Whale

Summer is always my favourite time to read and this is also the season for our family vacation. 

A useful guide for book choice is the theme of our trip. An essential read after a sea turtle island stay, as what we experienced last month, would be a book written by marine biologist. 

This week, we traveled to Andenes located in the Vesterålen in Northern Norway. Long a popular whale safaris excursion destination, Andenes is the prime location for meeting humpbacks and sperm whales. Once you have seen them, it's impossible to forget, just as if you never saw them, it would be impossible to describe.

To go with the whale watching experience, my book of choice is Fathoms: The World in the Whale. Rebecca Giggs wrote this book, the winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, after pushing a beached humpback whale back out into the sea. For the three days that humpback eventually expired off the coast of Perth, Rebecca Giggs experienced a very personal reflection on our relationship with sea creatures. Her narrative on whalefall is scientific and romantic at the same time. Whalefall, in case you haven't heard of this term, is what happened after whales died in mid-ocean without being washed into the shallows. Their massive bodies sink and decompose on the descent. The journey of being pecked at by seabirds, fish, swimming crabs, and sharks, lasts for weeks or months. 

The bones and the decomposing blubber of the dead whale turn out to be untold stories of our ecosystem, embedded into the mysterious basement floor of the Earth. A deep story: deeper than I could have fathomed.

Henningsvær

If you run long enough and rack up enough birthdays, you'll find your watch registering a slower and slower pace. Even that's the case, older runners aren't at higher risk of walking away. One simple trick for me to keep the motivation is to follow a mix of playful plans. 

So when I got a chance to travel to Lofoten's tiny village of Henningsvær, I knew I should head for the famous football pitch. Located just within a few feet of cliffs, the green field of Henningsvær Stadium is the most picturesque football pitch in the world. Running a lap around the track will guarantee me an otherworldly ocean view. 

That means I can switch from tempo run to all-out sprint depending on the viewpoint on the track. No matter which I choose, the goal is to make the run an enjoyable experience. To make sure I would never forget the experience, I ran there twice within one day. 

Trust me, you will never get tired running at Henningsvær Stadium. 

Doppler

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had been collecting fairy tales and folklore for years in Germany. The Brothers Grimm didn't travel to Norway, otherwise they should have picked up the fable Doppler from Erlend Loe, one of Norway's bestselling novelists. Or else, those from Roald Dahl, born to Norwegian parents and named after polar explorer Roald Amundsen.

I've been thinking about the choice of novels to bring on my Norway trip. The Kafkaesque story of Doppler, a captivating blend of humour and absurdity, offers a joyful treat. 

Here is the plot: Andreas Doppler isn't sure if he is a failed man of his time. Or just a man of a failed time. He takes off into the forest around Oslo, leaving a note telling his family not to expect him for dinner. He runs out of food, ambushes and kills a mother elk. He adopts the calf elk, and names the calf Bongo.   

The friendship between Doppler and Bongo, as it turns out, is a whimsical one. 

Expedition

Ask any geologist about their worst nightmare in fieldwork and it will likely be that they have lost the compass. Or else, the aerial photographs. Pretty interesting, huh? I know. 

That's a story even before we have Google Maps. I borrowed the novel Beyond Sleep for my Norwegian trip. Think about an insomniac expedition of a young geologist to the mountains of Norway's Arctic north. That can be freezing. He had never been able to procure his set of aerial photographs for his research and route planning.  

The story makes more sense to me after visiting the Norwegian Aviation Museum today. The history of civil flight in Norway goes all the way to the late 1800s, when Francesco Cetti experimented with balloon flight and aerial photography. Few invention brought advances in quite the same way as Norge, Norway's first balloon. No mapmaking, glacier monitoring, or archaeological surveying would have been possible without aerial photography.

The tragedy of the geologist without aerial photographs doesn't need further explanation.

Backyard

Mention Amy Tan and most of us will think of the Joy Luck Club at the First Chinese Baptist Church. Little do we know the backyard of hers, a menagerie of fledglings – baby juncos, flinches, and chickadees  – drawn to the bird feeders.

Through reading The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan, I have been fascinated by her personal observations of birds in backyard. A paradise for birds. 

Our lodging in Norway this week, it turns out, is as colourful as Amy Tan's. We visited Nordland, where Norway narrows and heads for the Arctic. Before heading for the Lofoten Islands, we stayed at Bodø, right next to Saltstraumen. The view from our cottage is second to none. Gulls, Arctic terns, Eurasian oystercatchers,  grey herons are right next to us. 

I wonder if there is better meaning of joy. Or luck. 

Sense

Gretchen Rubin is a byword for happiness. One afternoon, this author of The Happiness Project discovered her eyes turning gummy and pink. That's the moment she could see what was missing. She sat in front of bulky eye-examination equipment. Never before had she experienced the world with sharper intensity. 

She walked home and learned to connect with her "big five" senses. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. These five senses link us to our past, tie us to the present, and help us create memories for the future. 

