How we went to California, Part 3

This is, again, long, and contains a brief appearance by a cat; also a lot of hermit crabs

Friday, August 29 -- Moss Beach

I didn't sleep very well. Toliman was extremely active. I was
much relieved to hear him eating and then very noisily lapping
water, but I could have done without the continual commentary and
the way he was trying to use the entire bathroom to bury the
unsatisfactory litterbox. I sympathized with him a great deal;
I'd have reacted in much the same way to such unexplained human
shenanigans as had been visited on him in the past week or so.

Eric slept very quietly, and I did have the exercise of watching
him do it, a thing like many things that would not be possible
for an unknown amount of time after we said goodbye.

He got up earlier than I did and went off to get coffee. Toliman
had crawled under the covers with us and burrowed to the very
bottom of the bed, and he repeated this tactic after Eric left.
I got a very good hour-and-a-half-nap, after which Eric came back
triumphant with coffee for me, with soy milk, from Peet's. He
has missed a great many things about the Bay Area, and Peet's was
one of them. The coffee was very good. He'd had a fruit bar, a
longtime favorite of his, but while Peet's does have some vegan
scones, they were out by the time he got there.

We agreed to go to Whole Foods and get some basic groceries, our
picnic lunch, and some breakfast for me. Having taken my
medication with one of the many MoJo Bars I had thoughtfully
brought along, I took a shower and got dressed. I balked at
putting on a long-sleeved shirt -- the Minneapolis heat wave and
the brief nightmare of Las Vegas being still very much with me --
but I did take my sweater and my raincoat, as Eric had
recommended I do for the beach; and I put on my hiking boots.
Eric admired them as "very nice light-weight hiking boots," and I
told him the story of going with David's mother and my mother to
the outlet mall somewhere in southern Minnesota, to get them for
our trip to the Lake District in 1994.

We were still fairly discombobulated, and Whole Foods rather
confusing, but we had a fine time wandering about checking out
the prices and availability of various things. We bought food
for our supper -- lovely bright Brussels sprouts, some smallish
sweet potatoes, and after a fair amount of discussion, two sand
dabs, which had the distinction of being both local and the
cheapest fish in the case. We looked with longing at various
other things, shrimp and salmon and mackerel, but were interested
to see how the sand dabs would come out. The helpful person
behind the counter said they should be pan-fried with a coating
of cornmeal or breadcrumbs.

We got olive oil and bread and a head of garlic; and, after much
discussion, a ginger-flavored soy sauce that we believed would
taste lovely on everything we had gotten for dinner: with the
olive oil, it would negate the need for margarine or butter. We
got bread and pasta and soy yoghurt and soy milk and sugar cubes
and some little whole-wheat pies. Mine had roasted tomato and
eggplant in it; I think Eric's had spinach and feta cheese. I
got a barbecued seitan sandwich and a tofu salad sandwich, and we
bought a huge bottle of water (house brand, mostly for the bottle
rather than for the water). I may be confusing this trip to
Whole Foods with a later one to the Whole Foods in Berkeley, but
I think Eric left it to me to buy fruit, and I got an apple and
an orange, since I was uncertain of the ripeness of anything
else. I'm pretty sure it was on the other occasion that we got
the mixed small tomatoes.

We took the groceries home and put the perishables away and our
lunch in a bag, located and placated the cat, stayed long enough
for me to have the roasted-vegetable pie and some soy yoghurt for
breakfast, and set off for Moss Beach.

Eric had shown me on the map where we were going. One of the
reliable nice aspects of the trip (as opposed to lovely
surprises; I don't mean that there were not-nice aspects, because
there were not, only a couple of unlovely surprises having
nothing to do with how Eric and I related to each other) was that
he would always do this, and he would point out natural and
artificial features of the landscape repeatedly, giving me half a
chance of actually remembering them.

So I knew that we were going to take 101, which is more or less
where the hotel was (actually it was on something like Shoreview
Way or Shoreway Drive or Shoredrive View), to Ralston Avenue, and
so over the hills and past the Crystal Springs Reservoir to
Highway 92, which would take us north past Half Moon Bay and on
to Moss Beach.

It was a sunny day when we started out. We lingered over the
young redwoods outside our hotel building, and Eric pointed out
the burl at their bases. I don't remember if he used the tree
book to determine their nature then or the next day, but it was
ultimately determined that these were in fact young redwoods.

