LJ Idol - 3 Strikes - Week 18 - Ikigai
Sep. 19th, 2022 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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therealljidol, prompt "Ikigai".
Roberto Salinas waited for the outboard motor to turn over and start, rapping his hand lightly on the Seward’s helm.
“She be small but she be mighty,” he whispered quietly under his breath, and grinned widely as the compact marine research vessel came to life.
He performed one last check of the equipment and supply closet, ensuring the Van Veen grabber and core sampler were where he’d last left them. He latched the closet and turned, snapping his fingers at the last-minute warning light pinging in his brain, and quickly stooped to tie down the tangled stack of sampling buckets, which were known to be flighty. He confirmed the boat’s tiny lab bench toolbox held the portable FTIR and ISFET/pH monitors he would need to analyze his samples. Finally, he returned to the helm, turned the steering wheel ever so lightly and setting the boat in reverse. The Seward navigated cleanly away from the pile and its twin, the Cordelia. As expeditionary boats, they weren’t the largest or fanciest MRVs he’d been on, and they certainly lacked much of the fancy equipment of larger vessels, but their small size and maneuverability made them ideal for navigating through tight spots and shallow waters.
It was another beautiful day, the sun rising over the bay, glittering through scattering remnants of sea fog and dancing over the waves. Roberto had been born on the water and lived his life by the water. In fact, he spent so much time shoreside as a youth that his Mamá had teased that while she was responsible for raising him right, it was clear the ocean was his true amor. The years he had spent as a youth observing the wildlife of the shoreline– picking through shells, observing isopods, and saving starfish throughout all the seasons of the year– made entering into marine science seem like the only natural and right thing for him to do with his life. And because Mamá had raised him right, he easily won a scholarship that helped to cover his undergraduate degree. Coming of age during the early alarms of the global climate crisis had made his decision seem all the more pertinent, as he learned about how the disruption of the global carbon cycle was contributing to ocean acidification, irrevocably changing both the make-up and the variety of life within the birthplace of his world. He was proud to accept an offer into the graduate program at La Universidad de Cartagena, where he would contribute to research mapping the changes to the Columbian-Caribbean coastal systems, including the diverse range of sea life that inhabited the reefs of the San Andrés archipelago.
Although many of his days were spent in the lab, Roberto loved his fieldwork the most. Not only did it allow him the joy of cruising on the open sea and enjoying the beauty of the coastal environment, but he hoped the observations he and his colleagues were gathering would help researchers around the world to better understand the chemistry of sensitive marine environments and help to slow the effects of climate change. Being out of the lab on a beautiful day helped to renew his sense of purpose.
“Sure, collecting sediment samples isn’t always glamorous,” Roberto thought out loud, “but you have to dig deeper to really get it.” He giggled at his own joke, only a little bummed that no one else was around to hear it.
Roberto followed the channel away from the institute as he navigated the Seward out to the first of several sampling sites the team had selected for the basis of their current research. He was careful to watch the water for signs of marine mammals as he traveled, aware that bottlenose dolphins frequented the waters year-round. Roberto worried for them, especially during tourist season, when vacationers rented speed boats and cruisers and drove more haphazardly, ignoring the channel speed limit. He understood the natural draw of the ocean, but he struggled with the realities of the human impacts on her and her inhabitants.
On reaching the end of the channel, Roberto led the Seward out to the Caribbean Sea, turning to follow the coastline away from the bulk of the hotels and houses that dotted its landscape. Eventually, he spotted the numbered buoy marker that signaled he was getting close. Pulling up a map of the area on his phone, he noted where previous samples had been taken, and identified the current plot where he would be settling for the morning. Soon he spotted the recessed cove, a small half-moon of coastline studded with an outcropping of basalt – heavy dark rocks that poked up from the sea like ancient guides, their tops smoothed to flat tables by the constant erosion of the waves. Roberto lightly turned the Seward’s steering to move her gently into the cove, and cut the engine as he let her drift towards the sample site. Grabbing his notebook, he logged the coordinates on his way to the boat’s iron anchor, which he promptly lifted and dropped over the Seward’s port side.
Roberto smiled as he gazed over the quiet bay, taking in the sparkling sand, heavy rocks, and blue-green water. Usually he conducted his work without fanfare, but this morning he’d remembered the ear buds that Mamá had given him last week, to replace an old pair that had gone missing in the lab. Roberto dug the ear buds out of his pocket and pulled up a playlist on his phone. Scrolling through the list, he loaded Peter Gabriel’s “Digging in the Dirt” and chuckled to himself as he unlatched the supply closet, pulling out the grabber and core sampler to begin set up.