Which means five senses are key to our life.

Also, I realised that for many people, including me, nostalgia of recalling tastes or images make us feel closer to our own past, and help us feel happier and less lonely. Not long after reading Life in Five Senses by Gretchen Rubin, I had a reunion with my medical school classmates. The simple pleasures of reunion remind us that the days are long, but the years are long – and our years are getting shorter. We might not notice the sights or sounds of today, because they're the kind we'd seen a thousand times and never really noticed. But wait, one day, now will be a long time ago. As poet Robert Southey observed, "Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life." I couldn't agree more when Gretchen Rubin says that her freshman year of high school seemed to last forever, but last year passed in a flash.

I felt the same way.

Quote

Very often, my mentor finishes his lecture with a quote on his last slide. The quote is as compelling as the second last conclusion slide, but even more resonating. That is one of the surprises I've kept looking forward to. 

An epigraph or short quote at the beginning of each book chapter serves a similar purpose. For that matter, such quote works like a hook to grab our attention to new chapter. One chapter after another.

One good example is Rosemary Grant's memoir, One Step Sideways, Three Steps Forward. The evolutionary biologist and research scholar emeritus at Princeton University tells us her life's work in the Galápagos Islands and her lifelong love of nature. The way she works as a field biologist and as a mother raising her family is legendary. The honour of receiving the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences from the Inamori Foundation is as significant as her achievement to bring her children to visit Machu Picchu in Peru at their age of ten and eight years old.

Out of the epigraphs from the twenty-five chapters, the best one is a Native American proverb: Only when the last tree is cut, only when the last river is polluted, only when the last fish is caught, will they realise that you can't eat money.

Hike

Lonely Planet writer says we all have a wish list at the back of our minds (or struck to the refrigerator). And I'd agree. 

After return from Mt Kinabalu, I borrowed Lonely Planet's Epic Hikes of the World. That's a reminder that we live on a uniquely scenic and precious living planet. 

The book reminds me of a long-ago trek along the Abel Tasman Coast Track in New Zealand. That's a world-class beachcombing walk for 60 kilometres, manageable in running shoes. Nothing defines Abel Tasman like its long coast from Bark Bay to Anchorage, winding past Torrent Bay and back to Tonga Island. With each stop, the challenge is resisting the temptation to stop and plunge into the blue. Each stop brings unexpected surprises. Some might see this as a blessing but, in fact, the dilemma – to take a dip or dawdle on – isn't that easy. 

One of the highlights, along the route, is Awaroa Inlet that can only be crossed two hours either side of low tide. Even when my wife and I had nailed the timing (by setting the alarm before dawn), we had to remove socks and shoes to wade across the estuary. 

Sometimes we simply have to get wet. This rule applies to all of us.

Coercion

In Alka Joshi's debut novel, The Henna Artist, she tells the story of forced marriage in India – from a powerless 15-year-old Lakshimi being told to to marry a man who spent most of his time in village sleeping and eating, to her bold move to escape three years after the abusive marriage, and her subsequent life a henna artist. 

To me as a non-Indian, Lakshimi's plight in 1950s seemed ridiculous, and yet also like something that we might be falling prey to nowadays. Think about blind recruitment, when a corporate top manager forced or coerced a hiring team to take up unmatched candidates simply to fill any vacant position. 

A total loss of autonomy. A threat to the alignment of the hiring team's standard with applicant's competence. 

So, if you think The Henna Artist is a historical fiction, be prepared for the sense of déjà vu when you find yourself sharing the same fate as Lakshimi.

Sparrows

To this day, the campaign of eradicating sparrows, one of the "Four Pests", by the Chinese leader Mao Zedong had remained the biggest disregard for the laws governing the natural world. 

Hundreds of millions of tree sparrows were killed after Mao had come to power in 1949. The cull is also known as the Great Sparrow Campaign, as a result of the Chinese rulers' perennial fondness for slogans. Somehow Mao's philosophy "People Will Conquer Nature" led to a superficially convincing theory. It all looked so very scientific to calculate that a single sparrow could consume 4.5 kilos of grain per year. It followed, intuitively, that for every million sparrows killed, enough would be spared to feed 60,000 people.

Oh, and let us not forget, there are more than the simple mathematics. What is abundantly clear, however, is that when we mess with nature we do so at our peril. On one hand, sparrows feed on seeds and grains in the autumn and winter. On the other hand, sparrows feed their hungry chicks on countless millions of insects during the breeding season. With all the sparrows gone, those insects – including vast swarms of locusts, the most destructive pests of all – were celebrating the biggest feast of crops. And then, along came the ill-fated famine. The rest is history.

When my daughter joined one of the tree sparrow census few years ago, I wasn't the first person to feel the relief that sparrows have now been thriving in Hong Kong. What is most remarkable about the survey finding is a 36 percent rebound in the tree sparrow population in 2022.

Or, as we might say, sparrow 1, humans 0.