Mermaids with cancer

This morning (Jan. 31st) I dreamed I was traveling with a companion (I don't remember whom, it might have been my mum, for the sake of description in this, I'll say it was), walking through a relatively old Western European town that had large stone alleys and walls.  We were supposed to meet with somebody and found the door to his house.  As the man was just entering his home and his door was still open, my mum knocked on the door frame of the house.  At the same time, I noticed another door, white, and almost completely hidden as part of an intricately patterned wall adjacent to the door, standing with waning magic to its right.  I knocked on that.

The man greeted my mum and opened the other door for me.  I saw he had a flaring salt-and-pepper streaked beard shaped a bit like Arvo Part's (the person looked a bit like Arvo Part too).  I stepped into a room laden with large smooth stones for the floor and wall--it almost looked like part of a castle.  In it, I noticed what I knew were a few Arthurian relics--part of a crown, a scabbard--and I stepped in.  There was definitely magic to the place, but it was mostly bare with stone.  I was also greeted with an enthusiastic cry from the ground and saw an attractive pallid mermaid with long, dark black, curly hair, dark blue/green scales, and tattoos across the top of her chest, on her forearms, and part of her obliques laying on a cot.  She cast a large down comforter off of her body as she leaned to look up and greet me.

She recognized me (or at least claimed to recognize me with genuine conviction) as an old friend whom she hadn't seen in a very long time--at least 8 years.  She had a fine English/British accent too.  I quickly accepted her assumption and wondered (I'm pretty sure I also asked her in good spirits) what she was doing so far from a body of water, and then (quietly to myself) why/how she got tattooed.   I learned, perhaps from her caretaker (the same person who let me into the room), who was also the curator and guardian of the relics and room, that she was ill with cancer.  I knew right away I could only give my heart's attention to her challenge even though I had not immediate or substantive ways to help her out or prevent it from happening to others.  I also started to imagine other potentially complicated challenges for water dwellers like noise pollution...
. . .

First off, I have no idea how I came to dream about a mermaid.  Nothing in my recent memory (or prior) makes me consider mermaids.  Giant squid? Maybe.  I might have eaten part of a trout not long ago.

Second, I normally don't share dreams like this with other people--some stories can only be told once or twice before losing their magic.  In some cultures, you're encouraged not to tell anyone about powerful visions/dreams you've had at all. In most cases, it seems like acceptable fantastic myths no longer have appropriate reasons to exist without a franchise or burgeoning industry or institution to support them.

Finally, I can be slow to trust some people, especially those whom seem to qualify me as a friend unusually quickly.  At this point in time, I'm skeptical and would even be surprised that anyone actually would warmly regard me as an old friend in that light.  But I think I might have figured out a thread that would affirm her confidence by looking back at one of my actions from today:
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Later this morning, after a treacherous drive to campus, I noticed a post from Friends of the Rouge remarking about the rising water level in the Rouge River. When I checked the USGS data, I saw the discharge was around 1090* (*I think, out of a previous record which I think* I recall reading was at 1270--the data changes by day and often by the hour), which compelled me to post this to the Student Environmental Association page:

Hey, check out that Rouge River data! It's edging up to the 1971 record maximum daily discharge.

http://waterdata.usgs.gov/mi/nwis/uv/?site_no=04166500&PARAmeter_cd=00065%2C00060"In honor of what's been happening with the river over the past few days, here is a song by Johnny Cash." - Friends of the Rouge
A little bit of permeable landscape/green roofs upstream in the broader Wayne/Oakland County area can make a big difference downstream.

And later try my hand at broadcasting a reduced announcement on twitter, which led to an updated "cover" photo:

https://twitter.com/GreatLakesIan

I was rather satisfied with the balanced counterpoint of urban & natural features in all the photos I used (all my own)--a silver maple leaf with water droplets resting on concrete pavement, a pigeon peaking out of a rain gutter, and a photo of me looking at a snake in a natural area as I wore a nylon windbreaker and backpack.

