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We had company that week, both Roger and my friend from Canada, Diana, had picked the same week to visit us in California. I took a week off from work and we showed them the sights. Roger and I took the boat on an overnighter on the Bay, sailing up to anchor for the evening in Belvedere, and spending the day exploring Angel Island. Diana preferred to stay in town with my wife and exploit the favorable exchange rate and stock up on clothes and cosmetics. The rest of the time we spent doing the typical San Francisco tourist activities, the Museums, Pier 39, Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, the cable car ride. But we saved the best for last: Point Reyes.

We drove up to Tomales Point, but rather than walk to the end of the Point, we chose instead to follow the little dry creek that starts at the trailhead parking lot and drops downhill to McClure’s Beach. Beaches in Northern California are very different from their counterparts in Florida. To begin with, there are a lot more of them, there is very little development on the coast, and no new construction is allowed at all, so you don’t have to spend hours getting to one and then trying to find a place to park. The only obstacles between US1 and the Pacific are natural, usually the big cliffs that drop precipitously to the water below. In the places where they are accessible on foot, the Golden State has provided parking and picnic tables, and an occasional Porta-Potti. There are plenty of beaches for everyone, and rarely are any of them crowded. It also helps that the water is a chilly 55 Fahrenheit the year round, and the wave action is powerful and dangerous….all the time. One frequently hears of beach strollers being pounded to death and dragged out to sea by “sneaker waves”, never to be heard from again. No one goes in the water except the incredibly fit wet-suited surfers, and even they are occasionally taken by a marauding Great White. In short, it’s not unusual to walk down an hour of beach and see only a half dozen other people, sometimes on horseback!

McClure’s Beach is about a mile of grey sand collected where the cliff face has wandered inland for a few hundred feet. The beach is littered with enormous piles of driftwood, often huge logs washed out to sea from the temperate rain forests further north, only to come to rest here on this desolate bit of coast. There is rock everywhere, stacks and arches, great boulders and, at the lowest tides, a labyrinth of tide pools, crowded with life. Contrary to what one might think, the constant aggressive wave action richly oxygenates the water, and the life-giving gas is kept in solution, along with mineral nutrients upwelling from the offshore abyssal plains and submarine canyons, by the coldness of the sea. The result is a marine flora of startling richness and diversity, much more so than the relatively warm and sterile, oxygen- and nutrient-poor waters of the tropics. At the bottom of the food chain, the endless submarine kelp forests with their associated populations of fish and invertebrates. At the top, this richness supports a megafauna of massive numbers, great schools of pelagic fish and hordes of marine mammals, from the terminally cute sea otters to the great whales. It’s enough to make this Florida boy cry, thinking of the systematic rape of our home coasts by developers and polluters and tourism. Jobs versus environment. Yeah, jobs for busboys and chambermaids and real estate salesmen.

So there are few to share the beach with us at McClure’s, too many rocks for the surfers, not enough tidepools (except at the lowest tides) for the collectors. Our favorite place for that activity was Pebble Beach, in Monterey, that’s right, the one by the golf course, and the State of California gave us as much right to be there as the golfers! McClure’s main attraction was it’s relative isolation, rarely did we have to share it with more than a few others, usually lovers cuddled by their bonfires (yes it’s legal to light them, the sea will always bring more fuel), or city folk treating their dogs to a day of cosmic Frisbie. We found a relatively remote spot, spread our blanket and our picnic supplies, and took a stroll down the beach: sweaters in July, Northern California.

