Well, as they say, it’s all over but the crying… I have officially come to the end of my time as an Oregon Sea Grant Summer Scholar.  Not gonna lie, I’m pretty bummed. It’s been a spectacular summer, and it ended in pretty spectacular fashion. You may or may not be aware that this Monday, our whole sun was totally blocked by the moon. Or, if you are in the “flat earth” camp, some other pseudo-celestial event occurred. Regardless, the result is that for a few minutes in a small band that spanned the USA, it went TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY DARK. And, as luck would have it, that small band included the very part of Oregon in which I’ve been living this summer. Even before the program I was told about the total eclipse hitting Newport. On orientation day, we were given free eclipse glasses by Sea Grant. Throughout the summer I was continuously texted by friends from other parts of the country asking if I knew that this eclipse was going to happen (I did). And for the few weeks leading up to it, we were constantly warned of the dangers of the “apoceclipse” coming to Oregon’s coast. Traffic would be chaos, gas stations would run dry, super markets would be empty, it was even predicted that cell service would fail due to an overload of Snapchatters and hashtaggers. Essentially, rational civilization was predicted to utterly implode as millions of people descended on Oregon’s coast with the sole intention of staring directly at the sun.

That didn’t happen. All in all, it was actually a fairly tame weekend in Newport. The only significant traffic was the backup at the county fair’s mud-runner rally when some guy named Alan got his Jeep stuck on the course (it was hilarious). On a whim, some interns and I decided to trek inland to Corvallis for the eclipse just in case the coast was too foggy. What is normally an hour drive took 50 minutes. No traffic to speak of. On the morning of, we hiked up to the top of Bald Hill a few hours early to get prime seats for the event. As prepared as I thought I was, I still absolutely cannot get over how COOL it was. In the few minutes before totality, the lighting became very eerie and muted. And when darkness hit, everyone around us couldn’t help but shout out in amazement. To be brief, it was so darn cool.

Pro-tip, you can tell this is staged because we’re standing in sunshine and the eclipse blocked out the sun. It’s all in the details.

Afterward though, it was back to reality as it became clear again that the program was ending. After eating lunch, we had to say a goodbye to Dustin and Catie, two of the South Coast Sea Grants who were driving back to Coos Bay. Then, later that evening Megan (another Sea Grant) departed from Newport for good. They were the first official goodbyes and it stunk. They’re three really awesome people who I’m really glad I got the opportunity to get to know some this summer.

I’ve been fortunate to spend a lot of my last week in the field. On Monday I went out into the intertidal zone to help plan permanent plots with some ODFW Marine Reserves folks, an Oregon State post-doc, her lab tech, and her 4-month old son! Seriously, Sara (the post-doc) scrambled around the intertidal with her baby strapped to her for about 3 hours and I was thoroughly thoroughly impressed. What an awesome early exposure to field work!! Anyway, the plots we planned will eventually supplement our Sea-Star Wasting data to give a clearer picture of what’s happening in the intertidal of Otter Rock and Cascade Head Marine Reserves. Sadly I won’t be around to perform the surveys myself, but it was great to see how the project and collaboration with OSU is evolving.

The next day I headed out early for my very last day of SMURFing… (insert image of me shedding a single tear here). It was a great day full of lots of oceanic animals, but very few juvenile fish recruits. We saw sea lions, seals, and a FAMILY OF GREY WHALES RIGHT NEXT TO OUR BOAT. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t get a picture of the whales because I was in a wetsuit covered in amphipods at the time but I swear it happened ask anyone else who was out there.

Pretty proud of this picture too. I won’t lie.

Speaking of who else was out there, it’s been an absolute pleasure working with my fellow SMURFers this summer. Madeline (REU) and I got to share a couple long road trips down to Port Orford together and also commiserated in our failure to come even close to Will’s success at catching fish. Will (Ph.D. student at OSU), for his part, has been an awesome guy to work with. He’s a great source of fish knowledge, as well as a great person to grab a burrito with. Doesn’t get much better than that.

