turtle foraging grounds. Hawksbill and green turtles (and even the occasional loggerhead) are in relative abundance, and will frequently swim just alongside your boat, almost willing you to pick them up.

Other outdoors-oriented entertainment options include dugong rides, shark and rock jumping, pleasant sauntering walks to Beanley Island, and night fishing (boat with outboard motor is provided free of charge). You must provide your own snorkel equipment if you wish to take advantage of the pristine reef viewing opportunities just offshore.

Quieter amusements include the extensive Ingram Island library and free cooking lessons. Storytelling and a cappella karaoke are popular with the locals and can often run into the late hours.

to be continued…

Home Is Where The Tent Is
posted August 17, 2005

I’m leafing through volumes in the travel section at my favorite bookstore. France on $30 a day. Wine growing in Sweden. Culture Shock: Antractica. My hand reaches for a guide to the Himalayas, but my gaze falls upon a shelf labeled Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific.

The full force of my homesickness hits me. My hand drops to my side.

I shouldn’t feel homesick. I am home. In the United States. New Jersey. The same little highrise apartment where I took my first steps, had my first imaginary friend, broke up with my first ex. This is where I have lived my entire 27 years. Even during four years of college in New England, “home” was always here.

I came home from Australia four days ago. Now all I can think about is going back.

---

It took a full day, plus a few hours, to advance from my familiar front door to the Esplanade in Cairns (where you can Dive The Great Barrier Reef! or Snorkel For A Day or Half Day! Equipment Provided! Boats Leaving Daily! and in Japanese as well!) and another full day bouncing and swaying on a cramped but homey little ex-trawler to reach my Australian destination, an island almost no one had heard of. Most maps didn’t show it. Weather reports didn’t mention it. Tour boats didn’t frequent it. This was simply because, 11 months of the year, nobody lived there.

Nobody human, that is.

My new Australian address was Ingram Island, a tiny coral cay of about 25 minutes in diameter, laid out between several reef flats, the Far North Queensland coastline, and a busy shipping channel that spanned the horizon. Ingram Island had no grocery stores, no main streets, no rest stops or campgrounds or structures of any kind. Anything we anticipated needing — sleeping tents, fuel, drinking water — had to be loaded onto the Gwendoline May, which would take us into viewing distance and then anchor in deep water to avoid a skirmish with the coral. The cargo would then be reloaded into one of the two small metal “catch boats” that we would be using for turtle research (creatively named Turtle Research 2 and Turtle Research 4 — I decided not to ask what had happened to 1 and 3) and finally unloaded onto Ingram’s sandy shore.

As it happened, I was one of the first two volunteers to come ashore. We offered to go first not because we were the strongest or most useful unloaders — just the most seasick. The Gwendoline May had encountered large swells and high winds soon after departure, and although I had traveled extensively on boats before without a single bodily complaint, I sensed this time would be different. Indeed, my first conversation on board the boat began with, “Have you taken seasickness medication yet?” asked by Sara, the biologist who would be cooking the ship’s meals, after she watched me gracefully jam my hip into the rim of the dining table.

Despite Sara’s friendliness and skill with cooking, the kitchen was definitely not the place to be. Too many items of furniture to bump into, too little ventilation, and too few windows with a horizon view. I spent every opportune moment outside on the back deck, watching the colorful plastic “nelly bins” filled with our food and supplies shift around under the blue tarp protecting them from the waves. Water flowed in thick lines across the deck, tickling my feet in their flimsy plastic sandals.

The other safe place to be, digestion-wise, was horizontal on the bottom bunk in the “girls’ bedroom”, a triangular alcove downstairs from the kitchen. I threw my purse (which I wouldn’t be needing for the next 14 days) at one end of the bed, threw my dizzy self down on the other, and tried to imagine I was being gently rocked to sleep instead of tossed about by ocean waves. The seasickness pill packaging had warned of possible drowsiness, and I fervently hoped it was right. Thankfully, it was.

I slept so soundly, in fact, that I missed the drama in Cooktown, when the boat stopped off to pick up three final passengers that would be joining the project. The waves had only gotten rockier, and the sky had faded to an unhelpful black, when Turtle 2 (or possibly Turtle 4) was dispatched to retrieve the new additions. When the boat returned, all those awake struggled to reel (or steer) it back in, but were thwarted by crashing waves that sprayed them with water and raised the boats to different heights, making it difficult to get across. At some point during docking, head researcher Ian — who, in a foreshadowingly creepy way, had recently warned us about the dangers of pinching extremities when climbing in and out — had his foot slammed between the boats, rather in disregard of the relatively fragile nature of the human toe. He tumbled into the water, while the others nervously watched, but then popped up, rolled his eyes, and climbed aboard. The three new passengers took possession of their luxurious accomodations on the dining benches and kitchen floor, and Ian retreated inside to examine his bit of mangled anatomy. But there was an encore of excitement, as the supplies had shifted loose due to the rough waves and had to be reorganized. Then, finally, all was quiet on the Gwendoline May once more.

I awoke early the next morning blissfully ignorant of the Battle of Cooktown Harbor. The last thing I remembered was Ian’s video of an episode of Crocodile Hunter focusing on sea turtles, in which he’d made a brief appearance. (The topic of the ubiquitous Steve Irwin and his exaggerated camera-mugging became a frequent diversion throughout my time in Australia — it seemed that anyone who worked with wildlife had encountered him at some point.) The inside scoop was that Steve broke some fingers while shooting a turtle jump, and had simply taped them up for the remainder of the shoot, without complaint. Now it seemed Ian was about to do the same with his toes.

