So Much Gratitude

The first couple of weeks of book motherhood have been an incredible experience. The book launch party was the first time I've been in a room crowded with people in nearly two years (other than Passport Control and various other airport and airplane spaces on my trip to Mexico, but let's not count those)--and all those people were all there for me (except the ones who thought they were going out for a late lunch at the local farm store/dining establishment, but let's not count those). I've been touched, honored, and humbled by the range of people from all different chapters in my history who came to the launch or attended my remote reading or have read my book and sent me messages with such kind words about it. It's been like starring in an episode of This is Your Life.

An enormous THANK YOU to all of you who have made it to any of the events or who have read the book so far! And for those of you who couldn't make it--don't worry; there's more to come! (See below.) And if you want a book reading or signing at a book store, library, or event space near you, drop me a line.

Book News

If you missed my Stone House Readers Series reading, along with the amazing poet Eder Williams, you can listen to the recording here (I say listen, since my internet has going wonky and my video was off).

If you missed my conversation with Jim Davidson, author of The Next Everest, through Old Firehouse Books in Forth Collins, CO, you can watch the recording here.

My local paper, The Lincoln County News, did a great interview about the book and a lovely writeup about the book launch party. 

Upcoming Events

Live Reading, March 29, 2022, 6 p.m., South Berwick Public Library, South Berwick, Maine.

Check out my events page for updates about readings and events as they're scheduled. And if you'd like to schedule an event at your local bookstore, library, school, land trust, business, or organization, send me an email and we'll put one together!

Buy the Book

You can order Uphill Both Ways from:

• Bison Books
• Bookshop.org
• Barnes & Noble
• Amazon

Or visit your local bookstore and ask them to order a copy for you

and a few to put on the shelves for other customers.

Signed Bookplates

If you can't make it to a reading, book signing, or other event but would like your book signed, send me an email with your address and the name of the person the book is for, and I'll mail you a personalized, signed bookplate that you can stick inside the front cover of your copy of Uphill Both Ways.

Giveaway

I'm doing one last giveaway of a matted 8x8 archival art print of one of the book's illustrations to a subscriber of my newsletter. This month's giveaway is one of my favorites--Blue Pleasing Fungus Beetle. I'll draw the winner on April 1. You can subscribe here.

Help Spread the Word!

Here are some ways you can help make Uphill Both Ways a success:

• If you enjoyed the book, please review it on Amazon and/or Goodreads.
• If you're a blogger or bookstagrammer and you'd like to write a review of Uphill Both Ways on your platform, send me an email and I can forward you a digital promotional copy of the book.
• If you know of a newspaper, magazine, or website that would be a good fit for a review, contact the book reviewer and let them know about it or send me an email and I'll get in touch with them.
• Ask your local bookstore, outdoor gear store, or library to carry the book. You can use this sell sheet to provide them more information. 
• Drop a stack of bookmarks at your local bookstore, library, coffee shop, gear store, or climbing gym. Email me and I'll send you a bunch.
• Share a picture of the book with your pet, your favorite beverage, or yourself reading it on social media. Tag @Andrea.lani and #uphillbothwaysbook on Instagram or link to my website, www.andrealani.com on Facebook or Twitter.

A version of this post went out recently to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. Subscribe here and receive a free PDF of my illustrated short essay "Eleven Ways to Raise a Wild Child" and also be entered in ONE LAST drawing to win a print of one of the illustrations from Uphill Both Ways.

Flash Friday ~ The Oak

The oak came down on Thursday morning. The sky was blue, the temperature around 34 degrees to start, later warming to nearly 50, which in March is balmy. Our arborist friends put a rope around its limbs, above the point where the trunk split into two leaders, threaded the rope around a distant maple tree, and hooked it up to the winch on a blue tractor. 

The arborist cut a notch out of the base of the tree, near the ground, on the north side, the direction it was intended to fall toward. Then he cut lines perpendicular to the notch and began the working the chainsaw into the meat of the tree. The bar was not much longer than the thickness of the trunk, and he came at it from different angles, until only a narrow strip of bark on either side of the notch remained intact. I thought about how the living tissue of a tree is only a thin layer of cells beneath the bark, how those two strips of connection might be enough to keep the tree alive, until a windstorm took it down.

