On The Beach

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Now she was half full. I paddled clear of the breakers and bailed out the water. I was wet, but the sun was rising. It would be a beautiful day, clear sky, calm sea. I would dry out.

A sudden blast behind me and a small cloud of vapor caused me to look back. It was Little Orphan Alfie (or was it Annie?), the lonely gray whale. It had been in the cove all summer, left behind in the great migration. A student of whales informed me that Alfie (or Annie) would starve. There was not enough food in that cove to keep it alive. It had lost touch with the great cycle that governed whale behavior. Too bad. Alfie was friendly. He seemed to enjoy coming up close to the kayak and giving me a start.

"Now, Alfie, I love whales in general and you in particular, but don't you think you could play just a wee bit farther off?" After all, the beast was at least 15 feet long and encrusted with barnacles. Suppose it took it into its head to scratch its back on Small Porgy's keel?

Fortunately, Alfie had other things in mind and rolled off, blowing at regular intervals. I let down my jig and started fishing. On the floor of the ocean were hordes of white sea anemones. I could feel their tentacles grabbing at the bait.

A hang-up.

I could tell by the feel of the line that I was held by a sea anemone. There is a rubbery feel about sea anemones. I jiggled the line. The sea anemone failed to release the hook. I pulled more forcibly. Extraordinary that those rubbery creatures could hold on so strongly that the 50-pound test line would break before they would loosen their hold on the rock! But this time the line was stronger than the anemone. I hauled it up, cautiously cut the creature loose, and dropped it back in the water. It would settle back on the rock.

A soft machine capable of repairing itself.

Those soft machines! Once again I marveled at the inventive power of the Old One. To create that enormous variety of soft machines out of carbon compounds and a few mineral salts . . . to make them self-repairing, self-reproducing, and even, in the case of man, self-aware . . . what a feat that was! All the basic mechanisms had been invented quite early-at the time when the ancestors of my sea anemone appeared on the scene-some time in the Cambrian . . . five to six hundred million years ago. Already the Old One had dreamed up muscular contraction, nervous conduction, sexual reproduction, and stinging cells that would paralyze the prey. What a device! The nerve fibers of the sea anemone were not very different from my own: extremely thin tubes filled with a dilute solution of sodium and potassium salts. Imagine trying to build a complex computer with only thin tubes of salt solution to transmit the signals! Out of this early device developed the human brain, which could generate the theory of relativity . . . write the sonnets of Shakespeare and the symphonies of Beethoven . . . design the Gothic cathedrals . . . originate the Gospels, the Sutras, the Upanishads. Not to mention invent and explode an atomic bomb.

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