Commentary
Suspended in that hazy frontier between sleep and awareness, I came awake at 3 a.m., not with the realization that something didn’t smell right, but rather that I am dying. I had been skunked. Inside my apartment, from under the floorboards.
Between rubbing my burning eyes into a bloodshot jelly and struggling to find a breath’s worth of oxygen, I hatched what, at the time, seemed a brilliant plan: I smeared toothpaste in my nostrils and hid under my comforter.
Figures recently released by a federal monitoring program should have more than raised loud alarm bells: total catch of striped bass by recreational fishermen in Massachusetts has fallen by almost 84 per cent over the past six years. In 2006, more than eight million fish were reported taken by rod-and-reel sports anglers. In 2011, the preliminary figure was 1.3 million. Even over the course of a year, the decrease was 690,000 fish, or 34 per cent less than in 2010.
Here is a short quiz: When does 202 equal 876? Think of telephone area codes, not mathematics. As the 876 area code (Jamaica, West Indies) is increasingly publicized as a red flag for scams on caller ID, schemers are responding by disguising their true locations with seemingly safe substitutes, such as 202 (Washington, D.C). This scam to shield an underlying scam is known as caller ID spoofing, which is no joke. A more accurate moniker would be caller ID cover-up.
Vampire bats share blood with sick bats too ill to get their own. Who would have thought? Rats laugh when tickled. Who would have thought? A biologist recounted how his dog followed a cart carrying the body of a mule who had been his companion for 12 years. When the mule was buried, the dog walked slowly over to the grave of his friend and wailed. Who would have thought?
You step off the airplane and the hustle
begins. This is Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Bags are temporarily possessed by throngs of porters pushing for tips. Then we are off in a pickup truck with our hosts Margaret Penicaud from the Vineyard, who heads up the Haiti Fish Farm Project here, and Margo Barnes.
It has been 15 months since my last visit and these are my impressions, two years after the devastating earthquake that claimed tens of thousands of lives.
At a first-class Vineyard seafood restaurant a diner asks the waitress: “What is the local Vineyard catch of the day?” The waitress responds: “I am sorry, we have no Vineyard fish on the menu today.” And the customer is surprised. “How can that be? I was down on the jetty this afternoon and I watched a fisherman land a beautiful large striped bass.”