Scientist of the year, R & D 100 Magazine

Mosaics: Recollections of a scientific endeavor.
Note: There is some scientific jargon in this remembering; if you not a scientist in my field, but curious about the vaccine, please excuse me and just skip those bits.

This award was a lovely surprise. It took a "village", lots of folks many years, get this vaccine into clinical trials. So here is some history if anybody is interested, of those who moved this concept along. I was initially inspired to try this idea based on the global database that my team at LANL keeps -- HIV diversity is an incredibly challenging problem for a vaccine, and minding the HIV database convinced me we needed to try to address the diversity directly, by trying to "see" the virus the way the immune system does. I wanted to design a vaccine that could trigger immune responses by allowing recognition of the most common forms of an epitope simultaneously, and cross react with diverse HIV strains (an epitope is a small bit of viral protein that an immune response recognizes). I also wanted to leave HIV proteins intact in the vaccine, so they would be easy to deliver and be processed naturally, and so antibodies that recognized folded proteins might be elicited by the vaccine as well as T cells. I came up an approach to the problem, evolving sets of protein sequences on a computer, that in combination could potentially optimize immunological coverage. The idea was partly inspired by the way HIV evolves in nature, partly by a machine learning concept called a genetic algorithm. It took me a couple of tries at a grant to get it funded; the first reviewers thought the idea was completely nuts, that this kind of thinking could never EVER work. I eventually got funded to bring together the scientists I needed to do the "theory" part of the project through an internal LANL internal grant which fostered exploratory research (a DR). A wonderfully talented machine learning computational scientist, Simon Perkins, was on the team, and with input from my also wonderfully talented husband James Theiler, Simon fine tuned the algorithm, got it in a good computational framework, and coded it up.

I tried to get my old friend Satish Pillai to come work on this project with me as a postdoc, but he was busy with a new job at UCSF, and even green chili couldn't get him back to New Mexico. (See, Satish, I _told_ you it was going to be a good project!) Satish of course now has his own lab, and 2018 found us still working together -- a bit on music, and a bit on an HIV therapeutic strategy, tugging on some crispr threads. But back in the day, Satish was a no, and so I hired Will Fischer instead, an unknown at the time, but a man who very clearly loved to think about evolution, so the project was a very good fit. Now Will is a long time friend and colleague, but then he was a newly minted postdoc. He helped me put Simon's code through its paces, and we explored together how it performed "in theory", working out ways to visualize the comparisons we needed to make (James also helped a lot with this part), and how to best inform the design of the actual vaccines for testing: global versus regional, one, two, three or four proteins sets, which proteins to include. Karina Yusim, Carla Kuiken, and Tanmoy Bhattacharya also helped us think about this. Mosaic code does not require a fancy computer, and we never used supercomputers on the mosaic project. Still this was all tricky business, with multiple false starts and restarts as we were getting going (like initially trying to add in HLA, then realizing, partly inspired by Steve Self, and partly simply by the very high density of epitopes in the database, that we could just treat every epitope-sized bit of the protein as a potential epitope and leave aside HLA complexity and frequencies). Once we had the basic code, we needed to address parameter optimization, tweaks were added to make the code run faster, and we made gradual improvements in output and interpretation. Our goal was resolving what might matter biologically as well as we could based on information in the database. For me it was several years of very very long days, and this comes with a high life-cost. And it wasn't trivial; things always seem more obvious in retrospect than when you are in trenches making something new.

As we worked, I regularly talked through the progress of the theory, for over a year, with my dear friends who were experimentalist colleagues, Bart Haynes, Beatrice Hahn, and Normal Letvin (now passed away), getting their input and advice. They shared good ideas. The four of us had gotten some NIH funding so we could turn the mosaic design theory into some experiments to test it. Bart and Norm did some initial studies, and Bart continues to work on mosaic related vaccine concepts with me currently, and we are working on second and third generation developments. We shared the mosaic concept with Dan Barouch in early days, and we made him some global designs, and happily Dan ran with them. Dan wanted us to only have two mosaic components per protein; given that constraint, we tried to design something with a chance at being able to work all over the world, Africa, US, Europe, Asia... It was Dan's experiments over many years that lead to the current clinical trial, and it is Dan's "vector" that delivers the HIV mosaic vaccine. The mosaic would not be in human efficacy trials now without his many ideas about good ways to express the vaccine insert, and his thoughtful and careful preclinical experimental work, and his collaborative spirit bringing in an industry to help take it forward.

