Recently in Bermuda 2004 Category

The last entry of this travelogue is being penned (an outdated but aesthetically attractive metaphor for recording information, which is in this case being typed) as I sit in the Bermuda airport, exhausted out of my mind, waiting to board my flight. I am, as mentioned, tired beyond belief, but I am also very, very, happy.

It should also be mentioned that I have been reading Cryptonomicon, and am currently in the midst of an extraordinarily long journal-type letter written by one of the prominent characters, Randy, described on the dust jacket as a "cryptohacker", a profession of which I was previously unaware but which strikes me more and more as a glorious and remarkable career choice. As a result of this recent cerebral input I find myself wanting desperately to emulate Neal Stephenson's brilliant and inimitable writing style. If such feeble attempts creep into my own hasty scrawlings (another outdated metaphor) in a few places, I hope my readers can forgive me this little foible, knowing that it will soon pass.

Remaining on the subject of Cryptonomicon for a few paragraphs is worthwhile and relevant to the purpose of this communication. First of all, Randy the cryptohacker has made me aware of the intriguing similarity between hackers and divers. (By divers I refer to scuba divers, and not to the Olympic sort to which those inclined to watch television may have been exposed recently. It has always seemed perfectly natural, if somewhat unfortunate, that these two activities should have the same name, but it was recently brought to my attention by my Venezuelan roommate that it is not natural, is in fact quite strange, and is not the case in other languages. Here I would like to employ the Spanish metaphor which she used to describe her confusion: "No tienen nada que ver!" i.e., they have nothing to do with each other.)

Divers of the scuba sort, Randy has asserted, are not unlike physically fit and active hackers. For the full explanation I will refer the reader to the novel to which I have thus far made continuous reference. In short, both professions involve deep and intuitive understanding of a body of knowledge that is generally inaccessible to the general public. I have always had an abiding respect for divers--not the recreational sort, nor even the research sort, until these reach a certain degree of hardcore-ness, but the intrinsically hardcore and competent commercial sort of divers. A good commercial diver is, in my opinion, the ultimate badass, and a career to which, in certain moments which I share with all the young males described in another Neal Stephenson book, I have aspired.

These aspirations have been brief. Much more consistently, I aspire to be a hardcore and competent research diver. Consequently I try to dive whenever and wherever possible.

This rambling is all coming around to the point of telling another travel story. So, of course, I brought my dive kit to Bermuda. (I use "kit" here in the English sense, due to the influence of an English girl with whom I spent yesterday at the beach, because the novelty appeals to me. Also it is a distinctly more pleasing word, auditorily, than the grinding "gear".) There was no diving involved in our course, but the biostation (Bermuda Biological Station for Research) divemaster organized a recreational trip for those of us who were anxious to dive while we were here. Unfortunately this dive was scheduled for the weekend immediately after the incident with the Knee and the Stitches. It is possible that a truly hardcore diver would have disregarded the Stitches as a trivial complication, but it is also possible that such a diver would be wise enough not to risk anything. At any rate, I didn't go diving.

Thus, I expected to have brought my dive gear all the way to the middle of the Sargasso Sea for nothing. Such was my thinking up to the day of our final presentations for class, which occurred in the morning and went extremely well. After these presentations, as I sat in the computer lab working on the paper which was due the next day, a girl in the class named Courtney came in and asked to borrow my dive kit. Moments later, she realized I could probably dive by now, and asked if I wished instead to use my own kit and join the small dive group.

With little hesitation, I abandoned my writing for the much more urgent responsibility of experiencing a dive in Bermuda. Courtney managed to borrow some gear from other members of the course, and off we went, along with two others.

The dive was magnificent. It was without question the warmest dive in which I have ever participated. Diving in California, I'm used to being cold at the end of a dive. Often not painfully or even uncomfortably so, but I do have a very strong association between diving and cold. But I was not cold at the end of this dive. I was not even cool. We spent nearly an hour in the water, during which I wore only a swimsuit and board shorts (and, of course, my dive kit), and I emerged not one noticeable iota colder than when I entered.

