Pescadero Memories

Story & Photos by John Vonderlin

email John (benloudman@sbcglobal.net)

Hi June,

I like to make up names to designate various places and features I encounter in my explorations. Usually it’s a form of shorthand I can use when discussing matters with my traveling companions.

When running through various possibilities of places to visit during a given trip, “the beach just south of the cove we accessed from that parking spot across from the landslide near Pescadero Creek,” is way too cumbersome, especially if three or four similarly obscure, nameless locations are also considered as possibilities.

Usually I try to come up with a name that incorporates some salient feature of the destination, i.e. Abalone Cove, Eyeball Beach, Forbidden Zone or Neptune’s Vomitorium. Keeping this in mind, I’ve decided to call the Acid Beach area “The Seven Sisters,” because of its seven wonderful sea arches.

If you Wikipedia this name you’ll find it has a venerable and diverse tradition. There are “Seven Sisters” in everything from mythology, women’s colleges, mountain ranges, mainline Protestant sects, Baja California surf spots, oil companies, caves on Mars and many many more.

In this case I feel the “Seven Sisters” is a Freudianly appropriate designation for a collection of the seven best arches on the California coast. All within two hundred yards of each other, the arches define and highlight this amazing sheer-cliff-faced stretch of practically unknown and unvisited coast.

Several of them, the double arch of Warm Water Lagoon (WWL) and the two that form a Y-shaped double arch in the cove between Acid Beach and W.W.L., are unique as far as I know.

To fully appreciate this concentration of natural wonders, it’s best to see them up close. But, that’s not always possible, or safe. In a previous posting I shared a photo of the most northerly arch and described how you can reach it, by accessing it from Greyhound Beach, at extremely low tides, and climbing across an obstacle course of slimy rocks.

If the tide isn’t very low, or you don’t like long hikes, you can view it from the bluff top, just off Highway 1.

The promontory this photo was shot from is highly unusual itself. Screened completely from Highway 1 by pine trees, access to it is limited by bushes and a ridiculous growth of poison oak, but this has got to be the best coastal outlaw camping spot I’ve seen.

In fact, there were several sheltered “nests” under the sprawling pine trees, fifty yards from the highway that had been previously used. One even had seven five- gallon bottles of water stored there. Best of all, ocean-ward from the trees, the promontory turns into a kind of front lawn, a large flat area with grass and scattered flowers, instead of bushes. I can’t think why this is so, nor of any other spot on our coast quite like this. But, if I ever become homeless, you’ll know where to find me. This would be my waking view of Greyhound Rock with Ano Nuevo in the distance.

Enjoy. John

I’ve combined many of those remnants with various natural oddities that I consider Natural Wonders to illustrate the dissonance created by the littering that is occurring in some of the most beautiful natural settings I’ve ever encountered, that is along the San Mateo Coast…..John Vonderlin

Neptune’s Body Farm

Story by John Vonderlin (email John: benloudman@sbcglobal.net)

Hi June,

People who are interested in Forensics are usually familiar with “The Body Farm,” a formerly clandestine plot of land at the University of Tennessee, where the decomposition of bodies is studied.

Hundreds of people have volunteered their bodies after death to aid in this study, hoping the knowledge gained can be used in crime-solving, or for other benefits to society. Popular TV shows, like CSI, frequently mention facts garnered from this, and similar areas of study, in the fictional cases their episodes revolve about.

This research is an outgrowth of a branch of study called taphonomy. (taphos…burial, nomos..law) The science of taphonomy’s original interest concerned the forces that lead to and control fossilization. From its introduction to paleontology in 1940, taphonomy has spread its concepts through various other disciplines.

I’m happy to say that includes the science (?) of identifying marine debris remnants, of which I’m one of the few students. As I mentioned earlier, I have a collection of hundreds of golf ball remnants that have been incorporated into “The Silent Procession from the Sunken Cathedral to Neptune’s Vomitorium.”

I’ve combined many of those remnants with various natural oddities that I consider Natural Wonders to illustrate the dissonance created by the littering that is occurring in some of the most beautiful natural settings I’ve ever encountered, that is along the San Mateo Coast.

