They appear like mirages in the dark of winter, burst into full-throated glory in Spring and fade away with the summer sun. Vernal ponds remind me of Brigadoon, the Scottish village in the classic musical that comes to life for one day every hundred years. The first time I came upon a gleaming pond in a field that had been dry just weeks before, I was as stunned as if a bag-pipe-playing Highlander had suddenly materialized.
I’ve looked at redwoods from both sides now. For decades I lived amid, hiked through and gazed up at northern California’s iconic trees. But it wasn’t until I ziplined to their heights that I realized that they are citizens of sky as well as earth, rooted in soil but soaring into the heavens.
The King Tide comes to conquer. Amid fury, foam and thunderous claps, its forces roar on shore and devour everything in their path. White-fringed waves swirl across jetties, smash against cliffs, engulf beaches, inundate mudflats, pummel piers. The unstoppable invader extends its watery domain so high that it seems to be creating the world anew.
As a little girl watching a Blue Planet video, Madeline Frey dreamed of becoming a scientist and discovering a never-before-known animal.
“I wanted to find what no one else had looked at before,” she recalls, “to study what no one else had.”a nice post-turkey-day surprise.
Frey didn’t expect to identify eleven new species by age 20 — nor did she imagine that they would be slippery, slimy, alien-looking ribbon worms at the Bodega Marine Laboratory and Reserve on the Northern California coast.
Fire up your imagination, and buckle your seat belt. Archaeologist Breck Parkman is sweeping us back 18,000 years to the peak of the last Ice Age.
Deep winter had frozen so much ocean water into glaciers that sea levels dropped by 400 feet. The “California Serengeti,” as Parkman christened it, stretched from Monterey to Mendocino. This vast fertile plain, thatched with grasses and tree-lined streams, “was probably the most spectacular place in the world for wildlife. Think of thousands of animals moving together, living together, feeding together, sometimes feeding on each other. It would have blown our minds.”
Today it sounds almost unimaginable: A 325,000 kilowatt nuclear plant looming upon majestic Bodega Head, within a quarter-mile of the restless San Andreas Fault. An emissions shaft belching steam. Heated water spewing into the Pacific. Electrical cables draped from steel towers along Doran Beach. Six decades ago this seemed the inevitable fate of Bodega Bay, then a remote fishing port with more seabirds than citizens. What stopped PG&E’s plan for an “Atomic Park” was an unlikely band of citizens-turned-activists who became known as the Hole in the Head Gang.
Thirty years ago, on assignment for a national women’s magazine, I visited Bodega Bay for the first time to interview the parents of Nicholas Green, a seven-year-old boy who became an international hero and unofficial patron saint of organ donation.
“Piccolo Nicola” (little Nicholas), as Italians call him, was killed by bandits’ gunfire as his family drove through southern Italy in the autumn of 1994. In their darkest hour, Reginald and Maggie Green donated his organs, saving or transforming the lives of seven Italians.
They were the aquatic beauties of the Northern California coast: ochre sea stars in jewel-bright colors, web-winged bat stars and the spectacular sunflower sea star that reigned as the Beyoncé of the breed. Bigger, brighter, bolder and hungrier than other species, these voracious prowlers could unfurl as many as two dozen arms, rocket across the ocean floor and devour a purple sea urchin in a blink. As an apex predator, the Pycnopodia helianthoides–sometimes dubbed the Death Star– feared none and was feared by all.
“So you’re an ecologist?” a doctoral student on a field trip asks.
“No, I’m not a scientist,” I hastily reply. “I’m just trying to get to know my neighborhood.”
With a patient smile, she informs me that “ecology” comes from the Greek words for “study of” and “home” or “place to live.” By this simple definition, I qualify–as, at the least, an accidental ecologist.
The beach attracts creatures of every sort: two-footed, four-pawed, finned, furry, feathered, scaly, slimy, slithering. With local animal trackers, I’ve trailed rabbits and raccoons, geese and gulls, deer and otters to observe how they “do beach.” But I never thought of looking at humans in the same way.