The arborist turned his saw off and all was quiet for a moment, then the winch started up, pulling the rope taught. The oak stood up, vertical, its limbs reaching toward the sky; it had developed a houseward lean over the years, reaching for the sunlight that grazed the roofline from the south. Then it tipped over and lay down almost gently among the scrubby saplings that grow on that side of the house, its own twigs and branches breaking its fall.

The oak was originally scheduled to come down in November, when I would be gone, visiting my family in Colorado. I measured it before I left, wrapping my dressmaker's tape around it at chest height: 57 inches in circumference, making it 18 in diameter. Later, after the arborists left and the tree lay in the yard in bucked-up cordwood lengths, I measured the stump at ground level: 27 inches across its widest dimension.

I have a picture of the oak from when out house was a framed-in box of raw wood. I stand where one day our purple front door and a granite step will be, holding M, a few weeks old, all big head and scrawny limbs. The tree stands in the foreground, and because of the perspective it's hard to say how big it is, but it looks almost small enough to wrap my two hands around. Counting off the thick growth rings of the last twenty years, it appears it was about eight inches in diameter then, meaning it's more than doubled in thickness in less than half its life.

We never intended to keep the oak. C had cut down most of the trees that inhabited the little, mostly bare, knoll where we planned to build our house. The oak tree he'd left for some reason--he thought it was too far from the house's footprint to bother with, perhaps, or he figured the excavators would take it down with their bucket. As it turned out, however, the tree was too close to the foundation for comfort--its roots would eventually gnaw at the basement walls, its branches overhang the roof and encroach on the chimney--and the excavators went to great lengths to avoid knocking it down. 

Because they'd saved it, we let it stay, leaving a little well around its base for water to collect in and to allow some of the roots to breathe when we backfilled the front yard. I planted white-and-apricot daffodils in that well. Our first clothesline hung between the oak and a poplar in the scrubby area north of the house, where I hung M's diapers, gathering them in in the twilight to an audience of mule deer. Each summer I'd hang the hummingbird feeder from the clothesline. We strung the hammock between the oak and a hemlock nearby, and I whiled away many summer hours reading and writing and daydreaming in its swinging embrace, the dappled shade of the oak leaves filtering the sun.

Then the brown-tailed moths came. The first caterpillar dropped from a different oak tree in the yard onto the back of my shirt. The rash formed in minutes, covering me from chin to shoulder in an angry, stinging red patch of raw meat. I am a sweller and an itcher, reacting redly to everything from cheap jewelry to synthetic waistbands. Mosquito and blackly bites give me welts; bee stings swell to the size of footballs; don't even think about fire ants and chiggers; poison I've spreads and weeps and oozes. But none of these irritations have kept me indoors. However, for weeks after my brown-tailed moth run-in, every time I stepped outside, my skin erupted in goosebumps. Burn the trees down, I thought. Burn them all down!

We did not burn the trees down, and we tried to live with the moths. For the first time ever, I prayed for a cold wet spring. But they kept coming and coming. By night the caterpillars would rain out of the oak tree and by day they would climb up the front of the house. I knocked them off with a twig into a bucket of soapy water. One day I counted more than 200 caterpillars caught in my bucket. C considered pruning the tree back, to keep it from overhanging the house, but our arborist friend issued the death sentence: take it down; take the whole tree down. Not long after the poplar, where the other end of the blackened clothesline was tied, long-dead and swollen with water from a rainstorm, collapsed on a still day. A sign.

After the tree was cut and bucked, it lay in the yard, the chunks of log giving off the vinegary smell of cut oak. When Z got home he asked why we hadn't left the log whole, to be cut into lumber, and I felt panicky ache in my chest, the feeling of having made a mistake you can't undo. The tree could have yielded the wood for the quarter-sawn oak end table I've always wanted. It could have ended its life with a little more dignity than sixteen-inch chunks of cordwood. We could have honored its place at the front door of our home for the first twenty years we lived here, but instead we will burn it, to keep that home warm, the tree reduced to nothing but smoke and ash and heat.

You can order my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail from any of the retailers listed here, or ask your local bookstore or library to order a copy. And if you want more Andrea, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

Book Stack ~ February 2022

A monthly post about what I've been reading, with aspirations but no real hope 

of reading down a very tall stack of books. Previous posts from this year:

January 2022

I see from this photo that I read a lot of books last month--I'm not sure when I found the time, because I felt straight out with book promotion all month, but I guess I found some escape and rest in books.

