Most calls of the wild, for me at least, come in the form of flashbacks. One moment I'll be sitting at my desk as a good editor should, and the next I'm crawling on my belly over a sand dune to get a good look at the shorebirds lining a puddle at low tide. Or I'll be draped across a jungle gym of mangrove branches, watching the fish in the water below. Sometimes I'm at the rail of a ship cutting through the water, marveling at how effortlessly dolphins ride the bow wave. Right now my flashback circuits are burning out with images from a New Year's voyage in the Gulf of California, between Baja California and mainland Mexico.
Sea lions drape themselves over rocks as if they had no bones at all.
Underwater, butterfly fish, blue-headed wrasses and huge angelfish swim around rocks that have tumbled down the steep hills. Ashore, as we struggle up bone-dry arroyos, naturalists point out some of the dozens of species of cactus, each with its own strategy for surviving in a place where it may not rain at all from one year to the next. From a beach we watch a manta ray jumping out of the water by twice its body length. From the ship we see a gray whale, blowing every 18 seconds until it sounds for eight minutes and then repeats the cycle, over and over. That last paragraph could be a capsule description of the trip, but it describes just as accurately the flashbacks that leap through my mind as I go through the routine of the days.