I had been on the boat for about 18 hours — many of these cocooned in my bed — and had met almost everyone with whom I would be living on Ingram Island. There was Ian, whom I’d met the night before we left. There was Travis, a young athletic Australian from outside Melbourne, whose wife Katie kindly kept me company while the guys attached the catch boats to the Gwendoline May.

Then there were four fellow Earthwatch volunteers, all from America like me, and all involved in education in some way (also like me). It had taken me quite a while to meet them. Ian and Travis had left me at the dock to help load the boat while they went back to pick up the other volunteers, as well as everyone’s luggage. In the ensuing rush of bags and bodies, my luggage got left behind, so Ian had to drive me back to get it. “Oh, you wanted that stuff?” he joked, but I had confused Cairns with New York City and was worried that someone might have swiped my bags from the hotel lobby, and I couldn’t bring myself to laugh. I wasn’t even sure that what was in my luggage would be useful — I had never slept in a tent or gone more than a few hours without access to running water — but I had compensated by bringing most of my closet, packed smartly in plastic bags in case the luggage fell into the ocean during unloading, which had been specifically mentioned as a possibility in Earthwatch’s official Expedition Briefing.

As we completed the loading — now with me personally supervising as my luggage descended to the deck — I surveyed the mountain of bins and poles and oddly shaped packages and had a flash from Spaceballs: “Take ONLY what you NEED to SURVIVE!”

I climbed back down onto the ship, now assured that we weren’t leaving my underwear in Cairns, and felt sufficiently recovered to meet the other volunteers. I met Rik first, thus dispelling the rumor that we were an all-female volunteer team. (One crew member, upon hearing said rumor, had made a silly remark about us constantly shaving our legs, which to my knowledge none of us ever did on the island.) Rik was an elementary school principal from the Midwest, and remarked that the rest of us seemed to be teachers — thus him spending time “with the enemy”. He had a small gash on his face from having bumped himself somewhere on the boat, and mentioned he had numerous other cuts and bruises from his week of scuba diving on the reef — particularly one injury sustained from a collision with a turtle. (Which was destined to be the first of many.)

The “other teachers” turned out to be Meg, Heather and Emily. Meg, a rather fit lady from Virginia, quickly pointed out that she was not, in fact, a teacher, but worked in the development office of a private school. Like Rik, she seemed comfortable in the water, since she was a competitive swimmer. In contrast, Heather was actually a teacher. She was from my neck of the woods, New York City, but taught in a different universe. Her students were tough, world-weary, self-identified “ghetto” high schoolers in Spanish Harlem. She had this in common with Emily, who taught a similar bunch at a charter school in Boston. Emily seemed more than ready to take on a rustic residence on Ingram Island, since she’d hiked and camped extensively on various road trips in the U.S.

Before piling into the dining area to get oriented, we assembled for a “before” picture, knowing full well that we would come out feeling, looking and (yes) smelling quite differently after the project ended.

Now, stumbling past the sleeping bodies in the kitchen area, I was certain that I already looked like an “after” picture. I therefore quickly formulated my very first Ingram Island rule — No Looking in the Mirror. I smoothed my hair back one final time in the ship’s bathroom, then sighed and stepped back into the kitchen, where life was beginning to stir.

Sam, a Parks and Wildlife Ranger from Cooktown, introduced both himself and his two companions — Aboriginal boys whose names I first misunderstood and then figured out to be Bevan and Gresham. Still wrapped in blankets, they struck me as shy and quiet, though they were simply subdued due to sleepiness. Sam, though, was talkative and friendly, and his typically sharp Australian wit flowed particularly long when he encountered Rik, who was to become his sparring partner over everything from light switches to sports to fruitcake.

For some reason that still eludes me, the Bone Collector was on over breakfast, which probably would have given me a queasy feeling even if we hadn’t been on a seasickness-inducing boat. Fortunately, I was soon spared by Ian’s announcement that we were about to start unloading. We assembled on the deck, and I mentioned that I wouldn’t mind leaving the boat immediately, or sooner. After Bevan and Gresham were dropped off with the first round of supplies, Meg and I went next.

As we hauled the bins up the beachfront, I thought nervously about the fate of my luggage, but swiftly dismissed the wayward idea that my bags might be left behind. As we threw our shoulders and elbows into propelling huge barrels of water up the slope (almost nothing is heavier than water) I was positive the other volunteers would check for me. As we panted on the beach, sprawled out and sweaty in salt-watered clothes, I knew for a fact that the boat crew wouldn’t raise anchor before inspecting for left items one last time.

But when the last boatload had been unraveled, piece by piece, onto a tarp hastily laid out in a vain effort to keep sand out (Ingram Island Rule #2: Sand gets in, no matter what, so don’t bother) I didn’t see one of my bags.

Back to the boat!

It turned out that it had indeed got to the island and was merely hidden under some larger bags. So after Ian checked with the boat crew about having one last lunch (and one last fling with plumbing) before they cast off, we disembarked on the island to start setting up.

Ingram didn’t feel like home to me yet. Not as Meg and I clung to the sides of her balloon of a tent as it caught the wind and achieved brief moments of flight. Not as we shuffled and peeked in the storage bins that housed our sustenance — including one that seemed devoted to cheese spread and Vegemite. Not as we were sitting down for a brief meeting and Ian plucked a green ant off his shirt and bit into its belly. I couldn’t help but feel quite far away from everyone and everything familiar. Ingram seemed a pretty island, an island that promised new experiences and a touch of adventure. It just didn’t feel like home.

But it would.

