my pacific coast muse

Category: intertidal zone (Page 2 of 2)

tidepools

 

anemone01-15

I’m working on a new piece about tide pools, or about whatever it is that tide pools are about. In any case, I need lots of footage of tide pools and of tides, coming and going. Yesterday, the shoot was mainly just dealing with technical issues. I walked along a good stretch of shore at Salt Point, looking for suitable locations and after two hours of being knee deep in the icy Pacific, I was ready to leave. I packed up my gear and stood up to leave… and looked over my shoulder at the next rocky pool behind me. There was an anemone, larger than my head, easily the biggest anemone I’d ever seen. Thinking back to the post about the captive anemone, this must have been an ancient individual. I returned today to spend some time with it. Beautiful.

[wpvideo XEOpvV3c]

aquariums

Salt Point starfish 2013

At the end of  “The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium” the author Bernd Brunner admits to trouble in paradise, and offers this quote from the son of Phillip Henry Gosse,  writing about his father in 1907. Gosse was a popularizer of the aquarium in the mid to late 19th century, and his books and lectures contributed to a craze in home aquariums. This led, of course, to a massive plundering of sea life from seashores around the world. Continue reading

no beginnings

I would start at the beginning but there is no beginning. At least not one that I remember. No, that’s a lie. There are many beginnings, many encounters that all converge. They converge here, in this small rocky cove, where Stockhoff Creek trickles out of a redwood-lined gulch and spills into the Pacific Ocean. But it’s not really about this cove, either. It’s about how this cove becomes a metaphor. This cove becomes a mirror. It becomes a victim, a perpetrator, an arbiter, and an enigma. It becomes a story book, a history book, a graveyard, a cauldron, an inquiry and an appeal. It becomes a paradise.

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