Fox News... Pigs Fly. Really

Island Fox (Urocyon littoralis)

The Island Fox, weighing in at no more than 5 pounds is the Featherweight Champion of apex predators on the Channel Islands in Southern California.  The islands, including Santa Cruz Island where I recently went camping, rose as volcanoes from the sea 19 to 15 million years ago. In all that time, no larger land predators than Island Foxes have showed up. This could be that heavyweight contenders like grizzly bears have made it from the mainland to the Channel Islands only to die. Until recently, the largest prey out there are mice. Nobody knows for sure how the first foxes got out there but the islands have never been connected to the mainland so it’s probably the case that a pregnant fox made a sea voyage of twenty miles at least and the voyage many tens of thousands of years ago.  The island of Santa Cruz was connected to the neighboring islands of Anacapa and Santa Rosa during the last ice age but never connected to the mainland.  Birds abound on the islands in legion. Marine mammals fill the seas.  The Island Fox has been out there for tens of thousands of years living on small prey like mice, birds, and eggs.  When the Chumash Indians arrived some 10,000 years ago, there wasn’t much change to the life of the Island Fox, though I would guess the fox soon learned to beg for food and steal it too. They are good at both these days.

Our trip out to Santa Cruz Island started out as a clusterfuck that eventually came under control. It was a beautiful trip but first I have to explain the clusterfetch. Growing up I had a friend that used the word clusterfetch. I grew up religious with religious friends. I really did.

Not Delicate Arch. Arch Rock in center. 

Traffic reigns over California thought with an iron fist and that includes a camping trip to an uninhabited island with no roads or vehicles. We went camping on Santa Cruz Island from Tuesday morning to Thursday afternoon. We had to be at the Ventura Harbor at 8AM to check in to a ferry that leaves at 9AM. Without traffic, it’s a 70 minute drive from Long Beach to Ventura and with traffic it can be at least three hours. This meant we could leave Long Beach at 5AM and miss traffic and get to Ventura two hours early or leave at 530 and get to Ventura late, and beg the ferry service to forgive us. The latter would have been easy. The phrase “Traffic was a bitch” is believable.

Traffic is a bitch and not just that morning.  Traffic is always a bitch. We opted to leave at 5AM and pulled into Ventura Harbor at 610 and twiddled our thumbs for hours. Traffic has a way of hijacking our sense of time and space.  In places with heavy traffic, distance is measured in hours, not miles or kilometers, and the “distance” changes radically depending upon traffic. I was told it is three hours from Long Beach to Ventura in heavy traffic and 70 minutes in light traffic but nobody mentioned how many miles it is.  Distance itself is barely relevant in a big city and that is why city folks don’t understand it.  This is more traffic detail than I thought necessary but you need some background because later I plan to present a theory (not hypothesis) about traffic.

Would you exchange your left nut for this?

We borrowed some camping gear and cobbled it together with stuff we brought down on the plane. That wasn’t the problem. Evonne’s sister’s stuff was perfect. Our problem was that we brought WAY too much stuff. The Island Packer’s web page showed people getting on their ferries with ice chests and plastic totes, not back packs. We brought two plastics totes, one large ice chest, two day packs, and a guitar. I don’t have a theory on how our arsenal grew; hypotheses yes, but no theory. I also have a solution that involves listening to my gut from the start. My first response was to bring only the contents of one backpack per person and I should have listened to my instincts.

We went to the grocery store to buy food for a three day trip and we just wandered around plucking stuff off the shelf. The ice chest weighed 49 pounds. Before we walked into Trader Joe’s we should have been shopping specifically for two breakfasts, three lunches, and two dinners. That’s it. it wasn’t just food either that got out of hand either. We had enough clothing for an arctic expedition and/or a trip across the Sahara. You never know what you are going to get in California. Our campsite was a mile from the pier and we made two trips with gear. It would have been three trips to bring the gear but Evonne’s sister Celeste came out with us but only for the day. Celeste helped us our gear. She brought a day pack.

