Don't Turn Your Back on the Ocean Read online

  He led the way to a concrete retaining wall on the far side of the bocce courts and we sat down. I looked at him disapprovingly as he took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “You shouldn’t be smoking.”

  “I’m eighty years old,” he retorted as he fired up his cigarette. “It hasn’t killed me yet. You been down to the wharf, to see Nick and Tina?”

  “Donna and I had lunch there. We saw Bobby.”

  I told Uncle Dom what had happened at Ravella’s and his face darkened. He muttered something in Italian, no doubt a comment on Sergeant Magruder’s antecedents.

  “Why is this cop sniffing around Bobby?” Uncle Dom asked. “He’s foolish. Bobby wouldn’t hurt anyone, especially not his girl. He loves this girl. So they had a fight. Who doesn’t? Me and your aunt Teresa, we fight all the time.”

  I smiled. Aunt Teresa could be a formidable opponent. “Maybe the body they found isn’t even Ariel.”

  “If it is her, could have been an accident. Bodies go into the water all the time. Boats get swamped, someone gets washed overboard. A lot of good fishermen go that way. The ocean’s a dangerous place. Don’t I know?” He rubbed his left arm and I knew he was thinking about a bad break years ago, out on the fishing boat during a storm, when he’d gotten tangled in a line.

  The old man sighed and puffed on his cigarette. “I hope it’s not her. She’s a nice girl, good for Bobby. That boy, he’s got enough trouble right now. He’s shorthanded, had to fire that no-good Frank, but he’s better off without a man like that,” Dom scowled. “That Frank, back when he was working salmon boats, he rammed another guy’s boat.”

  And that, I knew, broke one of the sacred rules of conduct of the Monterey fleet. You never damage another guy’s boat. You never make threats. And above all, you never say something bad about another man’s family. Which would, of course, be like disparaging your own, since everyone was related by blood or marriage.

  Uncle Dom winked at me. “If I can give Teresa the slip, I’ll go out fishing with Bobby. Show him how we used to do it in the old days, before they had all that fancy equipment.”

  Giving Aunt Teresa the slip would be a slick trick indeed and I laughed at the picture of Uncle Dom’s bride of nearly sixty years barring the door.

  “I’d like to go fishing again,” he said, “before it’s all gone.”

  “You think it’s disappearing.”

  “Hell, yes, just like the sardines. By the time young Nicky grows up, there won’t be any fishing boats left. Just rich people’s sailboats.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Who knows? Maybe this girl of Bobby’s, this Ariel, was right. She used to talk about passenger pigeons. How there were so many and now they’re all gone. She said people are polluting the ocean too much, taking too many fish. Big commercial outfits with lots of boats and equipment, driving little operators out of business. I’ve seen those big foreign trawlers with their drift nets, sucking up everything for miles.” The old man sighed and shook his head. “I’m telling you, Jeri, some days I feel like one of those pigeons. It’s not like it used to be.”

  No, it wasn’t. Things seldom are. As I walked back along the Rec Trail later, I felt the pull of the past, one I’d read about, heard about all my life.

  I’d parked my car in a lot near the Coast Guard jetty, where it joined the street that used to be called Ocean View Drive. The city changed the name to Cannery Row in 1953, some eight years after John Steinbeck wrote the book describing that street as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

  Mother remembered the stink above all else. It came from fish in all stages of processing, being cleaned and cut, cooked and packed into cans. Added to that was the stench of fish meal and the rotting remains.

  “You can’t imagine,” she’d say, when anyone colored the past with nostalgia. “It was indescribable.”

  I love old movies and there’s one from 1952, Clash by Night, that’s set in Monterey, on Cannery Row. It stars Barbara Stanwyck and a very young Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn’s supposed to be a cannery worker, but she looks much too well scrubbed. When Mother and I watched the film, Mother was reduced to howls of laughter.

  “It wasn’t like that at all,” she said. “Where’s the muck and the fish oil? Where’s the smell?”

  The odor permeated Mother’s childhood, since Dennis and Angelina Doyle began married life in a cannery worker’s cottage on Foam Street. Most of these little houses have long since been torn down to make way for other structures. The canneries also added to the financial prosperity of the Doyle family, which grew in children and income, finally moving up the New Monterey hill to a larger house on Prescott Avenue.

  Grandpa worked at the Hovden Cannery, producing Portola-brand sardines. The old black-and-white photos of the era show fishing boats unloading tons of silver sardines, and the huge canneries, smokestacks poking into the sky, that lined both sides of the Row, linked by walkways high above the street The people who worked in the canneries are preserved, too, in photographs showing men and women in smocks and aprons, with kerchiefs or nets covering their hair, standing at the cutting and packing tables.

