To me, Jim Sullivan seems a combination of Davy Crockett and David Attenborough: A scientist by training. A landscape designer, newspaper columnist, and college instructor by various career twists. An environmental activist, pleine-aire painter, philosopher, author, and drummer by personal passion. A living legend among the hundreds of tracking students he’s trained.
On a wildflowers hike at the Jenner Headlands Preserve in Northern California, Ranger Jill Adams of the Wildlands Conservancy asks what we expect to find.
“Sex,” a voice calls out. Giggling like school kids, we turn to a small woman in a tan bucket hat and sensible boots. “My father was a botanist,” she explains. “He taught us that when you go into the woods to look for wildflowers in Spring, you’re going to see lots and lots of sex.”
During my Pennsylvania childhood, the seasons paraded through the years in lockstep formation: Spring’s promises and petals. Summer’s lush ripeness. Autumn’s harlequin leaves. Winter’s icy grip. Here on the Northern California coast, the indomitable wind and waves have created seasons of their own: Upwelling (March through July), Relaxation (late summer through October), and Storm (November through February).
When you learn a language, a linguist once told me, you see with new eyes, listen with new ears, speak with a new tongue. In essence, you grow a new brain. As I began my coastal wonderings, waves of words—some entirely new, others familiar but with different meanings—washed over me. I quickly realized that I would need a new vocabulary as well as a new brain.
California’s Route One surfs the rim of the Pacific— swerving, curving, diving into gorges, curling around coves, spiraling up cliffs. Sixty-five miles north of San Francisco the rambling road skids into my town, the incorrigibly funky fishing port of Bodega Bay, immortalized in Hitchcocks’s The Birds.