Poetry

I had enjoyed Kate Baer's poetry collection What Kind of Woman and I love her erasure poems that peppered Instagram last year and which are gathered together in I Hope this Finds You Well. These are found poems, in which she turns messages--often hostile troll messages, but sometimes lovely, supportive messages--and blots out many, or most, of the words and turns them into tiny haiku-like commentaries on human nature. Loved it. 

Fiction

I brought a lot of books to Mexico in January. I don't know why I thought I'd have so much time to sit around reading, but I only finished one while I was there (covered in last month's post). I went thematic, and brought along novels that take place in Mexico. 

The first, Lost in Oaxaca, by Jessica Winters Mireles, I bought because I thought it was a thriller, but it turned out to be a love story, which was a little disappointing (in my defense, the first paragraph of the back cover makes it sound like the setup for a thriller; I did not read the second paragraph, which makes it clear it's a love story). Still, it had some lovely descriptions of the food, culture, and landscape of Oaxaca (which was not the part of Mexico I was in, so it was fascinating to read about). 

To sate my appetite for a thriller, I picked up a book I've read many times before, The Night of Four Hundred Rabbits by Elizabeth Peters. Even though I remembered who done it (though not why), it was still a thrill to read, and even though it was published in 1973, it has held up. The description of the drug trade in Mexico, however, comes off as naive, or quaint perhaps, compared to today's (more) murderous cartels. 

Finally, in the Mexico category, I read Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, which is SO good--super creepy and delightful in the gothic tradition, but with a heroine who is not a helpless ingenue and a supernatural force that is so original. I wish I could rhapsodize about the device, but it would give too much away. If you're a fan of the gothic tradition, you will want to read this book.

Graphic 

When I heard that a school district in Tennessee had banned Maus by Art Spiegelman, I knew I had to read it. I mean, if some ass-hats in Tennessee think it's bad, it must be good, right? And it's a book I've been meaning to read for a long time. It's the story of Spiegelman's parents' experience in Poland under Nazi occupation, right up to their removal to Auschwitz. You can see why fascists wouldn't want children to read about where fascism ultimately leads.

Nonfiction

Because my book has been so admiringly compared to Kelly Corrigan's work, I figured I needed to read her latest, Tell Me More. I was familiar with her work on NPR podcasts, but this was the first book of hers I read. It's warm and funny and smart and generous in all the right proportions, and even though it tackles a very difficult subject--the death of her close friend due to cancer--it manages to be a feel-good read. I do admit to skipping one essay, though, once it started delving into the realm of the scatological. I mean, I've got a pretty high tolerance for potty humor, being the mom of three boys, but this one went a little far down the toilet even for me to take.

Oh, why yes, I did read my own book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail. I started it the minute the box of author copies came in the mail. And, in my totally biased opinion, it is SO good! Of course I was on the lookout for mistakes, but I only found one typo and a handful of commas I wish had been placed differently, plus a sentence I didn't think needed to be in there--it over-explained what came before it in the rest of the paragraph. Otherwise? You guys, I'm SO happy with it. I mean, really, really happy. So please, if you haven't already, get your copy today, and then you can read it, too! And if you like it, give it a review on the old Amazon and Goodreads (I know, I know, but it's good for my visibility, which is good for my sales, which is good for feeding my children). 

And last of all, the book on the bottom of the stack, which doesn't have a title on the spine, is Your First 1,000 Copies by Tim Grahl. It's, as you can probably tell from the title, a book about marketing your book. Grahl calls his system permission-based marketing, which he defines as asking people's permission to market to them (primarily by getting them to sign up for an email list) and then giving them something of value in exchange (useful content). So here goes: if you subscribe to my newsletter here, you'll receive a free PDF of my illustrated short essay "Eleven Ways to Raise a Wild Child" and also be entered in ONE LAST drawing to win a print of one of the illustrations from Uphill Both Ways. Sounds like a good deal to me!

Publication Day!!!

Today is pub day, friends! I know many people have already begun to receive their copies of the book, which I guess could make today a little anticlimactic, but I hear pub day is generally anticlimactic anyway, and I'm not good at waiting for Christmas or birthdays, so I'm all for the books trickling into the world ahead of schedule. So far the reviews have been all positive (but then again, so far I've mostly only heard from friends and family!). I've already given two interviews (keep an eye on my website for links to those when they're published), and I've got two book events scheduled with more to come (see below). It's all terribly exciting!