Lost and Found
posted August 18, 2005

The night before I departed for Australia, my parents returned from a shopping trip with a perky yellow handheld GPS unit, which they gleefully presented to me to “use on the trip”. When I protested that I wasn’t THAT direction-impaired, they giggled nervously and backpedaled — “Oh, it’s for the whole family, of course. We just figured, since you’re going and we happen to have it…”

a perky yellow handheld photo of the GPS, taken from the product’s website

I am, in fact, not the swiftest, navigationally speaking. I dread field trips to large, complicated places like the Museum of Natural History — despite it being one of my favorite places to visit — because I fear accidentally steering my students into an inappropriate area (two words: GIFT SHOP) or going down the same set of stairs four times while searching for the exit. I’d be giving them extra exercise, of course, but after about the third time they’d likely catch on that I was kind of an idiot. Still, I study the maps, I take along another chaperone who isn’t spatially fuzzy, and I manage. To this day I’ve never gotten a group lost.

My sense of direction does seem to improve (to a point) when I’m abroad, possibly because I’m less ashamed to be seen in public engaging in a prolonged staring contest with a city map. It’s probably clear from the silly hat and sunburn that I’m a tourist anyway (well… everywhere except the Northern Territory) so I choose to be an obvious tourist who at least isn’t wandering around lost, dehydrated, and delusional. Those do abound, which is the only way I can explain the proliferation of furry faux leather koala keychains proudly sold in Australian gift shops under bright orange signs that say “Classy Gifts! 2 for $3!!” In Cairns, there were even ones that had GREAT BARRIER REEF printed on them — because if you’re not careful, you get eaten alive by koalas out there. They’re attracted by the snorkel tubes.

I never used the GPS, of course. Not for navigation, anyway. I poked around inside its electronic innards to test it out, like Consumer Reports, and started tagging silly waypoints like my hotel bathroom. Though that never quite worked, since the pesky thing would have a tantrum if you tried to use it indoors. This eventually led to some difficulty — in Kakadu, I had to stand well outside my little lodge to get a clear satellite signal, so the (very capable) guide spotted me and wanted to know exactly how little confidence I had in his ability to get us through the park without becoming hopelessly lost. I tried to convince him that I was just tooling around, but I don’t think he believed me. So Gary, if you ever get to see this, I never doubted you. Even if you told me it was safe to swim in that one water hole because there were no fish for crocodiles to feed on, and I counted at least THREE fish. We’re all entitled to one mistake, yeah?

After a day or so on Ingram Island, I remembered that the GPS was in my bag. Going into my bags on the island always felt like opening birthday presents, because I had to dig through layers of wrapping to get to the contents and was often pleasantly surprised at what I found. “Oh boy, a pair of pants not marinated in salt water! Just what I wanted!” Some days, especially towards the end, it was like a garage sale — I just browsed, hoping to find something that wasn’t junk. A GPS sort of qualified as “not junk”.

I dutifully tagged my tent’s location (S 14° 25.055′, E 144° 52.770′) for posterity, noting that even when I zoomed out as far as possible (an 800 mile radius, I believe) the nearest waypoint barely grazed the edge of the screen. And, the GPS didn’t know of any path back to my last known position.

For all intents and purposes, according to the GPS, I was lost.

That made sense to me. I felt a little lost.

The first night had been the most difficult. At first I told myself it was because my tent site was too exposed to the wind, and too far away from the others. Not that I was skittish about walking alone in the dark — mainly because it wasn’t dark. The moon was bright and full, eliminating the need for a flashlight (which was a good thing, since mine carried on its grand Earthwatch tradition and sputtered and died moments after I turned it on). Besides, during my first Earthwatch expedition, a sea turtle nesting study, I’d become accustomed to walking the beach at night without a light source. I’d even learned to hope that the moon would shine weakly or not at all, since glancing at any bright light was like taking a flash photograph of your eyeball — painful as well as pointless.

Trudging back to my tent after dinner on that first night, sidestepping burrs and inconveniently underfoot rocks, I could see exactly where I was going. It was after I had fumbled with the tent zippers and awkwardly contorted myself to crawl inside that my vision of how the trip would proceed was revealed as woefully unclear. I wondered whether I’d feel seasick every single time we ventured off in a boat, or if that was a privilege reserved for the Gwendoline May. I worried about the ocean and whether it would be calm enough for safe swimming, and whether I’d inadvertently do or say something that would betray my fear in front of everyone, which given the general toughness (and macho-ness) of the group seemed like a dangerous idea. A few summers back I’d spent a lot of time getting used to the ocean during my Earthwatch expedition in St. Croix, but with two very understanding older ladies who coaxed me along and reassured me that the rough waves on windy days were tough for even experienced ocean swimmers like themselves — I somehow doubted that anyone would have a similar issue on this trip, or admit to it if they did. I generally saw myself as the Designated Wimp of the group, which chafed against my overall view of myself as basically competent and dependable. I determined to prove to everyone that I wasn’t THAT dainty or weak… but how?

There was more. There was the tent and whether I’d anchored it properly — I didn’t want to go parasailing over the casuarinas late at night. The tent was also barely large enough to accomodate one person sitting up, so I fretted about my bags getting wet, and even after Meg graciously volunteered to utilize my luggage as ballast in her own voluminous tent, I worried that I’d have to bother her early in the mornings or during times that she needed privacy.

There was the little matter of the bathroom, or rather the lack of one. The less I thought about that, the better. Still, the issue lurked in the bowels of my unconscious mind — could I manage to, as the expedition briefing euphemistically stated, “use the ocean for all ablutions”, without falling into said ocean or inadvertently displaying my ablutatory organs to other island inhabitants or shipworkers passing by on the shipping channel?

