Friday, July 22, 2011

So, what did I miss...?

As the Ferry starts moving, I realize that I do not know where to start looking; Serves me right for missing the ferry to begin with/ I know that I should be on the lookout for something questionable, or question worthy. But at first nothing jumps at me.  There is only the exhilaration of the receding city and then, far closer than I imagined, the islands appear in succession.  I keep waiting for "nature" to begin; or, a little more to the point, I want to find anything that might have bearing on the harbor's marine life. I certainly can't see any shrimp from the ferry. 
Only on the way back I realize that something did suggest itself to me: there is (at least in the way the ferry charts its course from the Boston to the Quincy side) no real opening to the ocean. The city, in a very concrete sense, never stops. At this point I am tempted to wax philosophically about an intimate and liminal relationship between nature and the human world, etc. etc. But really, all I can see with my very untrained eyes is the very same relationship I would find everywhere else in the city between nature and planning. Only with a lot of water. 
I realize that I'm being quite silly. I expect the wildness of the water to manifest new phenomena that are for the most part (and as I write this, completely) hidden underneath or at the fringes of the oceans surface magnificence.  But I am left, eventually, with this tentative observation: the city did not stop for me, due to the natural enclosure of the harbor by the islands, (as well as the way that the continent itself jets out into the ocean, as I now remember from the maps.) Here is then one thing that I can observe, in abstraction from human planning and needs.
And so the question I am left with as I get close to Boston again is still not a scientific one; But it gives me some rudimentary orientation towards tomorrow: is there (or, are there, or what are)  the particular effects of  this natural enclosure of the ocean by land on the life that one can find in the harbor? I don't know if this is a good question, but I'm here alone and hey, that's the one I have. After I'm done transcribing this, I will look around to see if the internet can inform me of something important and obvious that I missed.
See you all tomorrow then! Don't be too mean to me for missing the boat; being a spaz is its own punishment...

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