Mountains and Marshes. David Rains Wallace
then flukes. A pod of gray whales was feeding in the shallows, sucking up bottom mud and straining out copepods and other small animals with the sieve-like baleen in their mouths. Of course, we couldn’t see them doing this, just their tails as they dived and their mouths as they surfaced. Despite their semiconcealment, the gray whales’ pale, mottled bodies had a weighty solidity, surprising in a medium that so far had mostly revealed amorphous jellyfish and kelp. Even the best photographs can’t convey this solidity: it must be seen in the flesh. It impressed the whale watchers so much that they cheered each time one surfaced.
As we passed the whales, something even stranger than lion’s mane jellyfish appeared in front of the boat—a large circular object with one black eye, like a giant, animated tea tray out of Through the Looking Glass. When the prow neared it, the tray brandished stubby fins and upended itself, than shook a stubby tale and swam down out of sight. It was an ocean sunfish, or mola, a several-hundred-pound species that likes to sunbathe lying on its side on the surface. Mike Ezekiel had described it in one of his class essays, but I had assumed something so exotic lived only in the tropics. They come north to California’s coast to eat the abundant jellyfish, although nobody knows how they get much nourishment from the watery coelenterates.
We steered past the island into deeper waters to look for more whales, and we soon found some humpbacks, a more pelagic species. Although larger than the grays, they seemed less substantial, more part of the amorphous marine world. Their dark, slick backs were hard to discern from the shifting swells, and they kept farther from the boat. They soon disappeared, probably diving to find plankton swarms.
A swarm of seabirds rested on the water, a sign of schooling fish, and we headed that way. A herd of California sea lions appeared, also headed for the fish. I hadn’t seen sea lions swimming in a herd since a rowboat excursion when they’d startled me by rearing up out of the water exactly at sunset and barking in unison. Unlike the preoccupied whales, the lions craned their necks to eye us curiously. Some swam under the hull and appeared on the other side. One group hung back timidly, probably juveniles still getting used to things.
The lions departed as we turned back toward the islands, but a pod of black-and-white Dall’s porpoises began to ride the boat’s bow wave. A porpoise would surface just under the rail, glide effortlessly as the wave pulled it along, and then veer off to be replaced by another. “It’s like they’re doing it to be friendly,” someone cried, although to me it seemed more like the daredevil exuberance of skateboarders attaching to cars.
As we approached Southeast Island, a fishy, ammoniac reek and a screeching din filled the air, then clouds of big black kelp flies that somehow managed to swarm around our heads despite the sea wind. The reason for all this soon became visible. Marine birds and mammals covered the island except for the empty buildings of a former lighthouse station. Gulls, murres, and cormorants sprinkled the tan granite like salt and pepper: their winged comings and goings blurred the horizon. When I focused my binoculars on what seemed to be blackish-brown moss on the seaside rocks, it resolved into masses of California sea lions, broken here and there with light brown patches of larger Steller’s sea lions.
A litter of silvery, cylindrical objects covered one cove—basking elephant seals. They were so much larger than the sea lions that they confused my sense of scale. I thought of the first elephant seal I’d seen, a twenty-foot bull protruding from both ends of a willow thicket at Año Nuevo Rookery south of San Francisco like something back-projected in a monster movie. Once considered extinct, elephant seals have taken full advantage of protected rookeries since I first came to California in the late 1960s. Hundreds of bulls now rampage like blubbery buses up and down beaches. Away from rookeries, they live like sperm whales, swimming to mid-ocean and diving a mile deep to feed on abyssal squid and fishes.
The crowded desert islands were exciting, but they dispelled my adolescent fantasies of living on one. I felt no wish to land on the beach where the elephant seals sprawled. They’ve been known to run over unwary visitors. I felt even less wish to penetrate an island interior swarming with kelp flies, maggot-ridden guano, and territorial gulls. Wardens and scientific researchers need protective clothing to walk there.
The island may have been more pleasant during the nineteenth century, when commercial egg hunters and sealers had reduced their breeding populations to a fraction of today’s restored ones. But I liked it the way it was. Thoreau wrote: We need to have some life “pasturing freely where we never wander.” I think we also need to have some life rampaging, shrieking, and stinking freely where we never wander.
It was getting late, and the boat turned back. It had been a perfect August day, with a quiet sea and only a light fog. If we’d come out a few weeks later, when the fall storms had begun, things might have been less serene. Entire boatloads of whale watchers have succumbed to seasickness on blustery days. The islands’ fauna also gets more active, as dozens of limousine-sized great white sharks arrive to feed on the seal population. Whale watchers sometimes see sharks decapitate unlucky seals and fling their bleeding bodies about. A few times, they have seen truck-sized orcas seize unlucky sharks and fling their bleeding bodies about.
I thought I’d seen almost everything for that time of year. As we plowed back into the lion’s mane jellyfish pasture, however, Mike Ezekiel shouted, “A turtle!” A dark, spherical head and part of a ridged carapace protruded from the water a few yards off the bow. It was a leatherback, the largest sea turtle species: this one was at least five feet long. They appear around the Farallones occasionally, probably to graze on jellyfish. Leatherbacks are less confined to tropical waters than other species because their bulk minimizes heat loss.
I was still surprised to see a sea turtle in the chill waters off the Golden Gate. I was equally surprised to see another leatherback fifteen minutes later, long enough to be sure it wasn’t the first. We got close enough to hear it breathing and to see limpets and barnacles on its carapace. Both turtles had orange patches on their heads and pinkish ones on their throats, colors I hadn’t expected, possibly epiphytic organisms like the limpets and barnacles.
The turtles reminded me of one of my favorite childhood books, Time/Life’s The World We Live In. It contains a painting of Mesozoic-era sea life, with plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and mosasaurs swimming in an aquamarine ocean off a mountainous, palm-fringed coast. Those toothy reptiles were thrilling, but what most struck me was an enormous, leathery-shelled turtle swimming under them. It seemed a connection to my world as well as the distantly past one. “Why turtles were selected for survival on land and sea remains one of evolution’s mysteries,” the book said. That was in 1955, but it’s still a mystery. But the fact that some sea turtles nest on desert islands probably contributes to it.
—Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, Winter 1993
Oakland’s Lake Merritt is, oddly enough, the oldest migratory bird refuge in the United States, established by the state in 1870 as a sanctuary for wintering ducks and other waterbirds. This was mainly for the benefit of the nouveau riche residents of mansions that ringed the lake after entrepreneur Samuel Merritt created it by damming a polluted tidal inlet to flush out the sewage. The residents probably liked having ducks to admire at the ends of their lawns: they certainly didn’t want shotguns blasting away at them where their children and dogs were playing. Still, the little lake protected waterfowl during times when hunters thought nothing of killing hundreds a day, and it later played a surprising role in migratory bird science.
Bird migration is one of the great challenges to human understanding. Early records like the Bible mention it, but the “why,” “how,” and “where” of it remained mysteries. Classical Greek philosophers knew more about math and physics. Aristotle thought redstarts, summer migrants in Europe, turned into redbreasts in winter. (Old World redstarts and redbreasts are songbirds that resemble New World bluebirds, although they aren’t blue.) The notion seems fanciful, but it was probably based on observation. Birds molt and change plumage before migrating, and species can be hard to distinguish then. Redstarts and redbreasts look