And that was the least of the marvels. We had rented the tanks and weights from a small dive shop in a hotel that was right on the beach, and then simply walked into the surf. We sank and swam out along a pipe that was supposed to take us to a wreck. We never found the wreck, but none of us cared--we were on the reef and that was what mattered. The reef was absolutely crowded (New-York-crowded, or London-crowded) with creatures. Soft corals, hard corals, gorgonians, anemones, and tube worms jostled each other, and those are just the sedentary things.

There were fish--such fish! Big and bright, they were nibbling at things and flirting with each other without caring about our presence in the least. There were bluehead wrasse--tons of them. There's no point in listing all the other fish we saw, because there is no way it could convey the gloriousness of it all.

Probably the neatest part of the whole dive was the quasi-caves. About half an hour into the dive, I saw an opening under the wall of coral we were looking at, with plenty of room to swim through. It less a cave than an arch, because I could see the sunlight filtering down from the surface right on the other side, so I decided it was harmless and kicked through it. The others followed, and we spent the next few minutes exploring this extremely porous bit of the reef. It was beautiful.

This dive occurred at Elbow Bay, one of the numerous, and famous, South Beaches. Around the north shore, where the biostation is, the beaches tend to be small and rocky. The South Beaches are classic postcard beaches. I don't often wish for sunglasses, but I did the first time I went to a South Beach (Horseshoe Bay) and the expanses of pink-white sand glared right back into my eyes everywhere I looked. I spent most of that day with my eyes fully closed, slitting one eye carefully open every now and then to imprint the truly impressive scenery in my memory. The water is like that of a swimming pool in clarity and temperature, with the added benefit (?) of being incredibly salty.

To leap without proper transition back to one more mention of Cryptonomicon: it is indicative of just how busy I have been for the past month that I am only on page 609 of the 910 pages of this, the only pleasure reading I brought along with me.

And what have I been doing to keep me so astonishingly busy, you may well ask. Well, I have been participating fully in a course on the Behavior of Coral Reef Animals. The classwork was more or less minimal, but the research project which I undertook along with two lab partners, Rebecca and Nancee, was of broad enough scope that had we accomplished all that we aspired to, we would have had results worthy of publishing in Nature or Science.

Of course, in addition to being known as a nerdy, responsible, good artist, I also gained a reputation over the course of the last few weeks as being an incurable optimist, bordering on annoyingly happy, especially at hours of the morning when many people are rendered civil only by the consumption of large quantities of caffeine. So I may be slightly overestimating the importance of our research.

But it was a truly fascinating question, and the last time someone studied, and found evidence for, observational learning in cephalopods, the paper made Science.

To rewind slightly. Observational learning is a specific type of learning which is essentially learning by watching--if you think about it, a lot of the things you've learned have been learned this way. In a strict experimental setup, observational learning is studied by first having a given subject learn a task, perhaps a simple association. Another subject then observes this task being performed by the first subject, and if the observer is then able to perform the task significantly better than a naive subject, this is evidence for observational learning.

It stands to reason that an ability to learn by observation would be most useful in social animals--animals which regular associate with other members of their same species, particular in mixed age groups. This is what happens in human societies--young individuals learn tasks by observing them being performed by older individuals. So, the Science paper I mentioned before showed observational learning in octopuses, but aside from being controversial in its methodology, the results seem dubious to some because octopuses are generally solitary creatures, so what good is it to them to be able to learn from each other?

But what about social cephalopods that regularly aggregate in groups, like squids and cuttlefish? The question has been asked, but no one has answered it yet. We tried.

Our subject was the Caribbean Reef Squid, as I may have mentioned before. Anyway, there's no need to get into the details of the whole experiment, but in short everything took much longer than we thought it would (a cardinal rule of science--and of pretty much everything else) and we didn't get very far with it. But the question is still so exciting to us that Nancee and I spent some time plotting to resume the experiment at some unspecified future point, when we will have unlimited time and resources. Details are still vague.