We had a small problem with the Ralston Avenue exit, which split
unexpectedly, giving the unwary about half a second to decipher
the signs. We had to go around and try again, in the meantime
pointing out trees and remarking on architecture, what there was
of it; but then we sailed off along Ralston Avenue. On the
horizon were hills. I mostly don't much care for that, but these
were quite beautiful and not terrifically high. Behind them the
sky looked cloudy, as if a front were coming in. "Look at the
fog," said Eric. "See that bank of fog? And the way it sends
fingers in through the low places?" He also identified several
hills and towns for me, but I have forgotten the details. Once
out of Belmont, the road started to climb, and passed between
Upper and Lower Crystal Springs Reservoir. Looking like lakes,
they made me feel somewhat at home.

The roadside ditches and some of the hillsides were scattered
with flowers. As would be the case in Minnesota too at this time
of the year, most of them were yellow, though there was a
smattering of small pink ones I didn't recognize. I didn't
recognize any of them, actually. There was one plant in
particular, a tall one with flat flowerheads in yellow that I
knew I ought to recognize but could not bring to mind. I finally
exclaimed so much about them, and about everything, that when
Eric saw a sign for a "vista" (we'd call it a scenic overlook
here, most likely) he waited to turn left across a line of
traffic, right at the top of the hill, and pulled into the
parking space provided.

It had been a bit warm in the car, but there was a very fresh
breeze blowing up there, and I put my sweater on. We looked
first back towards where we had been, the hills rolling downward
to glimpses of both reservoirs, the latter blue and the former
golden brown with grass or green with trees, and scattered with
yellow flowers here and there. One of the big plants with the
flat yellow flowerheads was there. "Dill!" I said at last. "It
looks like dill! The leaves are wrong, though." We rubbed them
between our fingers and sniffed. Something distinctly herbal and
sharp, but not terribly dill-like. Eric briefly acquiesced in my
identification but remarked not long after, "It smells like
licorice. I think it's wild anise." We never did confirm this
during my stay, but a Google search reveals that wild anise does
indeed look like that, though that name is one given to
Foeniculum vulgare, which is actually Sweet Fennel. It's a food
plant for the larvae of the Anise Swallowtail, an alien, and
profoundly invasive. Like many such plants, it looks very
beautiful in the lands it has conquered.

We were able to look closely at a plant with the pink flowers,
too, which were four-petalled but otherwise vaguely like phlox;
but I hadn't a clue what they were. We crossed the road to look
in the direction we would be going; more hills, and the fog.
When we came back we looked at the huge wind-wracked trees that
lined the road past the parking area, and decided that they were
enormous versions of western red cedar. They were well daubed
with lichen, and actually wet in spots that caught the fog, in
stark contrast to the dusty dryness of the road and ground; and
Eric pointed out a couple of fernlike parasitic plants growing in
the folds of their bark. We admired them greatly.

I thanked him for stopping, and we got back into the car and,
after a longer wait for the traffic to stop appearing with the
swiftness of hallucination from around the bend lower down, we
went on our way again.

It got cloudier and foggier. The fancy car had a nifty little
readout in the middle of the dashboard that provided the
direction in which the car was headed and the outside
temperature. I got my greatest pleasure in this device from
watching the temperature change when we drove out to Antioch a
day or two later, but I also enjoyed on this occasion watching it
drop from the seventies into the sixties as we neared the ocean.

We drove through the town of Half Moon Bay, Eric concentrating on
the actual driving and me swivelling my head between the hills
and the ocean, though the latter was mostly obscured by fog and
could have been just a lake shore. No, wait, I think that I must
have that wrong. I think we came at Moss Beach through a little
town all right, but that we only went home through Half Moon Bay.
I did the swivelling on the way home, I'm pretty sure of that.

I can't remember either if our basic discussion of California
houses happened now, or not until we go to Oakland and Berkeley.
I believe it was the latter. In any case, we followed some signs
for Moss Beach, got slightly turned around because Eric was
relying partly on signage and partly on memories of driving there
from the Bay Area rather than from Belmont, and ended up driving
along some very pretty streets with a mix of small stucco houses
and larger weathered wood ones, all with some kind of garden,
whether a patch of inappropriate lawn or great huge blooming
roses or topiary evergreen or a combination. I don't recall
either whether it was on this occasion or not until Berkeley that
I referred to a particularly lush effusion of bright flowers as
"rioting all over," but Eric picked it up at once, whenever I
first uttered it, and when wishing to call great spills of
flowers to my attention, would say, "Look, there's another riot."