I even felt anxious about being anxious, scrawling in my journal by rain-fly filtered moonlight, “I’m really surprised that I’m adjusting so slowly…I should be a lot happier about this than I am!” I contemplated how nervous I was allowed to be before I was officially Freaked Out, which might lead to Really Freaked Out or even the dreaded Seriously Overreacting. “Everyone’s nice, but they seem to have it a little more together than I do,” I mused in my journal, adding hopefully, “Maybe I look like I have it more together than I actually do?”

With so much to think about, or to try to not think about, I was too distracted to remember that I hadn’t yet inflated my sleeping pad, so I spent the night in rocky discomfort. I never get much sleep on my first night in a new place, and since I’d broken that pattern in spades by sleeping away the boat ride over, I had a debt to repay to the Sleep Gods, which I accomplished by sacrificing my first night to worry and fear.

The following morning I staggered out of my tent (literally — I’d missed the step of making sure the door was unzipped ALL the way before trying to climb out) and wandered down to the marquee tent, where to my surprise several folks were already awake and sipping French-pressed coffee. The presence of decent coffee on an island with rustic facilities was a pleasant discovery, and helped to reassure me that Ian, who’d planned and organized the entire project, had his priorities in order. Clearly, no one would be expected to endanger themselves by performing under caffeine-deprived conditions. I immediately began to relax.

That morning we donned wetsuits for the first time and zipped out to the nearby reef to catch our first turtles. I was excited about getting to work, particularly because it would give me something to think about besides how sleep deprived I was. I figured it would be impossible to feel lost while there was work to be done.

Travis dove in and came up clutching our first turtle catch. I felt a rush of relieved joy, peering from the rim of the boat at the wonderful thing we’d found.

The Adventures of… Austra-Man!
posted August 28, 2005

You know, ever since I left Ingram Island, I’ve been hearing voices. Actually, it’s just one voice. It echoes in my head at odd moments, often when I least expect it. Sometimes I have to completely stop what I’m doing and just listen, incredulous, to this voice berating me about… coins, perhaps. Or fruitcake. American sports. Americans in general.

It’s quite clear to me now that it will take some time before I can fully deprogram my consciousness, and that my recovery will be of some duration. But until then I, and all my fellow Americans who inhabited Ingram Island, will continue to feel the effects of our encounter with seemingly mild-mannered Sam, who in reality is none other than… Austra-Man!!

(man do we need some theme music!)

In these difficult times, when fear and despair seek to oppress the spirit of humankind, there are still those heroes among us willing to risk personal health and happiness for the greater good of all Australians everywhere. And not a moment too soon, for a new and heartless enemy has gathered its full strength to strike, and strike hard. This powerful foe invades under the cover of lies and deceit, with fast food and strip malls, with bad pop music and worse pronunciation…

Even when all hope seems to be lost, one hero stands tall against the infiltrators! Whenever the peace and harmony of the planet Earth is threatened by the fiendish race of Yanks, determined to impose their foolish ways upon innocents abroad, only one man can turn the tide of cultural combat against the forces of backwardness… Austra-Man!!

Setting: A quiet morning on a picturesque island, somewhere in Far North Queensland, where an innocent young Australian prepares for another balmy liquid-sunshiney day chasing hawkies on the GBR…

Travis: Hey Rik, how ya goin?

Evil Yank (played by Rik): Ha ha! I shall now attempt to confuse this innocent Australian with my fiendish American obsession with upside down light switches!

Travis: Loight switches?

Evil Yank: That’s right! Do you know how many innocent tourists have met their untimely end because your electricians fiendishly switched all light switches to flip backwards, thus causing hotel guests to stumble and fall and hurt themselves from lack of illumination?

Travis: You know, I never thought about it that way…

Austra-Man: Not so fast, Evil Yank!

Everyone: Austra-Man!

Austra-Man: The same! Now I’m aware of your scheming, you American, trying to convince US that WE’RE doing it wrong… You’re all alike, you Yanks! You do everything wrong! You drive on the wrong side of the road! You don’t know your donkeys from your bottoms!

Evil Yank: That isn’t true! Just because we pronounce a certain slang word for donkey the same as we pronounce a very similar slang word for bottoms…

Ian: What is this American obsession with bottoms?

Evil Yank: Curse you, Austra-Man! You have foiled my plan. But I shall return!

Later that day….

Austra-Man: (driving Turtle 4 with his foot while leaning halfway over the side of the boat to peer under the surface of Coombe Reef for a speeding turtle) Now you’re sure you want to try this, Yank?

Evil Yank: (balanced precariously on the bow of Turtle 4, clutching a rope, with a helmet jammed on his head) Of course! Just because I’m American doesn’t make me completely useless!

Austra-Man: It doesn’t?

Gresham: (pointing to a distant turtle somewhere between the boat and Mid Reef, several miles away) YEAH, THAT’S ‘IM!!

Austra-Man: (grinning slyly while maneuvering the boat around rocks and shifting waves) OK, wait… Wait… Go!!!

Evil Yank: Sam, that’s a shark!

Austra-Man: So? Jump! You can take him!

Evil Yank: No! You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?

Austra-Man: Every chance I get! (steers the boat towards a large accumulation of coral) There’s one! Get ‘im!

Evil Yank: That’s a bommie!

Austra-Man: You’re not scared of coral, are you?? You Yanks are completely soft!

Evil Yank: It’s not going to work! You can’t get rid of me that easily!