We won't know if this vaccine will protect people from HIV for another couple of years; so this "scientist of the year" is a bit premature, though I'm really happy and honored that it happened. On the hopeful side the mosaic vaccine does significantly slow down infection of virus exposed monkeys, and if vaccinated monkeys finally do become infected after multiple exposures, they stay healthier and don't progress to AIDs. We don't know if this will translate to preventing infection in people who will be confronted with HIV in all its natural diversity "in the wild", or if it will help them fare better if they are infected. We cannot know that until it is tested, and it takes time. But I harbor hope. If it doesn't protect people, still we will learn some things from trying.

Meanwhile, there are many other good HIV vaccine ideas in the pipeline -- and a few of them are my own! Its why I can't retire yet, I want to see the ones with promise through.

Thanks to everybody who has sent kind notes and good wishes.

I'm keeping some pretty classy company in this award, the nerds among you will know some of the names of past recipients:

Dr. William Pickering 1967 JPL
Dr. Wernher von Braun 1969 NASA MSFC
William Lear 1971 LearJet
Dr. Mary Good 1982 DOC
Dr. Justin Rattner 1989 Intel
Dr. Kary Mullis 1991 Nobel Laureate
Dr. Susan Solomon 1992 NOAA Ozone Hole
Dr. Tim-Berners Lee 1996 WWW
Dr. J. Craig Venter 1998 Human Genome Project
Dr. Eric Lander 2003 MIT/Whitehead Institute
Dr. Anthony Faucci 2005 NIH
Dr. Steven Chu 2011 DOE
Dr. Robert Langer 2012 MIT
Dr. James Tour 2013 Rice Univ.
Dr. Karl Deisseroth 2014 Stanford Univ.
Scott Kelly 2015 NASA
Dr. Dharmendra Modha 2016 IBM
Dr. Cori Bargmann 2017 Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Don't Look Away

I wrote a new song about the issues that are weighing on me, closest to my heart in these dark times: human rights and the environment. It is a song for the midterm elections in November, about voting.  Enclosed at the end of this post are two versions, one with just the lyrics on one page, and one with chords over a few pages.  It is easy to play on a guitar, please feel free to sing it if you like it when you hear the song. This song is dedicated to a man that I do not know. His name is Cody Hall, and he spoke in a moving youtube video, "Mni Wiconi: The Stand at Standing Rock". He made an eloquent call to action.  This song is my answer to his call -- Mr. Hall, thank you, I listened to my heart.

Cody Hall is a warrior and a leader, and he comes from a lineage of great leaders: Chief Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse. He leads by word and the example of his courage. I am a nerd who loves music, who, since Nov. 2016, cries a lot. I am from a lineage of good farmers. My name, Korber, means "weaver", a family name that links me to some long forgotten ancestor who did something useful for work, and I like to imagine, maybe even something beautiful. We sang a lot in my house when I was growing up. Protest songs: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. We always cared about justice, both for people and for the Earth. My sister and I were taught to respect people like Cody Hall, people willing to sacrifice so much to try to make our country, our collective home, better and stronger. I personally care a lot about science, and like most scientists in our times, I express myself through slide shows. So I did what I could do, made a song, and a slide show video.  Here's to Charts, Graphs, and Rock 'n' Roll.  Here's to the brave Cody Hall.

Thanks to the wonderful musicians, friends old and new, who gave life to my tune. I will be posting a recording and a YouTube video to go with it, sung by my amazing friend and musical mentor, Lisa Carman.  I'm honored to have had the talented Jono Manson, Satish Pillai, Paul Pearcy, Justin Bransford, Adrienne Bellis, Janice Ritter, and Michael MacDonald in musical collaboration to record the song, as well as Peter Oviatt who brings All Hands On Deck with his banjo for the video credits. And thanks to the all the photographers whose work I weave; your art visually tells the stories of our times. Photo credits are at the end of the video.