What a great gang of SMURFers

In the office, I’ve just been tying up some loose ends. I’ve written my final SMURF blog entry, input some old data, worked on these blog posts, and tried to organize my work from this summer a little bit. Additionally, I got to attend the REU’s summer symposium and learn more about the work they’re doing this summer. There are twelve REU’s at Hatfield studying everything from shrimp to humpback whales. They’re pretty brilliant students and it’s been great living in such a tight-knit community with them. We said goodbye to the first one yesterday and another one this morning along with another Sea Grant, and it was all darn sad. Goodbyes stink. But I’m excited to see where all my fellow Sea Grants and REUs end up, and what awesome things we accomplish.

Talking to a friend from back home the other day, he mentioned that my pictures and posts almost make it seem as if this has been an extended vacation rather than an internship. Honestly, he had a point. I feel as though I’ve really made the most out of my brief time in Oregon. Nearly every weekend has included some sort of adventure that has taken me all across the state and even into California. And not only have I taken advantage of my time not working, the work itself has been pretty awesome as well. I’ve learned a ton, grown a ton, met some awesome people, and gotten to do some pretty cool fieldwork. In addition, I’ve built some friendships that will definitely extend beyond this program while living in a great community of students (that includes you, South Coast Sea Grants, even though we didn’t live together).

To bring this full circle back to my first blog post, the final scene of Season 8 of Scrubs (which was meant to be the series finale before they regrettably made a mediocre 9^th season) shows JD walking down a hospital hallway as he leaves Sacred Heart Hospital for the final time. In his imagination, the halls are lined with the people he’s met – friends, co-workers, patients, love interests, The Janitor, etc. He walks outside to watch a projector screen flashing images of his future while Peter Gabriel’s The Book of Love plays in the background. It gets me every time, seriously.

Basically me right now.

I don’t imagine my exit will be anything like that. Except, I will be sad to say goodbye to this experience, and I am excited to see where it’ll take me. So long Sea Grant, and thanks for all the fish.

I’m out *mic drop* *big splash* *shriek as freezing water permeates wetsuit*

These last couple weeks of my internship have been a lot of tying up loose ends. Last week, I was busy getting prepared for the final presentation and poster for the symposium in Newport. It took a lot of work, but it was fun to bring together everything that I’ve been working on this summer and show what we’ve been doing at the South Slough. I’ve also been trying to go explore places in Coos Bay one more time before I leave. Earlier last week, I drove down the Cape Arago peninsula again, and this time I finally saw seals at Simpson Reef! The day was really clear, so there was no fog obstructing the view of the rocks, and it was at low tide, so the maximum amount of rock was exposed for seals to haul out on.

This picture basically just looks like big rocks, but they’re covered in seals:

I also went to the Bandon Marsh National Wildlife Refuge and spent some time birdwatching. At the shore at Coquille Point, there were tons of gulls and cormorants on the large rock outcrops and feeding along the intertidal. Along the emergent saltmarsh at the Ni-les’tun Unit, I saw swallows and sparrows, a great egret, a turkey vulture, and a peregrine falcon.

The big rock outcrops at Coquille Point in the Bandon Marsh National Wildlife Refuge:

However, the past few weeks haven’t been all lasts, but also some new things.

• I finally saw whales in Oregon! Katie and I were heading up north from Newport after the symposium and stopped in Depoe Bay. Depoe Bay claims to have the world’s smallest harbor—and it is a perfect spot for whale watching. Over the course of a couple hours that we sat overlooking the bay, we saw hundreds of grey whale spouts, tons of whale backs, and a couple shots of flukes. I was so happy that I got to see whales before I left Oregon!!
• The best new thing—the eclipse. We were really lucky that the eclipse was happening this Monday, August 21^st, only a couple days after our symposium in Newport. The path of totality passed right through Newport inland across Oregon. Coos Bay would see about 97% totality, but Katie and I decided to stay with my mom and sister at a friend’s house in Salem so that we could see the total eclipse.

