Yesterday,
between heavy showers and depressing newsflash from Indonesia, I drove 33 miles up highway 1 to Ana Nuevo State Reserve to look for elephant-seals. Most access ways to the beach had been closed because of the winterstorms, so I stood most of the time glazing and nauseous from the vastness and size of the Pacific. The sea was still but black only scattered dots of gold from the sun trying to break through the clouds queing up for another attack. It almost looked as if the sea said "I`m sorry, I`m ashamed...", but then I remembered that I heard a telltale: That in some parts of Mexico, the locals calls the Pacific for the "sea without memory", and therefore: it would never be ashame, I mean ofcourse it wouldn`t, but the telltale: The precision was sickening, it takes the lives of 125000 people, and then forget about it! And another thing hit me: the title of an Manfred Mann album: The Roaring Silence. This was it. Never had I felt the silence so...righteous, because what can you say? But then again the outcry, the aftermath should be an awakening.
Looking for shelter and a discret place to smoke a cigarette, I found a path leading to the beach. Crossing an abandoned old bridged, once a part of highway one, down some slippery steps, was the beach, and there - behind a dune, a 2 ton elephnat seal. At first I thought it was dead, but it soon started yawning and scracthing it`s belly: so layed back, so out of touch. A creek divided the strip of beach in two. I repaired hole in a dam some boys had been building, using seaweed and debris. I closed the hole. Found some strange looking rocks in the creek. The patterns, the line in the stones looks like somebody dripping paint on them, resembling the Jackson Pollock routines. The elephnatseal, the creek, the dam, the rocks: small things that made sense, a feeble attempt, but...sense: it is so much your own doing, because sometimes the world is just to big to give a shit about you. The forces, the determination. The curse of intelligence, it is none of our doing.