Celeste and Evonne, Santa Cruz Island Campground

Once we settled into camp, all was well. It was actually just fine while we lugged our gear in stages but a bit embarrassing. There was a couple with a baby out there camping and they had less stuff than we did. Admittedly, they told us they did not bring enough.  The weather in the Channel Islands mirrors that in Los Angeles with the exception that you can see the stars and the air doesn’t ever smell like sulfuric acid.

After we got our stuff to camp we went on a hike to the overlook of Potato Harbor with Celeste. The water out there is so much more clear than it is on the mainland twenty miles away. Potato Harbor isn’t much of a harbor as I can’t imagine brining a boat in there, except maybe a kayak. I can’t imagine it as a good harbor even on a good weather day because it’s surrounded by 400 foot cliffs that would make it very difficult to bring goods ashore or load goods from shore. It’s called Potato Harbor though and it’s strikingly beautiful. The north shore of Santa Cruz has more sea caves than anywhere else in the world and some of them are in Potato Harbor. I should get a sea kayak out there some day.  Before going out to Santa Cruz Island, I thought the Channel Islands were like southern California was like before white people arrived. It’s sort of like that in some ways but in other ways it isn’t.

Santa Cruz Island, you can't see the many sea caves in the cliffs

First off, there isn’t anybody living out permanently anymore and people lived there long before white people showed up. There are a few houses tucked behind a hill for Park Service folks but they stay there a week at a time and live in Ventura. There is a visitor’s center out there that isn’t staffed. Plaques in the visitor center tell the story of the ranching history on the island that spans 150 years. The names of the ranchers are written in stone, literally. There are stone tiles on the floor with their names and photos of them astride horses looking regal. The visitor canter contains little to no information on the impact of grazing. They mention feral pigs that ran amok for a century but there is no info about what they did to the landscape. They don’t mention that the ranchers released the pigs and a gadzillion sheep or that those things led to massive erosion. It took the Park Service and the Nature Conservancy decades to kill all the pigs. The pigs nearly wiped out the native oaks by eating acorns. Oak seedlings are surviving now that the pigs are gone. 

Evonne and Celeste near Potato Harbor.

It’s important to document history but an honest telling of history should document the whole story including the island’s ranching history. The rancher dudes, and they are all dudes, trashed the place and got their names written in stone like they did some noble act.  The Chumash Indians first arrived some 10,000 years ago, possibly 2,000 years before Adam and Eve. There is one photo on the wall of the visitor’s center commemorating those millennia. They built huge canoes called Tomols from redwood logs that drifted south and travelled the open sea. Modern Chumash built a replica and paddled it out there back on 2001. I am gobsmacked at their bravery even considering a motor boat followed them. Their ancestors were braver still.

Santa Cruz Island is also not like Los Angeles pre-Spanish conquest because the Channel Islands have never had any large animals. When the Spaniards arrived in Los Angeles, they reported huge herds of elk and grizzly bears. Deer were common and so were mountain lions. Deer, elk, and mountain lions are still common in some mountains of California. Grizzly bears (now extinct) once fished for salmon  (also extinct) in the Los Angeles river.  These days humans in BMWs (Homo pretentiousii) outnumber more interesting wildlife a thousand to one. There are marine mammals all around the Channel Islands but the largest terrestrial mammal native to Santa Cruz Island is the Island Fox. Introduced feral pigs also set into motion changes in the ecological community that almost killed off the Island Fox. The fox population is doing fine now but about thirty years ago they were nearly wiped out by golden eagles. Bald eagles are native to Santa Cruz but they went extinct out there from DDT about fifty years ago. Ball eagles ate primarily fish in nearby waters. Golden eagles came in large numbers when the feral pig population exploded. Golden eagles fed on piglets. Pigs fly though it doesn’t bode well for them. Golden eagles also feed on foxes and for the first time in a hundred thousand years, in the 1990’s it looked like the Island Fox as going to die off.  Finally, the NPS killed off the pigs, relocated the golden eagles, and brought back bald eagles. Apparently, baldies don’t eat foxes and they were the most common eagle on Santa Cruz before the ranchers brought pigs and sheep.

