I was a quiet, introverted teenager. Barbara was a terrible guitar player. She had lost most of her memory in a car wreck fifteen years before, when she was a uni- versity music student, herself just nineteen years old.

I stammered and had a disabling fear of public speaking and performance. I preferred diving in the quiet rock quarries of southern Indiana and the company of my dog and guitar. In a carpeted corner of the institutional lounge, we started in on the standard folk classics of her teens: Dylan; Simon and Garfunkel; Peter, Paul, and Mary. Simple chords, clear lyrics, nothing too demanding. Our Wednesday guitar lessons continued for eight months.

Some days it was agonizing work. We would play into dark dead ends. Our hour together would drag with poorly formed thunky chords and start-overs. Other days, a song—or a simple melodic phrase—would open a door into her memory and she would come alive. John Denver, in particular, caused knobs to turn and long-locked memories to flow. On those days we spoke more than we played. Music brought back images, names, stories, and other music. The nurses smiled.

“All my memories, gathered ‘round her. Miner’s lady, stranger to blue water.”

This was my first intimation of BlueMind. These moments enthralled and disturbed me. Late nights in the racks of neuroscience journals failed to provide satisfactory answers to my questions. The requisite formaldehyde-infused dissections in my anatomy courses paled in comparison to the wonder of Barbara’s living brain. I began to cherish Wednesday afternoons, strumming my guitar in time with hers and trying to find keys to unlock her memories. In the process, slaking my nostalgia for acoustic three-chord simplicity and swimming holes.

***

These words from e. e. cummings haunt me:

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

The words connect me to a dozen emotions, a hundred places, a thousand memories, and to the color blue. I prefer to read the lines last to first. The preceding ten words of the poem are:

for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)

And the ten words just before that are:

as small as a world and as large as alone

I read them backward and forward, and backward again. I read them that way to myself, to my daughters, to strangers, and to students.

I don’t know if e. e. cummings meant it that way, but I like to imagine he did; or, at least, that it didn’t matter to him which way you read them as he wrote them at his desk, seaside, planning the forward and the backward and the forward again permutations of his paean to the sea.

Have you ever lost a you? Did it happen at the sea? I’ve lost several me’s. So many me’s, I’ve lost count. I used to know the number; it was at least ten. They’ve mostly been lost in the sea, but one time I lost a me at the bottom of a water-filled quarry. There must be many me’s lost in the water. With a backlog of me’s-in- waiting, yet to be lost.

Sometimes, the me’s or the you’s lost in the ocean will return. Those lost to rivers have to travel to the sea where one can search for them. Successful searching often requires a guide—a young scientist, perhaps.

***

August 13, 1996. Martin Arce, a thick-handed lobsterman, and I watched Adelita, a loggerhead sea turtle, swim under and away from our small skiff bobbing in the immense Pacific offshore Baja California in Mex- ico. We stared out across the expanse of blue before us and thought maybe, perhaps, possibly these turtles aren’t born in Baja at all. Maybe they migrate here only to return home again—somewhere. We gazed at the horizon. Somewhere out there, across the vast Pacific, was Japan and the nearest known loggerhead nesting beaches, a mere 7,000 miles west.

Genetic evidence suggested the possibility of epic ocean-spanning migrations by sea turtles, but, in the face of the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, the hypoth- esis was revolutionary at the time. Too revolutionary, I guess. Unfathomable. Absurd even, but also loaded with scientific potential, as the best hypotheses usually are.

I was a doctoral student in wildlife ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

Debate was rife among scientists about the origins of endangered loggerhead sea turtles swimming along the Pacific coast of the Americas. As most school kids will tell you, the first and perhaps most impressive thing you learn about sea turtles is that they return to the same beaches where they were hatched to nest as adults. With not one single loggerhead nesting beach anywhere on the shores of the eastern Pacific, many questions were unanswered.

Martin and I had attached a small box to Adelita’s back. It contained a transmitter. Twentieth-century technology glued to a one-hundred-million-year-old body plan. Each day the box relayed her location to us via satellites linked to a base station in France. Each day we studied the data and then uploaded it to the Internet. Each day tiny dots aligned on a map, surrounded by nothing but blue. Soon, other people took note. Then more. Schoolkids, scientists, and turtle lovers the world over were watching Adelita’s progress.

Alone, but not alone, Adelita stroked on through the deepest, wildest, most humanless expanse of our blue planet.

People would write to me to talk about Adelita: “Hi J., this is Meghan and I was just wondering if you are as excited about this as I am?”

At night, I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie awake thinking about Adelita. Praying for her safety. Wonder- ing what was beneath her and above her. Was she hungry? How did it feel to be going home after so many years? I became obsessed with checking my email for the latest position. I’d imagine members of our loosely connected club sitting in front of glowing blue screens all over the world, plotting, calculating, imagining, hoping, and dreaming about that vast blue space.

We tracked the sea turtle due west out of Baja making a steady twenty miles per day; a healthy walking gait for you or me. By January 1, she was just north of Hawaii. From there, she tracked west and ever so slightly north. Sure enough, she was headed straight for Japan.

Brie, an Internet follower, wrote, “What are you gonna to do when Adelita gets to Japan? I mean are you gonna send a team to get her?”

“I’m not really sure,” I wrote back.

March 9, 1997. Barbara Garrison, an elementary school teacher in San Diego who was following Adelita’s progress with her students, receiving my regular emails and thoughts, wrote this poem during the journey as the turtle neared the International Date Line, which bisects the Pacific:

Adelita sleeps.
Do you ever find yourself thinking of her
in the middle of the day?

Sister of mercy
adrift in the world
her carapace around her
like a habit
following the liturgy of longitude like the Stations of the Cross
the draw string of dream gathering with each dive.

A sea shadow
cradled in the arms
of the great Turtle Mother.

The Virgin of Cobre guiding through the dangerous sea the black sand memory
of her natal beach

ringing her course in peals of instinct.

Cartographer explorer world traveler Adelita sleeps.

A Shinto priestess leads the way
a goddess path from Mexico

to the arribada on a distant Kyushu shore.

August 16, 1997. Three hundred and sixty-eight days and seven thousand miles after we lowered her into the Pacific, Adelita’s signal finally went dark—her final location put her transmitter at the end of a fishing pier in Isohama, a village in northern Japan since washed away by the 2011 tsunami.

***

It’s far easier to appreciate the little blue marble we live on from the water’s edge. Its waves of light and sound can make us feel both small and alone and yet exquisitely connected to the universe and everything in it. Like every little thing we do matters more than we could ever imagine.