At the same time, it's really hard to feel so happy and excited for myself when children are being bombed in Ukraine in an unprovoked attack by Russia, when trans kids are being persecuted by the government in Texas (and elsewhere), and women are losing their reproductive rights all over this country. The entire journey of creating this book has been a process of me trying to convince myself that what I'm writing about matters when really shitty things are going on in the world. The hardest day was November 8, 2016. Why should I bother writing a book about hiking, I wondered, when half of the people in this country chose to elect a tyrant and a buffoon president? It took me months to ease back off that ledge and get my pen moving again. The pandemic, along with being a health crisis of unprecedented proportions, brought with it dire predictions about the future of publishing, just at the point when I was ready to send my book proposal out to publishers. I had to forge through that barrier as well and send my book out into an uncertain world.

Speaking of uncertain worlds, on top of scrambling to accomplish a scattershot of pre-publication publicity efforts and having anxiety dreams about my book launch, this week I've been taking the younger two kids on tours of colleges around Maine. Unlike myself, who could not wait to go to college, their enthusiasm for the project is underwhelming. I wonder if it's because boys mature later than girls or if life at home here is just too cushy. C told me that he heard a radio report which suggested that all kids these days are lackadaisical about the future because they're skeptical that they'll even have a future, thanks to climate change, mass shootings, wealth inequality, and creeping christo-fascism (I added that part, but it's what keeps me awake at night). I countered, What about us, growing up in the Cold War? At least our kids don't have to worry about mutually assured destruction. And then Russia invaded Ukraine, returning nuclear annihilation to the realm of possibility. So I guess I don't blame the kids, if they really are skeptical about the future. But you'd think they'd at least want to go to college for the unlimited meal plans. May as well face the end times well fed.

As I try to balance my joy with a world of sadness, I'm reminded of Rachel Carson, whose first book, Under the Sea Wind, was published on the eve of the US entering World War II and as a result did not do well. But she persisted, writing two more books about the ocean world and one of the most important books of the twentieth century. I'm no Rachel Carson, and Vladimir Putin's shenanigans in Ukraine are no World War II (let's hope), but I can draw strength from Carson's example, and, as I did to extract myself from those earlier funks/existential crises, remind myself that what I write about--family and the natural world--does matter. Perhaps it matters more than anything else.

A version of this post went out recently to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. Subscribe here and receive a free PDF of my illustrated short essay "Eleven Ways to Raise a Wild Child" and also be entered in ONE LAST drawing to win a print of one of the illustrations from Uphill Both Ways.

The book launch party for Uphill Both Ways will be this Saturday, March 5, from 2-4 p.m. at Sheepscot General Store in Whitefield, Maine. There will be a meet & greet, reading, book signing, art print giveaway, and more!

You can order your copy of Uphill Both Ways from any of the following:

• Bison Books
• Bookshop.org
• Barnes & Noble
• Amazon

Or ask your local bookstore or library to order a copy for you. 

If you enjoy the book and aren't allergic to Amazon, consider writing a review. Those reviews really drive the algorithm. 

Flash Friday ~ My Rocket Scientist Alter Ego

I googled myself earlier this week, to see if my book, Uphill Both Ways, was showing up in the results yet (it was, but not until the middle of page two). This gave me a chance to check in on my name twin.

I have an unusual name, and as far as I can tell, only one other person on earth shares it. He's a man, and I believe he's originally from Italy. This may explain why he got stuck with Andrea, which in Italian might not be the feminine version of Andrew, but an ordinary everyday unisex name. We may even be distantly related. My twice-great-grandfather was born in Trieste, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time but is now part of Italy. I'm no expert on the ever-shifting borders of Europe, and I attribute my father's father's part of my heritage, variously, to Slovenian, Yugoslavian, and Austro-Hungarian. Why not add Italian to the mix?

I've known about my name doppelgänger for as long as I've googled myself, which I don't do frequently (I'm not that big a narcissist) but do do occasionally (as research into the effectiveness of my self-promotion as a writer). The first time may have coincided with my first publication, in 2008. So the other AL and I are old acquaintances, in a stalkerish kind of way.