  All of this I’ve learned secondhand, of course. By the time I was born the sardines had vanished from Monterey Bay. Through the fifties and sixties the canneries shut down one by one. Many of the derelict buildings were destroyed by fire, both accidental and, as local gossip would have it, deliberate. Grandpa Doyle retired and his visits to Cannery Row were limited to walking hand in hand with a small granddaughter named Jeri.

  We went to the Row to visit the ghosts, as Grandpa called all those empty buildings with pilings stretching out into the bay. He’d recite the names of the defunct canneries—Del Vista, Edgewater, Aeneas, Enterprise, San Carlos—names still visible on the outer walls, lettering blurred by time and the elements.

  Grandpa pointed out Doc Ricketts’s lab and the Wing Chong Market and the shell of the Hovden Cannery, describing how the fishing fleet would tie up at the end of those pilings and unload their catch. Then we walked past the Hopkins Marine Laboratory, along the shore to Lovers’ Point, looking out at the bay for breaching whales. Grandpa told me the names of the different birds we saw, explained why sea otters float on their backs, and taught me that sea lions have ears and harbor seals don’t.

  Grandpa wouldn’t recognize the Hovden Cannery now. The Monterey Bay Aquarium rests on the Hovden foundation, and some of the cannery equipment is displayed inside. The aquarium wrought a change here, deep and fundamental, as eventful as the departure of the sardines. It seems half the world wants to look at fish and sea otters. Since its debut in 1984 a steady growing stream of people came to Monterey to visit the aquarium. The city seemed ill-prepared for the onslaught.

  Now there are parking garages and shuttle buses to ferry visitors from the Wharf to the Row. The buildings where sardines were once packed into tins now pack in tourists, luring them with souvenirs and fast food. The common complaint voiced by locals is that you can’t drive to Pacific Grove on Saturdays, because of the traffic heading for Cannery Row, and it’s hard to get into the good restaurants.

  All of this means jobs and revenue for the city. But it’s changed Monterey’s face forever. The city was learning, as others had over the years, that tourism has two hands, one taking as much as the other gives.

  Five

  A SALINAS-BOUND PICKUP TRUCK WHIZZED PAST ME on Highway 68 as I braked and made the right turn onto the narrow asphalt ribbon that wound uphill through a meadow to the Monterey County SPCA. The ducks and geese had the right of way, roaming freely over the grassy area on either side of the road and gliding on a nearby pond.

  The road led first to a parking lot that bordered several low buildings, then snaked farther up the hills. I spotted dog runs in the back of one building. This was the animal shelter, where dogs and cats without people were either adopted or put to death. Whenever I visited such a place I always wanted to take
the creatures home with me. That impulse had to be balanced by the reality of living in a one-bedroom apartment with an irascible cat named Abigail who was quite sure she was the only cat in the universe.

  I saw Donna’s Jeep Cherokee and pulled into the space next to it “Marsha’s up at the wildlife center,” she said, getting out and slamming the door. “It’s not far. We’ll walk.”

  She led the way up the asphalt road to some outbuildings, waving a greeting at a young woman who was working on a truck. The road forked and we took the path to the right, climbing farther up the hillside covered with oaks and Monterey pines and brush to the wildlife center, located in a wooded clearing, masked from the view of people below.

  As we approached the one-story wooden building I saw other structures on the hillside to the left Donna explained that these were holding tanks for marine mammals, such as harbor seals or sea lions. The center’s purpose was to treat sick and injured animals and return them to the wild. Its isolation on this hillside was so the animals encountered as few humans as necessary.

  When we entered the building I saw a large cage sitting just to the right of the door. At the moment it was empty, and so was the small office to the left of the entrance. Directly in front of us a door led to an L-shaped room full of large cages, some taller than others. Many of these wire-and-mesh enclosures were draped with sheets. Donna explained that this was to keep the occupants safe from prying eyes or, in the case of the nocturnal creatures, so they could sleep during the day. When I peered through the glass window next to the door I saw a rabbit in the nearest cage. It gazed back at me with wild wide eyes, its nose twitching.

  “Marsha,” Donna called, listening for a response. Down the hallway to our left I heard water running. We walked toward the sound. I followed Donna into a large concrete-floored room. Most of the room was fenced off with a large mesh screen and there was a pool of water in the center of the concrete floor. Seabirds clustered around the pool, including several gulls. I recognized a sleek black cormorant and saw the black heads and white breasts of two common murres.

  There was no mistaking the big brown pelicans, two of them, as large as the one I’d seen earlier today at the Coast Guard jetty. They dwarfed the other residents of the enclosure. Both were mature adults, with grayish-brown feathers and white heads over their big dark bills and throat pouches. Their powerful wings were folded close to their bodies. To my uneducated eyes the pelicans didn’t appear to be injured, but they must be at the wildlife center for a reason. They stared at me warily with black beaded eyes and moved farther away, toward the other side of the pond.

