WW: Nacre sunset

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: More oyster mushrooms

(Still Pleurotus ostreatus. I've posted on these before, but it never ceases to amaze me how attached this species is to the saltchuck. Rare just a few hundred yards inland, if you can smell the bay, this choice edible isn't just common, it's riotous. Something in the chemical signature of sea air.

The above photo documents just a few feet of downed big leaf trunk that's covered with them. And it's not the only host in this patch of woods, either; if I'd been of a mind, or just greedier, I could have had gallons.

But I only took about five stems, and am busy deciding what to do with them. [Among other things, oyster mushrooms are great breaded and fried, and make a worthy substitute for seafood or chicken in veganised dishes.]

A spring blessing that never gets old.)


Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Big fudo rings

(Here are a few of the largest rings I've collected for making fudos. [Among those not yet deployed, of course.] Most of the malleable washers came off the beach, wrenched from the wreckage of docks and shoreworks cast up by storms over the years. Their condition betrays particular power. Note as well a rare wooden ring.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Fudo City

This is Nicola White, my favourite mudlark. (Yes, I have a favourite mudlark. I also have other mudlarks, who, while not my favourite mudlark, are also brilliant. If you don't have a favourite mudlark, what are you even doing?)

Ordinarily I unspool a mudlark video here and there for a bit of exotic foreign beachcombing. Because the seaweed is always greener on the far side of the planet. And let me tell you, us New Worlders are missing out; what Nicola finds in the Thames – midtown London, mind you – is better than anything I'll find in the North Pacific, ever.

But that's just the inescapable luck of the draw. Consider, for example, that I'd rather not dig clams there. Some things you got, some things you ain't. (Second Noble Truth, with a worldly-dharma chaser.)

But this one drove me mad. I'm talking physical pain. Because this time, my girl Nicola outed me as a bad monk, a self-righteous Buddhist, and a very strange man.

It starts about 1:40 – the video opens at that mark when you click on it – where, if you look carefully at the mud... you'll see a washer.

An old, rusty, well-abused washer.

The sort that makes a first-class fudo.

And boy, does that trigger my greed! You can see it right there. It's within reach. The camera places you right behind the hand. "It's right there! Just right! No, don't pan away!"

But that happens a lot in mudlarking videos. What is less common, happens next.

Another one. Just as good and just as near.

Then another. And another.

I counted at least half a dozen before Nicola wandered on, for a total of about a minute and a half of torment. And God knows how many other rings lie just out of frame.

Needless to say, she walks right past all of them. Because she's after, like, actual stuff. Interesting stuff. Thought-provoking stuff she can use in her artwork. (That's what Nicola is: an artist.)

So she doesn't need a pack of rusty washers.

She's probably got enough of those to hold the duration.

But if you're a fudo maker, that dreggy hardware shines, if only metaphorically, right off the gloomy muck. (Looking remarkably like ours, come to that. Amazing how similar the UK is to the North Coast.)

I'm telling you, that's powerful iron. Those guys contain enough disdain for suffering, each one, to make Mara incontinent for days.*

And I could reach out and take them, if my arms were 5,000 miles longer.

You're killing me here, Nicola.

*MaraisnotrealpleasedonotascribesufferingoreviltoasupernaturalbeingcalledMaraMaraisjustallegoryfordelusionformoreinformationpleasesitzazen.

WW: Sunset over the North Pacific

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Sea anemone eating a crab

(The anenome [suspect Urticina columbiana] is about the size of a teacup; the crab is Hemigrapsus oregonensis, the green shore crab.

Beach crabs are seldom swallowed by anemones; on the contrary, when below the waterline, these crabs often rest in the middle of an open anemone's tentacles for long periods. I suspect this bravado is down to the fact that they're hard as porcelain and quite intractable when challenged, which is why they have very few predators. So I have no idea what the story is here. This one was still perfectly healthy despite being half-gobbed, yet not trying in the least to escape. Perhaps he burrowed into the cnidarian deliberately, though to what end I've no better idea.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Giant acorn barnacle

(Balanus nubilus. Found it on the tideline after a heavy storm. It was delicious.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Kites

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Does A Starfish Have Buddha-Nature?

I had the good fortune to be raised on the coast, and have spent a good deal of my life beside, on, and in the sea. The incredible diversity of the marine environment has always fascinated me; I never tire of turning over stones and gazing into tide pools, every one full of intriguing creatures.

But what has captivated me most from toddlerhood are the lowest phyla. And of these, my decided favourite are the echinoderms. I love sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and sand dollars, but most especially starfish, in all their myriad extraterrestrial forms.

At the risk of bathos, I believe they were my first Zen teachers.

Because starfish, like other faceless marine invertebrates, have no brain. Yet they get on just fine.

They move about, eat, reproduce, and apparently enjoy a typical animal lifestyle, all without hearing, seeing, or thinking.

Still, they have to experience their habitat on some level. They're highly active, constantly touching everything with thousands of tiny restless feet. They know light from dark, warm from cold, wet from dry. When I pried one from a piling and lifted it out of the water, it clearly knew something was up, demonstrating behaviours my species associates with animation and alarm.

But they were obviously incapable of grasping my nature. Those little translucent fingers must've telegraphed something, but the creature clearly had no idea what I looked like; the whole notion of visual appearance is foreign to organisms without sight. Or sound, so there goes that dimension, too.

Raised into the air and sun, every marine thing suddenly out of tactile contact, it had to be completely bewildered; a simple displacement of a few feet having brought this limited being into a world so strange it literally had no idea how to proceed.

