The fruits of loneliness

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, naturalists, memoirs, isolation, bereavement

Everyone reacted to the pandemic and the various governmental restrictions surrounding it in different ways. Introverts like me could just hide out and read or carry on private studies; I had the freedom to take a few months off work. My very social aunt suffered greatly: isolated in her Independent Living suite, with meals delivered to the door and nobody allowed to visit for several months (thanks to Gov. Newsom, solidly in the running for worst in the nation), within a year she died, not of illness but of loneliness.

Dr. Maddalena Bearzi, a very active oceanographer, suffered as one might who'd lost all one's best friends at once. Being of an active mind and character, she found things to do, carrying on "homespun naturalist" activities in spite of the nagging depression. Stranded: Finding Nature in Uncertain Times is her memoir of those times.

The first and last chapters limn her last foray into the ocean to observe porpoises and whales, before the lockdown, and her first after the lockdown was lifted, more than a year later. In between, rather than spend all her time on the inside looking out, she took walks with her dog, she gardened mightily, and she made the acquaintance of the animals all around her that she had earlier mostly ignored.

It seems her dog Genghis is a real goofball. Fortunately he is a lovable goofball, in spite of his penchant for endangering the integrity of her shoulder socket whenever he spies a lizard or squirrel. She tells of several lizard species she encountered during those months, primarily at times that Genghis didn't see them yet. She watched a paper wasp land on her sandwich just before she took a bite, getting itself spotted with a bit of avocado; that enabled her to keep an eye on that particular wasp as it took up guard duties at the entrance to a nest in one of her patio lounges. She tells us of the gradual replacement of the native gray squirrels by invaders from the east, Eastern Fox Squirrels brought to California by well-meaning folks. She also encountered an opossum or two, and tried to spot coyotes that she sometimes heard, but never saw.

She has a chapter, really a well-deserved diatribe, about captive animals, particularly free-roaming ones such as orcas. Under certain circumstances, caging an animal may be needed, and urban kids do get some good from seeing zoo animals, at least in modern zoos with larger enclosures. But putting large animals in small aquariums for the sake of entertainment is quite troubling.

Her writing is lyrical, deep and evocative of many good emotions. I'm glad she's back to her beloved cetaceans, continuing a more-than-25-year study of their surface habits, now with new eyes for them after the months she spent observing a variety of (to her) less familiar species.