Also, I want to explain my motivation for including of one of photos I have in the video. It is there for a complicated reason. It is of sweet little girl who looks so afraid, at the border crossing in Texas with her mother. It is picture by John Moore/Getty. Mr. Moore has shown us with an unflinching clarity the deep human suffering in our borderlands. His work as a photojournalist helped wake up our nation's compassion. His photo of this little girl went viral. Some sources who posted it were confused about her status, and thought she had been separated from her mom, so it was a big story when her father wrote in that she and her mom had not been separated. But because of this confusion, the far right shrilly screamed "FAKE NEWS"; I viewed this as a cynical attempt to drown out the real story, and distract our nation from our newly found resolve to treat asylum seekers better.  And distracted we were. Over and over the press coverage was about the many people calling this picture fake, shifting our attention from the families. As a consequence, for precious days, the national debate on the issues was confounded.

Photo by John Moore/Getty;  Asylum seekers, June 12, McAllen, Texas

She is in my video because her tears are their own truth. I'm weary of people simply bellowing "FAKE NEWS!", and the news coverage of The Bellow then drowning out the deeper truths we are forgetting as a nation how to recognize. This is just one example of this dangerous pattern. In this particular case, the deeper truth this picture reflects is that asylum seekers have often journeyed far through terrible conditions; many faced this journey because they were fleeing terrors we can only begin to imagine. Once they are at our border, but only at our border or in our lands, they have a right to ask for asylum and to have their case considered. This is under international law for refugees, human rights laws that America helped craft and has historically supported. This little one's face was a real refection of a real moment on her and her mom's journey to seek asylum.  She was afraid. There is power and truth in this photo. As this photo came out, our government was beginning to report that many many other children, at just such a moment, were taken away from their parents and put into child detention centers, through the "Zero Tolerance Policy" imposed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump administration policy. Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services acknowledged 3,000 children had been taken by July 5th, 2018. The kids are so vulnerable, and so are their parents. What lifetime scars has Mr. Session's brutality left them with? These people deserve respect and consideration of their case. We should greet them with compassion, not fear. Could you have taken your child through such a journey, risking all to seek safety, and survived?

Fact checking and truth is important. Corrections when mistakes are made are valuable and good. When this picture was so much in the news, it was right for the press to be very clear that she and here mom were not separated. But what should our response be, as human beings, to learning our small friend was not taken from her mother? How about "Thank God, these two are together!" instead of "FAKE NEWS!".

Thanks to what remains of our Free Press, which is under constant attack from this administration, the American people saw the horror of family separation, even though our government for the most part closed these children's camps off from public view. And when we learned about it, our people demanded that it stop. Our country turned out to have limited tolerance for zero tolerance, once we understood the implications. Our courts also demanded that the separations stop, and that separated families be reunited, in response to the legal case for the families brought forward by the ACLU. But Jeff Session's nightmare policy had been so poorly implemented that for many of the children, they did not even keep record of who they were, who their parents were.  Some babies were so little they could not yet even speak their own names -- so they even stole their names, when that and their family's love were all they had in the world. As a consequence, now that at least we are going in the right direction and making progress in righting this terrible wrong, the process of reuniting families has been muddled and is shamefully slow.

We need to treat people with dignity and compassion.  We are Americans.  We can do this.

Creative Commons License
CC Modification: It is OK to sing this song in any live performance, non-profit or for profit.

With chords:

Mni Wiconi: The Stand at Standing Rock 

Creative Commons License
CC Modification: It is OK to sing this song in any live performance, non-profit or for profit.

Whale Tales, Laguna Ojo de Liebra

Whale Tales

Many of these pictures are taken by James or myself, but a few came from friends we made on our trip, Homa and Onanang.  To celebrate our 30th anniversary, March 4th, 2018, we were traveling with Baja Jones Adentures, a wonderful way to visit the gray whales in their winter waters. 

Laguna Ojo de Liebra is part of La Reserva de la Biosfera El Vizcaíno, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is a whale sanctuary. It is a world treasure, a sacred place, honored and vigilantly cared for by the good people of Mexico. It is given to the gray whales to bring their little ones into the world, and to court and mate, a part of their Baja destination in their annual swim south, from the ice-riddled arctic seas to the warm waters of Mexico. The lagoon is vast, and when the whales are there in their winter home, it is kept safe for them: no fishing, no sailing, no swimming or kayaking in their wintering waters, not even drones allowed overhead. An ancient place left in peace for whales. Only a handful of very small boats are allowed on the water, and those only allowed in sections of the lagoon. This restriction is so the whales can choose if they are inclined to do some people-watching, or not.