(This is one reason I love him. Sometimes the linguistic
influence goes the other way, too. When we began dating, "fancy"
was not in my vocabulary as an adjective. Early on, when matters
between us became much more romantic and serious than
anticipated, he had said to me, "You are a big fancy love affair,
that's what." I didn't actually know what that meant; later on,
however, he referred to the markings on Toliman's paws as "fancy
socks," and that helped to anchor the meaning. I use the word
myself now; it's nice and useful, if not itself remotely fancy.)

We got ourselves back on track easily enough, and after driving
along a winding road for a bit we pulled into the parking lot of
what was recognizably a state park office, its windows plastered
with posters of various sorts, including tide tables; the larger
area was complete with a separate building housing chemical
toilets. I felt right at home. We had parked facing the ocean,
and Eric pointed it out to me. I thought at first he knew it was
there only by the moving gray and blue light, but realized that
in fact I was seeing a small triangle of it that I had mistaken
for part of the sky.

We walked down the street to the beach. I don't recall if it was
then or later that we were distracted by several trees and
gardens and by a vast stretch of classic orange nasturtiums,
growing exactly like weeds beside the path that led to the cliff
tops.

There was a narrow stretch of sandy beach, somewhat occupied by
people making constructions in the sand, and a great deal of
ocean, when we got there. We scrambled down some steps and over
a narrow stream over which was posted a sign warning that the
water was contaminated with fecal coliform bacteria and not
suitable for swimming, the exact same language you can unhappily
sometimes see at state parks in Minnesota. To this boilerplate
someone had helpfully put an addendum in big black letters that
said something like, "Applies to stream only."

We crossed the stream on some tilted boulders, Eric giving me a
hand since the damn drugs make me a bit dizzy from time to time
and my balance has never been my strong point. We walked down
the beach to avoid the various constructions, most featuring
rocks and feathers more than sand; and went down to the edge of
the waves. I had told Eric that the first time I saw the ocean,
at Brighton Beach, I had walked right into it in the only pair of
shoes I possessed, and thus had ridden the train back to London
with wet shoes and socks, and gone about thereafter with damp
shoes until they finally dried. Those shoes fell apart not long
after I got home from my London seminar, and probably that dip in
salt water had something to do with it.

I told Eric I felt the same impulse, to wade into the ocean. He
advised against it. I admitted that if I had really meant to do
this, I could have brought dry socks. He recommended against it
anyway, saying, "Watch out!" when an extra large wave slapped up
the sand at us.

We admired the ocean for a while, and pointed out sailboats to
one another. What had at first seemed like an undifferentiated
mass of pale bright gray, indistinguishable from the cloudy and
foggy sky, took on hue and nuance. Low waves came in and
gathered themselves and broke in whiteness. Just before they
broke, the horizontal walls they made showed deep green. On the
ocean as a whole occasional bits of blue moved and vanished.
During the whole of our time there, at any given moment a
cormorant or a pelican might fly low over the waves. Sometimes a
line of three would do so.

We finally started trudging along the beach, partly to remove the
continuing temptation on my part to walk into the water. The
sand was scattered with ribbons and bladders of kelp. We reached
a clump of rocks upraised from the surrounding sand. The waves
were washing around it. Eric climbed up on top, but when I
considered following we realized that the tide must be still
coming in. Eric came down again, and we decided to eat some of
our lunch, check the tide tables at the park office, and then
climb the cliff path and explore up there until the tide had gone
out somewhat.

We sat on some hollowed bits of the rock cliff where it met the
sand; this was comfortable enough until one got up and realized
how uneven the rock really was. In the meantime, we ate some of
our food and were accosted by two gulls, the only two we had seen
on the beach thus far. In their behavior they seemed juvenile to
us, but later investigation showed them to be adult Hierman's
gulls. At first there was only one, which sidled closer and
closer and cocked its head at me and looked endearing. Eric had
made some noises earlier about not encouraging them too much
because they could become obnoxious, like the ducks in Gaudy
Night, but near the end of our meal he said mildly, "Oh, give
it some of your sandwich already."