We were really surprised there was basically no traffic getting to Newport or from Newport to Salem, because we had heard dire warnings about the millions of people coming to Oregon for the eclipse. On Sunday, we went to Silver Fall State Park, hiking an 8-mile loop that brings you past about 7 waterfalls. It was an awesome way to kill time before the eclipse.

Monday, Katie and I woke up early to claim a spot at a local golf course to view the eclipse. We definitely could have slept in a bit later, as only a couple dozen people ended up watching from the course. My family and friends came a bit later with food. It was amazing to just sit for the next couple hours, watching the moon slowly cover the sun. I had heard what eclipses would be like, but no description really prepared me for experiencing it. As totality neared, it got eerily dim and felt like I was looking at everything through a filter. Then the moon fully covered the sun, and it was instantly really dark. Streetlights came on, the horizon looked like sunset, and you could see the corona around the moon. The two minutes of totality felt like seconds. Before we knew it, the sun peeked out behind the moon, and we had to put our eclipse glasses back on.

My attempt to take a picture of the eclipse with my phone:

This whole summer—the fieldwork, research, hiking, camping—has been incredible, but I feel lucky that I got to end the summer with a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I may not have been able to see if I’d been somewhere else.

This summer I wanted to use the time away from home to set challenges for myself and see how many I could complete. Setting goals always seemed like a great way to work on self-improvement. So right from the start I set three goals for myself:

1. I wanted to run at least 3 times a week and get to the point where I enjoyed running.
2. I wanted to read for pleasure more.
3. I wanted to avoid the late night work sesh’s that stem from an unhealthy amount of procrastinating that has haunted me my entire college career.

So before we dive into this week’s work update, I’ll update everyone on my personal summer goals.

1. In the first week and a half I ran 4 times! That was more miles run in those 10 days than in the last 5 years, I was quite proud of myself. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you really hate running), that feeling of pride was not strong enough to stop me from giving up running completely when a group of interns roped me in to joining the local pool with them. The only sport I’ve ever done has been swimming and I’m quite awkward on land. After 11 years of competitive swimming, I’d like to think land sports just aren’t my thing. So I happily made a quick goal switcharoo to swimming at least 4 times a week instead of running. With a good group of supportive swimmers we’ve been able to motivate each other to hit that goal just about every week. All I can hope is that by the end I can still beat the 14 year old swimmers that I coach back home. Goal #1 = Kind of complete?
2. Well… I’ve read a bunch of research articles, papers and two textbooks. Learning is pleasure, right? Goal #2 = to be determined.
3. The past two weeks have been a grind to research and finish my final presentation and poster. While I didn’t procrastinate necessarily, I did burn the midnight oil. It’s just something about the quiet peacefulness of 4 am in the Hatfield library that really just lets the thoughts flow out clearly. Working in the ODFW cubicle staring into the corner of a wall is honestly driving me insane. It’s a quite a bummer I can’t do the out of project work out of the office. Oh well, the late nights will have to continue for now. A successful presentation and poster later and Goal #3 = half way finished, I think?

This leads into the next section of the blog… Presentation and posters! Presenting on our work over the summer felt like it snuck up on us. In reality this whole summer seemed to just slip away. I knew from experience that this 10 week program was going to go quick. But knowing and experiencing are always two different things. Walking home the other day felt like it was the first week and we had just signed our ODFW paperwork.

In case you weren’t at the Sea Grant final presentations, I presented on the importance of community engagement for research scientists. I modeled the presentation mostly on background research rather than on the Oregon Marine Reserves, as they are currently transitioning towards an engagement model rather than a pure outreach model.