Here is what happens when you visit. Your captain takes you out in a little boat, capacidad maxima 10 personas, and you motor out into the vast blue of the lagoon; you can lean over the side and let your fingers ripple the blue water. As you move out into the lagoon, your eyes hopefully scanning the horizon, you start to see whales spouting all around you -- great plumes of white water shooting up to feather into the wind. Thar she blows! And Thar! And Thar! Finally the captain idles the motor, so you are just rocking in the wind, on the little swells of the lagoon. And then, they come.

Spyhop

The first time we went out, we happened into spyhopping lessons. Out of the lagoon would rise a vertical tower of whale, upright and half out of the water. Then another, and another, and they were all around us, across the vast space of the lagoon, some very near, some distant. I thought the spyhopping would be fast; there was so much whale to lift out of the water, how could they linger long in our world? But it was a dignified controlled rise, and they would quietly stay upright for long moments, studying the world-above before just sinking back down into the water.  In shallow places in the lagoon, I was told they balance on their tails, but in other places they were just supported by the their great flukes, waving back and forth in the deep waters.

Just Breathe

Their breath was like a gentle whoosh and sigh. If we were lucky, it would be a pair heading towards us, Momma and baby: breathe, arc down, disappear for a minute, and then another explosion of spray as they surfaced next to our little boat. Sometimes we would be soaked in the rain of a spouting whale, all of us laughing, with the great momma arched up right next to us. Hello! I think they deliberately douse the boat, and it’s lovely. Maybe they like it when we laugh. The little ones come up for a breath in a perfect arc just by their big Momma’s side. Sometimes you when look up into the white spray of their breath, it would catch the sunlight in a rainbow.

When they were very near, you could see them moving fluidly just under the surface of the clear water, gliding by (and by and by), so vast and gentle. You could usually only see a small part of them at any one time, they were so much bigger than boats we were in. It is very hard to convey the feeling of wonder, and the unexpected feeling of peace. Their skin is a mottle of white, light gray, darker gray patches, with white scars and barnacles making distinctive patterns. We could sometimes tell who was who when several were playing around our little boat, by their markings.  “Ah -- there is the momma with two lines of scars across her back!” or “I recognize those flukes!” As they were swimming by the boat, the vast landscape of their skin would abruptly reveal a flipper, their side-flipper alone bigger than a man, weaving purposefully through the water, beautiful in color and design, every movement fluid and graceful. Water-wings. Everything was surprisingly slow, gentleness scaled up to awesome.

 

One whale played hide-and-seek with us, surfacing on one side of the boat, going under, surfacing on the other. And he kept up this game, delighting everyone on board, as we would dash across our little boat, following the cries of, “He’s here!”, NO! He’s here!  Now, here he is, here he is!”  My hands were in the water, he would glide just inches from my reach, then plunge deep and disappear, only to spyhop again in front of the boat, circle down and glide under us again. His flukes would be on one side of the boat, his head on the other. He would dive and breathe and scoot by, circle back and do it all again. When our captain finally decided to motor away, the whale was ready to keep playing; he escorted us, swimming parallel to the boat, for quite a stretch, and we regretted leaving him.

Twice I saw a whale came up to the surface on its side to bring an eye out of the water and peer into our boat.  So twice I was graced with looking into the eye of a wild whale, once a baby, once a great lone whale that rose up, his side out of the water, and met my gaze.  What did I see there? Intelligence. Mystery. Recognition – our eyes met, we saw each other. Attributes perhaps I’m not allowed by those who are quick to harrumph at anthropomorphizing, but still, this seems true to me: I saw curiosity, and a gentle tolerance. But perhaps that was context, because both qualities were clearly manifested in their actions. These extraordinary beings can live over 60 years.  What do they remember of us, if they think of us at all? I think they must at least consider us, as this people-watching thing is pretty clearly a part of their whale-culture.

Sunday morning as we were cruising out in our boat, we were 

greeted by magnificent flukes, shooting straight up from the sea, towering up into the sky and holding very still: I am here, I am here, I am here!

