Duck-a You Head

In 1961 I went on a three week European tour with my family.  It was one of those packaged group tours, so it was relatively affordable for us at the time.  One of the cities we visited was Venice, Italy, which is not as nice a place as one might think.  We were traveling on one of the back street canals in one of those famous gondolas when a woman leaned out of a second story window and shouted something in Italian, which none of us understood.  The gondolier told us laconically, "That means duck-a you head."  I don't know how that would have protected us from the paper grocery sack full of garbage that hit the water right next to me, since it came from directly above us, but we ducked out heads anyway.  The sack split open when it hit, and I remember seeing egg shells and watermelon rinds floating by.  I found out later that Venice is built on a tidal marsh, so anything dumped into the canals eventually floats out to sea.

I don't know if Venetians still dispose of their trash that way, but I understand that people in several Asian countries routinely toss their garbage into their rivers, or on the ground from whence it gets washed into the rivers by the monsoon rains.  I learned this just today from this month's National Geographic which features a big spread about plastic pollution.  Most plastic floats, and there are a few large "plastic patches" in the Pacific due to the prevailing circular ocean currents.  Sunlight and wave action eventually break plastic down into tiny particles called "micro beads" that have been accumulating in the oceans for decades.  I didn't know that they were also found in the Great Lakes, which is puzzling because we don't dump garbage into our waterways on nearly the scale that those Asian countries do.  Furthermore, I don't think that Americans litter as much they used to do in our youth. So where is that plastic coming from?

Another thing that puzzles me is those rectangular green patches that appear in that photo of the Mackinac Bridge.  They don't look like anything that should be there, so I wonder if they are some sort of photo effect deliberately placed here to block our view of something else.  I'm not aware of any secret government activity in that vicinity but, if it was a secret, I don't suppose I would be aware of it.  I do know that the water that flows under the Mackinac Bridge is not a river, it's the Straits of Mackinac, connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. There is a substantial current in the straits, but it reverses itself periodically depending on which way the wind is blowing.  Wind and differences in the atmospheric pressure commonly cause the water in the Great Lakes to pile up on one shore or the other, but it's usually not as noticeable in our part of the lakes as it is in Lake Erie which, I believe, is the shallowest of the Great Lakes.