To the Lighthouse, Part 2

In my last entry, I was strolling on the beach at Point Reyes National Seashore, marveling at the hideous beasties washed up by the waves. We started coming to Point Reyes regularly a couple of years ago, originally just to see that 19th century lighthouse. On our first trip, we were stopped by the placement of the lighthouse partway down a high cliff that faces the sea. We had read warnings that made it sound like the lighthouse was accessed by rope ladder. Jen, my wife, was five months pregnant. We gave up, and just went to the beach, where I got a big kick out of the tangled horrors that the tide had thrown up.

Our next trip was not until the following year, in the early spring. Again weary of the work routine, we headed first for the most remote beach we thought we could handle with a small baby: McClures Beach, at the literal end of the road running along the finger of land that juts northwest into the Pacific. I strolled again along the high tide line. Atop a boulder draped with black seaweed, a cormorant took a break from fighting the violently agitated water that pounded around the rocks and surged, foaming, in every direction. I hoped to find more of the usual interesting stuff, maybe a killer octopus with a tentacle wrapped around a deep sea diver's neck.

I've made Point Reyes sound like a badly run bait shop, and now like a home aquarium. It is neither, of course. Midway through my walk, I saw a brown thing on the pebbly sand ahead. A cuddly brown thing, I saw, moving closer. A mottled brown thing with big round Anime eyes, soulful sentimental Hallmark eyes, a puppy dog of the sea. It was a harbor seal, hauled out for reasons one could only guess at.

This was spring, and the usual reason sea mammals haul out during spring is to have pups. I walked on, thinking it best to leave the animal quite alone (and in fact, that's what the National Park Service tells people to do). But when I returned this way, the seal was surrounded by every other person on the beach, about a half dozen Marin County natives all tie-dyed and beaded, as is the uniform here. One of them looked like Shaggy, Scooby's pal. So did his girlfriend. They all wanted to help the seal. I crossed my arms over the front of my sweatshirt, so that no one could read the UC Davis logo there. We're famous for our animal science. I myself know nothing about animal science, but people tend to assume that we're so good we have a Veterinary Strike Force that would fly in here by helicopter from the university extension at Bodega Bay and rappel down with IV bags and defibrillators. I can understand the desire to aid a puppy dog of the sea, but no one anywhere near this remote beach would know what to do, and the seal, to me, looked less distressed than embarrassed. I fled. (Later that same day, we tried to go to the lighthouse, and were stopped by darkness. We did not want to descend the rope ladders in the dark, not with a baby).

So Point Reyes is filled with big noble animals, too, animals that fulfill some or all of the usual requirements of nature aesthetics. On nearly every trail, at some point, deer poke their heads out of the coastal scrub and flap their ears. The National Seashore has the usual problem of imbalance between predators and prey--too few of the predators, that is--but mountain lions do cull the deer herd. In season, monarch butterflies bedeck the eucalyptus trees. Along a beach behind the shelter of the point, an elephant seal colony has lately taken hold, in a cove where the beasts have the privacy they need to lumber around and make violent noises at each other, when they're not napping. The Seashore also functions as one of the state's tule elk refuges. Tule elk (it's pronounced too-lee) are named for the tule swamps or tulares that once covered a good portion of California's Central Valley, themselves named for the tough bulrush that lives there. A half million of the elk once ranged that Central Valley, until they were killed off by market hunters and had their habitat transformed into farmland. The present herd descends from a single remnant group that turned up on a ranch in 1874, after they were thought to have become extinct. There are over five hundred in the Seashore today, one of the largest tule elk herds in the state. They are as handsome as any elk.

Still, I think of that harshness I mentioned in my previous entry; Point Reyes has a severity about it that I find appealing. Parts of it went underwater during the heavy rainstorms that hit the middle of California over the New Year's holiday. Other parts toppled and slid. The San Andreas Fault itself passes through here. One can see it quite clearly on a map; note how the Seashore appears to be breaking off and heading out to sea. It looks that way because it's breaking off and heading out to sea. It sits on a crustal plate that is moving north, while the rest of California is going another direction. Park headquarters sits almost exactly on the fault line. Nearby is a fence that stood here in 1906, when the fault shifted mightily and destroyed San Francisco. The fence split in two and was displaced eighteen feet--that is, eighteen feet of empty ground separate the two halves of the fence that were once joined. The empty ground is the San Andreas Fault.

Later in our spring trip, we tried to go to the lighthouse and were stopped by a blistering wind. We had visions of people blown off the rope ladder, although we actually never got close; the NPS closed the whole area. Later still during that trip, we tried to go to the lighthouse, and were stopped by the worst fog I have seen in a while, waves of it dense enough to remind me that these were airborne waves of water. I wasn't sure where we were when I turned the car around. It is a wet place, wet and salty. As I said last time, anything made of steel is eaten alive. The works of the hand get messed up here, just gnawed away. That, I have lately realized, is one reason I like this place.

We don't usually put it in exactly these words, but a great many people today would like to be "part of nature," or at least feel themselves to be. But in a nation filled to the brim with 21st century comforts, it's hard to feel that way. Furthermore, when our thinking is confined within blocks of time of the size we're used to--weeks, months, years amounting only to decades--we aren't really a "part of nature." The kind of big civil engineering projects that a lot of people regret, like landfills and strip mines, seem absolutely permanent, and whatever natural landscapes those projects replaced seem to have been permanently destroyed. The large-scale changes we make on the face of the planet seem to take us eternally away from the natural, with the untouched parts of the globe only waiting their turn. But that is an illusion. Given ten or twenty million years, the biggest chunk of concrete in the world will dissolve like a sand castle on a beach, will become part of that constant motion of matter and energy that is "nature." When looked at on that time scale, all of the human world is natural, because it is all temporary. Blocks of time that large, however, are beyond the everyday thinking of anyone but a geologist.

Here at Point Reyes, the sense that human things are temporary comes very easily. Here, where much of the natural order is still in place, humanity's grip is, for now, nearly as uncertain as that of the other species that live here. And it isn't awful to contemplate, because usually no one gets hurt. After all, it's only salt.

At the end of our most recent trip, we tried to go to the lighthouse one last time. We went and discovered that the curse had lifted. No fog, no wind, no darkness. No rope ladders, either; instead, we found a nice, safe, exhausting stairway, three-hundred-plus steps leading down the cliff face to the lighthouse. Sea and sky were a vivid blue. Out past the blinding shimmer of sunlight on water was the outline, like a shark's teeth, of the Farallon Islands. We stayed down there for a long time, looking for migrating whales. We failed to find any, but we will try again.