Day 3 Monterey Peninsula

Monday
In the morning I drove to Asilomar State Beach and walked the paths there. This was not a simple operation: it's not like other park-and-walk beaches, but a large and glamorous conference center run by the state park system. Presumably it brings in good money but it's not designed for casual visiting. There are winding roads that swoop and intersect and take one past housing clusters, dining halls, conference buildings and retreats and nooks of all kinds, many with lyrical shorebird, sea creature or wild animal names. There must have been a dozen scattered parking lots, each with a letter name and warnings about who should not park there. I stopped at a reception center to get help and was given brief, cool responses by a receptionist whose main concern was answering the phone in silky tones. She did give me a map of the place and hurriedly scrawled a few circles around the lots I could safely park in.

The first photo I took on this walk was of a posted reminder that mountain lions share this land, too.

Wave your arms over your head and make a lot of noise in the rare event of meeting one. I thought of  my co-worker A and the worries she had about me being out and about "among the wild animals" when I described my trip. "Oh, my dear!" she would say, in her timid, soft voice. [Note to self: next   group text to office - omit this photo!]

As befits a well-tended conference center, the path is boardwalk until you cross Sunset Drive, and then you're on the Asilomar Coastal Trail overlooking rocks and surf. On the boardwalk I met singles, pairs and clumps of people draped with plastic-covered name tags on cords. It reminded me of the Omega Institute. Judging by gestures and eye gaze, conversations seemed not to concern what was all around us. Perhaps they were tangling with weighty matters: business trends; protecting endangered oil companies; making the world safe for Monsanto. No mountain lions showed up.

The truly beautiful rocky shores were a bit further north near Point Pinos, my next stop. There I climbed onto rocks awash with ocean breakers, filming short ragged video clips and enjoying the feel of rocky shapes underfoot. It was a glorious sunny day and the rocks had an organized look, as if layers had been stacked and solidified and then knocked over sideways to lie at angles in the sand. A few centuries of wave action  rounded off their edges. The sea was cobalt, the rocks when wet were dark rich brown, and mottled gray and tan when dried out.

 I sat for a time above tide line, jammed in all crookedy between boulders, thinking I had seen some movement flickering under a rocky overhang. In a few minutes a ground squirrel emerged, spotted me, froze. I stayed. He stayed. He stayed alert. Soon other squirrels appeared here and there to see what was happening in their world. They'd look for a time, then scamper to the next refuge, then emerge again to watch. I watched the closest one and kept watching. He was poised for flight, all senses alert, waiting. Next moment, I saw his body very distinctly ease into a more relaxed crouch. He was still ready, but he'd dialed it back just a bit. Others moved gradually closer but never came all the way up to me. It felt quiet being an element of their world, even right beside the din of waves constantly breaking on the rock piles and sliding sea-ward again.

I went back to the van and drove a short distance north to park at Point Pinos Lighthouse itself. I was there a good hour, touring the lighthouse exhibits and conversing with the docents. This is the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the west coast. Its light has been working since February 1, 1855, keeping shipping away from the hazardous southern entrance to Monterey Bay.

Two women have been lightkeepers here. The first, Charlotte Layton, assumed the post after her husband, the very first keeper, was killed helping the sheriff chase down an outlaw. Charlotte kept the light for 4 more years. Later, and more famously, Mrs. Emily Fish was lightkeeper from 1893 to 1914. There are excerpts from her logbooks posted on the walls of a small observatory nook that overlooks the water and has a desk for writing. It's a sunny, small space. Robert would adore it, loving lighthouses as he does, and so appreciative of quiet places to sit, meditate, study, and read.

Mrs. Emily Fish apparently entertained often: she was known as the Socialite Keeper and with her Chinese house-servant established flower gardens and trees on the bony ground outside the building, carting soil from further inland to provide for the plants. A person cannot now mount the spiral stair all the way to the top where the light is because the current source of light is a blinding 1,000 KW bulb. In the old days, costly whale oil was used and it burned at such a rate that the lightkeeper had to rouse and fill it several times every night.