Austra-Man: (chuckling softly)

The next day, Austra-Man and his crack team of turtle catchers are scouring the shallow waters of Beanley Island for juvenile green turtles when they spot a red-helmeted, wetsuit-clad figure waving to them from several feet meters away …

Another Hapless American: (played by Lisa) Hey, that’s Rik! What’s he doing standing around in the water? Turtle 2 didn’t just leave him there, did they?

Meg: No, there they are… They must have caught two turtles at once! Seems like they’re going to be busy for a while.

Austra-Man: OK, we’re going to drive right past him without stopping. Lisa, don’t laugh!

Lisa: (laughing) Okay!

Austra-Man: Shhh!

Evil Yank: (catapulting the turtle over the side of the boat and climbing aboard) Oh no you don’t. I’m coming in! (to himself) Now to continue with my evil plans! Say… I could try driving the boat for a bit, Sam, so you can have a chance to jump!

Lisa: I could try jumping! Hey look, there’s one! Think I could get it?

Austra-Man: Well, it’s missing a flipper and floating aimlessly in about two feet of extremely calm water… so um, well… never mind that, just get up here and jump!

Lisa: Really? Are you sure? Now?

Gresham: Yes, now!

Lisa: How about now? Should I really jump?

Everyone: Yes!!

Lisa: Now? (gets pushed off the front of the boat by Gresham as the boat is driven directly towards her)

Austra-Man: Hey! I’m the only boat driver allowed to kill anyone! (jumps off the front and nudges Turtle 4 to the side)

Lisa: (emerging, totally oblivious) I got it! Meg, take my picture!

Austra-Man: Typical…

Meg: Turtle 2! I’ll be safe there! (defects)

Evil Yank: Drat! My plan to discredit Austra-Man and his Austra-Powers has been foiled again!

Austra-Man: You’ll never win, Evil Yank! I have the power of the $2 coin on my side! And I measure my degrees in Celsius like the rest of the world! I don’t wear silly looking shoes on the beach at night!

Lisa: You mean his sneakers?

Austra-Man: (pouncing) Sneeeeeeeakers? What in the world do you mean by sneeeeeeeakers?

Lisa: (jumps off the boat)

Evil Yank: Now look what you’ve done! You’ve driven her to –

Lisa: (emerges with another sad looking special needs turtle)

Evil Yank: — never mind.

Gresham: I barely even had to push her that time!

Evil Yank: It was the power of the Turtle Whisperer!

(the radio crackles on — some American lady on board a shipping vessel would like to report that she is currently passing by… an island!)

Austra-Man: An island??? On the Great Barrier Reef? I hope they’re going to be all right! We should monitor their progress and be prepared to intervene! Good thing we are in Turtle 4, the far superior of the two catch boats in every respect! Now where was I? Oh yes! You Yanks! You probably eat peanut butter and jelly together, don’t you? Disgusting! No wonder your footie players wear so much bloody padding and don’t even use the proper rules! No wonder you have to have a World Series with only Yank players in it!…

Evil Yank: That’s OK. You play cricket!

Austra-Man: That’s right! A game far too challenging to the intellect for an American to understand!

Lisa: Sorry to interrupt, but do you think our readers have the general idea now?

Austra-Man: You might want to keep it going for a bit, so any Yanks with an attention span long enough to read this can begin to get the point.

Evil Yank: They’d have gotten it already if you didn’t pronounce the English language weird! You never say the letter R!

Austra-Man: You never say the letter H!

Lisa: No really, I think they get the picture.

Austra-Man: Fine. Just know this: that whenever Australian culture and language is threatened by evil Yank fiends, Austra-Man will be there!

The Turtle Whisperer
posted September 5, 2005
The cat greets me at the door, plaintively mewing and circling my les with its silky grey tail. I know what it wants. I proceed to the bottom right hand drawer of the pantry, precisely following the flowery handwritten directions on personalized stationary featuring my best friend’s mother in cheery cartoon form, playing golf. I have not pet-sat this cat before, but I know him well — his name is Tyler, but I have affectionately christened him Klepto after his charming habit of swiping any morsel of food from every conceivable location, including carelessly abandoned lunch bags on the kitchen counter, the microwave, and the dog’s food bowl. He is a soft, furry vacuum cleaner with whiskers, and it has not taken him long to figure out that I am the Food Lady. I scoop out a cup of dry pellets into his bowl, and sit back on the couch as he eagerly pounces on his evening meal.

But as I am pulling out my book, Tyler bounds up to the couch and inserts his head between my eyes and Chapter 14, purring fanatically and rubbing his head against the pages before sticking his nose in my face. I put the book down and pet his head, his back, his pudgy stomach, as he soaks in high pitched compliments about how he is a good cat, and a pretty cat, and a VERY pretty cat, and so on. After several luxurious minutes of star treatment, Tyler leaps off the sofa and attacks his dinner in the corridor. I chuckle and return to my chapter, but not before marveling that even a basically solitary cat who clearly thinks with his stomach chose to seek affection and touch before satiating his hunger.

Touch is powerful, not only for its ability to foster and cement relationships, but also in its transformative abilities in producing physical-emotional states. Touch can be welcoming, rebuffing, exciting (in various ways), and, frequently, calming. The most effective way to calm a crying infant is to cradle it, regardless of why it is crying. For those of us too big for cradling (at least physically) we might appreciate a firm handshake, a pat on the shoulder, a gentle hand on the back, or a hug, depending on our culture and experiences with touch, as well as our ability to handle the sensory input of physical closeness.

