A Larger World More Precious Than My Own

I sometimes forget the fact that I am a damn lucky boy. I live in a city I love, by the ocean, with friends, with enough money to make ends meet and have a few small pleasures here and there, and with easy access to the Sonoma Coast.

Friday morning I drove to Petaluma, had hot chocolate and a croissant outside, on a deck overlooking the river, then drove west via the Bodega Highway to the Pacific Ocean, and the coast that I have dreamed about since I was a kid. The jagged rock formations, just off shore, that in my dreams protrude from the water like shark dorsal fins. The arches that I saw collapsing in explosions of waves and wind.

I stopped at The Tides restaurant, long since remodeled beyond recognition of the site of a scene in Hitchcock's The Birds. Next door to the restaurant is a dock and a processing facility for fishing boats that trawl the bay and the ocean beyond. Sometimes sea lions are to be found among the pilings, lazily swimming and barking as they look for scraps from the fishermen. This Friday, there was one that must have been foraging at the bottom of the water, for all we saw of him were his flippers, pointing straight up out of the water as if he were waving to the humans at the railing. A little further out, a few of his friends were frolicking in the sun, flinging fish around like frisbees. Another sea lion, golden brown and long, emerged and submerged regularly, cocking his head to the right each time, as if to drain water from his ear.

I drove north lazily, stopping as usual at Duncan's Cove, just to watch the water and listen to the Counting Crows for a while. The water stretching out to the horizon, the surf breaking against the cliffs, the houses perched so precariously on the bluffs. It is a remarkable landscape, vivid and tranquil. It's a cure for the latent selfishness, a vanity or an insecurity, however you want to label it, that sneaks into my heart now and again. It just washes it away and makes me feel like a kid again, ready to play in the sand and the surf again.

At Goat Rock Beach, near the mouth of the Russian River, rope fences try to keep people back fifty yards from the water's edge that serves as a harbor seal nursery from March to July. You see them lined up like fuzzy sandbags, much less graceful on shore than in the water. Pelicans sweep and circle and plummet headfirst into the water, tucking their wings tightly to their flanks.

And today was my lucky day, as I saw something I'd never seen before. A few older seals undulated lazily through the crashing, curling waves, chaperoning a fuzzy pup, whose head kept popping up out of surf that looked much too shallow to contain anything thicker than a starfish. And a little ways down the beach from the swimming lesson, another seal was flolloping around in the foam, mostly on land, flailing a fish around in its mouth.

Days like Friday make me feel at once happy and scared. Given the pseudo-ethical behavior of the Environmental Pillaging Agency and their 'protection' of polar bears--named an endangered species, but with their habitat opened for oil drilling--it makes me wonder how the hell we can be so reckless with a world so beautiful as this. And what the hell can we do to protect it.

I wish I had answers. Here's one place trying to help.

http://www.marinemammalcenter.org