On The Beach

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All done with minute tubes filled with dilute salt solutions!

The ingenuity of the Old One is truly unbelievable. I had long ago given up trying to explain the mechanisms of evolution. The old neo-Darwinian cliches about natural selection acting on random mutations were so puerile that I could not take them seriously. I was satisfied to be aware that the Old One existed, that it could not be represented in any way, that it was forever beyond my power to understand. One could call it the soul or mind of the biosphere . . . but this explained nothing.

My kayak rocked and rolled on the Pacific swells. In some deeper level of my mind, vaguely erotic images followed one another, like a flock of nymphs chased by satyrs.

Symbols of the Old One.

Had I the wealth and resources of the Gupta kings, I would build on one of those smooth slopes by the Pacific a temple dedicated to the Old One. It would be even more complex than the great temples at Khajuraho and even richer in ornaments. The temple would celebrate the entire dream of the Old One, three billion years of organic evolution. All forms of life would there be represented. Fungi would sprout from the cornices, fantastic orchids from the eaves. There would be beetles and butterflies. There would be trilobites, graptolites, coelacanths, and crocodiles. In forests of cycads and tree ferns would be brontosaurs, allosaurs, tyrannosaurs, and mesosaurs. Pterodactyls would grimace like gargoyles. Sea anemones would link arms with giant squids. Snakes, worms, crinoids, starfish, eels would coil and writhe in undulating heaps. There would be carnivores and herbivores, the hunters and the hunted, horses, mammoths, antelopes, giraffes, anteaters. In the midst of all this teeming life a few naked apes at various stages of evolution would scuttle around... not the lords of creation at all, but simply one more product of the Old One's dream.

Ah, yes, that would be quite a temple, the whole squirming mass held together by endless strands of DNA, the code of life. And to that temple I would invite the young, fresh folk-she and she-to celebrate their nuptials . . . using the energies liberated during sexual union to enhance their awareness of the force that gave them life. Indeed it is true that through sexual union one can come to awareness of the Old One. This was well-known in ancient India . . . where the devadasi-temple girls trained in the arts of love-helped the worshiper attain the proper state through the practice of the sacred maithuna. This greatly shocked the proper British . . . who imagined that God was as uptight about sex as they were.

Once again I was hung up. This time the sea anemone got the better of the struggle. Another jig lost on the bottom. I paddled south to Pinnacle Rock. There were some big fish in its vicinity and fewer sea anemones. On every ridge of the rock stood brown pelicans, prehistoric in appearance, like pterodactyls or gargoyles. They took off awkwardly as my kayak approached. A large fish grabbed the jig, bending my rod, making me suddenly alert. It was an orange rockfish. I could tell that even before I reeled it in. They never put up a fight but came in passive as lumps of lead. Lingcod, on the other hand, fought like tigers. In a kayak one had to land them in one's lap. A large, struggling lingcod heavily armed with dorsal spines could be quite a lapful. But I caught no lingcod, only blue, orange, black, and vermilion rockfish ,. . . and a nice-looking flounder. What was a flounder doing on a rocky reef? One normally catches them on a sandy bottom.

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