Not being able to handle touch can have dramatic consequences. Babies who arch their backs and stiffen when held by their parents miss out on opportunities to feel mutual closeness and love, prerequisites for learning and functioning in society. Kids who react over-dramatically to being bumped into or poked, however innocently, tend to have difficulty interpreting social cues accurately and making friends. I’ve worked with autistic children who screamed when clothing or fingertips lightly brushed their skin, but who offered their arms so that I could forcefully squeeze and compress the flesh around their elbow and wrist joints (a technique I learned from the occupational therapist). Many of them disliked the squirmy, hot hugs they received from their parents and teachers, but happily wore weighted vests that provided the same sense of deep pressure. They enjoyed the feeling, but missed out on the communicative nature of touch, the aliveness of it. I was always searching for ways to connect with these children who were so sequestered in their own private sensory worlds, and if I could just find the touch they would tolerate, it would often become the bridge.

So perhaps it was not surprising when my Ingram Island identity emerged to revolve around touch — in this case, the way I handled the turtles. By the end of Day 3, the other volunteers had begun to call me the Turtle Whisperer.

For several days into our sojourn on the island (people always picture Survivor when I say “on the island”) I was still reeling from the many new and anxiety-provoking aspects of daily life and work with the turtles. To this point, I’d successfully survived a rocky and seasickness-inducing boat ride, several hours of unloading heavy cargo without dropping it into the ocean or on vulnerably exposed extremities, and using the Coral Sea as my own private (I hoped) bathroom without falling into the ocean, which I can safely say is the largest toilet I will ever use. I’d constructed my sarcophagus-with-a-convenient-side-zipper of a tent and planted it, more or less, in a suitable location. I’d even cajoled, massaged, pushed and eventually jammed my body into the confines of a borrowed wetsuit that would protect my legs from errant turtle flippers and beaks, as well as provide a buffer against coldness and salt spray, both of which I managed to enjoy copious amounts anyway.

As we zipped around the reefs on hardy metal catch-boats, I perched rigidly on the bench in the back, gripping the sides as we careened between outcroppings of coral and beach rock, and sideswiped waves. I told myself, rather unconvincingly, that Ian was the more careful of the drivers (or as Sam would put it — Turtle 2 was the slower and wimpier boat!) and therefore I did not need to worry. I was too disoriented to recognize the few stray landmarks surrounding us — lumpy Coombe Island and its outstretched reef flat, skinny, furry-looking Beanley Island (the fur, upon closer examination, turned out to be a dense forest of mangroves) and rocky, stubbly Ingram Island itself, framed by the hazy distant mountains of the Australian coast. The view was better standing up front, feet firmly dug into the seat cushion as I squinted aimlessly through the churning blue-green water for turtles, but I was unpracticed in the art of telling turtles and rocks apart (turtles move, rocks don’t) and my attention was rather absorbed by clinging on for dear life, besides.

My ability to function helpfully was little better on solid ground. During the unpacking process, I lifted and heaved and carried plastic bins and nudged water drums ineffectually with my shoulders, then wandered abashedly on the outskirts of the marquee tent as people who knew what they were doing fiddled with tent poles and ropes and stakes. Then I tackled a far more domestic project — cleaning the refridgerator. I delved into my role with gusto, girlishly exclaiming at the filth and calling for a better scrubber and bleach. (Vicious mutated flesh-eating cold storage microbes: 0, Lisa: Billions!) I washed dishes and cups, too, relieved to be doing something that probably wouldn’t kill anyone if I got it wrong somehow (at least not right away). Still, I was desperate to excel at a task that did not involve cleaning or especially cooking, as I was barely domestic enough to boil water and heat something in the microwave at the same time.

So when our day’s catches lay flopped on their backs on the sand, ready for processing, I was eager to get started. I had volunteered on a turtle project two years prior, and knew my way around a tape measure and clipboard. I even correctly anticipated what occurred as soon as we approached the animals — sheets of delicate coral sand flying into our faces and clothes, churned up by the powerful flippers of turtles trying unsuccessfully to turn themselves over. I had weathered many turtle-generated sandstorms on St. Croix, mostly while trying to cling to the back flippers of 800 pound leatherbacks long enough to read their rusty metal tags by faint red flashlight. These turtles, a mixture of hawksbills and greens, were much smaller, and were more likely to give you a nasty scratch with their flipper than to break your bone with it. Still, scratches were highly unwelcome, considering that the group had already used up its entire injury quota on Ian’s toes, and it was quite difficult for skin to heal with continuous exposure to salt water.

So Travis stepped forward and pressed down firmly on one turtle’s neck, quieting it instantly the way Ian had told us (”Just press down on its neck like this… oh, and it works on me too, when I get agitated.”) Its flippers sank back down toward the sand, and its head drooped. The turtle had gone into a classic yoga rest pose. Travis stepped back, his mission accomplished, and wandered off to assist in setting up the other equipment. Over the course of two weeks working together, we developed a highly efficient turtle processing center on the sand, with several volunteers wielding tape measures and calipers, another two manning clipboards, one or two people strapping turtles into the harness or rope to be lifted and weighed, and finally the open-air laparoscopic unit (more on that later). With ten people fluttering around, kneeling beside turtles and shouting out complicated alphanumeric codes to the clipboard holders — CCW! CCL! Plastron to vent! 18.4! — things could become quite uncomfortable if the turtles suddenly realized that no, they were not quite IN the ocean where they belonged, and began to flap. Plus, without anthropomorphizing the creatures too much, it was certainly possible that their health could be adversely affected if they felt stress, and by getting them to calm down, we were minimizing any damage that being a research subject might cause.

