Information Blues.

Beth had some University of Phoenix to get done, so I left her inside the shabby chic cafe to take a walk around Crescent City.

There was a heavy fog and Crescent City smelled salty; the tide was down. A great blue heron was standing hunched at the river mouth. His black cap, frilly adornments and fang gave him the appearance of Señor Dracula. I nodded to him and continued out the fractured path to the bay.

The jetty at Crescent City was constructed by army engineers and contained repeated warnings of unexpected surge. Even on a calm day, you could be washed away. It was a calm day and the beach was crammed with drift wood. A family was playing with three jack russells, trying to get them to jump in the water as the mom accused the dad of drinking too many Heinekens and he agreed. He was wearing a tank top that looked like he hadn’t changed it in a month. I tried not to look.

On the other side of the jetty sat a storybook lighthouse on a tiny island. The island was covered with miniature flowers colored pink and yellow and a wind-shaped Cypress tree. You had to wait until low tide to get there; the driveway was sunk beneath the water.

I walked out the jetty, ignoring the warnings as everybody else was. It was a long ass jetty, constructed for tsunami protection. On the inside it was calm with sea lions trolling and good birds floating. There were loons, long as cadillacs, and a new one, the Harlequin Duck. I wished I could tell my padre about it; had he seen one? It’d be noted in his bird books.

On the outside the sea was rough and men were fishing from the rocks. Pelagic Cormorants were diving, a new cormorant for me; had he seen those too? I wished I knew the answer, so I asked.

Halfway out the jetty I paused next to a pair of teens watching the drifting carcass of an elephant seal. It was rotting in the water, fat turning to jelly. It was stuck on the sheltered side, inside the hook of the jetty, going nowhere.

All the way to the end of the jetty nobody was around. It was a long way to walk. The end had an elbow with a horn to warn ships. The horn sounded twice every minute.

The end of the jetty was barricaded with a random assortment of concrete anchors. Each one was about ten feet tall and had arms and legs like a jack. There were about a hundred of them, piled in a random nest against the rocks. There was teenage graffiti sprayed on concrete, and hefty rusting chains.

I climbed out onto the anchors. Surf was rushing through the cracks, twenty feet below. It seemed apocalyptic, out in the middle of the surging ocean on a haphazard army structure coated with fog. I climbed a few jacks until I was too scared to go any farther, and then, chuckling like a daredevil teen, paused to pee into the water.