To the Lighthouse

A sudden sound from the corner of Hagrid's cabin made Harry, Ron, and Hermione whip around. Buckbeak the hippogriff was lying in the corner, chomping on something that was oozing blood all over the floor.

"I couldn' leave him tied up out there in the snow!" choked Hagrid. "All on his own! At Christmas."

Harry, Ron, and Hermione looked at one another. They had never seen eye to eye with Hagrid about what he called "interesting creatures" and other people called "terrifying monsters." On the other hand, there didn't seem to be any particular harm in Buckbeak. In fact, by Hagrid's usual standards, he was positively cute.

--J.K. Rowling


Working in Yellowstone, I used to dread the winter. I could live with the change in the weather, although, having grown up in a near-desert, that alone was a horrible shock. Worse, much worse, was this business of getting laid off and essentially evicted from the area, since I never did find the winter employment I was always looking for up there. I came to associate cold weather with unemployment checks and living out of the car. I'm always happy to find places that upset my expectations for this time of year--including, lately, a part of California that looks as if it is about to break off and head out to sea.

I refer to Point Reyes National Seashore, on the Marin coast north of San Francisco. I found myself there a few weeks ago, during a break from work, and made it a point to spend as much time as I could walking up and down its beaches, drawing a long zigzag between the water and the seaside cliffs, looking and watching. Pelicans cruised above the furthest line of breakers, exhibiting as much grace in the air as they do goofiness when seen up close on the ground. Little Vs turned up in the wet sand when the water rolled back, then quickly disappeared: sand crabs burrowing back under the surface (harmless and free of claws, sand crabs are the delight of West Coast children, who take them home in buckets and find them dead on arrival; by the millions, in suburban Southern California backyards, sand crabs lie in unmarked graves, over by the cat and the guinea pig). Further out in the water, I saw a flash of black flipping upward and submerging without becoming quite airborne: a sea lion, maybe. Further up in the air, a circle of vultures spun. The circle was getting narrower. Something dead in the coastal scrub on the high ground above.

Something dead lay in every direction I looked, as I drew that zigzag between dry land and water, the latter now at low tide (it's good, by the way, to check the tide tables: people get pinned against the cliff by high tides, which is--exciting). Clumps of mussels had washed up. Torn from the rocks that had held them by a storm the previous week, they lay like bunches of rotten bananas along the high tide line, some of the individual mussels bigger than any I'd ever seen, eight inches or more (it's good to check to make sure mussels are in season before eating them; when they aren't, they harbor a toxin that can kill, and with some dramatic flair). Sea birds lay sprawled on the sand between the hills of kelp, the birds more or less skeletonized. So did fish, some of hallucinatory make and model, and size. There had been no catastrophe; all this death was the normal result of life in the sea.

Among the biological wreckage lay wreckage of a human source, also normal, if sometimes more irritating. Crews of container ships at sea tend to heave anything they don't want overboard, so this part of the Northern California littoral is home to, among other things, a whole population of wrecked wooden pallets. Commercial fishing gear turned up--floats with Japanese characters on them, and nylon line and netting twisted into briny, synthetic dreadlocks. An expensive saltwater fishing rod, lost overboard and treated very rudely by the waves, rolled in. I picked it up and used it as a walking stick.

I walked like this for hours, over several days and on several beaches, including both the relatively sheltered beaches that hide behind Pt. Reyes itself, and those to the north that take the full force of the weather blowing off the Pacific. I could have done it for hours more. Here is a place where the sun comes out more often in the cold months; during the summer, fog is a daily presence. It is a cold sunlight, but enticing, and a perfect match (opposites attract) for the harsh nature of everything else about this place. The wind routinely gets up over forty miles an hour, blowing bits of sand deep enough into bodily recesses that they don't turn up for a week. When the wind doesn't blow, the fog descends, a one-two punch that makes the lighthouse at Pt. Reyes--finished originally in 1870--a necessity to this day. I could see it flashing as I walked, and could sometimes hear the foghorn. I don't see many surfers along these beaches, although it can be done; without a wetsuit, though, hypothermia is a going proposition.

Of course, just strolling along, this place is not physically threatening. But that harshness often takes forms more subtle, slow, pervasive. The salt, for instance. Brine is in every breath of air and coats every surface, leaving a sticky film that makes sand cling to anything it touches. Bedspreads and tabletops are always damp, and one almost expects banana slugs under the hotel bed (there are, however, precious few hotels in this rustic part of the state, mostly just bed and breakfasts with names like The Enchanted Crustacean). Salt air rots anything made of steel; barn roofs, though laboriously painted, are all measeled, and even mailboxes decay and cave in. Steel doors and fixtures on the older National Park Service restrooms look like they have been blasted by shotguns. Scattered all up and down the seashore, I found wreckage from a big pier, blown to bits by a storm, and obviously weakened by the decay of its steel parts from the salt.

I walked on, combing the beach, wondering what else the sea might disgorge, and how far that thing might have come. Just past another heap of wrecked pier, I was startled by a row of white objects that had a symmetry to them, a human symmetry, I thought. A ribcage. It was, I finally saw, a skeletal porpoise. I looked off toward the Farallon Islands, a row of rocky bulges along the horizon, aligned like the back of the Loch Ness Monster. In the water around those islands were great white sharks the size of the one in the movie. They spend part of the year dining on sea mammals out there. The Farallones, in the shimmering distance, were very beautiful indeed. The skeleton at my feet showed no sign of violence. I was still pleased with myself.

Why? Why would I--why would anyone--enjoy a place like this? Because these creatures are, as Hagrid says, "interesting" (the quote at the start comes from a Harry Potter book, of course, Prisoner of Azkaban specifically): the great white sharks off the Farallones, the line of expiring jellyfish I'd just noticed here on the beach, the really strikingly ugly vultures overhead, all are interesting. The human mind is built to be curious; we want something new all the time. Really, we want everything new all the time, a new universe every day. This desire is not a weakness created by Madison Avenue advertisers. This is how the mind works, and probably always has. After some weeks spent locked up indoors with Microsoft Word, I was ready for something--anything--messy, unusual, interesting.

I'll have to continue this topic next time. We had actually come to Point Reyes to see the 19th century lighthouse, a perfectly touristy thing to do, I thought. We were delayed by, to our surprise, dangerous conditions. Interesting.