Not long after Travis calmed the first turtle did another raise up its head and furiously beat its flippers against the sand. Aside from new hatchlings, who are downright acrobatic, turtles cannot flip themselves over once they are on their backs. Their flippers and tail dangle from their shell and can only flail about ineffectually, a fact taken advantage of by turtle hunters and poachers, who might leave the turtles lying on their backs for days at a time. (We only kept our turtles on the beach for a few hours, at the most.) Noticing the frenetic movements of the turtle, I stepped forward to attempt the turtle Vulcan neck press. I took the palm of my hand and pressed down on the turtle’s wide, wrinkly neck, and watched with delight as the turtle’s head dropped back and its large glassy eyes began to close. It had really worked!

I sat down beside the turtle, a medium-sized hawksbill (so-called due to its protruding beak, which, while not quite as sharp as a hawk’s, is not something you want chomping your fingers) and examined it more closely. Its underside was an orangey-brown, dusted with sand, with geometric brown scales dotting the flippers and larger oval scales welded together to form its plastron. Later, when we turned it over to measure its top, I got a better look at the famous, and misnamed, “tortoiseshell” on its carapace that might as well be a bright red bullseye mark painted on the back of every member of the species, since the multi-million dollar industry (currently outlawed) is in large part responsible for its severely endangered status. Underneath the algae and ocean grime, the reddish-flecked carapace glinted in the sun. This was a beautiful, and very powerful, animal.

My reverie was interrupted by the insistent sand-hurling of another turtle in the group. “Hey, shh,” I said, scrambling up to walk over to the turtle and press down on its neck. “Relax!”

By now the other volunteers were starting to giggle at my insistence upon talking to the turtles as though they were the preschoolers from my early teaching days. The previous night, in random conversation - most conversations on the island were random - I had mentioned a TV show on Animal Planet called the Dog Whisperer (derived from the book and TV movie the Horse Whisperer) so, naturally, I became the Turtle Whisperer.

At first I was just glad to be actually working that I could be good at. I figured I was a schoolteacher — I could handle unruly little creatures throwing sand, no problem. I pressed down on the neck of any fidgety turtle that crossed my path. I told them I knew they were having a hard day, and it would be over soon, and it wasn’t exactly a day at the spa but I really needed them to relax and it would all be OK. One of the other teachers present joked that you could see the difference in our teaching styles, since I was quietly coaxing and commiserating with recalcitrant subjects while she was snapping, “Jeez, shut the ___ up!” I spent as much time out on the beach with the turtles as possible, earning sand showers and one robust sunburn for my efforts, but also the satisfaction of a job completed, and some really lovely photographs (editor’s note: that I am going to post as soon as I’m back on my regular computer).

Eventually, I began to dislike the Turtle Whisperer, and then began to hate her outright, particularly as our time on the island came to a close. She popped up in conversations about teaching and airports and nothing at all, and I worried that she was a bit of a turtle hog, jumping in when someone else wanted a go at calming a turtle. One particularly sweaty afternoon, just two days before our departure, I accidentally reached out for a turtle at the same time as another volunteer, who backed off, commenting, “Sure, go ahead, if you want to be the Turtle Whisperer, you can do it,” which caught me off-balance and without a coherent reply. I didn’t want to “be” anything — I just wanted to do something helpful, whatever that might be. I’d spent the whole day on the island moping around and labeling the food bins, which was briefly fascinating (”What’s the difference between cannelini and canneloni beans?”) but didn’t exactly replace a day of turtle research. So I was eager to work, but certainly didn’t mean to step on anyone’s toes (insert your own broken toe reference here). It also didn’t help that it was my night to cook, and as I’ve mentioned before, my culinary prowess is more Iron Stomach than Iron Chef. My cooking partner ended up doing most of the actual work, probably figuring it was easier than giving me directions, and I ended up bolting down to the water’s edge just as dinner was ready, having nothing cheerful to whisper, shout, or anything in between.

I couldn’t expect anyone to magically figure out the peculiar combination of silly things that I’d chosen to allow to bother me, and it seemed awfully dramatic to make a fuss about it when we were so close to leaving. I had some thinking to do — some adjustments to make in the way I chose to see my contributions and abilities — but I decided it would have to wait. I let myself wallow in feeling idiotic and small and useless for a few minutes, then trudged back to the tent for some lighthearted eating and joking, which on most nights I very much enjoyed.

The next day, we donned our wetsuits one final time and slogged on foot to Beanley Island and its mangroves that seemed more like alien sculptures than trees with their fingerlike roots and twisted, contorted shapes. As we advanced down the reef flat in a few inches of water, I placed each foot forward with the precision of a ballet dancer en pointe, figuring that no one in front of me had been stung by anything and it was therefore safe if I walked exactly in their footsteps. Besides stingrays, which I could easily identify and couldn’t swim in such little water anyway, there were also rumored to be jellyfish (less likely at this time of year, but still possible) whose stingers could induce coma and death almost instantaneously. In case this wasn’t sufficiently worrisome, there were also blue-ringed octopi (we weren’t sure if what we spotted was one or not, but just the fact that it might have been one was enough for me!) and deadly stonefish, which looked just like rocks and were therefore impossible to avoid on purpose. I tried to focus on the clumps of weedy seagrass that brought the juvenile green turtles to our back doorstep, the bright blue starfish, the colorful crabs, and the increasingly plentiful giant clamps with shell openings that looked like a 5 year old girl had applied a wobbly line of lipstick to them. We picked up a sea cucumber that promptly emptied its muddy-ketchup innards like an old tube of toothpaste. As we walked, Rik suddenly said to me, “We tease you about being the Turtle Whisperer, but you really have a gift with touch. You need to use that in your work as a teacher.” We chatted about our respective work with children, the unfortunately justified paranoia about close physical contact with students, the necessity of helping kids to achieve emotional and social balance. It brought a clarity to my thinking that had not been there before. I began to see what all my various whisperings had in common.