This appraisal is generated not by homerism, as I live in Santa Clara, but rather by my frequent haunting of the incredibly varied, lightly touched, returning-to-wilderness South Coast that exists south of Half Moon Bay.

Neptune’s Body Farm principles usually work like this. Because I have found so many golf balls in various states of degradation, I’ve been able to identify remnants that look less– and less– like anything normally recognizable as a real golf ball. Because of the broad spectrum of remnants in my collection, the vaguest hint of dimples in a scrunched piece of white plastic, or a small rubber band tip emerging from a twisted bit of shriveled plastic, or just the faint imprint the rubber band winding leaves on the inside of the plastic makes it easy for me to identify what it is I’ve found.

But, it can also work another way. By finding the missing link between the unknown source objects and the unidentified objects in my collection, I can better understand the sequence of decay and identify the connection between both of them.

Here’s the story of my favorite solution to a longstanding mystery in my collection.

I have the “World’s Largest Fishing Line Ball,” (WLFLB), made up of some 3,000 pieces of fishing line knotted together, as well as three more full trash cans of line, still to be cleaned and tied to the WLFLB.

All of those are monofilament line in clear, or shades of light green and blue. I also have a box of monofilament line in a rainbow of colors that I’ll eventually use in some other “artplay.” Finally, there is the box of miscellaneous balls of line. Some of the balls are twine or cord. Some are kite string. Some are fly fishing line. The majority of them are made of some strong synthetic fiber: Nylon? Rayon? Polyester? Or? I’d never been able to figure out what their point source was. It had to be something common, probably from the fishing or crabbing industry, but what?

Well one day I found the “Missing Link” and everything became clear.

Eureka! All those balls of line were from the body plies in tires that had been degraded. After time and tide have ripped the tires to shreds, the virtually immortal synthetic fiber wraps itself in a ball and travels along the near-shore bottom until it is spit out by Neptune’s Vomitorium.

I just wonder if my “101 Tires,” project, which involves photographing, then disposing of tires that are making the same journey, is going to make these no longer mysterious balls of fiber no longer show up.

If so, I’ve got the market cornered.

Enjoy. John

Thank you Wikipedia:

[Body Ply
The body ply is a calendered sheet consisting of one layer of rubber, one layer of reinforcing fabric, and a second layer of rubber. The earliest textile used was cotton; later materials include rayon, nylon, polyester, and Kevlar™. Passenger tires typically have one or two body plies. Body plies give the tire structure strength. Truck tires, off-road tires, and aircraft tires have progressively more plies. The fabric cords are highly flexible but relatively inelastic.

(Image courtesy John Vonderlin)

Definition of wrack

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Hi June,

As I began regularly collecting the marine debris that was spit out by Neptune’s Vomitorium, onto Invisible Beach, I couldn’t help but note that often there would be clusters of certain types of debris. Knowing that moving water frequently does that because of the interactions of the water flow and the object’s density, surface area, and shape, I wasn’t too amazed at first.

After all, the clustering of objects on beaches is perfectly normal.

The typical clustering effect that’s visible on the average beach is characterized by the size of the sediment composing different parts of the beach; fine sand here, a gravel bank of similar-sized pebbles there, or a bed of larger cobbles over there; making you aware of its noisy presence every time a sizeable wave recedes.

Another less common, and slightly more mysterious clustering effect of beach sediment, that you can see occasionally where the waves reach a cliff, a bluff or a dune, manifests itself as black chevrons pointing seaward. These chevrons are usually composed of fine, but heavy particles of magnetite, moved into their characteristic shape by the myriad of forces working in the swash zone. They are called heavy mineral laminae and have been researched quite extensively.

Invisible Beach displays all of those rock related clusters as well as the gravel bed at Neptune’s Vomitorium that contains all the varieties of quartz I have mentioned previously.. But, it also frequently displays clusters of expired critters whose pictures I put into a folder I call, “I See Dead Things.”

The most common dead-things-cluster at Invisible Beach is one most beach walkers are probably familiar with, a great number of mollusk shells of the same type dog-piling together as pictured in the photo at the top of this story.

It also occasionally displays the more tragically poignant clusters of freshly dead sea stars, seemingly saying good-bye to each other as pictured below.

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