Beach of Mystery

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I haven't done an early rock-n-roll session in a long time -- getting up early enough to be somewhere by sunrise, that is. I kind of got faked out by yesterday's clear weather. I could see stars out when I woke up on Friday morning. Not so much on Saturday. But I was kinda sorta up early anyway, so I went for it.

You never know what you're going to find when you go someplace new. And sometimes you don't find the new place right away because it's still dark out. I overshot my main destination and had to hang out somewhere else until it got light enough to see my way around.

Sunrise came a little before 7 a.m. today, and low tide hit just past the hour. I was excited to find sea palm exposed on an accessible reef. I've never been able to walk right up to sea palm before. I've seen it at Salt Point in the past, but it was gone the last time I looked for it. If you're thinking I get excited about sea palm because they remind me of Hawaii, you'd be only partly right. Okay, I'm kidding. They do not remind me of Hawaii. What they remind me of is sea palm strudel, which I've had at one place only, Ravens Restaurant in Mendocino.

Very nice reef for tidepooling, but I didn't try to do any photography of tidepool critters because it was still too dark. Also, the total lack of starfish has got me down. Tidepools should, at the very least, have a few starfish just to give your reef-roving eyes something fun and easy to catch once in a while. The poor bastards are still fighting the wasting disease, a viral infection that turns them into mush.

I'd love to see a timelapse of tafoni forming.

Interesting tidbits in the pebbly sand include a couple of baby sea urchins. I couldn't tell until I got home and viewed several frames in succession that the smaller urchin was moving.

 

Here are the tafoni pits full of little pit-forming denizens.

A closer view of the tiny beans that scrub out the hollows.

You pretty much notice the dead whale right off. Even if your eyes are closed. I was interested to find the backbone exposed like this since I'd never seen anything like it before on a beach. Turns out some biologists from the California Academy of Sciences came down and did some harvesting. They determined, among other things, that this was a juvenile female humpback whale that was likely killed from a head injury sustained when it collided with a ship. It washed up less than a couple of months ago, on July 24. The remains were still being pecked at by numerous gulls, and a pair of fresh coyote tracks crossed its path. Where the tracks met the carcass, the remains looked like a beached carpet. I suspect the coyotes did not dine or linger.

Although I saw no stars of the sea, I did see a comet made of limpets.

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Back to Nature

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"You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things. Why not go into the forest for a time, literally? Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books."

--Carl Jung, in a letter to a colleague (from The Earth Has A Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life, edited by Meredith Sabini, 2008)

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"Civilized man . . . is in danger of losing all contact with the world of instinct -- a danger that is still further increased by his living an urban existence in what seems to be a purely manmade environment. This loss of instinct is largely responsible for the pathological condition of contemporary culture."

--from Jung's Collected Works, in the same book as above

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The practical advice Jung gave for remedying the loss of contact with Nature, within or without, is not much different from what is widely available today: to live in small communities; to work a shorter day and week; to have a plot of land to cultivate so the instincts come back to life; and to make the sparest use of radio, television, newspapers, and technological gadgetry. The purpose of doing these things, however, is not to repair Nature, but rather to let Nature affect us. 

--from the editor writing in the same book as above 

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Clean Air Day

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Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"

Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"

God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"

God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but

The next time you see me comin' you better run"

Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"

God says, "Out on Highway 61"

--Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited

This morning on KQED radio I heard a mother tell an interviewer that, although her child had asthma, she believes clean air is too expensive. 

“We all want cleaner air,” she said. “My son has asthma, I get it. We all want to work on policies that will improve the environment. But the question is at what cost?”

When I heard the mother – Assemblywoman Kristin Olsen of Modesto – say those words, I did a mental double-take. God asked Abraham to kill his son, but a lesser god, the almighty dollar, only asks us to give our children asthma.

When the time comes that there are more "Spare the Air" days than "clean air" days, will we still think it's worth it? Is making our children and ourselves sick in the pursuit of making a living a necessary evil?

On one side we have Ms. Olsen advocating for the status quo, for business as usual, even though it harms her own son. On the other side we have another politician, Senator Kevin de Leon of Los Angeles, saying, "We know that we can grow and prosper without poisoning our communities or the lungs of our children."

I know we don't look to our politicians to be heroes, anymore than we look to our business leaders to be heroes. But here's hoping that the heroes among them will find the ingenuity to one day make "Spare the Air" days a thing of the past, and healthy prosperity a thing of the present.

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