We found a place where the sand was carpeted for a hundred yards with a crinkly chitinous substance that crunched beneath our boots, the shriveled bodies of millions of Velella, the By-the-wind Sailor, a smaller, non-poisonous cousin of the Portuguese Man-of-War. Each creature is self-contained, shaped like a leaf, pointed at both ends, little more than a wisp of protoplasm encased in a stiff, transparent membrane. Only two inches long, it functions like a little sailboat, a triangular scrap of tissue on its dorsal surface catches the wind, the short, bristly tentacles suspended below it act as a keel. The sail on its back is not directly fore-and-aft, but is mounted slightly athwartships, so that the little creature sails not directly to leeward, but slightly upwind. Depending on which way the sail is set, there are two populations of Velella, I guess you could call them port and starboard, determined by whether they are left- or right-handed. The great gyre of wind and current in the northern Pacific selects between the creatures by allowing those appropriately rigged to beat off the lee shores of America and Asia, one tack preferentially favored on one coast, the opposite one on the other. The result is that the Eastern Pacific Velella now all sail on one tack, their Western Pacific brethren sail on the other, in both cases, away from the deadly coasts and into the great mid-ocean basin which is their native habitat. It is one of the many many voices that make up the great fugue that is life on this remarkable planet of ours. Still, there is a sour note in this glorious counterpoint, some freak of wind and wave, some slight variation from statistical norms, has temporarily frustrated this magnificent adaptation and has condemned this great fleet of deep ocean voyagers to ground on McClure’s sands, to be dried by the sun and to be devoured by seabirds and sand fleas.

Near the beached ships of the doomed squadron lies a great mass of tangled kelp, uprooted in some recent storm, now far up the beach and rotting in the sand. The kelp’s great stems, as thick as a child’s arms, and hundreds of feet long, allow the great submarine tree to anchor itself on the deep bottom and still reach the surface, it can root wherever sunlight can reach the seabed. The great hollow stems support the leaves and the floats, small air-filled sacs, elliptical in shape, which help lift the plant and allow it to reach the surface. It is the world’s fastest growing organism, up to ten inches a day. The kelp, along with the plankton, is the base of the food pyramid here, and this was not just a large marine plant, it was a multitude, a community, it’s stems and leaves are encrusted with bryozoans, sponges, tiny molluscs and crustaceans, its tissue riddled with the curlicue varicosities of minute burrowing creatures, tunneling through the cells like termites in a log. It’s holdfast, ripped from the rocky bottom, is a great Gordian knot of tightly wound stems, still encrusted with the mud and clay it had gripped until the last great storm. Also there in that sun-hardened soil are the tiny shellfish and worms that inhabited that remote environment, as strange to us as any weird creature basking in the light of an alien sun half a galaxy away. This entire submarine city is dying now, not just the kelp, but the corals and tunicates and algae that had adapted to living on it. The whole pile rots on the sand, slowly yielding its vital elements and moisture to the earth beneath, a feast for bacteria. I reach down and take one of the floats, a rubbery oval about two inches long, and I slit it open with my knife. Inside, swimming in the thimbleful of water that has collected within, is a tiny crustacean, scarcely a millimeter in length, that has adapted to life in this strange environment. I am sure it is found nowhere else, it is yet another niche colonized by evolution. I wonder if it has some jaw-breaking Latin name, or if I am the first human being to ever notice it.

I sense out of the corner of my eye a gesture from the others; while distracted, they left me to climb a great boulder, the size of a three-story building, that an unusually low tide has allowed them to reach. They are on the top, motioning me to join them, but they do not call out. I scramble up to them, a rather foolhardy enterprise, to risk injury for a view, but when I get there it is well worth the effort and the danger. The boulder is hollow, open at the top like a great volcanic crater. At the bottom is a wide pool of water with direct access to the sea through a cave in the seaward side of the rock, normally hidden but now exposed by the extreme low tide. The pool is large, about big enough so that an automobile could easily fit there, in knee-deep water. But in the center of the pool is a large flat table of rock, just awash, and stretched out there is a sea lion. The great beast lies there, glistening from the sea, resting like a sea-nymph in a bed of Anthopleura Elegantissima, the huge green and purple anemone of the California tidepools. She is a large female, a magnificent creature, all sleek and brown and smooth, the great muscles visible beneath the fur and flesh, an immensely powerful animal, yet somehow sleek and sensual, and thoroughly female. The scene is disturbing in a way, voyeuristic, almost erotic. This is an incredibly beautiful animal in the prime of her life. She turns her graceful head and regards us, she knows she is safe from us, and she feels no need to run or hide, but she rolls ever so slightly so she can see all of us at once, we are close enough to hear her sigh as she exhales. There is a feeling of immense privilege that she has allowed us to stare at her naked body, and we do so silently, for what seems a very long time.