1. Journeys

Dearest Friends and Family,

I have retired my blog, “Under Construction,” because our remodeling project came to its end. My plan was to stop writing when the renovations were done, but several readers asked me to soldier on. A few said they enjoyed finding the occasional diversion in their inbox; others wanted to keep track of Marcia and me (which is a bit creepy, now that I think about it). 

To appease these readers I will start a new blog called “Golden State” — a homage to California and my stage in life. Think of it as a holiday letter broken up into disjointed installments that arrive haphazardly. I will write about what Marcia and I are doing and what is happening to the two of us. But no politics, because that is happening to everyone. 

Let’s get going, as my wife has me in a rush: 

“There are tons of them!” exclaims Marcia, her face fastened to a Facebook feed she has just joined. “Tons of them — just south of the pier, by the Taco Bell. Hurry!”

We are driving to Pacifica, a dozy coastal town between San Francisco and Half Moon Bay, 35 minutes from our home in Berkeley. The whales have arrived, as they do every August. This year large schools of herring and anchovies have lured the Humpbacks unusually close to shore. “Hurry!” implores Marcia.

The Taco Bell Cantina was built right on Pacifica’s beach, at the edge of a cove inside a state park, and this is where Marcia’s Facebook feed is telling us we have to go to see the Humpbacks —right now — although it seems to me that everyone all along the California coastline is reporting whale sightings and Marcia’s feed is probably more useful for finding concentrations of active Facebook users than whales.

The city of Pacifica is home to 38,000 residents. The state park at its southern end attracts surfers from nearby towns, along with the whales that come up from Mexico on their way to Alaska. The coast here was originally inhabited by two Ohlone Indian tribes, and if I were writing for the New Yorker this would be where I would launch into a ten-page digression about the region’s history, beginning on a windy November afternoon in 1769 when Gaspar de Portolà first looked down at San Francisco Bay from Sweeney Ridge to the east. That was the first European sighting of the now-famous bay, the mouth of which had been shrouded by fog and invisible to sea-going Spaniards. You would dutifully read along, telling yourself you are thankful that long-form journalism is still alive, but secretly suffering (as you are now) and aching to skip ahead to the whales, which was where the story was supposed to have been going before you were kidnapped by a long-form journalist. I’m going to save you further agitation and jump forward to the whales myself, since I don’t write for the New Yorker.

They are impressive creatures, these whales. A mature humpback weighs 60,000 pounds. When Marcia exclaimed “there are tons of them” she could be referring to as few as two whales. Or a single humpback, if it is a non-binary whale. 

We purchased two crispy-shell beef tacos and a veggie bowl, and made ourselves comfortable at a wooden picnic table on an outdoor deck behind the cantina. The cove was dripping with whales. Dripping. Every 15 seconds or so one of us would see a blow — a column of spray extending 20 feet into the air. 

Humpbacks display a variety of surface behaviors. I saw two whales breach, propelling their spiraling bodies out of the water before crashing down on their sides. More common were whales slapping their huge pectoral fins on the ocean’s surface or repeatedly smacking their tails against the water. There are a variety of theories about why Humpbacks and other Cetaceans do this (e.g., to play, attract mates, communicate, remove barnacles, blah, blah). When there are more than three theories about why something happens in nature, that means scientists don’t have a clue and amateurs are free to add their own ideas to the theory pile. My hypothesis is that whales slap their tails against the waves when they are laughing at their own jokes. Whales don’t have any knees to slap. They don’t even have legs; it's just vertebral bodies all the way down to the flukes of their tail. When a humpback tells a joke that he enjoys himself, and wants to share his amusement with nearby whales, what other options does he have? 

Most of the whales we were watching were visible for only a few seconds before they disappeared below the surface to eat. The entire California coastline is one long sushi bar for Humpbacks, pretty much the same as it is for Californians. When a whale surfaced, I quickly called out to Marcia to make sure she saw it too. Somehow, my whale didn’t count unless witnessed by Marcia. Married people feel this way about all sorts of experiences. Sharing an event somehow makes it legitimate: “Ugh — this milk went sour. It tastes awful. You taste it, hon. Come over here and taste it. It’s terrible. Taste it.”

When Humpbacks heave their heads above the water’s surface they see us as we stare at them. It’s a two-way thing. I snapped a photo of two surfers a few hundred yards out who were waiting for their wave, but got a whale instead. See below. I wonder what the whale thought as it looked down on the pair, or at me on the shore, holding up my phone. An adult humpback brain weighs 14 pounds; I imagine they can summon complex thoughts:

“That guy on the deck, pointing his phone at me — what is he up to? He’s putting me in his blog, isn’t he? He is going to write something trite, about how I make him seem small, which is kind of obvious, me being a whale and all. Oh no, tell me he isn’t going to make my annual migration a metaphor for his journey through life. Please, not that. Not in the title, for God’s sake. Oh goodness, he did it. This guy is never going to write for the New Yorker, let me tell you. Hey, hon, you’ve got to see this. Swim over here. See that guy on the deck, the one holding up his phone. See him? See him? He’s putting us in his blog. It’s sweet, in a hopeless sort of way.”

And so it is.

— Paul

P.S. — I have posted this and my previous entries on the web, for those of you new to my mailing list and wanting to catch up:

California Daze (2022-3)

Under Construction (2023-4)

Golden State (2024)