On Self-Reliance (and other modern myths) / Pt 1: The Sea

In my childhood, it was a constant. Sometimes blue, sometimes green, but mostly brown or gray: the North Pacific. On magical mornings it lay flat as a glittering mirror, stretching out West to the fog bank we called horizon. But most days it maintained a consistent motion, something like the final cycle of your washing machine. In those prelapsarian years before the cell phone towers came, we spent long days combing the wind-blown beaches in blissful ignorance of the latest celebrity scandal or the most recent affront on our personal liberties à la Patriot Act. By day, the rushing sound of ocean water sucked through rolling rocks, by night the howling of sea lions -- the fearful California wolves of the Spanish conquista.

Growing up in a fishing town, our school field trips were on commercial boats, to fish packing plants, and an occasional stop over at the "Egg Taking Station" upstream where the Department of Fish and Game (euphemistically renamed Fish and Wildlife) assured us that -- despite the overfishing -- a sustainable salmon population was well under their control.

Fast forward almost thirty years: the contentious practice of artificially inflating wild salmon populations with hatchery-raised fish is now suspected to have actually contributed to the decline of wild fisheries -- the better-fed, aquarium-raised salmon outcompete their smaller, wild cousins. They grow faster due to injections of nutrients at key stages of their early life, making them a convenient Band-Aid for the commercial fishing industry, but the lack of natural selection in their life-cycles renders many ill-prepared for real life in the open seas. Studies show they are also frequently less fertile than wild salmon, but those who live to maturity still contend with wild populations for territory in the few remaining un-dammed spawning grounds.

[for a brief overview of recent research (2015), check out this article with hyperlinks to more in-depth reports]

California's #history has always been one of excess. From Hollywood to the gold rush to oil fields and sea otter pelts, guerrilla grows (that's illegal marijuana cultivation on someone else's land for those of you who didn't grow up in the Wild West) and mass tourism, we in the Golden State have had a tough-time self-regulating. When you've got too much of a good thing, it's hard to know how much you're going to miss it until it's gone.

Take the red abalone, for example: a particularly poignant case in point for me. On minus tides in my own lifetime, when the sun, moon, and earth aligned in such a way as to suck out the ebbing tide a little further than the norm, these giant mollusks literally covered every rock in the splash zone. As a kid, I'd spend early summer mornings with my dad and several of his friends -- transplants to Mendo from the far-flung Azore Islands -- plucking abalone like fleshy hubcaps from the intertidal pools. For our Portuguese friends, they must have seemed leviathans: enormous versions of the tasty lapas [limpets] of their youth. With the world record shell measuring just shy of 13 inches [33 cm], red abalone seemed to confirm everyone's suspicion that things really were bigger in America. Everyone but me, of course. As the only homegrown member of our #Mendocino fishing gang, I simply took for granted the cornucopia of urchin, abalone, and surf fish we'd haul away.

As a teen, I started free diving for 'abs.' Working summers at the North Coast's legendary NAUI-dive shop, Sub-Surface Progression (the only full-service #scuba shop at the time for hundreds of miles of Northern California's coast), I found the sort of zen I'd later read described so eloquently in the warrior poetry of surf-writers (emphasis on writer) like William Finnegan in his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoires Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

Between the rush and pull of cold Pacific waves, suspended on a revolving surface between breaths of air, there are few things in the world that make you realize your insignificance with more candor than a breath-hold dive into the darkness of the kelp forest. One false calculation of the swell, one seaweed tangled fin, and each casual swim in the big water can quickly be your last.

After hours of lung-crushing agony in 48° F (8.8° C) brine, your bloodless extremities achieve a state of bliss. But it isn't merely the nirvana of an oxygen-starved mind. There is a satisfaction in returning with the hard-won bounty of the #sea. A single 10-inch abalone (anything over is considered trophy-size) can feed both family and friends to bursting. A few frozen in fresh water blocks at the end of abalone season provide unexpected feasts during the winter fast.

Ah, the illusion of that most American of dreams: self-reliance. Ne te quaesiveris extra -- not to seek oneself outside oneself, but to remain, as best we can, self-sustained. It is the fundamental bastion of American thought, the defining principle that drew the world's radicals and outcasts to defy the social order of the Old World to recreate new inequalities in the isolation of a once fecund, 'wild' land. Combining an Emersonian belief in the sanctity of one's limited life experience with the Turner Doctrine professing the transformative potential of 'empty' lands (these hyperlinks are in no way an endorsement of either philosophy, but rather a testament to their enduring presence in modern thought), the dream of a life free from social or environmental responsibility has reached its staggering conclusion on the coasts of a now-(re)settled American West.