The mommas and babies stayed very close to each other, side-by-side and often touching as they swim.  While I suspect it would be dangerous to get between a mother and her baby, I’m not even sure it would be possible, as they stay so close together. As they rose in synchrony out of the water to breathe, the babies would sometimes flip their flukes up along the their momma’s back, a tender cuddle. The babies had to get strong, to make their journey of 5,000 miles up the coast to the Arctic seas. So they were all being taken out for swimming lessons, strengthening as they swam daily against the tidal currents in the deeper channels of their lagoon. Their mothers had not eaten since autumn; their great bodies (nearing 50 feet long, weighing up to 40 tons) holding all they needed for both their own journey, and to pass strength into the little ones.  Each baby nursed more than 50 gallons of warm creamy milk a day, to build up the muscle and blubber they would need for the long trip to their cold northern sea-home.  Newborns are up to 15 feet long, 1400 pounds. They grow fast, and they were considerably bigger than this already in early March when we came to see them. The babies had whale-ways to learn. How to spyhop. How to ride their mothers’ backs, a strategy to take refuge in case they are attacked by a pod of orcas as they are en route to their arctic summer feeding grounds. Several times we saw little ones near the surface, their mothers steady and just underneath them. Once a baby found itself horizontal across his momma’s back as she surfaced, and then he slip-slided into the water… Practice, little one, you have a long and dangerous swim ahead!

Our second day, we humans in our little boat were invited to a dance.  A trio of adult whales were, according to our guide, courting, and they swam to our boat side. Their movements were utterly beautiful. A furl of a whale fluke, 10 feet of smooth grace emerging from the water with a waterfall of sea shimmering off its edge. An undulation of grays rippling just beneath the surface of the water. Sometimes it was difficult to see where one whale began and the other ended. Flipper, fluke, jaw would surface by the boat, then sink down again into the green blue waters. The blow-hole of the whale as it came up for a breath, then the calming sweet sound of its exhale, then the slow arching of its back out of the water, the knobs of its spine ripping past as it dove deeper into the water, ending with a flourish of its tail; all was movement, elegance and power. They were strong enough to smash our boat in a moment, instead this dance was perfectly controlled, and their small human audience was safe in the midst of wonder. They repeatedly came within inches of our boat, but never touched it. One swam along by the boat on his side, flipper up, like a flag. It was ridiculously cute. Another spyhopped.  One rolled its great belly up to the sky, perhaps to cool down in the brisk wind, but it seemed utterly vulnerable, full of trust.  For me, these three were the most remarkable encounter. I gather two whales mate with the help of another whale; given their vast size and their watery home, love-making is not a simple task for a pair, and they need some support. Perhaps a new baby will be swimming in Laguna Ojo de Liebra next winter, as a perfect finale to the elegant dance we witnessed the beginnings of on this fine March day.

We also had the good fortune to see some whales breaching. My God!  Exuberance is the word that seems to be associated with most descriptions of breaching, so, “exuberance” it is. Breaching is when a whale leaps out of the water, his whole body shining in the sun, waves pouring off him as he curves with a quick twist in the sky, and then splashes down. The sea closes over him, quickly taking him back into his home, and the sea birds rush into the space he just held in the air, flying in spinning vortex, circling over the great turbulence in the sea where the fish are swept to the surface in the chaos of his landing.

Osprey parent

Ojo de Liebra had other wonders to offer as well. For a time, a gull flying over our boat decided to hang out with us, so just rode the wind and lingered over our heads, a small birdish human-watcher.  Dolphins, with their sleek fast ways would speed by, dorsal fins up and slicing through the water. As we were heading in to dock, a pair of dolphins, their two fins side-by-side, came racing towards our boat. They zoomed in front of us, then they leapt together, both out of the water in two perfect synchronous arcs. Show-offs! There was an osprey nest on the boat dock, with a magnificent couple tending to their cute little gray fluff ball, the chick peering over the edge of his grand stick-home, looking down at us as we passed under.  A fine-looking coyote, strong with an elegant glossy coat, was trotting along the dirt road as we drove back out to the campground, and he lay down to watch us rumble by. We turistas were visiting theater for the native furred and feathered set that call this place home. 

Just two days with the whales.  A time-out-of-time.  Grace and wonder.

Here is a link to three short whale videos that were shared by our new friends on the trip.

