There's An Ocean On My Mountain!

Welcome to The Mountain Mermaid, the official blog of the newly established community of ocean lovers and advocates called, The Tide Turners.  As a filmmaker, environmental biologist, and educator, I wanted to create a forum where scientists and surfers, teachers and artists, media-makers and policy-makers could come together to splash around thoughts, ideas, and potential solutions to the issues facing our ocean.

I do not intend for this to be a bla-bla-bla blog, where I write, you read, and we all move on.  It is intended instead to be a launching point for an exchange.  I’ll pose a topic each week and would love you to add your comments, join our Facebook community, and follow on Twitter.  So, where do we start?  I suppose by getting personal about our relationship with the ocean.  Here’s my story:

Three years ago, I said goodbye to Brooklyn, New York and set out across the country to Bozeman, Montana.  I had just finished a film about wolverines for PBS and National Geographic and was asked to come out to Montana State University to teach in their MFA program for Science and Natural History Filmmaking.

I expected it would be different – I would be trading skyscrapers made of steel and glass for ones made of rock and ice. Trading the frenetic pulse of the city for the tempered beat of “mountain time.” And trading the sirens and horn blasts for the bugling of elk. All that seemed a pretty fair trade by me. But there was one thing I wasn’t quite ready to trade – and that was the song of the ocean for the silence of the mountains.

I grew up in Rhode Island, “The Ocean State.” And if there was one language I thought I understood well, it was that of the sea. I was familiar with her rant through a storm, as well as her easy lullaby on a quiet summer night. When I moved to New York, I sought out that familiar voice to cut through the noise. Whether taking a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, strolling the Boardwalk on Coney Island, or dipping my toes in the Atlantic at Rockaway Beach, the voice of the ocean was a constant companion and it centered me.

With a move to Montana, I expected that voice to be hushed. The nearest ocean would now be the Pacific, and that would be nearly 1000 miles away.

As a filmmaker, I guess I should have known to expect the unexpected. . .

A thousand miles sure seems a long way for a voice to be carried, but the ocean is a powerful force. The mighty Pacific perpetually evaporates and whips itself into clouds which hitch an eastbound ride on the wind, halt over the Rockies, and cloak these rugged peaks in white for nine months of the year.  It’s simple, it’s elemental, it’s poetry . . . it’s music.

Yes, even here in this land-locked state, the language of the ocean is communicated in rich, full verse. It’s not heard through the pounding of surf, or lapping of waves — the summertime serenade with which I was acquainted.  Here in the mountains, the ocean sings in a different register: it pings across the ice of a blue-white glacier, it rasps in the whirling diamond dust on a sub-zero morning, it grunts in the steamy breath of a bison rooting for forage, and it whispers as softly as a lover as it falls as snow on the evergreens. It’s the Ocean’s very own Rhapsody in White.

We often think in terms of what separates us: our religion, our color, our land, our language. We tend to frame our lives in the context of “boundaries,” but if there is one thing that I have learned since moving from sea-level to five-thousand feet, it’s that nothing is truly isolated. Everything is interconnected, interdependent.  Mountain needs Ocean as bone needs blood.  As modern society needs ancient wisdom.  As music needs ears that are open.

So, in the spirit of that connection, I invite you this week to share a bit about YOUR relationship with the ocean.  How do you define it?  Where did it start?  What excites you?

 

No matter where we find ourselves -- on the edge of shoreline, in the heart of a city, in the thick of a forest, or at the top of a mountain -- the ocean is what links us; supplying us the oxygen for every second breath we take.  Think about that -- and then breathe deep. That’s our starting point.  Now let’s dive in, collaborate, and turn some tides!

Please comment, follow, and join the Tide Turners Facebook and Twitter community as well.