Dolphin Address 12 2003
July 11th 2003
Some people think I must be an optimal optimist to enter this cold water everyday. But I don't swim with Dusty every day. I could, but I don't. There is no central reason for that, more like a webwork of small ones. You don't visit your best friend everyday, do you?
Each swim with Dusty needs to be digested. The weather is often quite bad. Strong wind and high waves make me seasick within half an hour. Also it makes restless swimming. And when it rains all my clothes get soaking wet and so everything in the car gets damp. But if I want to, this does not stop me.
And then there's timing. When I sit on the rocks and I look around me, habitually keep an eye on the ocean for Dusty, by itself the 'must' and 'want' disappear. Then I slide into another consciousness, my own. That is strictly normal, for everyone has it. But some people get scared, because there's nothing in it.
Then it comes all by itself and just like that. I change and go to the water. Dusty lies in wait for me.
The prodigious gift
The response I have received on the salmon Dusty brought me is mainly about the honour that was conferred to me. That is how it felt to me too and it still does. But I have also wondered how this would be for Dusty. If dolphins know the concept of 'honour', then it will probably have little overlap with ours. Might she have just wanted to feed me?
But according to theory, she can scan the content of my stomach and there were the three slices of McCambridge bread. Did she want to share the fish with me and would she expect me, as I once have spoken if Fungi would bring me a fish, to dig my teeth in the raw? Was it a gift, a reward, because I was there for her so often, a symbol of good friendship or did she expect compensation, as in tribal life reciprocity is a social mechanism for redistribution.
Last year she deliberately touched my hand with her vagina (and not the other way around). On this moment
www.irishdolphins.com has posted an article about Dusty's attack on an Irish woman, about four weeks ago. She has rammed this woman with her beak and cracked two ribs.
This is by far the most violent act she has ever committed (I only heard this only two days ago). ID's conclusion is that all (minor) 'attacks' Dusty has performed were on women, particularly on women that accompanied men, that often swam with Dusty. I only know exceptions to that rule, safe one: the woman with the red boogieboard
('Dolphin Address 11').
It is beginning to dawn on me that the salmon might have been an act of passion.
Jan Ploeg, Holy Well, July 11th 2003
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