With just a few days until I present, I was very much looking forward to getting feedback from my mentor. In true fashion she gave me some feedback in ways that seemed as blunt as possible. Which, after getting over myself I realized how important it was. The advice that stuck out the most was that I needed to explain the topics as if I was “explaining it to my friend at the bar.” She wanted me to pretend there was a barrier of noise between myself (the message sender) and my mate (message receiver). In order to get my message across effectively I had to be clear and say it as quickly as possible to avoid getting, literally in this case, drowned out by the noise. In reality noise could refer to literal noise, visual distractions, extra words, other conversations, etc. This noise distracts and takes away from the message you are trying to convey. I had always recognized noise, but always in terms of designing a campaign message. For some reason it never occurred to me that the same idea could be applied while giving a presentation. Kelsey also encouraged me to get out of my comfort zone and use PowerPoint to aid the presentation, instead of being the presentation. I took out as many words as I could and replaced them with easy to understand graphics and pictures.

This forced myself to be able to confidently explain the topic without the use of notes or cue words. Practicing this resulted in a few 3 am nights in the library practicing to my audience of wheelie chairs. But once I got it down, it felt sooo goooood. It was so much harder, but I felt my presentation skills improve loads. S/o to my mentor Kelsey for the top pro tips.

Of course we can’t forget to talk about the one event that was so incredible that it just eclipsed the whole week. An event that felt spiritual, as if you could feel it throughout your entire body. An event that mentally and physically puts you in a state of awe. An event that, should you be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time for, you would be a fool to miss out on. An event that I know that I will spin never ending yarns to my grand children about. An event that I hope goes down in history as a moment where we put away the sadness and strife of the current state of the environment and politics and replaced it with joy and wonder. Obviously we’re talking about the pre-final Sea Grant presentation cinnamon bun trip! 5 Sea Grants interns, 5 cinnamon buns and 5 full happy stomachs, what more could you ask for?! Granted they weren’t the best cinnamon buns of all time, but boy were they still so good. Really overshadowed just about every other event that occurred recently.

We live in perpetual motion around a star. As a metaphor, deity and mystery, our star’s various memetic incarnations derive from its constancy of power and presence, yet we still know precious little about it. The long life span of trees relative to that of humans makes studying them difficult. Similarly, understanding the life of a star is an infinitely more daunting endeavor and in many ways an eternal puzzle, one that we can only observe indirectly, mediated through technology, projecting ourselves into the future and past, and only in the briefest of blinks. We know that our star is not magical, that it obeys known laws of physics and nuclear chemistry, that it is incredibly far from us, yet we can feel it on our skin, and as we consume the products of its excitations and marvel at the games it plays, we continue to spin around and around its eternal light. A place of constant origin, only one of an infinity of others that speak to us from the night sky. A contradictory and alien being, our sun.

On Monday I watched our moon eclipse this star from a field in Corvallis, hundreds of people laying or sitting in the grass with lawn chairs and blankets, drinking morning cocktails, chasing rambunctious dogs and kids, telescopes and cameras trained to the sky. As the light dimmed and the world changed color, the shadows through an old redwood sprayed a hundred crescent suns across the ground, all of us wondering at the fascinating pattern of light and shadow in the dirt. At the moment of totality, cheers and gasps filled the air, life holding its breathe on the cool wind, wonder and fear echoing back through thousands of such events throughout human history.

Intellectually I was aware of the process as a consequence of orbits, relative distances and coincidental alignment, but the animal within howled. I stood there in the stop-time of fear and curiosity so common to the human animal, wondering at what I was seeing, not with my eyes but with my being. A part of me knew that I was looking at the corona of the sun, but such explanations have no bearing on the emotional component of such an event. In that moment I felt an awesome and terrible presence. I can now understand why such events have inspired panic and sacrifice. I have only once before felt something similar about the sun, my first morning in the sands of Kuwait, the sun rising as a pale blue disc on the horizon, its visible rays feeble and weak, yet its power all around me in the 120 degree air. The sun as an embrace, a holy gesture of an ambivalent god, a passing terror, a perpetually unknowable entity driving art, religion, science and life together under its rays.