~~~
Roberto had planned on taking five different sediment cores from 4 different points around the cove where they expected to find the tiny pteropod shells that would be analyzed for changes in calcification. As the morning progressed, he’d collected numerous samples, carefully removing the mud layers from the corer that designated changes within the ocean timeframe and separating out the species of interest into small buckets. From there he weighed and conducted counts of the tiny shells in each bucket.
He was setting up his notebook to record a fresh set of measurements, music still gently pulsing in his ears, when he noticed light glinting off the dark rocks adorning the shoreline. Roberto paused momentarily from his task, shielding his eyes from the sun, which had grown harsher as the day progressed. In the distance the waves were gentle against the rocks, which were covered in layers of green and brown algae. Not observing any more tricks of the light, he squatted and turned his attention back to the buckets in front of him. Roberto turned up his music and shoved his phone in his back pocket before beginning the more tedious task of repeatedly flushing freshwater over the tiny, empty shells in each bucket, then filtering out the debris to ready them for the analyzer.
As he dropped the sediment sampler– a fancy name for a clear cylindrical tube that was weighted to facilitate its drop down into the soft mud– Roberto bobbed his head to the music, comfortable and in his groove. The water lapped gently at the Seward’s sides, but she was designed to remain steady enough for the simple task he was doing. At one point, as Rush’s “Natural Science” played, he heard a high-pitched wobble in the background. Curious, he removed the earbud from his left ear, but he could only hear the sound of the water lazing at the hull. He pulled up the sampler using a stationed pulley, and the metal wheel swung and squeaked from rust. Shaking his finger at the sneaky simple machine, he carefully grabbed and guided the sampler, full of ocean mud, over a bucket. Replacing his ear bud, he continued with his work.
~~~
On finishing the last set of core samples at the site, Roberto smiled at the completion of the task. The weather and the ocean had been perfectly behaved – he couldn’t have asked for better conditions. He held the empty sampler in one hand as he wrote down the last of the pteropod weights, his mind starting to shift gears to ready the carbonates for the spectrometer. His playlist was beginning to repeat itself, and he pulled off his earbuds, placing them on the bench, to better focus on his next task.
Suddenly the boat lurched, Roberto stumbling as his ears rang with a piercing shriek that seemed to reverberate through the entire vessel and around the cove. Reorienting himself, he braced himself and jumped to the port side, his first terrible thought of some sea mammal caught up beneath the boat. His eyes darted to the waves below, and he found himself face-to-face with a woman, floating directly below, her pale face twisted with emotion.
For a moment, Roberto’s brain refused to engage. The woman had small, delicate features, but her skin was ghastly pale – almost light green, and her eyes were full and dark, as if filled with oil. Her hair, an inky dark black, clung to her bony cheeks. Her mouth, still torn into a rage, was stacked and crowded with saw-like grey teeth, reminiscent of an angler fish. He had never seen anyone – or anything – like her.
Against his better instincts, Roberto felt drawn to her. His brain could not decipher if she was human or animal, as if all his neurons were short-circuiting. She appeared to be in pain. Cautiously, stupidly, he reached his right hand towards her, grasping the railing with his left.
The woman shrieked again, her face contorting, the high-pitched sound of such volume that it knocked the Seward back onto the waves. Roberto’s buckets were sliding wildly around him as he clutched at the rail. He watched her dark eyes and face dive below the waves as an overwhelming sense of anguish came over him, one he couldn’t begin to explain.
“Wait!” he called out, his heart hammering in his chest. “My god!”
He called out again, as the ocean wrapped itself around the creature as she turned, and – this he would later swear, though he knew it made him sound crazy – began to swim away, her lower half the tail of an enormous fish. He followed the sun reflecting off her scales through the water as she disappeared below the waves.
Roberto stood slack-jawed, clutching the rail, willing his heart to return to normal. His mind was all over the place, his samples forgotten and scattered. He eventually raised a shaky hand and ran it through his dark hair, lowering his head and reciting one of his mother’s old sea prayers.
He questioned what it was that he’d just seen, whether he had been hallucinating from the sun. He had no plausible explanation. Roberto was now questioning everything, including his entire life’s work.
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Date: 2022-09-20 01:51 am (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
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Date: 2022-09-20 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-21 10:11 pm (UTC)I adore Sirens and mermaids, as you might have noticed. :)
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Date: 2022-09-22 01:40 am (UTC)Roberto's story came about because a loooong time I did some sediment sampling with a marine science class in coastal waterways, so I've used some of the tools before - although I did do a lot of reading/research to make sure his field work at least seemed plausible.
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Date: 2022-09-24 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-24 01:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-25 03:59 pm (UTC)*settles in and waits for next instalment*
Great work with telling these tales and gently bringing your passion for the earth and her seas into the story.
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Date: 2022-09-25 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-25 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-09-25 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-09-26 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-27 01:53 am (UTC)