So, we had to write up a report and present a presentation on all this, which was lots of fun but also quite stressful and quite a lot of work. And of course, at the same time, the class all realized that we were leaving each other in a few days and wanted to spend as much time together in social situations as possible, so we were often up past the wee hours of the morning pursuing the double agenda of accomplishing work and hanging out.

And that is why I am now exhausted out of my mind, and why I will now end this journal with acknowledgments, as I've been far too conditioned by writing scientific papers. Thanks are due to my parents, who out of the supreme generosity of their hearts loaned me survival money until I get back to the paychecks waiting for me in Santa Barbara, also to the friends who drove me to the airport and who will pick me up. Lots of warm and fuzzy feelings remain in my heart for all the wonderful, funny, fantastic people I met in Bermuda, who were really the ones to make the trip what it was.

I am now going to pass out for a couple of days, before packing all my worldly possessions and moving.

So, last weekend--the weekend of the sixth, right after my last entry--it rained all weekend. In the immortal words of Danny the Brit, "It's not funny anymore."

Although, to be honest, I still thought it was funny. And fun. On Sunday, the sun peeked out for a moment or two in the morning, and so we made a firm decision to go to the beach in the afternoon. We grabbed our snorkel gear and took a bus to St. George's, the nearest town, from whence we walked to Tobacco Bay, the nearest and most popular sandy beach.

It was quite cloudy, but still delightfully warm. I went for a snorkel and saw some really lovely fish--huge parrots and bright butterflies, as well as a moon jelly. I never get tired of how different coral reefs are from the (still beautiful) rocky reefs we have back in California.

But as the afternoon wore on, the clouds became several shades darker and more menacing, and finally a few drops starting falling. And, as seems to be the tropical standard from my limited experience, within three minutes the drizzle had turned into a downpour.

Everyone on the beach crowded under the few umbrellas and awnings outside the little snack and gift shop. On a tangent, this shop particularly annoyed me, because I feel it to be the primary function of any beachside snack shop to provide beachgoers with ice cream. I am aware that few people in the world share the degree of my fondness for ice cream, but it seems not unreasonable to expect ice cream at a beach. But the Tobacco Bay snack shop has no ice cream! None! Not even bars in a freezer! The closest they have are frozen italian ices. I find this totally unacceptable.

Anyway, there we all were, soaked because the wind was blowing the rain right under the umbrellas, waiting and waiting for it to let up. Sometimes, in Bermuda, downpours last five or ten minutes. Sometimes they last all day. This time turned out to be one of the latter. The rest of my group made a dash for the bathroom, which was fully dry, while I took the opposite path. Reasoning that I was already entirely soaked, I went back in swimming.

First, however, I waded through the rapidly forming pools to ask the people working the snack bar if they could call us a taxi, which they did, and said it would take about half an hour.

So I spent the next half an hour kicking lazily across the bay, watching the rain spot across the water, and keeping an eye out for the taxi.

And that was the weekend. But on Monday, we woke up to a brilliant sky and a sun blazing some of the humidity out of the air. It was a gorgeous day to begin the week of our data collecting for experiments. But, before we could start our lab experiment, we needed another catch of fish to feed to the squid.

So we set out for Horseshoe Bay with the groups doing field work in the bay, unrolled our seine net, and started looking for fish. The silversides were schooling, or rather not schooling, in frustratingly small and scattered groups. Finally we caught a few, and I started carrying the bucket back to shore. As I was wading through a few feet of water, I walked right into a rock. It hurt. So I said "Ow."

I kept moving, because I'd scraped myself on these rocks before, and it was just something through which to grit one's teeth for a moment or two. But it kept hurting. So I said "Ow" a few more times, quite loudly and distinctly, but, I was told later, calmly.

A few people asked if I was okay. Curious about that myself, I lifted up my knee to look at it, and was startled to see it gushing blood. Carefully I set the bucket down in the rocks, and, remembering my first aid training, put my hand over the wound and applied pressure.

