Just a little ray of light - 1st draft, its quite rough around the edges
I had never thought much of rays. I knew they were cartilaginous fish, and surprisingly, closely related to the much feared sharks; but apart from that, since they never stirred much controversy, never got the star attention of their fearsome cousins. However, to this day I still remember a close encounter with one in the battlefield that had been the waters around Cayo la Yayí, one of many keys near Vieques, Porto Rico. Back then, those waters were used as bombing range by the US Navy while the fisherman of Porto Rico struggled to regain what before the 1948 forced removal was their land and waters. I wondered how such a delicate and graceful animal, spineless to the point of being literally boneless, could dare to nonchalantly swim by the bombs.
I was 15 and enjoying myself in the key’s clear waters who could have easily decorated any Caribbean paradise-like postcard image: warm, clean and serene in its play of cobalt and emerald colors. It’s amazing how the sea refuses to be blue in these places. And then, I had the childish impulse of looking under the water even though I could have seen anything from above. There it was, with a chain attached to it and spikes coming out like a godforsaken sea urchin, the 1 feet in diameter bomb silently stood its ground against the almost imperceptible movement of the waves. Just when I was about to run out of the beach in fear, a ray appeared. It didn’t seem afraid to flaunt its greatness and shadow the bomb from the sun or me with its size that doubled the bomb’s.
But then it got too close and actually touched the bomb. For a second I trembled thinking that we were all lost. Me, the ray, the placid sway of the waves; we would just be a couple more martyrs for what was already a national struggle against the US Navy’s use of Vieques, its beaches and keys, as military playground. Like David Sanes, who was accidentally killed by a US Marine jet pilot a year before, in 1999, we would end up in all the newspaper covers. “LA MARINA MATA OTRA VEZ” they would scream in red capital letters and the people would be outraged at the Navy killing Porto Ricans again. I was young and in the middle of a nationalistic spree against what was considered one more aggression in a list of imperialist like abuses, but I still wasn’t suicidal, so I left the waters and just told my parents that I saw a big ray. It was also sandy grey on top and slimy white underneath, but in my Caribbean limited world that was how all rays were, so I didn’t notice until today that I meet again with reckless rays.
It turns out that on the other side of the world, yet along the same incendiary latitude that is the Tropic of Cancer, lays another hot blooded sea, so obstinate its scarlet infatuation that it goes by the name of the Red Sea. Being enclosed, among others, by Egypt and Saudi Arabia it sways knowingly of its credentials in history, Moses and Mohamed being only two of the references it could put in its maritime resumé. On one side the proximity of Mecca brings it closer to heaven and on the other Luxor’s temples and burial grounds ground it to the ruddy earth.
When I first found out that I was going to Egypt I knew I had to go and see this inland water way. I had never dived in my life, nor really had any passion for it, but I knew it was a divers Mecca and I suddenly had to grab my Gatorade and “just do it”. I rummaged through guides until I finally found the perfect town: Dahab. It had facilities, yet it wasn’t a quirky tourist Disneyland like Sharm el-Sheik or nearby Hurgada. On the contrary, Dahab was right near a natural oasis were Bedouins had lived for centuries, and it was them who ran the town, not some rich Saudi Arabians with big hotels reeking of oil.
I wanted to escape the oily past, and sadly, present, of the Arab world, it reminded me of the third world irony that seemed to run rampant among these latitudes, past the cancerous line. Countries incredibly rich in resources, still struggled to reach their northern neighbors success. Europe with its wine obsessions and fascist tendencies could still be more resourceful than the lands of the infamous black gold resource.
I planned to forego the option of crossing the Suez Canal in order to experience a less industrial, but more monumental heritage present in the Sinai region. Here Dahab’s deserts looked down sternly on the Red Sea’s eccentric collection of life: red corals, turtles, lion fishes and, of course, rays strolled by without the menace of inflation or oil drilling machines. Here rays could just be rays, or even stingrays, which is how the bigger ones with tails are called; it’s hard to know who’s who in a family of over four hundred. And here lives the Dark-spotted ray. It’s not really interesting; it’s a ray, it has spots, they happen to be dark. After coming up with Garibaldis, killer whales and clown fishes creativity can be a little stunned, leaving us with nothing else than a straightforward levelheaded Dark-spotted ray.
It turns out that after all my gray big Caribbean ray with its 2 feet across the wings range was merely child’s play, this Arabic fella’ can be up to 5 feet across the wings. But like my adventure loving friend, it’s a little oblivious to politics and national states. It is doing something dangerous, maybe even insidious: it is heading a colonization project right through the Suez. Operation Populate Europe Peripheries it may well be called. OPEP is taking over the Eastern Mediterranean and then who knows where. It makes you wonder why would they start crossing the Suez now and not take advantage of it from the beginning in 1869? Are Dark-spotted rays so slow to discover new paths, or just plain afraid of change and modernization that the Suez industrial looks kept them at bay? Or maybe they just heard the call of the wild in a whole new dimension? Maybe the south is getting hotter and hotter, burning with circumstantial problems and like its continental counterparts, now life at sea is just harder to bear? So go north, cross the bridge, the sea, the canal, whichever, and get to Europe.
They say that rays are peaceful; people usually imaging them flying through the big blue sea, the maritime birds of that concave sky. But maybe we just got it wrong and the sky is the sea wannabe in this copying game. The ancient Egyptians used to see the sky as a sea, thus a pharaohs mortal voyage to the afterworld above would begin riding a felucca down the Nile. Eventually, someday, it would finish by docking its vessel in the light blue waters of the upper floating sea. So maybe the storks are really elegantly floating in that converse sea that we call sky and rays really fly.
