How Oceanic Wilderness got its name.

My brother recently texted me a photo of a book Oceanic Wilderness, but published in 2007 long after I started blogging as Oceanic Wilderness. It made me think that perhaps I should do a post on how I even came up with this name since I rarely blog about anything ocean related.

So. I have a degree in marine biology. I graduated in 2002 from Texas A&M University and was gung-ho on using that degree for what it was intended, not to teach or go into a field that was not marine related. *snort* look where I am now! It should be noted that most marine biology majors don’t really use their degree in that manner and if you want to train dolphins at Sea World you don’t really need a degree, you just need to work your way up through the system and become a trainer. This is what most incoming freshmen dream of and while it was in the back of my head what I really wanted to do was to decode the dolphin language. You laugh, but I was serious! And there are people who have been working on that, differentiating clicks and sounds from many species of marine mammals, so it isn’t a far fetched idea.

My only problem was that if I wanted to do that I should’ve gotten on the PhD track early and not strayed.

Anyway, I’d graduated college in May 2002, blogging was starting to take off and so I got myself a Blogspot account like everyone else. While it had another name before the .blogspot.com part the official title was Oceanic Wilderness. And it stuck, despite my changing to a Geocities account later on when I started coding HTML and then finally when Chris bought the hosting and domain name www.oceanicwilderness.com for one of my birthdays.

The ocean was always a big part of my life despite the fact I lived five hour away from it growing up. I dreamed of being an oceanographer, some of it stemmed from Dolphin Cove and Sea Quest DSV. Somehow despite all of this marine mammals interest I did not focus on marine mammals in college. As marine biology majors we were able to pick a couple different tracks with specific classes to focus on and I chose wetlands. Which is how I ended up working in wetlands. I think my sense at that time was that I knew knowing all of the marine mammals was not going to pan into a great career, and while there are jobs for marine mammal folks they are very, very competitive and often pay meagerly. I also developed a strong interest in sea turtles after doing an internship and while that would be my dream job, I’m pretty sure the only time I will ever work with sea turtles is if I volunteer somewhere (if I get live on the coast again!). It is a similarly competitive field.

Now, it really seems these days I am more of Land Wilderness because our interests have really taken us this direction. But, it seems too late to go changing names now and I still love the ocean, the smell of the salt, the rotting sargassum, the animals on the coast. I’d take a coast and ocean job in a second (with the right pay of course!).

And there you have it. Oceanic Wilderness. 😉

*Later edit: Did some digging, apparently I went by A Place in the Sun for the first year before my brother temporarily hosted my site on a sub-site of his own. Then it became Oceanic Wilderness. It was funny to read a post prior to getting married in 2002 where I mention my brother and his girlfriend, aka: his wife and Zoe’s mom. Oh, those writings deserve to be downloaded. I’ll have to see if blogspot allows that. Good times!