Twenty years ago I had the good fortune of meeting Donis Davey. She was then a preschool instructor at the Orange County Marine Institute at Dana Point, California. http://www.ocean-institute.org/ Donis taught me how to recover the child in me so I could teach the smallest of students. We became friends along the way, and now, after her passing last year, I am missing her terribly. For Donis possessed the most treasured of qualities in a human being: passion!
Donis lived by the sea, actually by the San Clemente Pier, a famous place for surfers and beach goers in southern California. http://www.beachcalifornia.com/san-clemente-pier.html When you go to this link, follow the curving street up the hill and look for a white watch tower on top of a house. That's the tower she and her husband Don built so they could continue observing the ocean, something they did everyday. That house is where they raised their kids, and where Donis lived for over 30 years. She walked that beach everyday except when she was too sick to go down there.
The reason I am sharing this life with you is that I think Donis was on the right track in her life. She was fearless when it came to protecting the ocean and all its life. She was very active in land reforms and zoning policies and fought hard to keep the town and her neighborhood from overdevelopment. Well, as you can see in the picture of her neighborhood, she was not successful in keeping development down, but she influenced the way it happened. The point is Donis stood up for what she believed in.
My daughter recently accepted a position with the Ocean Conservancy in Washington, D.C. One visit to their website reveals the need for citizen participation in the ongoing pressures of human activities on the ocean: http://www.oceanconservancy.org/site/PageServer?pagename=home.
Donis taught children through her intuitive wisdom. She studied preschool education at Pasadena College, but her ability to engage little children in learning emanated from her own child within. Docents at the Marine Institute helped make puppets of all sizes and kinds for her programs. One remained a hallmark of Donis around Orange County: Sandwitch, a funny old witch who trashed the beaches and made the kids go wild with laughter at her antics. Donis had Sandwitch toss the plastic rings from a six pack on the "beach" only to find a bird or an otter end up strangled by it. She always had the kids rescue the victim. Other puppets were large enough for kids to get inside, like a gray whale that four kids could get inside and work the flukes and open its mouth to gather krill. Donis was alive and full of surprise and mystery. She always started off with a Treasure Box. What little kid doesn't want to know what's inside? There was a story connected to each object she slowly pulled from the box as kids stood up to see what was coming next!
Donis became a professional storyteller in her seventies. She travelled around the county performing in libraries. Her energy was boundless. She instituted the famous Ocean Birthday Party program that thousands of kids and parents attended. I helped her with these elaborate parties. She wore a lobster hat with long red segmented arms and pinchers protruding in every direction! We sang and danced the Hermit Crab Cha Cha which the kids loved because at one point they have to shake their "tails" and wiggle into a new shell. Watching parents shake their booty always made the kids crack up.
Toward the end of her life she held performances on the pier outside Schleppy's Bar and Grill on the Dana Point wharf. There one could find her dressed in purple, of course, and doning some crazy hat, draped with gorgeous jewelry made especially for her in the shape of seastars, dolphins, sand dollars and ocean waves. Sandwitch would be there, too, throwing styrafoam cups and saying the most outrageous things like, Why should I care about what happens to birds and fish? Donis's puppet co-star exemplified the worst human behavior toward the environment. Before long she would have a crowd around her with little kids booing Sandwitch's behavior.
Donis suffered from a host of life-long illnesses and finally died of a brain tumor. But inspite of her physical challenges, she accomplished more than most in a lifetime. Because of Donis Davey, there are tens of thousands of adults - once child prodigies of the woman who loved the ocean - out there with a love for the ocean in their hearts because Donis taught them to love it, to keep it well and to fight for the magnificent creation we hold in trust with our Creator.
Good teachers are worth their weight in gold. But sometimes we don't recognize them because they follow unusual paths. Donis's contributions to the Ocean Institute's program (then the Marine Institute) were never fully valued. The Director cast dispersions on her parties and while he never said it outloud to her, he thought they were frivolous compared to the other more scienctific classes taught to upper grades. Yet Donis followed the rose colored stream of passion that Rachel Carson so eloquently explained as the key to engendering a desire to protect and value nature:
Once emotions have been aroused – a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love – then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.[1]
[1] Carson, Rachel (1965). A Sense of Wonder. New York: Harper & Row.
I look around and still see the stale factual presentations about "the environment." Once an Indian elder told me that her people have no word for environment because they do not conceptualize themselves as separate from it. "We are the environment," she told me.
Donis's abilities to bring the love and wonder about the ocean into the hearts of children derived from her own deep love for marine life - and that welled-up from a lifetime of exploration and experiences in and around oceans.
Even into her late 60's Donis could be found in a purple bathing suit with her colorful boogey board surfing the waves in front of her home at San Clemente pier. With the Boogaloos, a surfing club for which the only entrance requirement is you have to be at least 60, she held firm to the life force so many of us forget and eventually lose!
To my friend and mentor, Donis Davey, I am so glad that one such as you walked the Earth and that by the grace of God I had the opportunity to know you! Your spirit lives on in all of us who were lucky enough to know you and frolick with you by the edge of the sea!
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/edgeofsea/
http://www.mbayaq.org/ Monterey Bay Aquarium
http://www.sheddaquarium.org/ Shedd Aquarium
For some real fun, read Carl Hiaasen's two books: Hoot and Flush or go see the movie "Hoot" and fall in love with Florida oceans and estuaries. http://www.hootmovie.com/
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