I like barnacles.

The way they look so inviolate, so hard and dead and solid. Then I noticed if you touch them in the centre there's a slight softness there, a little give. They flinch slightly and curl inward. After that I couldn't stop touching them, giving a little poke and watching for the contraction.

Notes from Glacier Bay:

Late night on the catamaran the full moon rose in the last dusky dusk and orca fins cut the ocean blackly.

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More lovely sea otters curious and mobile. Porpoise. I always think of Lewis Carroll: "With what porpoise?"

One dead floating sea otter sad still feet. Tonight at dinner seven river otters ran down to the ocean, changed their mind(s), ran back into the alders, then after a few minutes emerged again, only six brave (foolish?) enough to make it to the water, one chickening out.

Tonight a humpback is feeding close in this small bay, surfacing, humping, going down in small fluke-lifting dives. And a seal saw me off to bed.

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Hummingbird alighting on a branch above my head. Salmon swarming roiling the surface of the bay. That harbour seal gray-spotted. Puffins with orange eyebrows. White butts of diving murrelets; better underwater, their flight is comical: they bounce, touch down bellies on their way into the air.

Black and white murres. Oystercatchers orange beach bill. Kittiwakes. Songbirds thrilling trilling. Sea lice suckers onboard the pink salmon Ken caught.

Sea lions humping and bumping into the water then surging forward boiling the water like eels in a pot, like hattifatteners towards obtuse encroaching paddlers.

Half-moon arc of porpoise. The sea is so calm now. The sun is umber, ochre. Waiting for the watery breath of a whale. The rusty squeak of a bald eagle. Sea lions from afar sound like bullfrogs, like distant thunder. From up close, like Tyrannosaurus Rex.

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Here in Glacier Bay the air is thick, everything is alive, the sea breathes a great sucking wet breath every twelve hours.

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On July 10 we wake to fog damp drops hovering. But later it lifts then clears in Adams Inlet a herd of seals bobbing eyes so deep and watchful. Porpoises humping arcs and a mother moose and two long-legged calves.

Tonight at McBride Glacier it's all heaving and grinding ice, oystercatcher alarm calls, terns squeaking and then a humpback puffs by, wolves mourning as we eat our rice.

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Here the birds fly underwater and the fish fling themselves skyward.

How hard it is to communicate

An excerpt from Moominland Midwinter, by Tove Jansson:

A herd of small creatures with spindly legs came blowing like a wisp of smoke over the ice. Someone with silvered horns walked stamping past Moomintroll, and over the fire flapped something black with large wings, which disappeared northwards. But everything happened a little too quickly, and Moomintroll never found time to introduce himself.

"Please, Too-ticky," he asked, pulling at her sweater.

She said kindly: "Well, there's The Dweller Under the Sink."

He was rather a small one, with bushy eyebrows. He sat by himself, looking into the fire.

Moomintroll sat down beside him and said: "I hope those biscuits weren't too old?"

The little beast looked at him but didn't reply.

"May I compliment you on your exceptionally bushy eyebrows?" Moomintroll continued politely.

To this the beast with the eyebrows replied: "Shadaff oomoo."

"Eh?", asked Moomintroll, surprisedly.

"Radamsah," said the little beast fretfully.

"He has a language all his own, and now he believes that you've hurt him," Too-ticky explained.

"But that wasn't my intention at all," said Moomintroll anxiously. "Radamsah, radamsah," he added imploringly.

This seemed to make the beast with the eyebrows really overcome by rage. He rose in great haste and disappeared.

"Dear me, what shall I do?" said Moomintroll, "Now he'll live under our sink for a whole year more without knowing that I just wanted to be friends with him."

"Such things happen," said Too-ticky.

Absolutely fictional fiction

You’re Fucking Beautiful or How I Got Rejected by a Twenty-three Year-Old

He sucked me in by being so young I didn’t take him seriously. I got a fun crush, first on his friend who was cuter but turned out to be kind of dumb so I ended up laughing at the jokes of the shorter chunky one with the nice glasses. He had really nice curly hair and his voice was like an old man coming out of this scruffy boy.

This was in a college astronomy class. I was auditing it so I could have a good reason to stare at the sky. I was the oldest one in the class by ten years. When I noticed how cute the two young men were I started wearing my tightest t-shirts to the class.

After the class ended I ran into the two of them at a concert. I pulled my shoulders back and went over. “Hey, it’s astronomy class girl,” they said.

Outside I lingered and the short cute chunky one came over and leaned in a bit and asked me if I wanted to do something sometime, “like a date” he said, enunciating the T. “Okay,” I said and I stayed close and he kissed me and it was sweet.

On the date we sat in an empty bar and talked about comic books and other books. We went back to his place to get the address of a party. His apartment was very small and the things in it looked cheap and quirky and temporary, like a place a young person would live. I looked in the fridge and there was only orange juice, bacon, ketchup and beer in there. Instead of going to the party we stayed in and watched a DVD on his laptop computer on a small coffee table, from knees-touching distance on a sagging couch.

