Red Tide

Received this from Izzy this evening. I cannot believe my luck to be married to someone who writes this well.

There is a red tide in San Diego. This is my first time to see it, and it only took 2500 miles and 45 hrs. 20 min. of travel to get here.

Some of you know that I was making the trek for my brother's graduation this coming Sunday from UCSD. A few of you even know that I turned the trip into a Iron Butt Association 50CC Quest (coast to coast on a motorcycle in less than 50 hours). This is why, when I left Columbia for San Diego, my first stop was Savannah, GA; I had to start from a coastal city.

I started where I-16 starts (a BP station in downtown Savannah) at just before 4:00 AM on Monday morning. I finished at the first gas station I could find after I ran out of I-8 (a Union 76 at the corner of Rosecrans and Nimitz in San Diego) at 10:15 PM local time on Tuesday night. I had stopped for a seven hour break in west Texas, and then only slept for six hours here before getting up yesterday in a house full of relatives.

There is, of course, my brother's nuclear family of four, including a bright, blonde beach bunny who shed her first name when she shed middle school and became Liz for ninth grade this year. She writes notes to her friends in Tolkein's elvish and is mortified that we're all showing up at her school's annual awards ceremony tomorrow night. The other child in the house is a couple of years younger and much more male. He has an oral report on hemophilia today and then he's done for the summer. We've been doing tricks with ferrous fuids and powerful magnets. My sister-in-law's parents got here a few hours before I did, and yesterday just before noon yesterday, we picked up my mother from the bus station -- she's riding home to Oregon with the other grandparents, who live in Bellingham, WA.

My brother, his wife, their two kids, her parents, my mother, and me -- eight of us in a house made for four, and the four oldest having all just travelled great distances to be here. We've been laughing a lot and telling a lot of stories. Most of them I will not remember. Much of yesterday is lost in a haze of happy fatigue. And most of us were headed to bed early last night when my brother called home.

He was on his way back from his last undergrad final exam (epistemology) when he saw the waves glowing. Red tides aften come with bioluminescence, the breakers creating long curls of vivid green light on a dark ocean surface. Debbie, his wife,
told him that we were all tuckered out and retiring. I had a toothbrush in my mouth. My niece and nephew were gathering their pj's. We all froze when we heard Debbie's side of the conversation. She declined the view. When she hung up, I took the phone and called Dave back. He came back, parked his two-seater for the night, and then four of us piled into the family minivan.

So it was that last night, long after I should have been in bed, I found myself on a dark beach under a clear sky with my brother, my niece, and my nephew, playing with the lights. The same little critters that light up the distant crash and curl wash up onto the beach and are mixed up in the sand and the salt sea. When we step, the sand around our feet lights up in a green flash. When we stomp, a large area around our feet does the same trick, but muted under the sand. Splash, and the water flashes green. Throw a stick or a rock, and the splash shows green spatter in the darkness.

But there are sublter effects, too. Bend over and drag your hand across the sand. There is a quick green streak where your hand moves, but don't look away. Where the green skid was, there are late, individual flashes, like cameras going off in a stadium crowd. And if you then wash the sand off your hands in the incoming waves, the critters cling to your hands and then make hundreds of little greek sparkles all over your palms and fingers for the space of about three seconds.

The four of us walked along in the darkness, tired from school and travel, telling bad jokes, talking about why even numbered Star Trek movies don't suck, and kicking waves while the sea curled green. My nephew, Nathan, who has seen a red tide once before, tells me that the beach is going to start to stink as the magical dinoflagellates begin to die and decay. He doesn't know yet that decay and ruin await us all, and I myself manage to forget for a while in the presence of magical creatures both single-celled and bipedal. We walked a while longer, watching the stars twinkle on our hands while other stars twinkled above. Then we came home and jostled for position in the line for our showers. It's good to be here.

[1] a quick search on red tides and bioluminescence turned up a couple of good links: http://siobiolum.ucsd.edu/Dino_what.html and http://itotd.com/index.alt?ArticleID=249 I'd try to find you an online video clip, but the house is waking up; my mother is talking with her grandson, and I don't want to miss out.