I never got to Dahab. As life has it I burst my eardrum while doing the second required dive of the PADI examination and couldn’t get my divers license on time. But the rays are still there, fearless like Vieques bomb squad rays, strutting along the Mediterranean, at least all the way up to Turkey, possibly the first Muslim country to enter Europe. Maybe that’s worrisome to storks; any moment now rays may start flying and taking their chimneys. Until then, it may tell us something about the world when even rays are crossing the Suez.
I was 15 and enjoying myself in the key’s clear waters who could have easily decorated any Caribbean paradise-like postcard image: warm, clean and serene in its play of cobalt and emerald colors. It’s amazing how the sea refuses to be blue in these places. And then, I had the childish impulse of looking under the water even though I could have seen anything from above. There it was, with a chain attached to it and spikes coming out like a godforsaken sea urchin, the 1 feet in diameter bomb silently stood its ground against the almost imperceptible movement of the waves. Just when I was about to run out of the beach in fear, a ray appeared. It didn’t seem afraid to flaunt its greatness and shadow the bomb from the sun or me with its size that doubled the bomb’s.
But then it got too close and actually touched the bomb. For a second I trembled thinking that we were all lost. Me, the ray, the placid sway of the waves; we would just be a couple more martyrs for what was already a national struggle against the US Navy’s use of Vieques, its beaches and keys, as military playground. Like David Sanes, who was accidentally killed by a US Marine jet pilot a year before, in 1999, we would end up in all the newspaper covers. “LA MARINA MATA OTRA VEZ” they would scream in red capital letters and the people would be outraged at the Navy killing Porto Ricans again. I was young and in the middle of a nationalistic spree against what was considered one more aggression in a list of imperialist like abuses, but I still wasn’t suicidal, so I left the waters and just told my parents that I saw a big ray. It was also sandy grey on top and slimy white underneath, but in my Caribbean limited world that was how all rays were, so I didn’t notice until today that I meet again with reckless rays.
It turns out that on the other side of the world, yet along the same incendiary latitude that is the Tropic of Cancer, lays another hot blooded sea, so obstinate its scarlet infatuation that it goes by the name of the Red Sea. Being enclosed, among others, by Egypt and Saudi Arabia it sways knowingly of its credentials in history, Moses and Mohamed being only two of the references it could put in its maritime resumé. On one side the proximity of Mecca brings it closer to heaven and on the other Luxor’s temples and burial grounds ground it to the ruddy earth.
When I first found out that I was going to Egypt I knew I had to go and see this inland water way. I had never dived in my life, nor really had any passion for it, but I knew it was a divers Mecca and I suddenly had to grab my Gatorade and “just do it”. I rummaged through guides until I finally found the perfect town: Dahab. It had facilities, yet it wasn’t a quirky tourist Disneyland like Sharm el-Sheik or nearby Hurgada. On the contrary, Dahab was right near a natural oasis were Bedouins had lived for centuries, and it was them who ran the town, not some rich Saudi Arabians with big hotels reeking of oil.
I wanted to escape the oily past, and sadly, present, of the Arab world, it reminded me of the third world irony that seemed to run rampant among these latitudes, past the cancerous line. Countries incredibly rich in resources, still struggled to reach their northern neighbors success. Europe with its wine obsessions and fascist tendencies could still be more resourceful than the lands of the infamous black gold resource.
I planned to forego the option of crossing the Suez Canal in order to experience a less industrial, but more monumental heritage present in the Sinai region. Here Dahab’s deserts looked down sternly on the Red Sea’s eccentric collection of life: red corals, turtles, lion fishes and, of course, rays strolled by without the menace of inflation or oil drilling machines. Here rays could just be rays, or even stingrays, which is how the bigger ones with tails are called; it’s hard to know who’s who in a family of over four hundred. And here lives the Dark-spotted ray. It’s not really interesting; it’s a ray, it has spots, they happen to be dark. After coming up with Garibaldis, killer whales and clown fishes creativity can be a little stunned, leaving us with nothing else than a straightforward levelheaded Dark-spotted ray.
It turns out that after all my gray big Caribbean ray with its 2 feet across the wings range was merely child’s play, this Arabic fella’ can be up to 5 feet across the wings. But like my adventure loving friend, it’s a little oblivious to politics and national states. It is doing something dangerous, maybe even insidious: it is heading a colonization project right through the Suez. Operation Populate Europe Peripheries it may well be called. OPEP is taking over the Eastern Mediterranean and then who knows where. It makes you wonder why would they start crossing the Suez now and not take advantage of it from the beginning in 1869? Are Dark-spotted rays so slow to discover new paths, or just plain afraid of change and modernization that the Suez industrial looks kept them at bay? Or maybe they just heard the call of the wild in a whole new dimension? Maybe the south is getting hotter and hotter, burning with circumstantial problems and like its continental counterparts, now life at sea is just harder to bear? So go north, cross the bridge, the sea, the canal, whichever, and get to Europe.
They say that rays are peaceful; people usually imaging them flying through the big blue sea, the maritime birds of that concave sky. But maybe we just got it wrong and the sky is the sea wannabe in this copying game. The ancient Egyptians used to see the sky as a sea, thus a pharaohs mortal voyage to the afterworld above would begin riding a felucca down the Nile. Eventually, someday, it would finish by docking its vessel in the light blue waters of the upper floating sea. So maybe the storks are really elegantly floating in that converse sea that we call sky and rays really fly.
I never got to Dahab. As life has it I burst my eardrum while doing the second required dive of the PADI examination and couldn’t get my divers license on time. But the rays are still there, fearless like Vieques bomb squad rays, strutting along the Mediterranean, at least all the way up to Turkey, possibly the first Muslim country to enter Europe. Maybe that’s worrisome to storks; any moment now rays may start flying and taking their chimneys. Until then, it may tell us something about the world when even rays are crossing the Suez.
posted by Diana | 6:06 AM
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