A Seal Between The Roads
Seeing a Seal While Driving + Link To a New Article Out
Driving into Marin beside the Larkspur ferry I saw a seal. As I turned slowly up the on-ramp of highway 101 I saw, below me, between the high road over the calm estuary waters, a fully grown harbor seal, some six feet long, just floating. For a brief moment, I was mesmerized by the animal, its large soft body shining in the bright, already hot morning sun as it lazed in the still water, staring up and around at the concrete world that seemed, from my angle, to surround it. The houses beside the water to our right, the highways in front and and behind and beside it, the plantless estuary and this large animal, all converge to make this one brief scene I passed through.
This was two weeks ago, and something about the seal’s idle floating I can’t quite shake. It seemed almost bored. And if not bored, maybe it was alone, lonely even. But, as with most things, perhaps these were my projections. After all, I saw the animal for no more than five seconds. And yet, in those five seconds I created a world for the seal. A world in which it was wrapped by the trappings and demands of an industrialized people, wandering in isolation, the shimmer of the light of the sun on its head and the grey of its fur in contrast with the mucky green of the waters. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the critter, having to, like the rest of us, live with and through this world.
The stories we tell of other things are the stories we tell of ourselves to a degree. What we see in the world, and most importantly how we speak of it, is really a reflection of our own perspective on things. Try as we might to believe we have a solid and objective view of things, how we see the world is through stories, and stories always have a perspective.
The story I often tell of the world to varying degrees, is one that comes back to a simple statement: the world is made up of endless connections, of relationships. Looking for a moment at the seal down below the highway, it is not my separation from the seal that captivates my thoughts, but the very nature that this highway, and the water below it, creates this separation. It is the relationship of the water to the highway that defines our relationship; because this is the place where we pass, two creatures inevitably linked by the road, driving or swimming through it. For generations of humanity, we have brought with us a changed world, from breadfruit seeds to the water held within ships far off oceans into the bay area. This changing of the world that we made as people is often, in my story, the quietly tragic tale of our relationship with the world.
Recently, I wrote a little column that touches on all this muddying, all this connection, for the Bay Area Current on the odd world traveling critter, the lake merritt nudibranchs, and how, through the conquest of industry, they made Oakland their home. Like the seal, this creature’s day to day life is defined because and despite our presence, our impact to the land and the sea. And yet, passing along Lake Merritt, or driving on an overpass, we might meet, for a brief moment, small characters in the story of concrete, engines, and rumbling boats across on turbid waters hundreds of years ago.