"Are you okay?" someone asked again.

"I don't think so," I answered. "It looks kind of bad."

Beth came over to look, and I lifted my hand for a moment to show her. She was rather surprised, and instantly worried, and we decided I'd better get back to the station if not to the hospital. I felt incredibly stupid for hurting myself, but there we were.

So Beth carried me through the water back to the sandy bit of shore where I could get out, and people crowded around, of course. I asked someone to get my shirt to tie around it, but my lab partner Rebecca offered her purple shirt, which was close at hand. I said I didn't want to use her shirt.

"It's not my color anyway," she said, which I found incredibly sweet and cute.

I tried to convince people to go and catch fish, while Beth ran back to the station to get someone to come pick me up with a car. Everyone was so nice. Danny carried me piggyback up to the road from the beach, and Daylin sat with me and talked while we waited for a vehicle.

One of the girls in our class, Diana, works full time as a lifeguard, and she was the one who came to get me with her scooter. She untied the shirt, looked at my gaping wound, pronounced me in need of stitches, wrapped it up with real bandages, put a helmet on me, put me on the scooter, and took me back to the station, where we called a taxi to take me to the hospital.

The rest of the story isn't really that interesting. I shall simply note that I was treated by a Nigerian-born doctor who lived in England and spoke perfect British English and was quite competent but quite rude. The injection of anaesthetic was excruciating but mercifully brief, and watching him put in the stitches was really interesting. The fact that we still have to take a needle and stitch wounds together so that they heal seems unbearably medieval to me, though. I can't explain it very well, but I feel we ought to have much more sophisticated techniques by now.

Speaking of sophisticated, I did get a very neat square of something like sticky saran wrap over the stitches, which was all I had in the way of a bandage, so you could see the stitches and the blood around them as it dried over the course of the next few days.

The huge bummer about all of this was all of the things I couldn't do. As the taxi was driving me into the station, I saw the boys out playing Monday soccer, which I had been so looking forward to playing again.

And I couldn't go in the water, rendering me useless for collecting feeder fish--a critical part of our project, as you may recall. Fortunately, I could still feed the squid, and put little red Legos in the water, and watch them try to discriminate between horizontal and vertical Legos, and take notes. Maybe I'll write more about the lab work, and our project, later on. Suffice it to say for now that I could do all of the experimental work with stitches in my knee.

I got a couple of new nicknames out of the whole experience--"Stitches" and "Gimpy", predictably. Gimpy didn't last, because I stopped gimping after the first day or two, and Stitches unfortunately didn't either--unfortunately, because I thought it was pretty cute.

It didn't last because by the end of the week, I was no longer the only one on the station with stitches.

On Friday, I was just coming out of my room after an afternoon nap when I saw Beth racing up to her room from a taxi that was just outside housing. When she saw me, she stopped for a moment. "Danny cut himself on a rock at Whalebone," she said. "We're going to the hospital for stitches. I'm getting his wallet from his room."

"You're kidding," I said, and started laughing. I walked over to the taxi with a big grin on my face, and poked my head in to see Danny sitting there, a bloody bandage around one forearm and a disgusted expression on his face.

"There was no reason for this to happen," he protested, as soon as he saw me. "I was in maybe this much water"--gesturing less than a foot--"and I set my arm down on a rock, and picked it up again, and it was gushing blood."

"I know exactly how you feel," I said.

"How many stitches did you get again?" he asked me.

"Five," I told him. "See if you can beat me."

He did. He got six. And they cost less than mine, which irked me significantly. At least, I feel it to be significant. If our irk were measured over the time from our wounds, mine would show a statistically significant spike at this point.

So, yeah, I'm being nerdy again. I've acquired quite a reputation as the nerd here. I've also got a reputation for being responsible and a good artist. Who knew? Consequently I ended up being the one to design and draw our class t-shirt. But that's a story for another day, as it's already getting late, and I'm supposed to write the introduction for our paper tonight.

