Tide Pools
A foggy morning in 1966, in what might be memory, or a dream, or the memory of a dream.
The school activities bus has brought us to Arroyo Burro County Park, where a creek cuts through a gap in the white, chalky coastal cliffs, widening in a stagnant slough near the surf, a pond of lemon-lime color (from the algae), which we are told to stay away from by our teachers.
The Second Grade Field Trip proceeds, out of the parking lot, over the yellow-gray sandstone boulders that line the shore, onto a flat prairie of cold, gray sand. The girls walk in orderly fashion carrying the sample buckets, while the boys drop their shovels and rakes to throw rocks and kelp bulbs at each other.
The tide is fully out, moon-drawn, which is why this day and hour has been selected for the excursion. Half a mile down the beach, the sand vanishes, replaced by orderly rows of jagged rock, looking like the jaws of a shark, angling away from the cliff.
Between each diagonal row of rock is shallow sea water, warming slightly in isolation, trapped there, but only temporarily. By afternoon, the sun will be out and the waves will be breaking right up against the chalky cliff.
I think of my life like a tide pool, the various constituents assembling in a miniature sea: starfish, anemones, fiddler crabs, mussels, mollusks, limpets, chitons, barnacles, empty bivalve shells, kelp strands, driftwood, ocean debris like rope strands and loosened buoys,, and particular to Santa Barbara, globs of oil seepage.
The tide pool and the human genome have much in common. What appears to be random assemblage, is in fact, a subtle, sophisticated ordering of life, how Nature curates disparate elements using ocean currents, the moon’s pull, and lines of sea-worn rock.
Each life is complete unto itself. Our stories exist just below the surface and slightly offshore, those important things revealed when the ocean recedes on a foggy spring morning.
Image © by author: “Low Tide Picasso, Santa Cruz”
This piece will appear in my third collection of essays, “Hear Me Out,” to be independently published in 2024.
