Night, Part II
If the ocean sees you…
When darkness falls, when the sky plays its farthest blues, my pleasure is to walk on past the bright yellow sign ~ END ~ and step off asphalt onto old-fashioned dirt. The place I enter has many names—Ellwood Shores, Goleta Wetlands Preserve, Mathilda Swale, Monarch Grove—as well as many graces
For more than 30 years in Santa Barbara County, these swales, vernal pools, beaches, cypress stands, and untamed fields, have inspired me more than I can sing or say.
North, behind me, the blue jagged heartline of Santa Ynez Mountains. Ravines and cordilleras give way to soft brown foothills unfolding into the valley below, where earth flattens out into cityscape and pavement.
West lies the Monarch Butterfly Reserve where fall through winter, tens of thousands of black and fire-orange butterflies cluster twilight to dawn, layers and layers of wings high in eucalyptus branches. As sunlight touches them they drop into swirling flight. I’ve spent hours lying under these slow-motion blizzards. They will eat nothing during this stop off on their long migration up from Mexico. They are urged by two imperatives—find a mate and rest. Can you do both
East beyond the wind-break trees, lie flat eroded fields and the Ocean Meadows golf range. The owners of the course have agreed to allow a reedy channel of “wetland” to wind through the center of the long greens, interrupted by no more than a few simple wood-plank footbridges. This small branch of a once enormous slough, irrigated with municipal water, helps thirsty Redwing Blackbirds, Great Egrets, Mallards, Marsh Wrens, Yellow-throats, and many others, to survive Southern California drought years.
South, directly in front of me, a rutted dirt path slopes up toward the sea where a stretch of Ellwood seashore is cordoned off for the protection of nesting plovers. From nearly a mile away it shakes you, the boom of surf.
If the ocean, when you are alone at night, speaks to you…
Streetlight and barbeque smoke left behind, I enter the sway of eucalyptus and oak , following the lay of the land into oncoming dark. Moon or no moon, I’m forced to let go of day-brain noise, make my way less by eye, more by tilt and slide, down through lakes of dense cold air, sulphur and mudbrown odors
Combustion engines, television-talk undetectable here, the slightest tick and flutter in bulrush or dockweed—raccoon, opossum, skunk, mouse?—triggers a burst of pure awareness, curiosity, wonder
Walking’s not just tonic for the body, but the spirit too. A steady rolling amble, one leg in front of the other, mind floating free—a slow-dance rhythm that attracts the muses
Little Brown Bats peel off branches into loopy flight. A Barn Owl streaks by less than a foot above me—I whirl and follow with my eye
Somewhere down in the grove where the owl vanishes, a pair of American Kestrels bicker like teenagers. Just off the footpath a Black-tailed Jackrabbit freezes at the sight of me—I freeze too and we play who’s going to disappear first.
At the top of the trail, trees give way to a wide-open mesa, a few sparse fountains of pampas grass, squat bush olive, poison oak. I drink in the sweep of land criss-crossed by animal and human foot-trails, and the sky where Orion’s three-starred belt appears…
…startled by uncanny voices —the whinny of horses?! They turn me in circles, trying to locate the source. Wild, joyful, shaking the darkness. I prick up my ears and listen harder. Mystified. Suddenly those neighing ponies metamorphose into a troupe of comic-opera tenors—falsetto, vibrato, tremolo, swoop…
…and night falls silent around me. A waning moon scuds over my shoulder, a two-legged shadow vibrates from the soles of my boots, ripples over the ground
The mystery-choir breaks up into yaps and yodels—a band of coyotes! I laugh out loud. They really had me going.
Coyotes are feared, even loathed, for their habit of moving into suburban neighborhoods, picking off cats and small dogs for their dinners. To some their cackling yips resemble taunts. Others hear threat or gloat in that night-music. As more and more of their habitat is taken over by human projects, they refuse to go quietly. Instead, like crows and raccoons and a few other hardy species, they’ve figured out how to thrive in our unwelcoming proximity. But long before showing up in suburban fields and devouring pets, Coyote carried the shadow of night and death. Like wolves, their canine cousins, coyotes have been relentlessly hunted, trapped and poisoned since the arrival of Europeans
A field mouse or vole is Coyote’s favorite meal —though like us they are capable of enjoying almost anything, including a little junkfood – a rotting berry, a half-eaten bagel, a snail. As I listen to their morphing chorus, the echoing silence of their departure, a disorienting reversal strikes me. I hear with coyote-ears— a handful of young people coming down from the beach, shouting into cell phones, gossiping through the trees swinging flashlights, blaring rap— and in my bones I know an animal dread
Something similar happened to me another evening, listening to “Borders”, an album by Lila Downs who usually sings in Spanish. Suddenly she switched into West Coast-English, and for a few instants I could actually hear my own native tongue as a foreign language— weird staccato sing-song, incomprehensible rattle
I savor such altering moments that like Ventura’s bi-directional senses—like night itself—reveal the alien inside the familiar
The familiar also hides heartbreak
I cross the mesa to the cliffs overlooking the Pacific and the Channel Islands, and stand among the old California Fan Palms guarding the edge. From yards above the breakers, the tumbling seascape at night is breathtaking. Even those oil platforms floating on inky seawater, rigging strung with lights, resemble fairy boats. But only my eye is fooled. And only for a moment.
“The sea is in almost every culture a realm belonging to the divine because it is absolutely beyond our power to predict or control.”
But not to harm
As I gaze down on the fanning tideline, I know the sea everywhere is groaning with losses—90% of large fish like tuna and cod gone. Three-quarters of kelp forests gone, along with most of the world’s pristine coral reefs. Almost half of all albatross chicks die from a belly-full of plastic trash. Fed by sewage, by chemical-runoff from lawns and farms, the fastest growing ocean-creatures now are the simple, angry forms—pathogenic bacteria, jelly fish, toxic “fireweed” and poisonous blooms of “algae”..
“Off the coast of Sweden each summer, blooms of cyanobacteria turn the Baltic Sea into a stinking, yellow-brown slush that locals call “rhubarb soup.” Dead fish bob in the surf. If people get too close, their eyes burn and they have trouble breathing.” *
I sit and brood a long time on the sea ruffling back and forth below. The ancient Greek philosopher Thales admired water as the mothering element giving rise to all the others because water has the power to exist in all phases at once, the power to turn the wheel of biological existence. Round and round she goes
Here in these salty waves, as far as anyone knows, Life first arose, spread out onto land and flourished—ginkgo, bonobo, pomegranate, honeybee, cougar, snake—until now— when the youngest of all, the ironically self-named homo sapiens, we ourselves, are rapidly, ungratefully, ruining this very sea
A Tibetan Buddhist teacher I know likes to say that when you are Awake, when you are fully present to a place, a being, a world, you don’t get to choose what you experience.
You get to choose how you respond
* from The Impossibility Of Dolphins, William Bryant Logan, in OAK: The Frame Of Civilizatio
** from the LA Times, Pulitzer Prize winning series, Altered Oceans, by Kenneth Weiss
Preview of Night, Part Three: I’ve been roaming fields and foothills alone since I was seven, but my night-studies began in earnest about twelve years ago, when I made a vow to sleep outside one or more nights of every month for an entire calendar year…
©Maia, 2008