I used to think about this as a kid: that starfish, wholly competent and to all appearances supremely confident in their intended environment, were probably certain that everything in existence could be known by their tube feet and rudimentary photosensors. Growing older, meeting many more sea stars, it also occurred to me that "what can be known" to starfish must in places exceed "what can be known" by humans; their radically different neural network can't just fail to catalogue information that ours can; in some domains, it must also catalogue information ours can't.

Jump ahead several decades, and I've now tried and failed to read marine biology at university (chemistry is one of the types of information that my neural net does not catalogue), to splash at length into the sea of Zen.

Where I'm reminded of starfish.

Because Zenners talk about perception a lot. And the lack of it. And the lack of perceiving our lack of perception. And the perception that we're perceiving perceptions that we can't perceive we can't perceive.

And then perceiving that.

Without perceiving it.

All of which I suspect starfish are too insightful to piddle with.

But my species is dead certain that we can perceive everything that can be perceived. With our so-so eyes, our so-so ears, and especially, our magnificent climax-community brain.

It isn't belief. It's knowledge.

I run into it all the time. Near-death experience people. Atheists. Certainty addicts of one cant or the other. And those annoying "scientific mindset" people who can't even perceive science, let alone everything.

We are chronically, incurably ignorant of giant swathes of existence. Whole dimensions. Entire phenomena that we don't simply not see or feel, but indeed that our brains, constructed for seeing and feeling, can't even picture. The very existence of these characteristics of reality, we will never grasp.

Because we're starfish.

And I think if a human can grasp that, there's hope for that human.

Besides, now Pisaster ochraceus, the purple sea star of my own North Pacific, apparently hunts in packs.

You read that right. These echinoderms band together like wolves and pitch epic raids against terrified prey.

This fact was only recently discovered by the planet's most advanced species, by an amateur diver no less, who noticed something quizzical in footage he'd taken of a P. ochraceus colony off the coast of Oregon. Curious, he sped up the film, then watched in horror as a brainless swarm of purple and orange sci-fi monsters zoomed at great speed over the rocks and sand, implacably herding and finally engulfing their presumably screaming quarry under a heap of flailing rays and gnashing centre discs.

Starfish are not intellectually equipped to do that.

But these did.

WW: Hill in fog

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Autumn moon

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: November on the North Pacific

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Baby barn swallow

(I was climbing down to the beach the other day and happened on this little guy [Hirundo rustica] in the tall grass, newly kicked/fallen out of a nest in the eaves of an old boathouse. His hovering parents became hysterical at my approach, but as you can see, the kid himself was game [or naïve] enough to meet me head-on.)

WW: Sand lance

(Ammodytes personatus. For some reason they often turn up dead or dying on the tidelands.)

WW: Green sea anemones

(Anthopleura xanthogrammica. With support from elegantissima.)

WW: Navigation light

(This is a ship's larboard navigation light. When they change them the crews tend to drop the dead one overboard, so we often find them washed up. They're actually quite striking amidst all the grey. This one's about the size of an overripe summer squash.)

WW: Six-legged seastar

(This is good old Henricia leviuscula, the blood star, but with an experimental enhancement. Happens sometimes. Reminds you how elementary the genetic situation is in this ancient phylum.)

Extraterrestrial Snail

The large round shells of moon snails (Polinices lewisii) are one of the more memorable features of a walk on North Coast tidelands. Their sheer size – some reach softball proportions – is remarkable, in a region otherwise bereft of large gastropods. But the casual tourist may miss the fact that the animal itself was even two or three times larger than that.

In echo of their spacey name, moon snails are great sci-fi doomsday machines, implacably bulldozing the mud in quest of anything that can't run. Just under the surface, the animal expands to dinner plate size, squishing and undulating through the substrate, leaving just a quarter-sized bit of shell visible from above.

All shellfish it encounters are engulfed in that big gluey mantle, after which the snail's abrasive tongue rasps… rasps… rasps… until it's drilled a neat hole in the victim's shell. The attacker then pumps it full of digestive juices, which dissolve the flesh. Finally, it sucks the slurry back out and moves on, leaving behind a half-digested husk.

Thus, the presence of Polinices can be readily divined, not just by the vacated shells of past generations, but also the many clam and cockle shells littering the beach, each with a distinctive round hole near the hinge, as if pierced by a Native pump drill. Rubbery grey sand collars – its equally extraterrestrial egg cases – are another clue.

When I was a kid, oystermen and clam diggers threw moon snails up the bank to stop them damaging their beds. The law is not so dumb as to allow that now, but I used to eat this mega-escargot regularly before a decade or so, when that too became illegal. I'm not sure why; they're certainly not endangered, and the only people I ever knew who gathered them as food were me and a handful of elderly tribal members.

Any road, the only creatures that benefit materially from these Dr. Who villains today are the similarly B-movie giant black-eyed hermit crabs (Pagurus armata) that inhabit their empty shells.

Those guys are, if anything, even more memorable.

WW: Policeman's helmet

(Impatiens glandulifera. A shade-loving shoreline invasive from the Himalayas, imported to the North Coast as a garden flower, it remains nevertheless undeniably beautiful.)

WW: Jackknife clam

(I found this shell on the lower tidelands during a recent very low tide. It came from a jackknife clam [Solen sicarius], close relative of the more familiar razor clam [Silqua patula] of the outer beach.

Jackknives are a great deal smaller and rarer than their larger, edible cousins, and of course, they live in a very different habitat. While similar bivalves are used as fishbait and even food in other parts of the world, I'm not aware of any human use for this species.

It's just cool.)