Potato Harbor, Santa Cruz Island

The Island Foxes are cute and sly indeed. They circle your camp while you are eating and they will come up behind you and take your food if you are not careful. The ravens are just as bad. They can undo zippers so you have to wrap packs in tarps so they don’t tear your stuff to bits in search of food. A raven trashed our map of the island and there wasn’t any food in that bag. They just like to wreak havoc. Rock and roll.

The ranchers named the landscape as if their brains were infected by elementary school kids playing pirate. The two piers on Santa Cruz Island are at Scorpion Anchorage and Prisoner’s Harbor. Across the island from Scorpion Anchorage is Smuggler’s Cove. The tallest mountain on the island is Devil’s Peak.

At 330 PM the afternoon ferry arrived and Celeste headed back to the mainland. Evonne and I set up camp and made dinner.  We sat and talked by lantern and I played some guitar. We went to bed early. They don’t allow fires out there and we found that sooner or later, the lantern isn’t a substitute for staring at a fire. The place is a potential tinder box. The following morning, we woke up early because we heard that the SpaceX rocket was going to fly overhead. We didn’t see anything except a beautiful morning. I suspect we got bum info about SpaceX.  We ate breakfast and then went on a hike to Smuggler’s Cove, a beach on the opposite side of the island from Scorpion Anchorage. It’s about a four miles one way. Nobody was on the beach at Smuggler’s. We sat in the sunshine for about and hour and headed back. In the evening, we watched the sunset over the ocean. You can’t get too much of that.

Island Fox, Santa Cruz Island.

The following day we lugged our stuff back to the pier and this time it took THREE trips because Celeste wasn’t there to help us. That is five miles of walking with plastic totes weighing about 40 pounds each. Next time we go anywhere we are going to pare it down. Once we got our stuff to the pier, I went on a trail run that was one of the most scenic runs I have ever done.

We caught the ferry back to the mainland at 330PM. Seas were a little rough and I was having a good time. I like rough seas when in a good boat.  Evonne isn’t a fan of waves but she didn’t get sea sick. We also saw about fifty dolphins. We got back to Ventura Harbor at 5PM and went to a Mexican Restaurant to eat and wait out traffic. The food was good but we didn't wait long enough. We left Ventura at 630 and traffic was clear until we got into Los Angeles. On the 405, we saw no grizzly bears, elk, deer, mountain lions, golden eagles, bald eagles, salmon, or anything else worth seeing. Most of these  species went extinct in Los Angeles ages ago. It's not clear if they were killed off or if they left because they have a better sense of ascetic than most than humans. We were stuck in traffic for two hours and got a great view of the Los Angeles Airport.

Grizzly Bear Fishing.

Taken from internet, not in Los Angeles

I did a rough calculation and figured that at 8PM on a Thursday evening, there were likely a million people stuck in stop and go traffic somewhere along Interstate 405 in the LA area and I gestimate that 999,000 of those people hadn’t once stopped to think about how insane the situation is. It’s not just that many folks' commute robs them of many hours of life every day. To be in traffic you must be constantly on watch to make sure you don’t miss when it stops suddenly or sudden lurches forward. Our primal senses react like we are in danger and our limbic system responds like we are being attacked a sabre toothed tiger or squashed by a mastodon.  Human are monkeys in clothing; we evolved in caves and our health and happiness still live in caves. The part of our brain that conducts reason knows we aren’t being attacked directly but our eyes see objects the size of mastodons headed straight at us at cheetah speed.  Our senses are right until we use mental gymnastics to justify otherwise. The fact that occasionally modern metal mastodons do collide with tragic force reinforces our generalized anxiety that comes from driving the freeway in traffic. The air quality in Los Angeles is bad but it’s much worse on the freeway itself because carbon monoxide hangs around because it’s heavier than air. It’s poisonous when taken in daily. Day in and day out millions drive the freeways and waste their lives and their health to get something they think important. It doesn’t matter if the thing they thought was important is a big house, a pile of electronics, or a chunk of metal and wheels from “World Famous Beverly Hills BMW.”

