Saturday I took an excursion to Año Nuevo State Park to view elephant seals. My Aunt Donna is a volunteer docent; she took us on an after hours tour.
You need an appointment to see the elephants. They run a tight ship there; they have cascading check points, quotas, and communication by walkie talkie. Rangers pace the dunes like covert ops.
I didn’t know what to expect. My vague expectation was that I’d see a few gigantic fat guys lying around in perceived comas. I never knew there would be so much tension. The air was electric. See, the elephants don’t eat at all for the two or three months they’re beached. They come in enormously fat, looking like long stacks of twenty bean bag chairs. Fat, yet totally jacked up on hormones. They’d like to move as little as possible, to conserve energy, but the bulls are strung out on testosterone. So what they do is play a slow, shocking game of chess. They gain strategic outposts then sprawl out like drunks. At first glance it seemed like the valley of the hangover. But then you realize these guys are fully, painfully aware. They’re glaring at eachother out of the corner of their eyes, evaluating the hierarchy, waiting for a security breach to exploit.
When an opening develops, things happen fast. They rise up on their bellies, standing eight feet in the air, and trumpet battle cries. Their cries are incredibly strange; it sounds like a ceramic type of burping, like there’s elaborate plumbing in their throats. It’s a hollow yet explosive bark, with a menacing bass that carries to your center. And when the elephants decide to move, they really move; they move as fast as possible. Elephant bulls surge forth like giant caterpillars. They seem made out of jelly, so jelly bounces, and sand and water fly. They joust and intimidate with pure mass.
So you’re walking through a field of enraged bulls playing some sophisticated strategy game you don’t know the rules to. There are no set paths; it’s up to the docent to choose the proper route through the dunes that won’t result in any casualties. The dunes are carved out and smooth, like they’ve been terraced by steamrollers. Elephant steamrollers, dragging tracks through the sand.
We tiptoed our way through the peripheral dunes to emerge on the overlook above the main elephant valley. Out in the valley sat hundreds of seals barking, screaming, burping. This was where the females were, and the most gigantic males lorded over them. They ran the show, controlled their harems like gang bosses as the smaller, younger men sprawled around the outside, reading the board game, looking for a way in. When one of the bosses judged an interloper had come too close he’d snort with rage and surge forth without any regard for the much smaller female seals or even their new pups.
It was a sea of brandished jaws and blubber and loud, visceral noise. The females’ voices sounded like screams as their babies made impatient requests for seal’s milk (which is something like 50% fat, we learned.) The mothers and young stared at eachother, bared their teeth, breathed on one another, trying to remember who they were. This is how they imprint, form a bond. Apparently if a storm came the babies would wash out to sea and the white sharks would become very happy.
It was totally awe inspiring to witness so much mass, volume, war and sex. Then the sun went down with so much orange it seemed as if it had exploded.
On the way home my Uncle Mike and I stopped in at Tres Amigos for a burrito, but they were remodeling and there was nowhere to sit. So we sat in the car in the parking lot, listening to Led Zeppelin and pouring salsa on our pants.
You can see the rest of the pictures I took here. It was a good day.
