You could call it a love affair with all thing’s octopi, but at this point it is more like a one-night stand. The night before last, we watched the documentary, My Octopus Teacher. This movie tells the story of the year spent by filmmaker Craig Foster forging a relationship with a common octopus in a South African kelp forest. It won Best Documentary at the 93rd Academy’s. Its cinematography is mesmerizing, combined with its hypnotic narration, no wonder I was smitten.
Yesterday, I stayed home and Flora, the housekeeper who came to clean the house. Anne, Jay and Carl went to Point Lobos and walked along the coast. Come the afternoon, Flora finished and the four of us went to Monterey. After lunch, we hit the aquarium. Typically, we go there first thing in the morning, trying to beat the rush. This time it was the reverse. We closed the place. By the end of the day, the aquarium really clears out. Our last two hours there were the best that I ever experienced. The field trips had all left, and the place was actually quite empty. The docents outnumbered the remaining visitors. At closing time, I swung by the octopus to see it one more time. Previously, it had been curled up on itself in a corner, barely visible. This time it was out and about. There were three of us there to watch him, a man, a docent and myself. We were all checking him (a male Pacific octopus) out as he did the same to us.
That night, I continued my octopus-adventure. I watched a Sea Hunt episode entitled “Mark of the Octopus”. This sixties TV show featured Lloyd Bridges as frogman Mike Nelson, a sort of skin-diving detective. In this episode an evil doer was murdering fellow divers and covering up his acts by leaving his victim’s bodies covered with red hickeys that were supposed to be caused by some killer octopus’s suckers. Nelson wasn’t buying it and in twenty-six minutes had solved the case, brought the perps to justice and exonerated the octopus.
In her book, The Soul of an Octopus, author Sy Montgomery describes these creatures as such: “A giant Pacific octopus—the largest of the world’s 250 or so octopus species—can easily overpower a person. Just one of a big male’s three-inch-diameter suckers can lift 30 pounds, and a giant Pacific octopus has 1,600 of them. An octopus bite can inject a neurotoxic venom as well as saliva that has the ability to dissolve flesh.” This sounds pretty scary. They are certainly other worldly and the fact that they are intelligent makes them fascinating to me. An extraterrestrial from our own world. Behind glass they don’t act frightening. More curious, as I was of him. Not that I was ready to plunge into his 47 °F tank, but I think that the water temperature had more to do with that.
