Red Tide

I find myself now, at 30, surrounded by people and things of my choosing, feeling nostalgic for an evening 16 years ago. Perhaps it is not strange, as I stand looking out on a gray sky and a gothic prison, that I think about a beach bonfire. It would have been late summer, when the tourists and the fog were both lifting. In the hills, a dry wind would blow off the oak trees and fields, bringing a smell of warm straw. A neighbor, a girl who seemed, even then, to be anorexic, invited me and drove me in her Turbo Volvo, of which she seemed inordinately proud. I don’t remember her name, but I do remember her telling me that her mother said, “women are like flowers, every time they have sex they loose a petal.” At the beach football player types and their girlfriends, a group I barely knew, drank beer surreptitiously.

Although I had lived on the central coast of California all of my life, I had never seen the waves lit up the way they were that night. It was as if the Milky-Way had fallen into the bay. In small groups the boys stripped to their shorts and dove in the shimmering water, leaving glowing trails. They swam around the point to a cave in the cliff, accessible only through an opening under water. Shivering and boasting, they dried themselves by the fire. Walking at the reflective edge of the sea with the moon reflected dozens of times on the waves, I felt that if I died then, it would be alright.

But now, I can’t help wondering, were even the innocent things we loved poisonous? Bioluminescence is the official word for what I saw that night, and tiny organisms called dinoflagellates cause it. These algae can cause a variety of fish and human ailments, including paralytic shellfish poisoning. Red tides off the California coast have become more common since 1991, when I first saw them, the increase attributed, at least in part, to increased agricultural runoff and warming of the ocean. They have been associated with fish and bird kills, and small outbreaks of seafood caused illness. Although periodic climate variations may have played a part in that year’s bloom, and the glimmering I saw might have been from one of the harmless varieties of the dinoflagellates, more likely that magical night was an early sign of global climate changes to come. And so I think about how easy it is to conflate beauty and “goodness”. I ponder danger, youth, and the limits of aesthetics as I watch the trash-strewn alley, the prison and the gray sky.

[Picture from Wikipedia's artice on Red tide.]