Tuesday

The winding drive down 92’s western slope was typically satisfying, the exuberant decline through the winding fertile gap towards Half Moon Bay set me reeling for the low tide, earmarking time later in the day for the nursery that I breathlessly passed along the way.

We plop down immediately on the beach and the boys begin carving into the coarse, wet sand. In the distance, atop the rocks on the outer reef, gray harbor seal pups shimmy up to their enormous basking mothers and settle back down. The surging surf swells back into the ocean, returns seconds later, breaks upon the shining boulders and the seals hoist flippers above the white surf. The boys are building alien spacecraft and reenacting battle. I am sitting crosslegged, smelling a rotting rockfish that I hadn’t yet noticed, which is drying in the noontime sun and it’s close enough to where we are sitting that I can discriminate white swim bladder tangled in other viscera. We have so many bags, we just sat down, the boys are building. There is no sense moving yet, until they stop playing and notice the smell. I put my book down and walk to the upper intertidal pools.

You aren’t supposed to pick up rocks. Beneath rocks, small animals hide during low tide. To pick up a rock undermines their efforts to survive; anything can come along and notice them in this hostile little pool, which is heating up by the minute, already a stressful enough for any small Pacific animal stranded in a small pool, and the salinity is heightening at the same time. It is a small, ragged rock perched in the middle of the very shallow pool.

Still, I pick up the rock. The kids aren’t watching me. Nobody is watching me. I feel like I’m trying to rob a bank in this kind of stealth. I lift the rock gingerly about six inches above the pool. A small crab crouches, freezes. A serpentine fish slinks into the nearest algae frond. I take the half dollar-sized crab and transfer it to a neigboring pool so that it can hide again, and turn to examine the fish.

It’s small, the length of my index finger, the width of a chopstick. It is brown, with a tiny tailfin and a cerebral noggin, eyes set close and undoubtedly fixed on me, perhaps my own eyes. I think it’s pouting. In the dark shadow of the red algae I can barely discern other features, but I know enough; this is a monkeyface eel.

I search for a vacant space and set the rock down, a few inches from where it once stood. By this time, the kids are tossing sand at each other and before I can reach the dispute, Chas is screaming about the sand in his eyes that Ford threw, and Ford is laying a screaming claim on his innocence. Time for lunch.