Anacapa Island as seen from the east end of Santa Cruz Island. 

Anacapa is actually three islands.

Nothing is worth driving in traffic like that every day. It takes a huge amount of groupthink to rationalize subjecting that many people to that much crazy. In addition to the ill effects on ouI have mentioned this to Southern Californians lots of times and they always respond the same. “You get used to it.”  Even the Southern Californians that work near their homes and don’t drive freeways every day say much the same. They defend the insanity and I don’t know why. Maybe they subconsciously sense a need to defend their commuter friends’ insanity. People say freeway drivers develop a system to kill the time like listening to the radio or audio books. The tone is much like a person that lost a limb might speak of the way they cope. You get used to living without an arm. You learn to cope. The difference between losing an arm and taking a job that requires driving the freeway is that nobody would ever willingly cuts off their arm for anything. Certainly not for a BMW. Losing an arm might be better than a daily freeway commute because once your arm is off, you aren’t going get lung cancer or emphysema later in life. Losing your arm sucks but at least there are no hidden health effects from a lost arm.

Selfie on the beach at Smuggler's Cove. 

We would have asked someone to take this but we might have waited for days for someone to show up.

Drowning and the five stages of grief.

Lately I worry that I have the capacity to watch myself drown. I think that most people have that capacity. It’s not that I want to drown or die in any way but that under extreme duress, it’s human nature to accept dying and die. Stories told by my instructor at the Wilderness Survival courses and an account from the local Juneau newspaper suggest that maybe all humans have the capacity to yearn to die under the wrong circumstances. I also wonder about how we react to life and death situations can be a mirror to how we live everyday life.

My wilderness survival instructor told of a man doing a roped crossing of a ravine in the Sierra Nevada. He had clipped into a rope stretched over a ravine and miscalculated the angle of the rope. Due to sag in the rope from his weight, he stopped four feet from the far wall and hung there for two days. He fought to live the whole time. When rescuers arrived, he collapsed and soon died. When he was alone, he was solely responsible for his survival but once the rescuers arrived, he gave up both mentally and physically. We don’t know what was going on in his mind because he didn’t live to tell.

The Juneau Empire carried a story a few years back written by a man that survived a boat accident. This time the guy lived but not by his own choice. This man was at sea and capsized his boat. He tried to climb on top the capsized boat but the boat kept moving. Within minutes, the boat sank and in a very short time he went through all five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. His reckoning of time was off kilter. He said that at times he felt like he was in the water for many hours and other times it felt like minutes. In reality he could not have been in the water for more than 30 minutes. People die of hypothermia in Alaskan waters quickly even on warm summer days. He was only saved by his life jacket and another fishing boat. That’s the part of his story that intrigues me. That and he was a good writer who articulated with humility all that he thought. I tried to find the story with an internet search but couldn't.

Lynn Canal near Juneau with flat seas. 

When presented with a throw-rope, he didn’t want to grab it. He told the other fisherman that he couldn’t grab it even though he could. People can become so cold that their muscles no longer function but that wasn’t his situation. With some coaxing, he finally grabbed the rope. Just minutes earlier he was fighting like a mad cat to climb on top of his sinking skiff but once he resigned himself to death, he didn’t want to fight even with rescue right in front of him.

The five stages of grief are probably an evolutionary benefit. The stages of grief apply to anything in our lives that involve major loss, whether it's a terminal illness, the loss of a loved one, the loss of something philosophically important to you, or the impending loss of your own life or health.  The time frames for going through the five stages can be minutes to years, depending upon the nature of the potential loss. Facing a serious accident, the five stages of grief can happen quickly.  Nothing as universal as this type of behavior comes about by accident. Each stage allows us to cope with a loss situation and that can be comforting at the point of dying. At the genetic level, we are Stone Age monkeys evolved over millions of years in Stone Age conditions. Humans lived in caves for millions of years longer than we have lived in houses and our loves, hates, fears, and dreams reflect that. We cling to our loves ones like our tribe is the only thing standing between us and a sabre toothed tiger. 

