Ode to Sutro Sam

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The October-December issue of Bay Nature magazine’s feature on river otters got me thinking about good old Sutro Sam, who delighted a lot of people during his brief stay at Sutro Baths in 2012. Sam eventually ate all the fish in the tank and had to move on to greener pastures.

I’m reading a fascinating and beautifully written book called Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island, where author Will Harlan states that only relatively recently in human history did we lose the ability to live within our resource limits. As many others do, he implies that we lost a wisdom that we once had. But as I wonder about that I have my doubts. As hunter-gatherers we spread out over the globe in search of greener pastures, just like Sutro Sam, until we learned that through agriculture and animal husbandry we could stay in one place and even continue to prosper as our numbers grew. In one respect, our survival strategy as hunter-gatherers didn’t change. In an agricultural society, resource depletion just takes longer.

By 2016 agricultural society has almost entirely supplanted hunter-gatherer societies. Human populations and markets have become so huge that we’re faced with the possibility of whole aquifers and even whole resource stocks being entirely consumed. People are just trying to make a living, but the resource—even when it’s in an ocean—turns out to be finite. The ocean is amazingly productive, but it isn’t magically so.

Maybe we’re a lot more like Sutro Sam than we like to admit, taking care of our immediate needs with little or no thought about where it all leads.

Harlan also mentions in Untamed the observations of NASA scientist James Lovelock, who noticed self-regulating systems in the earth’s atmosphere and in other natural processes, and way back in 1969 “came to a startling conclusion: the earth is alive.”

“He proposed,” Harlan continues, “that the earth is a superorganism—one giant living system that includes not just animals and plants but rocks, gases, and soil—acting together as if the planet was a single living being.”

I like the analogy, but it’s too bad the earth doesn’t reproduce! Then we would have greener pastures to move into. On the same page as the rest of this stuff, Harlan quotes the “wild woman” who is the subject of his book who says, “We cannot grow infinitely on a finite planet.” It’s such an obvious and simple fact that surely everyone sees it. Yet we keep chowing down like Sutro Sam, with no more intelligence or perspective, no more forward-looking consciousness, than a river otter’s.

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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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The Cat Food Caper

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I started putting food out for a neighbor's cat after noticing one day while I was petting him that he was very skinny. Figuring a hungry cat is going to bring more hell on birds than a full cat, I decided to put out a little kibble in what passes for my back yard. 

The skinny cat's name is Ren. He's black-and-white and full of personality. Often when the neighbors take their frisky young German shepherd for a walk, Ren follows them. And I don't mean for just a few steps. He'll follow them on a long walk around the neighborhood, ducking for cover here and there, then catching up again. Sometimes the dog will playfully pounce toward Ren, and Ren will return the pounce, taking no guff. If Ren encounters someone else walking their dog down the sidewalk, he sits on his haunches and stares them down. The dog-walker usually crosses the street to pass. I watched out my living room window late one night as Ren did the same thing with a huge raccoon. They had a quick boxing match before going their separate ways.

So back when I started doing this I put the trail camera out back to see if Ren would find and eat the cat food. I found that he did in fact find and eat it, and on a couple of occasions he would even be waiting for me when I set it out in the morning. However, two other neighborhood cats also got in on the free lunch -- a small, short-haired black cat, and a large, long-haired gray cat. (Squirrels and birds seemed to ignore the cat food.) Using the clock on the trail camera, I took notes on when each cat showed up. Ren and the black cat came by every day, usually multiple times. The long-haired cat showed up too rarely to set a pattern, but Ren and the black cat invariably came during the day, probably because their owners let them inside at night.

Any cat food left out overnight became fair game for rats and raccoons. Ren didn't like other critters eating his food, so he started scooping sand and leaves on it after he was done. That was making a mess, so I started putting the food in my other neighbor's yard, which is just a slab of concrete. (There's a tall fence separating my yard from Ren's yard, but nothing between me and the concrete yard.) After seeing the night action, I put out only as much chow in the morning as the cats could completely eat during the course of the day.

Just on a whim, I decided the other day to start putting the food back in my yard, laying it out on a stepping stone. I was surprised to come home from work to see the pile still there. I checked it again in the morning and it was all gone. I noticed I hadn't seen my neighbors in a few days and figured they might have gone on vacation, and that would explain Ren's absence. But I don't know where the black cat lives and thought it was strange that the food would remain uneaten all day. I did not believe the rat would eat that much so I set my trail camera out there to see what was going on. Why was the food being left uneaten all day? Where were Ren and the black cat?

When I went out to check the camera after work, I saw that most of the cat food had been eaten. Usually it is all gone, so I knew something unusual was still going on. 

Well, the camera found out. The night life was having a party. Ren might indeed be wherever his owners put him when they go out of town, but the black cat had obviously been gone to get medical care. You'll see in the last frame of the video that he walks right past the chow before coming back and finally spotting it. He usually shows up early in the morning, but he didn't show up this time until just after noon, and he didn't return later for seconds, which is why there was still some food left.

My trail camera has been sitting in a drawer since the water hole on Mt. Tam dried up. I was glad to find a use for it by uncovering a back yard mystery.

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Aug. 21 follow-up (Ren returns):

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