I am becoming a scientist. I am the recipient of a vast canon of knowledge about the world we live in, a gift from our ancestors. I have been given many tools to inquire about the workings of nature, to ensure that I am not seeing only what I want to see, or the spirits of habit and superstition. I have a community of passionate and experienced scientists from around the globe that I can call on for help and guidance, yet this is a relatively recent state of affairs. Staring at the sun and moon in alignment I found myself remembering all of those who came before and confronted such phenomena without science. They possessed the same mind and intellectual powers as I, an inheritance of knowledge and experience to keep them alive, and a cultural narrative to order the why’s and how’s of the world, but no science. Those people put stones in circles, piled them high toward the stars and consecrated them with human blood in the effort to understand and control the powers of life and death. I remember and honor those ancestor’s efforts, the generations of sacrifice and confusion that led to here and now, to me. Confronted by the mystery and terror of an eclipse, I must have felt much as they did, quaking at the sight of the sun blotted out by the moon, an event that shouldn’t be.

I have struggled both intellectually and emotionally this summer in pursuit of science. Standing before a wonder of life on planet earth, I was reminded that a part of my being remains untouched and untouchable by science and intellect, that at some level I am unable to completely integrate what I know from science with what I feel with my being. Like the sun, I am a mysterious power of contradiction that defies explanation, even as I seek to explain this condition and the world around me. Much remains hidden in the light.

Well this past week has been pretty eventful. On Friday, the event that had been looming over us since we began the program had finally come: the Final Symposium. And now that it’s done and all the stress and anxiety has been washed away, it was pretty sweet! As much stress and work goes into these kinds of things, it’s always very rewarding to share what you’ve been working on with your peers and colleagues and have them share their own work-babies with you. As much as I’m terrified of public speaking it was a good feeling to stand in front of the crowd and show them some of the images that we received for the Wild Rivers Coast Project. And it’s always fun to dress professional for a day! (only for a day though, that’s more than enough)

Happy Professional Dustin in his non-natural habitat

When I had first told friends from SoCal that I was going to be in Oregon for the summer many of them were quick to exclaim “I’m going to come visit you!” Well nine weeks later and not one friend has made it up here until now. On Wednesday night, one of my oldest friends came to visit me. I have known Jordan literally since I’ve been born. Our dads went to college together and their group of homies made it a point to raise all their kids together once they had them. Fast forward many, many years and you have nine intelligent, adventurous, and deliciously mixed brown adults. Jordan definitely embodies these adjectives. He graduated college Summa Cum Laude, is dedicating his life to public service, and has traveled much of the world, even living in Bolivia for a year teaching English to kids. He actually has been working a 9-5 for the past year but due to a lack of fulfillment decided to quit his job two weeks ago and is now starting a trip through the main 48 states. I was fortunate enough to be his first stop. And though we are very different in a lot of ways I love the guy to death and I’m so happy I got to spend some quality time with him for a few days. I wish I had had more time to show him the South Coast, but I’m very glad he got to accompany me on my adventures up north and that we could experience the eclipse together.

We played putt putt at Bandon Dunes and I got two holes in one and my highest score so far. Holla at cha boiii.

Eclipse photo feat. Zach’s trademarked eclipse photos

In addition to hanging with Jordan, I was able to have one final, elongated chillness with the North Coasters which was very swell. Jordan and I stayed at Hatfield on Friday and Saturday night (thanks Neil) and in Corvallis on Sunday night. During those days, we went to the beach, checked out the farmer’s market, ate some good food, checked out cute Newport shops, made Eclipse t-shirts, watched Game of Thrones, and juggled soccer balls. On top of that we all saw the eclipse which was INSANE. All in all, it was a great weekend shared with chill ass people, some whom I knew well, others who I didn’t at first but now I feel like I do. I didn’t get to hang out with these people as much as I would have liked this summer so I’m very happy this weekend happened. I will say it, North Coasters are a chill cohort. Now, I am tired and slowly trying not to accept that the program is coming to a close so I’m going to slide into bed. Night.

TOTALITY

Eclipse squad feat. Jordan’s face

Unrelated to everything I talked about but Zach thought this sleeping bag made him look like Jon Snow so I kind of have to show him and the world how false that statement was.