Contents
Features; Essays:
Ode to the Por Favor
From Chuckchi to Baja
MBARI & its Snuffling sub
Pelicans & Orchestras
Trouble with Cute
Are You a Fish or a Mammal?
Greedy Lings
Orcas in Monterey Bay
Night of the Orcas
Season's Essays
August & Anchovies
The Tourists are Back
Winter Musing
Spring in the Sanctuary
Poems:
The Boatyard
Passage of Hawks
Tomales Point
Elephant Seal
Captain's Bay, Unalaska
Zoya
Orca Talk
Forgiveness of Peregrines
Whistle Buoy
Ospreys
Short Stories:
Gray Whale Cove
Sand Shark
A Swan, a Young Girl
Steamer's Lane
Mad Jack and the Officer
Like Loose Horses
Five Miles Out
There Ain't No Mules in the Canyon!

U/W Anthology Selections:

The Boat Yard

"I don't throw nothin' away!" chuckles Crabherd
Hefting a dunnish board and shuffling past
Monstrous hulls that rust and rot in the sourdough air;

His clothes are dried engine grease,
His bald head leather and storms
That shrugged off all vanity, long ago,

Studded so, with warts and crags.
All around lay boats shocking with ruin:
Rusted out motor hearts dropped in sand,

Rusting spools and cables, spars and ancient outboards.
"Honduran mahogany," he laughs, "good wood!"
And he speaks like a motor starting; cognition sprinkled

With coughs, with wheezes, with whistles,
And strangely tuned in his rumpled body.
We reach the object of his board:

A 12-foot runabout startling with beauty,
With ribs and spars joined like rhymes,
Like thoughts sanded down to form.

So I cast around the hulks and find
Another fashioned craft; then another, and one more,
All different as seasons; all glowing with work.

And suddenly, the whole ridiculous place transforms:
Every forgotten plank and keel gleams with promise
For what it is—was—could be . . .