Life here in Bermuda has fallen into something vaguely resembling a routine. The standard day--which has not actually existed yet, except in the never-never land of averages and idealizations--goes as follows:

Wake at 6:00. Burrow under the covers for another fifteen minutes, because the air conditioning has been on all night, and it's cold in the room. Drag out of bed, go to the bathroom, which is even colder because that's where the A/C unit lives, pull on running clothes and shoes, grab key, go outside.

Thoroughly enjoy the blast of already warm, humid air for approximately seven seconds. Meet up with our TA Beth. Run. Observe sunrise through piles of rainclouds.

Return around 7:00. Shower quickly. Go to lab, turn on lights, feed squid. Throw away inevitable dead fish. Wash hands. Go to breakfast, where I am reunited with Beth and our two teachers, and, rarely, some other students from the class.

Read, wander around the library, check e-mail, and chat until 9:00, when class starts. Once class starts, work on Sephie LePodde comic. Keep an ear cocked for any new information which may be introduced during lecture. Sometimes, if I get sleepy, I make a mocha at break out of packets of Swiss Miss and machine coffee.

After lecture, we usually discuss the project and figure out what's going on the afternoon. Then it's lunchtime. And after lunch, research time.

Take net out and spend an hour or two catching fish. Return to lab, feed squid, set up for experiment, and maybe, if we're lucky, conduct a small bit of the experiment before it's time for dinner.

Eat dinner. Do background research, read literature, take notes. Possible engage in some enjoyable, relaxing evening activity, like football (soccer). Start yawning. Feed squid. Go to sleep.

Now that the theoretical framework has been laid down, allow me to present a couple of isolated and entertaining experiences.

Soccer, for example. As most of my readers are well aware, I've never really been one for organized sports, though I do enjoy throwing/kicking/shooting a ball around as a form of social interaction. But this experience has generally been limited to basketball and frisbee, because I don't really know any soccer players. In fact, I can't remember the last time I played soccer.

But there is an open green area in the middle of the station, permanently decorated with soccer goals and a volleyball net. The latter is used on Wednesdays and Fridays; the former, on Mondays and Thursdays. On Monday evening, as I was walking past the field, I noticed four guys kicking a ball around, and I was overcome with an urge to join them. So I put on sneakers, gathered my courage and some very vague memories of the rules, and asked if I could join.

I was motivated in part because it looked like fun, in part because I want to get more exercise and generally be in better shape, and in part because I miss hanging out with a crowd of boys. Of the eleven students in our class, one is male, not too surprising in a marine biology course, but I still feel a little overwhelmed with girliness. It was great to run around on the grass and indulge the scrappy little tomboy who dwells within me.

That one boy in our class, incidentally, was one of the boys playing, and he said afterwards that I was just as good as any of them, which was nice to hear and seemed more or less true. I missed a few passes and lost the ball a couple times, but so did everyone else, and I also stole it once or twice, made a good pass or two, and made one goal. So I fit right in.

Except for one thing. They had been playing since 6:30, and I joined around 7:30. We stopped a little after 8:00, and I was just destroyed. It's always amazing to me how exhausting sports are, because they don't feel like working out, but I was dripping sweat and gasping for breath when we stopped. So were the guys, but they'd been playing an hour longer. I cannot imagine that. It would kill me.

I will move without any attempt at transition on to the next subject (This reminds me, I wish to state that due to time constraints and the fairly cluttered state in which my brain finds itself currently, this journal may degenerate in coherency and writing style. This should not be taken as any effective lowering of my literary standards, and should I ever find myself in a position to publish these memoirs, they would undergo extensive editing and rewriting.) which are fireworms.

(Another quick aside: there is a beetle in this room which must be related to June bugs because of its massive size and incredible stupidity. It keeps running into walls, hitting the ceiling, and falling to the floor. Yet another distraction to excuse any lack of clarity in my writing.)