This must have been quite a life. Mrs. Emily Fish's bedroom is a set piece now, furnished with antiques of her era. The tiny-waisted beaded Victorian dress hanging on the wall looked impossible to get into, let alone move around in, carrying buckets of whale oil in the middle of the night. I asked the docent downstairs about it but all she could say was that it was of the era and that the Socialite Lightkeeper would indeed wear something like it. That waist was so small it made my stomach hurt just to look at it.


The mechanism room in the cellar is a low-ceilinged lair where a very affable, articulate and enthusiastic docent explained how the Fresnel lens works, and for the first time it made sense to me. Prisms bend the light from a relatively weak source, and a large array of the prisms are so positioned as to concentrate all beams into one point, thus sending out one single powerful beam. The pattern of 3 seconds on, 1 second off, is known by all navigators to belong to this light only. Every light in the world has its own code and worldwide, a 24-second pause is observed to help punctuate the bouts of signalling. Codes do change, however: when this light was first set up it was steady on, no blinking. In 1912 an eclipser was added which rotated around the light masking and revealing it in a pattern of 10-seconds on, 20 seconds off. That eclipser was run by a grandfather clock mechanism that kept it regular and timely for the next 28 years until electric lights and switching took over in 1940.

The light is currently operated by the Coast Guard, but the city of Pacific Grove owns the lighthouse and grounds, and a local historical society keeps it up and supplies trained volunteers as docents.

After Pt. Pinos I drove back through Monterey and made a stop to get out and walk along the harbor's edge, taking pictures of an interesting reddish-green succulent shrub with rosettes of recurving pointed leaves edged with shark's teeth. The whole mass can grow to be 7 or 8 feet high. This scrub jay knew exactly when to hop away to keep me from getting a close-up glamor shot of his dress blues:

I still had hopes of finding our long ago sand dunes, so I now went back up the coast toward Fort Ord Dunes State Park. Maybe I'd find the 3 Murie sisters perched there. The sun was on its downward path, bringing out the warm colors as I walked  across an open area toward a range of dunes at the beach. The path is fenced on both sides by serious strong fencing. I don't recall barbed wire, but it looked like tough military stuff. I came upon a cluster of old concrete structures and a sign that explained this was the artillery range when Fort Ord was an active military base. Later I learned that Fort Ord ran some atom bomb simulations to test how well their equipment would hold up under the shock. These were extremely high level explosive devices, claimed to be as fierce as an A-bomb without the radiation. It sounds implausible to me. If we can achieve that much detonation power without the radiation, why go through with developing the atomic bomb and inflicting its unpardonable hell-on-earth trauma on civilians? Oops, trying to apply logic again.

On the path I met a group of teenagers and asked one of them if this path led all the way to the sand dunes. It turned out he spoke only Spanish and we could not make each other understand, so we smiled at our failure and passed on. The fenced corridor finally made a turn toward a gap in the dunes and let me out onto the beach to walk freely down the strand admiring massive gold dunes, and waves, and late afternoon sun.

The sand is quite lovely and back before that wicked ice plant crowded out the native grasses and other plants, it could have been our picnic spot. I'll have to check the photo again to see if the color of the sand gives a clue.

For a while I watched a big hawk perched high on the crest of a dune keeping its vigil over the seascape. I was waiting for it to fly so I could film it in action. I waited and waited, clicking the start button at any flicker of movement. More waiting. Suddenly it lifted off --- and immediately wheeled directly back and out of sight. Gone!

I found more of the sea carrots in a range of shades, from caramelized onions to stewed prunes. On the return I ran across a concrete tunnel with a colorful mural of graffiti-upon-
graffiti messages. My favorite:

Walking back through the fenced-in acres of flattened dunes, the sun was still lower and those ice-plant covered mounds were a glowing pumpkin orange.

 I returned to the Veterans Memorial Park, glad I'd already arranged my night's sleeping place. The day had been long and well-filled. There are only a few more pages of Nella left to enjoy. I must find a bookstore soon.