The tossing of bits of sandwich was a wildly exciting business
for the gull, which, though it had been silent before, now began
emitting high-pitched remarks. These attracted the only other
gull on the beach, and they had several spirited encounters. I
had fun distracting the original beneficiary with large pieces so
that I could toss something to the interloper.

We packed up the remains of our lunch. Eric was kindly carrying
the food, since I had the camera, a pleasant role reversal from
hikes with either David or Raphael, though unfortunately my
excursions into photography are not a patch on theirs. We walked
back along the narrow strip of sand, now deserted by all but the
two gulls. The tide was washing at the sand, rock, and feather
constructions. We crossed the stream, trudged up the hill, and
looked at the tide tables. High tide had in fact been around the
time we arrived, and low tide would be around six p.m. Thus
fortified with information, we found the bottom of the path that
led up to the cliffs. We stopped to admire the nasturtiums and
to puzzle over some of the trees and shrubs they grew under.
Then we climbed a very steep slope indeed, well bedizened with
eucalyptus and cypress.

The eucalyptus added a very pleasant smell to the occasion,
masking the scent of dust, and its strewn golden leaves were
pleasant to look at. Once we got to the top, however, I tended
to neglect it in favor of the cypresses, which were immensely old
and had that classic cypress appearance of floating in some ether
that was neither air nor water.

In fact it was foggy air. Gray-green lichen hardly more
substantial than that floated from most of the branches. We
walked out onto a spur of the cliff that had no trees on it and,
oddly, featured a fence carefully containing the sparse grassy
space in the center, while leaving the path to meander around the
edge with no protection at all for people walking on it should
they suddenly feel dizzy. The view was excellent, though. The
sun came out and turned the ocean a completely different set of
colors, blue and green and a far warmer gray with hints of gold.

We went along the cliff edge, now hedged with giant cypresses,
their trunks gray and twisted; Eric pointed out a vivid
orange-red encrustation on one of them, and I wondered if it was
cedar-apple rust. He said there were certainly orchards not far
off. From time to time the line of trees had a gap, and we could
walk closer to the cliff edge, now fenced. Eric had already told
me about pickleweed, or iceplant. It grew mostly on the vertical
faces of the cliff, but its fat pointed green- or red-tipped
leaves spilled over the top as well. Eric said it accumulated
salt in the tips of its leaves; hence its name, from those
intrepid enough to taste it.

Near the far end of the cliff we came quite unexpectedly upon a
neat row of three little palm trees, in front of what looked like
the foundation of a house and the vague remnants of a garden.
They looked very odd indeed with the ghostly eucalyptus trees and
the flat dark planes of the cedars around them. We were getting
hungry again, so we went on past the steps leading down to the
beach, through a gate in the fence and a little way along a
street, in hope of a place to sit; but the street looked
relentlessly and rather grumpily private -- not a remarkable
attitude, I suppose, for property adjacent to a public beach. We
came back through the gate and found a fallen cypress log at the
edge of the slope. It was more comfortable than the rocks. We
ate the rest of our sandwiches and drank our water and looked at
the ocean rushing about below, in bits between the branches of
the trees. We talked about what we had seen and what was still
ahead on the beach. Eric took the opportunity to have a
cigarette.

I think it was just after that that we found the cypress knees.
This was a thing I had read about in books, largely thrillers,
for whatever reason, but a perfectly huge ancient tree did in
fact have them, thick branches that grew horizontally out from
the tree and then bent at a 90-degree angle. We admired them and
the tree. At a number of times, including this one, I had
thought of taking photographs, but the sun had gone in again, and
even when it was out the light was very peculiar if you were a
camera, so I didn't end up taking any photos of the grove on the
clifftop.

We went down the steps, with one or two interesting moments when
the wooden bits had come away from their supports or the supports
had fallen aside, and so back down to the beach. This was now a
tumble of shiny lopsided rocks, covered with seaweed and looking
largely impassable. Eric said he would help me if I needed it.
I was thinking of thrillers again -- possibly most of what I have
read about the ocean has been in mystery novels -- and hoped
nobody would end up with a cracked skull.