Beyond our names, we have nothing in common. He appears to be some kind of aerospace engineer. I've never clicked on the links to his research articles and profiles on various platforms (I'm not actually a stalker), but phrases like "computational scientist" and "fluid dynamics" and "mathematical plasma astrophysics" pop up in the teasers to the listings on Google. I feel like there's a great joke in there somewhere: "Do I look like a rocket scientist to you?" "No, but the guy on Google who shares your name does." It needs some work.

I wonder if rocket scientists google themselves, when they're not busy doing rocket science? I mean, even mathematical plasma astrophysicists need a break now and then, right? And if my name twin googles himself, does it rankle him that his research articles on fluid dynamics alternate in the results, in almost a one-to-one ratio, with essays about motherhood? Or does his mathematical brain see some kind of beautiful symmetry in the listings: man/woman; numbers/words; the endless vacuum of space/the endless vacuuming of the living room; launching rockets into the stratosphere/launching humans into adulthood? 

I think my twin and I have more in common than it might appear at first glimpse. I have no idea what fluid dynamics is, but I'm going to believe it has something to do with the mysterious ways of the universe, where very unlike things come together in surprising ways.

Book Stack ~ January 2022

I thought of giving this series a new name in 2022. I also thought of discontinuing it. But I still have a very tall stack of books to get through, and this is my only way of tracking what I've read--I've tried keeping a reading journal, and I don't follow through. I'm abysmal at keeping up with my Goodreads list (also, do I really want the Amazon corporation to know every last thing I read? No.).  Plus, several people have told me they've gotten book recommendations from my lists, so why not keep on sharing the love? So this is it, the inaugural post of another year of trying to get through all the books I own while really buying new books to read instead, just like this.

I decided late last year that the best way to get through my book stack was to prioritize reading books that had been given or loaned to me by friends, so I started the year reading two of the books I got for Christmas. 

Fiction

I started with The Mystery of Charles Dickens by A.N. Wilson, because everyone's in a Dickens mood at Christmastime. This is a biography, but not written in the usual "he was born here, he did all these things, then he died" linear progression (no doubt there are a gazillion of those out there already), but rather is arranged by several "mysteries" about Dickens's life and his personality, and it was totally fascinating. I did not know much about Dickens and had not read much by Dickens before reading this. Turns out that, like Tolstoy is described by George Saunders's in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, Dickens was an extremely moral writer but not as moral of a person. He had high ideals about society, but was an ass to his wife. His ideas also lingered around the populist range, and so did not extend to equal rights to oppressed minorities (he considered British people superior and was sympathetic with the Confederate South). He was also an extremely troubled man, due to his childhood traumas, and also a gifted literary genius. And basically a rock star. People would line up to hear him perform his works. I like seeing up close how complicated people, especially people who are so canonized, really are.

Another book I got for Christmas, also featuring a renowned literary figure from history, was Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, which reimagines the events that led to the death of William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet (which in some way inspired the writing of Hamlet, but I'm less clear on the connection). This was interesting on so many levels, not least of which the way that plague was viewed at the time (how lucky to be an author who comes out with a plague novel at the beginning of an actual plague!), as well as the experiences of the women in Shakespeare's life (W.S. himself is not named in the book, and plays a fairly peripheral role compared to his wife, mother, father, sister, and children.) It turns out that he was probably a bit more moral on the page than he was in real life too. 

Nonfiction

The next two books weren't gifts and they weren't from the stack. I bought Carolyn See's Making a Literary Life last summer after hearing it extolled on the #AmWriting podcast several times. It's a lovely little book and I wish I'd been handed it a lot earlier in my writing journey. Still, there's much to be gleaned at whatever stage of writing one's at. I'm still trying to put the advice of "write 1,000 words five days a week for the rest of your life" into process. It's tough, but a good goal to shoot for.

I picked up a copy of Bad Tourist by Suzanne Roberts for my trip to Mexico. I envisioned a lot more time spent reading than actually took place, so this is the only book I finished there, but it was the perfect book to read on a trip. It's a collection of travel essays, so it was fun to read them while I was actually traveling (although what a different style of traveling: lounging on a resort beach chair reading about near death experiences with motorcycles and unclean water in remote parts of Latin America. Also, the essays, many about the author's adventures in dating and hooking up, were a lot sexier than my middle-aged-ladies trip. Roberts's latest book, Animal Bodies, just landed in my mailbox and I'm excited to read it next!