After the movie he put some music on and it got awkward again and I couldn’t think of anything to say and I thought that he had good taste in music and it made me like him and that made me more nervous.

Sometime after that he kissed me. “That wasn’t scary, was it,” he said, and kissed me again and again and then a whole bunch more times. I kissed back hard and it was like we couldn’t stop then and there was all of a sudden nothing awkward about it, it was the perfect opposite of awkward and he pulled me onto his lap and lifted off my t-shirt and then he said “You’re fucking beautiful,” and he actually growled it, shouted it a bit, said it with a vehemence that would ring in my head and my stomach for weeks.

Then we went into the bedroom and we took all of each other’s clothes off and it still wasn’t awkward, maybe only a few small times, and then he fucked me and it was over pretty quickly and then he brought me some orange juice. We lay there and talked and then I moved over close again and his dick moved against my leg and I moved closer and he said “You can touch him, it’s okay,” and I felt like I was twelve. Then we did it again and it was still over pretty quickly and then he said I was swell and that word made me very happy.

I went home late and I woke up early and I felt so good I had a smile on my face all day and that was when I started to stop thinking it was ridiculous to date a 23 year-old and started to fantasize that he might be this exceptional 23 year-old who would go crazy for me and move to Newfoundland with me and have a baby with me and be this young cool dad. I thought this might be the exact perfect thing to stop me having to think about all my thoroughly adult ex-boyfriends.

That was the beginning of things not going well. I’d left some things at his house and so I emailed him and he emailed me back with good comma usage and I felt smitten but when I went over to his house he was sleeping and acted out of it but not in a sexy come get back into bed with me way, more of a here’s your watch and your necklace way.

I went away then, on a three-week trip, and thought about him a lot and thought about how free I felt – finally – from my lingering thoroughly adult ex-boyfriends. Free from both the ones I still loved and the ones who still loved me.

When I got back from my trip I went to the Laundromat for the first time in three years, to wash my dog’s blanket, and the cute young chunky guy, the 23 year-old with the very nice glasses was sitting there alone, reading with his feet up among all the big machines.

That was too much. Why bother having romantic coincidences if it’s not going to mean anything? That’s what I ask myself, now. At that time I thought that romantic coincidences were not coincidences and I sat down and listened to him talk about himself and watched him carefully fold his t-shirts and his Tommy Hilfiger underwear.

Outside I offered him a ride and he smiled and said no, he liked to walk, and I got in my car and watched him walk away with a big hockey bag of laundry on his back and I felt charmed again.

The next time I saw him he was with a group of people and he said they were going for a drink but he didn’t ask me to come directly. I came anyway, a little nervous all of a sudden, and when we got to the bar he took the only available chair and ordered a beer and started talking to someone and I stood there and thought, fuck. I thought I might have to leave then, but he turned around and after a moment he said, “Did you want this chair?”

We were talking and he was doing most of the talking but every once in a while I said something too. It was hard to tell if things were good or not and I started to feel all off-balance like how I felt for so many years around the ex-boyfriend who I still loved. That off-balance feeling made me tired and quiet and I couldn’t keep up with his banter even though I tried which made it worse.

He walked me to my car but he didn’t get close, not close enough at all for kissing to be even on the table. He said he’d see me at an astronomy lecture that was happening the next week.

By the time of the astronomy lecture I had talked myself back into some good fantasies about the whole Newfoundland, young dad, having lots of sex thing. When I got there I stood next to him and he said hi but then after a few minutes he walked away and sat somewhere else. I tried to keep the sinking feeling at bay but it was coming on fast and I could tell that my friends who were there saw it and knew it but I kept pretending to be okay.

After that I didn’t look at him at all and I went and sat with my friends and my ex-boyfriend who still loves me came over and gave me a big hug and said something self-deprecating and made me laugh. I loved him for that, almost enough, but not enough not to care that the 23 year-old was leaving without me.

I guess I know I got blown off, but I don’t really know why. I asked my friend Thomas, the one who is so honest he tells me when I’m too fat, what he thought, and I went through the whole story and I said, “So do you think he likes me? Or do you think he doesn’t like me?”

And Thomas said, “I think he might be a dick.”

I guess that might be right but rejection is rejection. I guess I might feel bad for a while. My ex-boyfriend, the one that I still love, told me one time that he admired people who opened themselves up to love, even when they got hurt over and over, the way sea anemones shrink up and open wide again. The sea anemone metaphor was his, by the way, but I feel it now.

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There is a postscript to this fictional story. A year later, the 23 year-old emailed me out of the clear blue and said he was in Nashville and he'd seen a fiddle player that looked like me. He said if I still wanted to move to Newfoundland, now was the time.

I'd learned enough by this time not to take that offer too seriously. But the message renewed my faith. In what? In picking up the right kinds of strangers, and that certain kinds of mistakes are not only okay, but possibly beneficial - at least from an artistic perspective, to make, and that there's all kinds of possibility out there for sea creatures.