Recently, I've returned to thinking a lot about the nexus between genetics, medical health, environment, and cancer too. There was a time when I wanted to bring light to this phenomenon in Relay for Life events, among cancer researchers, and also in the neighborhood I grew up in (which has an unusually high prevalence for people who had breast cancer and is located near a landfill and industrial corridor which had emissions ranked 4/5 for poor air quality by the EPA).

These may not be the exact things that led to my dream or a privileged visit from a mermaid who'd consider me an old friend, but they certainly make me wonder...

Returning to another thought about the photos on my twitter profile: All of the photos have something to do with rivers and watersheds. Both the silver maple (Acer saccharinum) leaf background photo and the profile picture were taken in fairly close proximity to the Lower Rouge River, in Michigan. The photo of the pigeon (Dover Pigeon--Columba livia) was taken in San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio, for those who haven't been there, has a famous river walk paved into its downtown tourist area. Their river is terribly stagnant, it's stiff and can no longer move about due to their intensive channelization and lock system and you can smell the effluent (sewage) discharge. Call me biased, but the Lower Rouge River has a sweeter smell (this time from treated effluent), can freely flow and meander about its banks, and has far less channelization until it unites with its sisters to become the Rouge River in Dearborn. Granted, given fair river literacy, you'll note its banks are stressed by upstream development as well, but unlike the San Antonio River, it can change, and gradually, with far less revision to the man-made infrastructure which currently influences its behavior. At the least, both are richly storied water bodies stressed by heavy development.

An educated land planner will acknowledge that dense development can be important and have a lower environmental impact than sprawled development--it's never to be interpreted as a case of people-vs.-environment. However, most developers/construction firms tend to use pavement and roofing materials which cover up parts of the land that once slowed the flow of water (and all of the things that get carried by stormwater) from land quickly into streams, tributaries, and eventually lakes, etc. Viable alternative landscaping techniques (use native plants to capture rainwater and reduce chemical application/mowing, create "riparian buffers"/"no-mow zones" near open waters, etc.), pervious pavement (sponge-like pavement that allows water to seep through and into the ground), and different paradigms for roofing technology ("living" rooftops/greenroofs) can help mitigate this. Of course, there's no substitute for a quality wetland/swamp when it comes to filtering water. In the bigger picture, stormwater from flashy rivers--typically, rivers located in areas with 10-20% of the land covered with non-permeable paved/roofed surfaces--contributes to algal blooms which can be toxic, or at least will deplete the lakes of oxygen as they die off (bacteria digesting the decaying algae wind up using much of the oxygen in the water), which leads to large-scale fish-kills. For anyone wondering, this process is called eutrophication. It happens in small inland lakes, in the Great Lakes, and even in the Gulf of Mexico.


Note the green in agricultural areas like Saginaw Bay
and the Northern shores of Ohio--that's an explosion of algae.
Too much fertilizer from land washing into tributaries and rivers eventually
goes into the Great Lakes. The Mississippi/Gulf of Mexico "dead zones"
have similar challenges (see http://bit.ly/14w6eJg
for well-illustrated explanations ) Image from NASA Earth Observatory.

These are fairly technical details, but it's something I've comfortably worked to educate the public about for several years as it's a reasonable issue to convey (in bite-sized pieces) without making people feel threatened or overwhelmed, and I can easily point out social and economic bearings. Note that in Metro Detroit, waste water is dumped upstream of our drinking water collection facilities. The cleaner we keep the water from upstream by preventing raw pollutants and sediments from rushing into the river due to flash flooding (like the recent events witnessed in late January by those who looked at the Rouge River directly, or at its data in the link posted way above), the less intensively we have to invest (AKA, pay taxes) in our municipal infrastructure, and the less we need to worry about indirect health concerns like salt and pharmaceutical drugs that the water treatment plant is unable to effectively strain out of our drinking water.

I'll edit this post to provide direct pointers to better watershed practice soon.

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Back to dreams about a mermaid with cancer:  Hopefully, putting all this information into writing and action meets the merit of doing things worthy of being a friend to mermaids even if it's in a distant and roundabout way.

Interesting coincidence: tomorrow is World Wetlands Day. Start 00:20 ; #23:21 1 II 2013