Flying into the Far Away

Friends told me they were thinking about a trip to Baja, to see the whales for themselves, and asked for some thoughts about how to go, and what it is like. Here is my main thought: if you’re the least bit tempted, then go. JT and I went to Baja specifically to see the whales of Laguna Ojo de Liebra, but loved our whole trip. We went with Baja Jones Adventures, and we highly recommend them – Keith Jones and his posse of good old friends have been hosting these trips for many years, and they know what they are about. You’re camping. There is nothing else out there, and it would be crazy to stay in town, and besides it is lovely on the beach.  But even if you’re not a camper by temperament, they make it very easy: a really comfortable bed in your tent; a wooden floor with a rug; sand swept up and tent cleaned every day; a down comforter; hot showers; great meals; and they take care of all the transportation. The soft clean sheets smelled lovely, and when I saw the sheets billowing in the wind, set out to dry on the line, I understood why: you were resting your head on white sheets made fragrant by the desert wind. Then there are the whale tales and yarns, spun in the quiet evenings after they fix you a delicious dinner. Free from the internet, the ancient art of listening, and then countering a story of your own, wakes right up! Conversation turns to tigers, to gorillas, then to pandas as you sip your China tea, because Keith Jones and his girlfriend Onanang travel the world together.

You can find Baja Jones Adventure Travel on the web, and if you want to go to Baja next year, you should sign up early, as the flights are a limiting factor and it helps to schedule early.  In particular, flights into Guerrero Negro are limited, typically only a few a week go from Ensenada, and the alternative is a 14 hour bus or drive through Baja, from San Diego. There are a couple of other travel options, with other groups around San Ignacio, another Baja lagoon that the whales winter in. Baja Jones is the only guided trip to Ojo de Liebra.

(Alternatively, you could make your own way down, there was plenty of space in the campground, and they have built shelters from the wind. If you decide to do this, get out to the dock first thing in the morning to get a place on a boat, and they will take you out with the whales for 1.5-2 hours. Plan to go out several times at least. Each time out was unique, the whales were up to different stuff. And plan to eat papayas.)

But we really enjoyed being so well taken care of. We were met in San Diego, and driven south to Ensenada, to board the little 13-seater plane that takes you to the town of Guerrero Negro, ½ way down the Baja Peninsula. The plane flies low, skimming the wild lonely Pacific coast. We could watch the skin of deep blue sea in its constant movement. It makes a plaid, a weaving of swells in a warp and weft that run in perpendicular lines of light and wind and water. The fluffy white clouds cast dark traces of themselves as shadows on the surface, and the darkest blue channels run deep and mysterious.  A few images of the Baja coastline from the plane:

Five pictures of the Baja Pacific coast from the plane.

The first stop was at the Isla des Cedros, steep mountains plunging abruptly up out of the sea.  Curved beaches where the mountains join the sea, with lines of crashing breakers, are each perfect places that no road touches. As we were flying in, a collection of clouds had gathered on the peaks and highest ridges, so that the rim of the island that touched the sky was lost in clouds. On the way back, the sky was clear, we could see that on these highest steepest points, Cedar trees grow, giving the island her name; thin lines of green at the crest of everything. We marveled that any tree could make a home on land so steep and barren, until we realized that those highest ridges and peaks that were precisely the gathering place of the clouds; the embrace of the clouds must be how the trees have enough water to flourish.  We later met a wonderful fellow, Oscar, who works at the camp. He had lived on Isla des Cedros for a stretch when he was young.  He had taken a backpack up those steep desert mountains, found a rare flat place among los Cedros, and tucked himself into it for a night, his only company trees and the stars. He treasured that lonely memory; I loved being invited into it.

Salt Barge

The industry on that little island is transferring salt from the Guerrero Negro salt mines in Baja, taken out to the island by tug boat and barge, to the deep-water ocean-going vessels, that then ship it out to the rest of the world – salt for Japanese industry, for safe roads in an Alaskan winter, for a sprinkling in a soup-pot in New Zealand.  It’s the largest salt mine in the world, so you see mountains of salt, rivers of salt: 7 million tons a year flow through this place.