During the denial phase, you actually do know that death is possible and likely. They wouldn’t call it denial if there were nothing to deny.  Maybe humans are prone to denial because evolutionarily, denial impairs the tendency to panic. Anger can have a similar evolutionary benefit. Imagine a Stone Age hunter facing a sabre toothed tiger. Panic could kill him. Anger might save his life.  Bargaining can also help the hunter and I am not talking about bargaining with a sabre toothed tiger. Bargaining with god, a goddess, a sacred ancestor, or some other deity can give the person under stress the chance to see a path forward. Depression and acceptance are evolutionarily beneficial because statistically speaking we are rarely lucky enough to have a throw rope and things end badly. Depression and acceptance don’t come around until things gets really bad but they are beneficial evolutionarily to those witnessing the horrible events. If I accept my demise after all I have done, my children might benefit and they carry my genes.  However, in a situation where a "throw rope" comes along, acceptance can turn against us.

Modern life may have made rescue more likely in dire situations, turning evolution's asset into a liability.

It took the Juneau man in a capsized skiff about twenty minutes to go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  Upon seeing rescue his head needed about twenty minutes to reverse the process and accept that he wasn’t going to die that day. After it was all over, he recognized that he was being irrational but he did not recognize irrationality at the time and that is important. Survival sometimes requires making rational decisions “in the moment” and by definition we can’t recognize irrationality in ourselves until after the fact, if ever. If we can see that we are irrational clearly, we aren’t irrational.

Big River Beach, the sea cave is on the far left of the photo and hard to see. 

Big River enters the sea on the right of photo, behind the rocks.

Search and Rescue personnel see this behavior a lot. People get sketched out, at first they fight to survive, but some will eventually fight to die. I don’t know what I would do because I haven’t reached been in a situation where all options seemed gone. I have been close, however.

Several years ago I was surfing in my kayak near Mendocino, California. It’s a fair distance north of San Francisco.  I made some dumb mistakes and I should not have been out there at all. I was alone in a place I wasn’t familiar with. I didn’t take the time to notice important aspects of my surrounding. I didn’t pay attention to the rip current coming off Big River Beach where I was surfing. Big River, the namesake of the beach, was in flood stage from recent rains so the rip current was strong. I didn’t check the marine report to find that swells were in excess of 15 feet and small craft advisories in effect and I didn’t notice a northward drift.  The waves crashing into the cliffs to the north of my beach didn’t concern me because I didn’t realize I was going to be pulled toward them if I had to swim to shore. I went out and caught a wave and thought I was fine because I was a good kayaker and had a good wet suit and a life jacket. Any one of these mistakes would rarely cause a problem by itself but all the mistakes in concert caused a stereo of misfortune. For example, a rip current isn't a huge deal taken solo. Sure, a rip current can carry you out to sea if you try to swim against it but if you swim perpendicular to it, you exit the rip current and can swim to shore. Often there is a complimentary current carrying you toward shore.  In my case the complimentary current carried me toward but shore was a cliff and larege waves were crashing into it with intense force. The life jacket and wetsuit saved my life.

Waves come in sets. Often, there will be six to eight smaller waves followed by six to eight larger waves. So it goes. I went out during the small set but thinking I was in the large set. The waves were six to eight feet tall and that seemed like the large set to me. I caught a wave about seven feet tall and it was a wild ride but I rode it, though not with finesse.   When the large set arrived they were 12-15 feet tall and I sit 18 inches tall in my kayak. When the wave hit I felt like a rag in a washing machine. I was out of my kayak and soon the kayak itself floated away. I swam toward the beach only to notice that I was not going to get to the sandy beach because the current was drifting to the north and into the cliffs at Mendocino. I swam as hard as I could but I worried. I went through the denial phase thinking this was much like other dumps and swims I have made but deep down I knew otherwise. I was unwillingly body surfing toward a cliff, not a sandy beach. The person in denial puts the thought on a on a shelf. The thoughts of doom are still real but suppressed.  I was in a bad situation and I definitely reached the anger phase and the bargaining phase. The anger was at myself.  After about forty minutes of fighting against the rip tide, I had drifted north enough to escape the rip tide and swim to shore but the shore was a cliff north of my beach. I noted a large cave in the cliff and body surfed into the cave. The back end of the cave was out of the water. 