So, yeah. Fireworms. Fireworms are these fairly ordinary looking errant polychaetes (marine worms) that spawn at very specific times. The particular local species spawns fifty-four minutes after sunset on the third night after the full moon.

No, really.

So on Tuesday evening, we all tramped down to a bridge just a little past Whalebone Bay, which was already quite populated with various tourists and locals--apparently word had gotten out. Oh yes, and fireworms are bioluminescent. Hence the name. So right on time, little bright lights starting appearing in the water, here and there, swirling and dancing. They would spin for a little while, then explode in a puff of bioluminescence--the gametes--and fade away. It was quite beautiful.

But there weren't that many of them, and it was crowded on the bridge, so actually I though the best bioluminescent part of the night was later, when we were all in the bay, snorkeling, and we turned out our dive lights and watched the plankton sparkle around us wherever we moved. It was like swimming through the stars.

And then, I pulled off my mask and floated on my back and stared up at the sky, and spent a few minutes being completely overwhelmed with beauty.

When we turned our lights back on, though, the little schools of silversides got all excited, and started jumping out of the water all around us. It was so strange to feel all these little bodies hurling themselves against us in a frenzy of light-lust. Strange, and frustrating, because if I'd only had a net, I could have caught enough fish to feed our squid for a month.

Squid are voracious.

Apart from their large brains and active lifestyle, cephalopods are of particular interest due to their truly enormous growth rate. With a few exceptions (most notably the chambered nautilus) the cephalopod theme is: grow fast, live hard, die young. The smaller species live less than a year, the large ones--even jumbo squid--rarely more than two or three. Most reproduce only once.

The key to this type of life is an insatiable appetite. When I visited Stanford for interview weekend, my advisor had half a dozen squid in a tank, and we spent one evening satisfying our scientific curiosity by trying to sate them. We emptied a tank of feeder goldfish and found that it was more or less impossible. I believe they ate something on the order of two hundred goldfish over the course of four hours.

We now have twenty-five Sepioteuthis sepioidea, or Caribbean reef squid, to maintain. I spent this morning in the library and learned that, compared to the UC system, the Bermuda Biological Station for Research library is totally useless. Fortunately I can connect to the UC system by proxy. Thus I also learned that Sepioteuthis prefer to eat 30-60% of their body weight per day. Anything below 10-20% is a starvation diet and they will die.

For our squid, this translates to three or four fish a day. Call it four and you're looking at one hundred fish every day. As a result I have spent most of the last few days in the water, in snorkel gear, chasing schools of little fish into a big net. Never mind the experiment, we're just trying to keep the little beasts alive.

Danna's Bermuda Summer Tan is now in its second edition, which features a jaunty tricolor look, due to two swimsuits and one pair of board shorts.

Weekend? Oh, yes, there was a weekend. I determinedly took some of yesterday afternoon off, and hopped in a taxi with the rest of the class to go to a real sandy beach for some snorkeling and relaxing. It was very nice; I saw a bluehead wrasse, my first viewing in the wild of the fish around which one of my UCSB professors has built his quite impressive career.

I also developed a rather nasty headache over the course of the afternoon; maybe too much sun, maybe lingering jet lag, who knows. We made it back just in time for dinner, but I opted out and crawled into bed instead.

I woke up three hours later and discovered my roommate had come back from dinner and was also napping. Quick aside: she's from Venezuela, and I can understand her Spanish quite well, unlike that of the two Cubanos, which is fast and fluid and often hard to catch. Between the three of them, another fellow from Argentina, the Dutch girl whose father is Argentinian, and me, there's quite a lot of Spanish going around.

Anyhow, the two of us woke from our naps and wandered outside a bit groggily, amusing our classmates, who were getting ready to go to the station's "bar," which is as much nightlife as you can easily get to around here. Again I opted out (antisocial? me?) so I could sit outside, reading Cryptonomicon, munching leftovers from lunch, and being serenaded by frogs.

Most of the frogs around here are tiny (with the occasional whopping exception) but they make a truly astonishing noise at night.

