Peace be with you, from the beach

With good reason, there was nary a surfer to be seen at the beach today, but as the day unfurled and the barometric pressure rose, the sky just got bluer and bluer and the sea more calm and smooth all the time, and it would have been a perfect day to see whales, but we did not. The sun grew stronger behind the fast-moving clouds, laying shadows on the surface of the water that looked like deep green and steely blue stripes on canvas, which I tried to photograph to no avail. If I could ask for my gift, as the animals did in the T.H. White story I told you the other day, I would ask for the ability to paint the effect of light on the world, like Edward Hopper. Alas, such is not my gift as you know, so we shall have to make do with the photo I have. You can let its sun kiss your face and the color of its sky lighten your heart.

What I did see was an amazingly big object in the surf. It looked like a long bone, black as obsidian and gleaming in the water. Despite an incoming tide, I went in after it, got wet nearly to the waist, and retreived this amazing thing. You can see that it has a curved shape to it, like a rib bone, and you get a sense of how long it is by comparison to my foot. I wouldn't hazard a guess as to what kind of animal it may have come from, as there was an ancient time in which the peninsula of Florida was far wider than it is now, and another time when it was far more narrow, meaning that hundreds of square miles that are now above the water line once belonged to the ocean, and vice versa. The bone fragment is a beautiful thing and creates a sense of connection for me between our humble selves and those of our sister and brother vertebrates who dwelt in the backyard of Mother Ocean long before we did. That sounds serious and respectful, but you would have laughed your head off to see an old fat lady, running into the surf on a chilly day in 30 mile an hour wind gusts, chasing a bone the size of her own forearm. Remember that scene in Bringing Up Baby where Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn are chasing George around the yard, looking for the all-important bone they think he's buried? Rodney kept calling me Mister Bone, but I think he was proud of my perseverance.

There was also a dead sea turtle. It was about 2 feet long from the top of the shell to the back, and perhaps 18 inches wide. Considering the size of the baby turtles that emerge from eggs along this same stretch of beach, which are smaller than the palm of my hand, I would guess this that this was a turtle of some mighty years: perhaps 50 or more. Its back was covered with barnacles. Rodney knows the person who coordinates the sea turtle preservation program for St. Johns County. This being St. Augustine, he used to work with the woman's husband and had their phone number in his phone, so I called. If the turtle had been tagged, the nice husband told me, there would have been a large white X painted on the shell, but there was no such mark. I wondered if this turtle could have started its life before we ever gave their species a thought for preservation, and he said, Yes, that was certainly possible. He was grateful we'd called, and he would let the folks at Guana know so they could collect the body and one hopes, learn whatever it might have to teach them.

And so goes the circle of life at the beautiful beach of Guana. I won't include a recipe tonight but I am making a southwestern chicken and corn chowder. I promise to tell you how to make it, just in case you don't already know. If you already have a perfectly marvelous chowder recipe of your own, let me know. Nothing is nicer on cold February nights, when the sky is clear, the stars are beginning to peep out and the hope of spring is furled tightly as a budding tree, invisible still, but certain as sunrise.

'Tis the season

No, not that season. It's winter, and for another few weeks the camellias will continue to bloom and it will continue to be whale watching season in northern Florida. I mentioned it briefly in a previous blog entry, but it's worthy of a further note, and more detail.

About this time last year, Rodney was working at one of the county's beach access points in the northeast part of our county when he saw what he thought was a car or something equally unlikely rising out of the Atlantic. And then he realized the sound he could hear was air: she was close enough that people on the beach could hear the sound of her blow hole. He thought she might have been a hundred yards off the beach, and she might have been 30 feet long, maybe more. And this is a man who's worked for a living, a man who knows how to fix things and put things together, one of the smartest men I've ever known, a man whose estimates are trustworthy. 30 feet. Imagine that.

Because we spend so much time at our beloved Guana Tolomato Reserve, a state park, and because it has signs posted like the one I've pictured for you, he remembered that there was a number he ought to call, so he did. To his surprise, he got a call later that night. "We've found your whale," the woman on the phone said, "and her name is Arpeggio. She's traveling with a calf, and this is the fourth year we've seen her..." So imagine THAT: out of an entire population consisting of less than 400 individual animals, the most endangered whale species in the world, Rodney had seen a veteran mother, and a new baby. When the whale calving season ended, and all the North Atlantic Right Whales had moved back up to their regular range far to our north, Rodney got a certificate in the mail. He had been one of only a hundred or so people to see and report a whale that year.

The world turned round and round and a year later my friend Louise was at the beach, less than 10 miles from Rodney's spot last year, and called her husband to say she could see 4 whales. She had her binoculars, but they were too far off the beach for her to take pictures of them, and in any case I think she wanted to watch them more than take pictures. It happens that her husband and I are work colleagues, and he mentioned she'd called to say what she'd seen. "Well, have her call," I said, and pulled out the very picture I've given you here to hand over the number. There were a couple of rough patches, work and communication being what they are, but the long and short of it is that Louise did call, and did get her observations to the right people. A short while later, driving toward town, she was able to see the plane circling over the ocean, looking for the whales she'd spotted. And that evening, she got a call: the plane had spotted not only the 4 whales Louise had seen, but 5 more: a total of 9 whales. And when you think about that, those whales represent nearly 5% of the whole living population of these marvelous creatures. It is nearly indescribable, so miraculous does it seem. I have lived on this coast the most part of my life now, and have never seen one, for they could glide by in the night or be under the water when you happen to look, or have wandered far enough from the breaking surf that you could miss them, easily. But they are out there, my loves. They are.