Frederick Jackson Turner, that bombastic, late 19th-century champion of Western expansion proclaimed that the:

...perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.

If you bridle at his description of the profound complexity of indigenous American life as "the simplicity of primitive society," know that in the same breath, he also downplays the significance of period debates on the legacy of American slavery as relevant only in regards to its impact on policy-making in the West (and not the moral compass of a burgeoning nation).

And yet, somehow, perhaps not surprisingly, his legacy remains. Whether it be the lax environmental restraints on industrial mining -- from Appalachia to the Colorado Plateau, offshore oil drilling with its obvious environmental impact in the Gulf of Mexico, or fracking and pipeline construction on the Great Plains, America maintains its laissez-faire relationship to the repercussions of its industry. There always seems to be someplace else to go. And in a nation of this sheer geographic area, out of sight really seems to be out of mind.

And yet for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Every movement has its consequence. And whether or not you disavow climate #science, it's difficult to disavow the evidence of your own eyes. The construction of dams and neon cities in the desert has drained away the Colorado River (yes, that same mighty waterway that continues to carve out the Grand Canyon). I've seen the cesspools of salt marsh and empty desert where its waters once merged into the Sea of Cortez. They form a startling conclusion for a harsh region which has nonetheless sustained thousands of years of civil human history.

California's commercial salmon industry, like many of its salmon, is all but dead: much-decried, The World's Largest Salmon BBQ, an annual event in my hometown, is now a #conservation fundraiser supplied with Alaskan fish. And this very year, #California's Department of Fish and Wildlife closed recreational abalone harvesting indefinitely. It comes as no surprise, though it has dealt an almost fatal blow to the fledgling eco- and adventure tourism which has sustained the region's painful (legal) transformation from the lumber and fishing industries.

A portion of the empty (dead) abalone shells observed in a single visit to the beach.

A few years ago, when the first empty abalone shells began washing up on the Mendocino Coast, Nativist locals blamed 'Asian poachers' from 'the City' for harvesting the still-living mollusks underwater with sophisticated smuggling rings (the empty shells collected here are a fraction of the dead abalone littering the seafloor that one can observe on a single scuba dive). Despite their professed love for this Asian delicacy, this mass die-off wasn't the fault of my Bay Area Korean aunts. Nor was it the result of the occasional poachers (local or otherwise) whose capture is much-lauded in the local news. The less-casual observer had long noticed the declining size of adult abalone, their emaciated feet, and the lackluster force with which they've clung to wash rocks in recent years. Those same observers might also have taken note of the disappearing kelp forests which once provided surface markers for scuba divers to the North Coast's maze of underwater reefs.

Where once a thriving underwater ecosystem splashed the rocks in technicolor glory, urchin barrens bloom today. The precise origins of this submarine monoculture lie in a fatal combination of ruptured food chains and rising water temperatures -- the purple urchins' insatiable hunger leaves little life remaining in their wake. They bulldoze through the underwater world. Thriving on an omnivorous diet, they devour plants and animals alike. The more sedentary red abalone survive in their rock crevices, emerging to an empty moonscape where once tall forests of bull kelp stretched up to the fog.

Because, you see, the world's resources are finite, even under the big skies of that 'wild' American West. Overpopulation, urban sprawl, pollution, and yes, even yours and my attempt at self-reliance take their toll. There isn't one simple solution. There isn't just one party to blame. In the end, it's been a sustained failure of communication -- with each self-contained link in our social network believing too much in its own infallible self-sufficiency.

Perhaps it's time for a new history of the American West. A history that begins where the wagon trains ended and the destitution of depleted native villages began. The memories of different, more harmonious models for civilization should not exist in the bastardized place names on Anglophone maps alone: Noyo, Ukiah, Sinkyone, Usal, the Pomo Bluffs.

A more realistic history might read in the tradition of the controversial novelist John Steinbeck: California's Nobel-prize winning (postmigrant) native son. In the movingly semi-autobiographical style which defines so many of his observations on our civilization in the West he describes, in the final chapter of his novella, The Red Pony, a conversation with the grandfather of the tale's protagonist -- a grandfather who might well have been his, yours, or my own:

He goes down and stares off west over the ocean. [...] There's no place to go. There's the ocean to stop you. There's a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them.

Maybe it's time to look back, instead, at where we came.