Along the theme of local wildlife, there are a lot of gorgeous lizards, blue-green on top and orange-bellied. I haven't caught one yet, but it's on my to-do list. I believe this falls into the category of things that children and stupid adults do, reasonable adults know enough not to do, and really smart biology geeks who ought to know better do anyway because they feel entitled. Picking up unfamiliar sea cucumbers and poking anemones are other members of this category.

Moving on to the arthropod population, Bermuda has truly enormous spiders. Some of their abdomens are nearly golfball-sized. This wouldn't be so alarming if they didn't stretch their webs from tree branches right over a walking path to the wall on the other side. Thus, their great bulbous bodies hang directly overhead, silent witnesses to every expedition to Whalebone Bay.

They don't bother me per se, they're just interesting in an adrenaline-pumping sort of way.

Speaking of things that don't bother me, there is a light sprinkling of ants over nearly every space upon which one might wish to walk. This includes the floor of one's room. They're quite small (not as small as the microants that so frustrate me in my kitchen back home, but small) and I don't really see them any more. However, I have taken to wearing flip-flops at all times, after I noticed the ant carcasses adhering to my toes and heels.

Fortunately, they don't seem to be the vengeful, biting type.

So. Bermuda. Here I am. And where is here? Nowhere. I mean really nowhere. Bermuda is about as nowhere as you can get and still be somewhere. And that last part is doubtful. No, where is it really, I hear you asking. Well, it's in the middle of the Atlantic. Right above Atlantis. On the Gulf Stream, if that helps. About the same latitude as Carolina. Which one, I don't remember.

Enough of me being a smart-aleck. On with the story. The Story begins Sunday evening at 6:00, when I decided to check what time my flight was going to leave on Tuesday. I discovered my flight did not leave on Tuesday, rather it arrived on Tuesday. It left Monday evening. Tomorrow. So I panicked quietly for a few minutes, and went to work.

The work I've been doing this summer is a continuation, and I hope a culmination, of the theoretical ecology work I started last summer. The idea was to culminate it by the time I left for Bermuda. I did the best I could. I worked Sunday night until my brain fried, at which point I went home and packed.

Now, my friend Kira was coming to visit me on Monday, at 4:30 am to be precise. When I was thinking ahead at 6:01 on Sunday, I thought I would simply stay up until it was time to pick her up. But at 3:00 on Monday morning, that potential one hour of sleep was looking good. So I took it. I woke up an hour and ten minutes later and lept out of bed, frantically scrubbing the sleep from my eyes, to call Jay. Jay was driving to the bus station with me to pick up Kira. Because he's amazingly cool like that.

We got Kira. We went to Carrow's. We drove home. We all decided to go to sleep. Even me, though I knew I had to go back to work. I took an hour nap, got up, and biked to work. I stopped at Starbucks on the way. It was going to be a long day.

I finished the paper as much as I could, sent it off to my boss, and came home to hang out with Kira and finish packing. A number of friends came trickling over, so in the end there was quite a large party to wish me well. Jamie, the lovely, drove me to the airport.

From Santa Barbara to Los Angeles to New York to Bermuda, and all on an expired passport. No questions asked. I'd read somewhere that Bermuda only requires proof of U.S. citizenship, for which an expired passport counts, so I hadn't been expecting trouble. But that doesn't mean I wasn't praying every time I handed it over to an Official Person.

Bermuda! I saw the long fish-hook island through the airplane window, lost in the middle of the Atlantic, hours by plane from any other land, and I knew it was going to be good. When we stepped into the airport, we were greeted by a smiling reggae band, whose music accompanied the long wait in Customs.

In the fondness for reggae as well as in other respects, Bermuda is very like a chunk of the Caribbean which broke off and floated up the Gulf Stream. The heat of the Gulf Stream keeps the island warm and wet, tropical as tropical can be. But in other ways, it's more like a little bit of England that broke off and blew down on the trade winds. When I got out of the airport, to my embarrassment, I tried to get in on the wrong side of the taxi. I had known that they drive on the left here; I'd just forgotten.

