Bubbly
The Austin Children’s Museum hosted “Bubble Day” this afternoon, for which we have been planning to attend all week. There was a special shirt Ford selected to wear, and a priority given to this event over all other appointments, even eating. We left Houston in the rain last night in order not to miss it. And Ford has been talking about it all week, All Week.
The entire visit, Ford whisked among the exhibits like an ER surgeon urgently attending triage, objective and meticulous, testing each demonstration and lingering where he saw fit before moving onto the next interest, oblivious to everyone else but with growing receptivity towards taking turns, nonetheless.
Chas, sometimes clapping with pride, figured out all of the baby room puzzle exhibits, but he petered out quickly along with my aching feet.
Freeport, very NOT Maine
As we drove back tonight from Freeport (Texas), through a cloud of small insects that stretched sixty miles in the moonlight and caked my windshield, I realized that this may be the last time I ever willingly drive down past Chlorine Boulevard and the oil refineries on my way to this particular section of the Texas coastline. But we had to do it today, because Chas has never seen the saltwater and I was anxious to beachcomb and show Ford a few ctenophores and nudibranchs among the mile-high piles of sargassum. And I was sure that the longshore current would have brought, along with hurricane Emily, plenty of flotsam to collect at the neck of the jetty.
When we opened our doors on arrival, a warm effluvia (my God how pretentious of me) of rotting seaweed and crustaceans rolled through the car. Nickel-sized mosquitoes swarmed and fire ants began to gnaw on Ford’s feet as he stepped down onto the pavement. The sand, if you can call it sand, was a fine, sooty brown, not quite anything like sand but more like the fine sediment atop the ground after a flood. Particles of rock left to churn and churn and churn until there is hardly a surface to grind any further, sand grains the size of atoms remain. It is an irritating, virtually impossible sand to rinse off the body, and it carries with it the unmistakable stench of Freeport if you forget to clean you car out afterwards (just so you know, honey, I did). And the piles of sargassum, the miles and miles of mile-high piles of sargassum, were unprecedented. Even the flies gave up on the bacchus; I think they must have all lost their minds because I didn’t see a single fly on the beach. There were only the rounded remains of shell bits, and virtually no sea life besides the rotting seaweed and a few entangled shrimp.
Of course, it is difficult to comb the beach for wildlife when your baby is busy crawling into the Gulf like Kate Chopin’s Edna (in the final chapter of The Awakening). He was in love and wonder, on a blind mission like a sea turtle hatchling, flapping his huge broad hands onto the slick sand and beeline-ing it to the Eastern Australian Current or EAC as Crush calls it because that’s what sea turtles do, according the Disney/Pixar, and there was NO STOPPING HIM until the waves began to roll over his head and, unlike the baby sea turtles, he stood up, squinting and licking, unsure what to do next.
And just like those cute little sea turtles you see on Nova, I got Chas’ first sea legs on film, too. I can post it when we return to Austin this weekend.