relatives mon uow all of us are at least 100th cousins 050309 ... ovenbird In the marina: a visitor, barking like a child with croup. This, I know, is a wonder calling, so I rush with my parents to the docks and we scan the river until we find it: a Rubenesque mermaid, silk hide shining, two hundred and eighty pounds of impossibility. I once read a theory that argued humans are nearly hairless due to a phase in our evolution that found us closely tied to the water where we traded our fur for sleek seal-like skin. This theory has largely been disproven but the idea makes room for myth, one in which this sea lion and I might recognize each other. In the water they are speed and grace. I catch the tail coming up like a whale’s, flippers facilitating flight in a sky full of reflected clouds. On the dock buoyancy falls away leaving a puddle made of lead, heavy and black and oily. Humans are compelled to speak to everything we encounter. (You can’t tell me that you didn’t moo the last time you saw a cow.) And so we bark. We can’t help it. Low and throaty and rasping, we pitch our voices to the rolling tributary. The sea lion is unimpressed, or perhaps our accents are too thick for meaning to penetrate. It doesn’t even lift its head or blink its oceanic eyes. It doesn’t care to know us, this water born cousin, twenty three times removed. 251219 what's it to you? who go blather from