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.
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.
Never mind spooky ghosts and goblins. Far scarier creatures are prowling along the Northern California coast. During Sharktober, a season that extends from September to November, great white sharks, the largest predatory fish on the planet, are on the hunt.
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.
“Have you heard of Frank Zappa?”
Visitors touring the Bodega Marine Laboratory and Reserve often seem surprised by my question. Baby-boomers call out answers: Guitarist. Composer. Had a band called the Mothers of Invention. Named his kids Moon Unit and Dweezle. For those too young to recall, I explain that shaggy-haired, iconoclastic Frank Zappa (1940-1993) released more than sixty albums and rocked the music world in a career that spanned three decades,
The first time I spied newborn Western gulls, I instinctively wanted to scoop the downy, dotted hatchlings up and away from a sea and sky of dangers. I needn’t have worried. Their parents had the job covered.
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.
The streets where I live are named for California birds: Heron, Gull, Swan, Osprey, Loon. When I tell people my address, some ask if I ever see real pelicans on their namesake loop. Indeed I do. From early summer into fall, Brown Pelicans glide over our neighborhood almost every day.