Then we arrived at the edge of the reef flat, beyond which lay deeper water, and we began to look for pools deep enough to hold turtles. There was very little water at all — the tides had refused to cooperate — and in the end we only managed to find a few. I caught one as it glided right past my legs, so easily that I almost felt, for one silly little moment, like a turtle whisperer after all.

The Al Fresco Dining Area
posted October 5th, 2005
apologies for lack of updates… I am actually trying to write for quality rather than quickness!

Communal life on Ingram Island centered around an open-air marquee tent, a marvelously engineered mess of ropes and two moldy blue tarps and adjustable metal tent poles that kept sneaking out of their assigned holes, causing various sections of the ceiling to flap in the wind and droop down on our heads. Extra poles, coils of rope, scratchy tarps and heavy tent pegs reminiscent of medieval weaponry lay scattered around on the ground on blankets of dead pine needles and spongy beach rocks. This “storage system” was highly useful, as one never knew when a random piece of camping equipment would be called for — such as when the two Aboriginal boys grabbed some extra poles, headed to the shallow reef flat behind the island and speared a stingray for lunch.

For equipment too delicate or perishable to be left out in the elements — such as the entire month’s supply of food — Queensland Parks and Wildlife supplied perky primary colored “nelly bins” (Australian for “plastic containers”) stenciled with the yellow silhouette of a sea turtle. Bins were stacked along the back edge of the tent in twos and threes, with “canned Asian” next to “long life milk” and “Vegemite and Cheese Spread”, jumbled in with the enigmatically labeled “Heavy — Two People” which turned out to contain packets of jasmine rice and Thai egg noodles. Eventually two of the volunteers, tired of prying open rain-splattered lids marked “Coffee and Tea” from previous projects only to find seventeen cans of canneloni beans, orchestrated a mass reorganization of the food supply. From this point on, the bins were lined up so that one proceeded naturally from breakfast to lunch to dinner, with crackers and spreads (the dreaded tar-like Vegemite and, oddly, several jars of Nutella) inserted at random intervals for our convenience.

One of my first tasks on the island was to clean out the fridge, a heavy faux wood paneled contraption stocked with enough grime and bacterial growth to launch biological warfare on our neighbors, if we had had any. Feeling unqualified to drive tent stakes into the grainy coral sand or rig up the oily-black oven range to the canisters of gas for cooking, I dove into my domestic role with gusto, squealing girlishly and calling for bleach and steel wool from the plastic bins clustered under the folding tables, which were designated for cleaning supplies. Plates and silverware lay piled on the tables in white dish racks, along with the all-important black ceramic mugs that prevented anyone having to work in dangerously undercaffeinated conditions. A gradual parade of garbage bags were tethered to the tent ropes and fluttered in the breeze next to the single heaviest item on the island — the monstrous blue barrel from which we pumped all of our drinking and cooking water. This barrel, and its two replacements, required at least three people to sacrifice their arms, shoulders, hips and backs to the task of budging the precious water one square inch at a time until at least the high water mark, so it wouldn’t be swept back out onto the reef during the next high tide.

For our dining comfort, olive-colored plastic backyard tables and chairs were arranged over a crinkly Astroturf-colored tarp, which shielded our feet from the pebbles and burrs and vines that exacted small sacrifices from heels and toes when we went walking around the island (particularly for late night bathroom visits). We attempted to keep the tarp clean with small handheld brushes, which generally succeeded in dispersing millions of grains of sand, tracked in from our wetsuit booties, into less conspicuous piles. Heather, who had recently returned from a Peace Corps stint in Africa, was reminded of the women there who spent hours stooped in the sun, swiping with wiry brooms at their front porches. My technique was to get onto my knees and whisk furiously, chasing the sand until it fell off the edge of the tarp into the patches of leaves peeking out from underneath. Then I would stand up, triumphant, the skin of my knees dented with the imprints of the tarp-lines.

We spent hours upon hours gathered underneath the marquee in various configurations — all ten of us crowded around the two tables, dabbing ourselves with iodine like tribespeople adorning themselves with ceremonial paint; the two Aboriginal boys tugging at my journal while I sketched coral specimens from wildlife books and diving reference cards and eventually taking over the drawing themselves; one very wild game of Charades in which the opening depiction was “Debbie Does Dallas”; and the ten of us sleepily sipping ground coffee and pouring dried fruit into our cereal bowls to liven up our soggy-cardboard Weetbix cereal while trying to block out the shrill squeals of two juvenile seagulls pestering their mother for their own breakfast…

Travis was the first to call our humble tent set-up the “al fresco dining area”, pronouncing the word “doining” with his impenetrably thick Southern Australian drawl. It might behoove the Australian government, in the interest of future tourism, to add a symbol for “al fresco dining” to the official Ingram Island National Park sign on the shoreline — that is, if camping were not prohibited for all except those lucky enough to be conducting research on the Great Barrier Reef.

some photos of Ingram Island
posted October 13th, 2005

This is a map of the Great Barrier Reef featuring the Howick Group. If you really squint, Ingram Island is in there somewhere!

The next images are courtesy of Heather. Some are just plain scenic — others made me cackle hysterically when I first saw them!

a captured loggerhead turtle

Emily with a very important piece of equipment

Sam with one of our many gourmet meal offerings in the al fresco dining area

More to follow!
(Thanks for the pictures, Heather, hope you don’t mind me posting them)

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