In the event, while I did need help getting over some of the
larger rills of retreating seawater, the going was very easy if
you wanted to dawdle, which we always do. I don't know what the
rock was; it was mostly black, though if you looked at the cliff
and the coarse sand and the fine sand, you could see that it had
gold in it as well and also some pink bits.

And so at last we began our afternoon of looking at tidepools.
At first we admired the colors of the rock, and the seaweed that
looked just like grass or sedges, and the green, green moss that
looked just like moss. Then we started to see the snail shells,
pink or yellow or black or mixed. I pointed out one that was
moving very briskly for a snail, and Eric took a closer look at
it and said, "That's a hermit crab." There were a lot of hermit
crabs, all of them in snail shells, including some in tiny, tiny
snail shells the size of my little fingernail. I found them
endlessly interesting and hilarious. They did not move anything
like snails; it wasn't just the speed but, of course, the whole
means of locomotion. It was not always possible to see the crab
well, but even sans that sight you knew what it was doing,
rocketing its shell about like that. They clambered about with
great energy. Later on we saw a few small very fast fish, but
for the most part the hermit crabs were the fastest things
around.

Eric said there should be anemones, and found some still
underwater. We worked gradually back from recognizing those to
recognizing the ones whose water had just been withdrawn, and to
realizing that the sand-encrusted rounds we'd been looking at for
an hour were also anemones. Eric described how they operated,
and I said I'd been just about to say that they looked like
mouths, but now of course knew that that was not merely a
comparison; they were mouths.

So we spent the afternoon and early evening, climbing from rock
to rock, watching different geographies at different scales
unfold beneath our feet as the seawater ran out like rivers
between the rocks and the rocks looked now like rocks inhabited
by creatures the size of one's thumbnail or as big around as
one's wrist, and now like an aerial view of mountains and rivers,
and now like some miniature of one or the other, as we bent and
straightened and called to one another, pointing out the busy
hermit crabs and the moveless anemones. Once or twice we caught
an anemone closing itself up as the water receded -- Eric's idea;
once or twice we saw the small fast fish darting from one shadow
to the next.

Once we looked up at just the right moment and a heron flew
almost in front of us, trailing its fancy feathers, to land not
so very far away and stalk among the tidepools further out. I
got out the binoculars and we took turns looking at it. It
snatched suddenly at a pool and came up with a long wriggling
sinuous thing, perhaps an eel. Whatever it was, it gave the
heron quite some trouble, wrapping itself around the heron's bill
so that the heron jerked and tossed its head. At last the heron
shook its prey free and then caught it again the right way around
in its long bill, and swallowed visibly, and had won. It resumed
its stalk, and we went on peering at tidepools. Later on we were
much closer, but it did not regard us. We saw another bird, a
long-legged brown one with a very long bill, also hunting.

We admitted to becoming chilly, and climbed a little more rapidly
over a number of nearly dry rocks, until we were back where we
had had our picnic. A number of people were out wading in the
lagoon formed by a line of rocks that Eric had pointed out to me
earlier. The rocks were now a bar of islands. We admired the
strewn uprooted kelp, and Eric, picking up a ribbon of it, told
me that the first time he found some, he thought it was trash,
that it must be plastic. He handed me the ribbon, and I could
see why he had been so misled.

We noted with pleasure that a couple of people had a very small
child indeed and were showing her things in the water, and that
several older mobile children were wading and showing things to
one another. I didn't think I'd care to be in the water, but I
liked seeing them. When it came out it could be seen that they
had nifty waterproof shoes for splashing about in tidepools.

We were back near the stream where we had started when Eric said,
"I think that's a seal." We used the binoculars again. It
certainly was a seal, and not the only one. The rocks were fewer
rocks and more seals than seemed reasonable. The seals were
large and spotted with white and well bewhiskered, and looked
briefly quite dead. But then one very slowly raised a flipper
and stretched it out and laid it languidly back upon its belly
again, and another stretched its tail and its head up and then
put them down. We watched for some time, laughing, and got to
see one or two rouse themselves with immense deliberation and
lumber into the water of the lagoon, looking sideways at the
shore out of their large dark eyes.

At last, reluctant but really getting cold by now, we crossed the
stream for the last time and, having stopped to read the
informational board about the harbor seals, walked back to the
car and went away back to our hotel to make dinner.

Pamela