Big River Cave, (from the internet) I haven't been back and didn't have a camera. This photo is low tide. At high tide most of the cave is full of water and you can't tell that you could walk out at low tide.

I lay on the ground at the back of the cave and figured I had never been more exhausted and very glad to be alive. To this day, I still have never been more exhausted. I was in a dead-end cave with the ocean smashing into the entrance.  Yet, I was on land and breathing.  I didn’t have a plan beyond regaining my composure and then looking for a way out of the cave. When I finally gathered my strength a guy from the Coast Guard dropped from the sky. Literally! Somebody saw me bobbing around in the water, called the Coast Guard, and one of them rappelled off the cliff from above and into my cave. The Coast Guard pulled me up the rope and out of the cave and I was fine. I made the news in Mendocino, California.  The Coasty was about five minutes late pulling me out of the water because I was already safe but it was VERY nice to see him. I was safe in the cave but I had not thought of an exit strategy. You can walk out of this cave on sand at low tide but I didn’t know that at the time. I should go back and visit the scene some time and sit in that cave. Later in the day, I recovered my kayak where it washed up on a beach about half a mile north. I still own that kayak.

My kayak in Lynn Canal, Alaska

I never went through the last of the five stages of grief. I went through denial, anger, and did a fair amount of bargaining, but never experienced depression or acceptance.  I started to bargain with God and just felt silly. I quit swimming numerous times and I bargained with myself, making agreements that I might live if I fought harder. I remember thinking, “This is a such beautiful place to die,” and then thinking, “But you can’t fucking die today.” I promised myself that I wasn’t going to waste my days caring about material things and not because I felt the promise would help me to shore but because at that moment it was crystal clear that measuring human value by the metric of possessions is a bullshit metric. The person with the most toys is not the winner. The human race is doomed by our glorification of possessions. I didn’t keep all these promises because I still sometimes lose sight of what is most important. One thinks about a lot of things in a very short period of time during a bargaining phase even if it only lasts twenty minutes.  I prayed to my own Gods. Visions of my wife and children spurred me to keep swimming and that kept me going but eventually you run out of physical strength.

Bargaining is a stage that only carries people so far. I believe now that I was just luckier than the people that finish the five stages of grief and finally accept death. The guy that capsized his skiff near Juneau accepted his own death because he didn’t have a cave to swim to like I did. Juneau is a beautiful place to die. The fact that I never completed the five stages of grief leads me to wonder how would react if I were the guy from the capsized skiff near Juneau that accepted his own death and had to be coaxed to accept his own rescue. I am not sure I would be different. Who among us is immune to human nature?

Somewhere along the Mendocino Coast, 2008. 

Different trip

Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  We don’t have to be in dire situations to pass through the stages of grief. I meet too many people that once had hopes and dreams and now they go to work and go home and watch TV and occasionally drink themselves into a stupor. I know other people that have quit going to work and just sit home and watch TV.  Grief provides a dark twist on the speech by Apostle Paul from Corinthians. “"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." Why the hell would anyone want to put away childish things? Childish things Saint Paul, are some of the best things.  Too many people come to accept that life is functionally over before they even know what it means to live. They have accepted that life is dull and useless but safer and easier if lived vicariously, mostly on television but sometimes through drugs, alcohol and/or cultish behavior. The person with the most toys, wins.  Perhaps they have accepted the final phase of grief already. It’s difficult to get people to grab the throw-rope and make the move necessary to live.

Mendocino Coast, 2008

In most day to day life it’s difficult to know where you are in the rescue scenario. Am I the guy in the water who is refusing to grab the throw-rope or am I the guy trying to save the sap that won’t help save himself? I am not quite sure. 

Mendocino Coast

Your dreams might be different.