Tashlich

It being a new year, an old friend and I wandered down to the continent’s edge to turn our pockets inside out and throw the missteps of the old year out into the flowing water.

While we were there, we did a little tidepooling.

John Steinbeck’s old friend Ed Ricketts loved the rich intertidal zone, a fertile area of constant turmoil, washed with fresh nutrients at every high tide, left to warm and interact as the water draws back out, creating a steady stream of surplus energy for the next several links in the food chain.

My old friend Susan loves the tidepools, where you can poke sea anemones and watch them squirt.

Different forms of life seem to cling in every crevice here, some hunkering down and hiding in the dry time until the water comes back, others lurking in the water most of the day but darting up onto land for the air they need to survive. Nothing here survives by being all wet or all dry.

All sorts of life blossom and intertwine in this microhabitat, rife with diversity, adaptation, and specialization.

Shorebirds love the band along the coast too, where chum fish school and forage on the tasty nutrients in the shallows.

We saw a couple of different flocks of pelicans swirling over shoals of unseen fish near the shore, diving past each other and splashing often two at a time, feeding as fast as they could drop, surface, and climb back up into the air to dive again.

Much of the abundant life in the intertidal zone is literally neither fish nor fowl, invertebrates of various colors and stripes getting on with life in what modest ways they know.

Having unloaded our misdemeanors from the past year, we headed back to a higher-cultured forage: We heard there was frozen yogurt waiting for us once we got back to the top of the bluffs.

Roadside Distractions

I spent about four hours riding, and about two hours stopped.

I only stopped twice because a hill was fighting back. The rest of my stops were to take pictures, except once when I had to adjust my front derailleur.

I have it on good authority from someone who knows the names of things that this is a California turkey vulture, not to be confused with a turkey buzzard in a pork pie hat. The turkey vulture is one of California’s largest native birds. The bright red face caught my eye as the bird turned. When you spend your mealtimes poking your head into carcasses, you don’t want lots of feathers on your face to catch loose bits.

I was hoping to catch more shots of raptors on the fly, but the few I saw overhead quickly glided away when I stopped and took out my camera. I came upon one big bird getting started on a fresh piece of roadside skunk, but he took off before I could tell whether he was one of these guys or just a big corvid.

One of my goals on this trip was to scout out the roads I’ll be riding in early October. No two hills are quite alike: One has better pavement, another more wind; one climbs in shallow terraces and steep rises, another in a long, slow, steady grind. So it’s good to know what you’re up against. Another goal was to get lots of my picture taking done, so that next time I can ride more or less straight through.

I took all the major hills from the October ride and broke them up into two large chunks, one to ride Saturday and one Sunday.

The next picture is taken from the road just above this tree, looking back down at the spot where I was standing when I took this picture.

I was happy with the hills. Make no mistake: Work is involved here. But the climbs are a rewarding challenge, and I made it over. I’ve got more training to do before I come back ready to take them all in a single day. For now, though, I know that day will be filled with golden vistas and a few screaming downhills.

Fog Rolls Like a Cyclist

I took a short detour to have a look at the fog gathering up on the ocean below me.

If I had followed this road to its end, I would have found myself at Russia’s southernmost outpost in North America, from back in the 1800s.

When you’re over this hill, you don’t plan on coming back up from the other side. You might find yourself building up speed on the way down. The only way out is through.

Return to the Sea

The light was getting better and better for pictures, which meant the sun was going down.

I couldn’t resist stopping for frequent pictures in this great light, especially since I knew I had climbed my last hard hill for the day, but I knew I’d better keep scooting along to get back to my car before daylight ran out.

As I came to the top of the steepest, longest grade of the day, the ocean unfolded in all its magnificence.

Sun Down, Moon Up

As I rode my last downhill mile back to the car, I passed about a hundred tourists standing with cameras poised on the bluffs outside of Jenner, at the mouth of the Russian River, to capture the vision of the sun going down over the scenic rocks scattered off in the water.

I was done riding and had no desire to join them, but the light at that hour is magical, and I stood at the car and froze in time the little things I saw.

In Northern California, the moon has more trouble pushing up through shaggy trees. In Southern California, mostly it goes up between palm trees and very seldom gets entangled.

The Reward Comes at the End

These stones offshore in the fog were incredible; I could have watched them for days if I didn’t have to keep moving. The soundtrack was something from Myst, distant washing waves and an occasional gull’s scree. I shot video too, to try to capture the sound, but it was too subtle for the camera and mostly sounded like a dull hiss, except when cars whoosh by. In three dimensions, the lopsided rhythm of rushing surge and then silence, now over here, now far over there, created an intriguing aural space to go with these looming giant teeth, abstract shapes half shrouded at the outer edge of what can be seen.