Travel Diary: At Sea
That is not our ship, but we are heading to New York on a Cunard line ship. We will get there eventually. We boarded the Queen Mary 2 in Hamburg and will disembark in Brooklyn. Right now we are smack-dab in the middle of the Atlantic. "Smack-dab" is the official nautical term, if you are wondering.
Last night when we went back to our room, we saw dolphins frolicking in the water (where else would they be? Do dolphins ever just swim or is the frolicking mandatory?) The only other time I've seen dolphins in the wild was when we first moved to Tallahassee back in the early 1990s. We went to the beach early one morning and there they were. Dolphins. Frolicking. When we told people about it later the Floridians looked at us the way an Iowan would look at someone who told them, "We went out to the country and we saw cows!" Yeah, apparently dolphins playing in the surf was so ordinary as to not bear mentioning.
Dolphins, like otters, have great PR. They are cute, they are smart, and they smile all the time. They are also nasty, aggressive creatures that kill for fun. Back in the 1980s, I was a volunteer at the Minnesota Zoo. After 1000 hours of volunteer service, a volunteer got to pick something special to do and swimming the the dolphins was a top choice. During orientation, we were advised that this was not necessarily a good choice. "If they decide they don't like you, they can become very aggressive." Given how miserable dolphins were in captivity, I could hardly blame them from taking their frustration out on some stupid biped who thought they were "cute.":
Leave them in the ocean and let them frolic.
My record for seeing creatures in the wild is pretty dismal. The state animal for Colorado (of course there is state animal, we're not a bunch of uncultured swine, you know!) is the bighorn sheep. I lived in Colorado for 18 years and never saw one. Even when rafting through Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area where you would think that the sheep would be obligated to appear, I saw not a one. It was hard not to take it personally.
How great a name is "bighorn sheep," anyway? European explorers just kind of named things with the first thing that they noticed:
I suppose some sort of naming-fatigue set in as they moved west. "Hell, it is a sheep and it has big horns," some prospector said wearily, "let's call it a bighorn sheep."
"What do you want to call that antelope that is almost as fast as a cheetah?"
"Let's call it a pronghorn!"
I can go on. Two kinds of bears are found in the North American west: the imaginatively named Black Bear and the Brown Bear:
Grizzly bears are a subspecies of Brown bears, so named because of their grizzled fur:
Did you know the Latin name for grizzly bear is Ursus arctos horribilis? We should have left naming things to the Romans. Or the Pope.
Michele makes the excellent point that these names are preferable to other naming practices. She cogently argues, "Who the hell is Thompson and why does he have a whole gazelle named after him?" Fair point, well made, my dear.
So anyway....
That's shipboard life. A place to let the mind wander.