They're also mad about cricket. This weekend--Thursday through Sunday--is a national holiday for the Cup Match. The two ends of the island play a game against each other, and Bermudians take this as an excuse to close every single shop and restaurant, camp out along the coast, play loud reggae, and drink gallons of Bermudian rum. This is not entirely strange to me, as I became acquainted with the obscure importance of cricket in the Commonwealth while in Australia. However, I must say that it's just about the stupidest sport I've ever heard of. Except golf. But golf is not a sport.

Just to confuse things, the Bermudian dollar is equivalent not to a British pound, but to an American dollar, and the two dollars are perfectly interchangeable. It's quite nice for American visitors, and leaves me very curious to see if I can use Bermudian quarters in laundry machines, parking meters, etc. when I get home.

So the taxi took me to the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, my new home for this trip. I checked in, got a key to my room, and moved in. All of the students in our class are housed in Visitor Housing, which looks more like a rather large house than a rather small hostel. The rooms are quite nice. The first thing I noticed--and was grateful for--were two large, industrial-strength fans mounted to the walls.

There are three beds, but I was only going to have one roommate, and she hadn't arrived yet, so I took my pick of beds (closest to the glass doors), drawers (closest to my bed), and closet space (er . . . wherever).

Then I changed into shorts and started walking. There was nothing planned until an orientation the next morning, and I was exhausted, but why waste good time recuperating from travel when there's an entire island to explore? First I wandered around the station itself. Along a dirt path that led right down to the water, I met a very nice groundskeeper named Wayne. He told me that the students often went swimming right off the path where I was standing, but that the water was nicer and there was more of a beach further on down the island, about a twenty-minute walk.

So I changed into my swimsuit, and went walking. Bermuda, it goes nearly without saying, is beautiful. The sea is blue, the land is green, and the air shines. It's overgrown with colorful tropical imports like hibiscus and oleander. As if this weren't enough color, most of the houses are painted in surprisingly bright blues, pinks, and oranges.

After ten or fifteen minutes, though, I'd stopped appreciating it as much, and come to the realization that the key to a tropical island paradise is the island part. There is no such thing as a tropical land paradise, because tropical land, without tropical sea, is actually a steamy jungle hell.

Eventually, dripping and panting, I reached the end of the road and found my blue heaven. The water was just cool enough not to be too warm but no cooler, and so clear I could see the staghorn corals ten or more meters below. I floated on my back, letting the sun pound on my eyelids and work on the first edition of Danna's Bermuda Summer Tan.

I learned after dinner that I had actually walked a bit further than necessary; there was a turnoff earlier that led to Whalebone Bay, where our course teacher, Ruth, took us for a lovely evening snorkel. Afterwards I showered, and fell immediately asleep.

My roommate arrived at about 1:00 am, an event for which I awoke very briefly.

The next morning we had an orientation to the station, and to Bermuda, in which we learned that the island's only source of freshwater is rain, which is caught on the roofs and stored in tanks. They have reverse osmosis to convert saltwater to fresh if straits become dire, but water conservation is very important, especially as it's not the rainy season right now.

Less than an hour later we were huddled under an overhang while the rain poured down as only tropical rain can: a warm, drenching weather event than lasted about ten minutes. We had another ten minutes of rain this morning. If this continues I'm going to start taking longer showers.

Our class consists of two instructors, one TA, and eleven students. We are from Austria, Holland, Cuba, Venezuela, England, and America. With a few exceptions, we are overwhelmingly interested in cephalopods.

The course has morning lectures, but the focus is on research, and teaching us how to conduct our own research projects, and the afternoons are spent in this pursuit. This is a relief as the lectures so far are almost exactly the same as half a dozen other lectures I have had in half a dozen other classes, only with an Austrian accent.

We are divided into groups for the research projects, of which there are four. One is on octopuses, one on squid, one on filefish, one on fish guilds. Guess which one I'm working on.

Wrong! I'm doing squid! Hah!