We were the only gringos on the flight, and we had the company of a few families: salt farmers (la sal de la tierra).  After we bounced down into our landing on the island, kids tumbled out of the plane, bursting with all the laughter they had politely held in check for the flight. They magically transformed the airport steps into a playground, and the one little broken pillar that was in the airport yard became a framework for hide-and-seek. Chief magician in this transformation was a knee-high

El Capitan

person, her hair swooped up with ribbons, and all dressed up in lace for her flight home. Her beautiful big brown eyes were peeping around the pillar’s base, more laughter erupting when her Dad “found her” and spun her into the air. The Boss of the tiny airport was the Belgian Shepherd who took his work very seriously, his nose carefully checking every single bag with rigor and focus. Then he sat quietly by his human assistant, watching his domain, the antics of the kids bringing out just a hint of a tail wag. He was a military dog, his dignity singing out, “yo no soy marinero, soy capitan, soy capitan…”

Ejido Benito Jaurez is a collective, the Ejidos established in the Mexican Revolution to share and govern resources in a region.  The Ejido chooses the fate of the place, and in Ojo de Liebra the people work with the biosphere reserve to best share their home with the whales.  These people are also the ones who mine the salt from the sea, and the huge evaporation pools that give an otherworldly look to the landscape as you drive out to the lagoon. You are surrounded by pillars and islands of pure salt slowly emerging in these fields of evaporating water, water so still it makes a perfect blue mirror of the sky. It is an interesting patient sort of mining: flood a pool via a channel from the lagoon, the let it dry, and dry some more, and then some more, then gather the salt. The local people also fish, and they seem to live in harmony with their trust. The lagoon is closed to all fishing, swimming, kayaking, boating and other activities while the whales are here; they just allow a few small boats onto restricted parts of the vast lagoon. This is governed by a harbormaster, who keeps both whales and people safe.  They give the whales room to rear their young, and space to frolic. Whales definitely need space to frolic.

The lagoon is vast, an expanse of deepest blue and greens, set in wild dry desert. It is a 2-dimentional world, horizons on all side. Our first night we saw a full moon rise, a great golden-orange orb to the east, in balance with the sun setting into the sea to the west; the sky was rimmed with fire and light either way you looked. Subsequent nights we got to watch Orion and his bright companion Sirius spin across the winter sky, and Cassiopia riding by in her throne, because the moon circled round later and later each evening, leaving the opening act to the stars in a very dark sky. There were distant mountain ranges that rim this flat world to the east, north and south, their strange silhouettes a dark and jagged drama.  To the west, it’s lagoon, as far as you can see. 

When I arrived on Friday, words like barren, stark, and harsh were scuttling around my brain.  By Saturday, those words made themselves scarce, and I instead I saw a world of softness. Gentle curves of sand, caressed and carved by wind into waving patterns of curves upon curves. The cool sand underfoot. The beautiful colors to the rest your eyes: greens, creamy whites and gold, and every kind of blue. The laughter from our new friends. The arc of a gull’s wings. The way wind and water, chief architects, slowly shaped this landscape into an abstraction of ripples. An ocotillo branch, slim twist of life, with green leaf and red trumpet flowers, a vivid

Ocotillo remembers rain.

trace of the blessing left by a rare and recent rain. A flock of a hundred sea birds rising into flight, then tilting into the wind in unison so the dark and light of their wings held the same shifting angles, making a moving sculpture of light, life, flight and feather.

The sound of the sea stirs with the tides, a gentle lapping on the shore; this rhythm was a continuous undercurrent for the strong winds that course over this place.  The wind quiets down in the morning, but is relentless in its midday start up. It rocks your tent at night, beating at the canvas, and pulling at the ties; the tent groans, as the wind gathers up its strength and charges again. This wind rattles your between-time: waking/sleeping twilight dreams are shaped by the sounds of your tent doing its best impression of a clipper ship in a storm. I closed my eyes to see sails billowing and slamming in the wind, to hear the wooden ship’s joints creaking and shifting.  But then, it was in fact, just a tent, we were snug on shore, and eventually each night, sleep came. We would wake to the quiet of still mornings. All wind-blown dreams fled with the sun and the promise of whales.

Anniversary Party

This trip spanned our 30th anniversary: 3/4/2018, so we Marched Forth, again.  We decided to re-speak our vows, but this time with leviathans and our new friends as our witnesses. Patti helps with the camp, she is the resident whale-whisperer. Like the whales, she comes on her own annual migration to Ojo des Leibra, her wintering grounds. She leaves her family’s farm in Minnesota to find her place with her whale-kin. She took us under her wing.  She put her very creative mind into turning our little re-vow ceremony into a perfect celebration.  She timed it, with the sun going down over the lagoon, so the surface of the sea was filled with diamonds. Then she found a lovely of drift of sand for us to promenade down, she up gathered the camp to bear witness, and she miraculously came up with recording of “In my life, I love you more” for us to walk to. She then did a remix of the Beatles, with the Baja wind on rhythm, and she got the whole thing on video for us: wind, Beatles, and us.