Flash Friday ~ Reef

 

I float in the warm, salty water of the Caribbean Sea. Above me, clear air, blue sky. Beneath me, clear water that appears blue at a distance. The cove is shallow, the bottom pale sand, dark rock, and coral. I recognize brain coral from my field guide, greenish and furrowed in cranial folds and wrinkles, but much bigger than I imagined, each one bigger than a hassock. The fan corals actually fan, back-and-forth with the action of the waves, not stiff like a paper fan, but in a smooth, sinuous fashion like the tail of a fish. The other corals, the branching in filamented ones, move with the water, too, and all this movement surprises me. Though I'd known coral to be a living creature, I expected it to be stiff and brittle, the way it is in museum cases, failing to recognize those frozen-in-time specimens are mere dead husks. The long black spines of urchins bloom among the coral like bundles of slender chopsticks, and flower-like shapes form bouquets, only I don't know enough to say if they're coral polyps or sea anemones. 

I know so little about this undersea world that the fish that flash past in singles and pairs and threes and schools, strike me as mythological creatures brought to life. Of course I've seen tropical fish in nature programs and aquariums, but I don't think I truly believed in them until I plunged into the water and swam among them. It's not just their improbable colors in outrageous arrangements of stripes and spots that make them appear otherworldly; it's their nearness. I could, if I wanted, reach out and touch a passing fish. Even the more shy and wary ones hover a few yards away. No binoculars or zoom lenses needed.

Our guide, Juan, points to a crevice in the coral, and I see an electric blue fish sparkle with neon blue spots. Three fish shaped like an iron, white with wine-colored strips, fan past. Schools of pearly fish with blue and yellow markings congregate and disperse. Three enormous club-shaped fish with bulging eyes hover near the sandy bottom. A fish smaller than a grasshopper swims past. Small fish, big fish, fish in every imaginable, and unimaginable, color combination move about on their private, fishy business. I skull my hands, follow the contours of the reef--the swim fins are too bulky and cumbersome to bother with--and take it all in. The water is warm and buoyant; floating is effortless. I've never felt more at peace in my life.

I feel absolutely no fear, but I raise my head now and then to keep track of the location of the guide, our boat, and my companions and to clear water from my snorkel. One of these times I notice big black birds with long, knife-blade wings and long, scissored tails wheel in the sky. Magnificent frigatebirds, one of the birds I'd hoped to see when I came to the Caribbean. I float on my back and watch them until I remember I'm here to see the reef, and I roll back to the underwater world, overwhelmed with abundance. 

A ripple of energy runs through the schools of pearly fish with blue and yellow markings, and I realize Juan, hanging from the back of one of the boats anchored in the cove, is feeding them, bits of chum shaken from a net bag. The fish whirl around him, grabbing at bits of food that rain down. I notice pink feet paddling an arm's length away, and I see a brown pelican plunge its enormous mouth-bag into the water. I don't know if it's going for the whole, live fish or for the fish bits, and I'm not sure how I feel having such a large maw grabbing indiscriminately for food so nearby; I tuck my hands well out of the way.

Three sting rays, the largest the size of a card table, the smallest a notebook, join the scrum, flapping along the bottom like living magic carpets, hoovering up the fallen fish food, flipping and turning with amazing agility. When the food runs out, the scrum disperses, and I turn my head to come face-to-face with a sea turtle. It's a small one, maybe the size of two snapping turtles, and it hovers in the water vertically, it's head up, its back legs down. Its black, shoe-button eye looks into mine, and I think I'm going to have a moment of connection, but the turtle turns and paddles away on short, flippery feet as some guy in red trunks chases it with his underwater camera. 

Juan leads us back to the boat, gets out to warm up, and tells us we have a half hour to explore on our own. I paddle back toward the reef, noticing now that what look like rocks might once have been coral, and that where the coral does grow, chunks are broken off here and there, and that there's a greenish haze of algae over the whole thing. Maybe that's normal in a shallow reef. I don't know enough to know, but I do know it doesn't look as pristine as the reefs in nature programs. And though Juan told us to keep our feet up so we wouldn't hurt ourselves, he didn't mention not hurting the coral. The dude chasing the sea turtle was just one of dozens of obnoxious tourists who no doubt visit the reef every day. And some of the fish who were there only came because they were fed.

I skull along the edge of the reef, taking in the magical colors and shapes, the overwhelming feeling of peace, and wondering how I reconcile that one of the most peaceful, spectacular nature experiences of my life has also a somewhat contrived expedition to a diminished seascape.