And I got to look again into my JT’s green eyes as we renewed the promise of our future together, but this time that man of mine is a handsome Silverback.  Then there was champagne, toasts, and camp dinner table decorated with hearts and whale drawings, and Patti’s sweet gift of a beautiful shell. Then, the other camp-Patty, the camp chef, served us up a fantastic chicken mole, scented with cinnamon and chile, and a Tres Leches cake finale.

Three whales heading north -- baby on top of mom on the left.

It was very hard to leave Monday morning. Flying out low over the coast line, we could see five mother-and-baby whale-pairs also leaving the lagoon, turning right, heading out for the Northern lights (Perhaps that is why they do all that spyhopping practice, getting ready to attend the Celestial Theater in the Northern seas).  I suspect the mother whales were feeling some of the same tug at their hearts that I was, sad to leave this magical place. But I like thinking about how curious and wondering the little ones must have felt, as they left the lagoon for the very first time to follow their mommas into the sea.

Easy Chicken/Squash mole: 

Patty of Baja Jones Adventures suggested getting a pre-made jar mole; I was happy to follow her advice not deal with hours of work and 26 ingredients.

She is a wise woman.  While what I made was not

Patty at work in the camp kitchen

as good as Patty’s was, still I managed to serve mole it on a work night, and it was a quite a step up from our usual fare.

1) Squash: Steamed a cubed butternut squash, with a 5 sprigs of fresh rosemary. When the squash is soft, ~ 25 minutes, it is ready.  Rosemary infuses the squash, and squash is really tasty this way on its own.

Serve sprinkled with toasted pinon nuts, lightly toasting them in a hot frying pan prior to serving. As a veg alternative for dinner, just skip the chicken below and stick with squash.

2) Get some rice cooking.

3) Fry 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts, on the stove top in a little olive oil until golden brown (15-20 minutes total). Slice chicken and serve on top of fresh greens (baby kale…). 

4) Starting with a jar of purchased mole, follow the directions on the jar and warm it up (it comes concentrated, and looks like axle grease; don't be fooled).  I used Majordomo Mole Negro, purchased at Amazon, about 1/3 cup, added some water, a few squares of very dark sweetened chocolate, and some extra cinnamon.  One jar will last several meals. I served the mole in a small dish on the side, and we dipped bites of chicken or squash into the mole -- mole fondue, rather than pouring the sauce over; I don’t think this is traditional, but we liked regulating how much mole we wanted, as it is quite rich.

Music to cook by:

After renewing my old friendship with the Pacific Ocean last week, feeling restored by her power and beauty, I came home inspired to try to look into how to get active in the fight against the horrifying offshore drilling threat that Zinke and Trump have created. They are putting our coastal waters and all who depend up on them at risk (as for those who depend on the Pacific coast, the whales and their life giving annual migration come to mind). Here are maps of evil intent:

This kind of damage we can not step aback from; Democrats as well as Republicans are united in this fight.

I was hoping to write a letter to the Dept. of the Interior in protest, but discovered I just missed the period for public comment (ended March 9th). But, California friends, I found a great thing you can do -- write or call you state representatives to express your support for California senate Bill SB-834, or its counterpart Assembly Bill 1775, which would prohibit new pipelines in state waters. Here are some links to read more, if you're interested. Meanwhile, I would welcome thoughts on the best ways for New Mexican's to help. 

Please learn more, and figure out how to help. Your Earth needs you. Now.

#Resist #WaterIsLife

https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.4/energy-and-industry-interior-opens-nearly-all-western-waters-to-offshore-drilling

https://www.hcn.org/articles/oil-californias-resistance-to-offshore-drilling-is-rooted-in-the-past

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB834

http://sd19.senate.ca.gov/news/2018-01-04-jackson-and-muratsuchi-reintroduce-legislation-halt-new-federal-offshore-oil

And from the front lines on the Atlantic seaboard, in South Carolina:

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2018-2-march-april/feature/southern-revolt-against-offshore-oil-drilling

Don't give up hope.  Resist!