  “Is that you, Donna?”

  The voice came from just beyond a screen door opposite us, leading outside the building. The door opened and two women stepped through. The first was an older woman with curly gray hair and glasses. She was followed by a woman who appeared to be in her thirties. Her brown hair was short and pulled back from her face, showing a pair of tiny gold studs sparkling in her earlobes. Both women wore rubber-soled shoes, slacks, and shirts covered by pale blue smocks stained with water and soil. I saw a gray-brown feather caught in the seam that joined the pocket to the younger woman’s smock, next to a reddish-brown splotch that could have been blood.

  Donna made the introductions. The younger woman, as I’d guessed, was Marsha Landers, Donna’s friend who worked at the SPCA. Helena, the older woman, was a volunteer, one of several who staffed the wildlife center. Now Helena excused herself. She passed us and opened the door we’d just come through, heading back up the hallway.

  “What’s with these two?” Donna asked, indicating the pelicans.

  “The female got caught in a net,” Marsha said. “The male has an injured wing. They should be ready for release in a few days.” Donna nodded and I looked at the huge seabirds again, wondering how one sexed a pelican.

  “I heard on the radio that a body was found down at Rocky Creek.” Marsha opened the door that led to the hallway. “Do you think it’s Ariel Logan?”

  “I hope not.” Donna followed Marsha down the corridor and I brought up the rear.

  “How do you know Ariel?” I asked.

  “I talked to her this summer, middle of August, I think. I’d have to look at my calendar. She’d seen a couple of sea lions in distress at Point Pinos.”

  “What was wrong with the animals?”

  “I don’t know. She was alone, walking along the Rec Trail. By the time she found a phone and called the SPCA, the animals were gone. From the way she described it, the animals were having seizures. It could have been something they’d ingested, something they swam through. Maybe they’d contracted some illness. But without examining the animals, I have nothing to go on.”

  Marsha frowned. “I haven’t received any other reports about sea lions or seals, so I’m hoping those were isolated incidents. We’ve been so occupied with these pelican mutilations. In fact we found one the same day Ariel saw the sea lions.”

  Now Marsha looked at Donna. “We had another one this morning. The crew of the Mary Esther brought it in.”

  “Where is it?” Donna asked.

  “It didn’t make it.” Marsha looked grim. “The beak had been hacked off and the throat pouch slashed. That’s the eighth one.”

  Donna swore under her breath. When we reached the entry area I glanced through the window in the L-shaped room and saw Helena cleaning out cages. Marsha opened the office door. The room held a cluttered desk and a couple of filing cabinets and two chairs. All in all it was barely large enough to hold all three of us. Marsha sat down in the chair nearest the desk and waved me to the other, while Donna stood in the doorway.

  “Donna said you might be able to help us,” Marsha said.

  “I don’t know,” I said frankly. “Donna tells me you’re a state humane officer, and the National Marine Fisheries Service agent is investigating as well. That might be too many people messing around in the same patch.”

  Marsha nodded. “That’s true. I thought maybe an outside observer could pick up on something we’d missed. I’m very frustrated by this, Jeri. It makes me angry and I’d like to nail whoever’s responsible.”

  When I didn’t answer right away, she reached into the open leather briefcase that took up much of the desk’s surface. It held some file folders and a five-by-seven brown envelope. This she handed to me.

  “Take a look at those pictures, from several years ago,” Marsha said, “and you’ll see why I’m angry that it’s happening again.”

  I opened the envelope and pulled out the contents. All the words Donna and Marsha had used to describe the mutilations had not prepared me for the reality documented in these color photographs.

  The first showed a pelican on an examining table, its feathers stained with blood from the bird’s beak—or what was left of it The long formidable-looking bill had been hacked off with an ax or a saw, and what remained was a ragged and truncated appendage that left the pelican helpless. The dark brown throat pouch, which expanded as the bird sucked up water and small fish to feed, hung in ribbons of flesh, slashed by some sharp instrument.

  As I sifted through the photographs I grew more sickened and appalled. Bird after bird lay on the table, each with a variation of the same cruel injuries. Some of the pelicans were obviously dead, and I wondered how many had actually survived this treatment. I’ve seen what humans do to each other, but somehow this was worse. The pelicans didn’t have any defense against the warped strength and design of the human predator who had done this to them.

  “How many were attacked like this before?” I shoved the grotesque photos back into the envelope and handed it to Marsha.

  “One hundred twenty-five birds in 1984. Sixty-three in 1987. Those are only the ones we know about,” Marsha said. “Birds that were reported to us or caught and brought here. Most of them didn’t survive. Pelicans can still fly when they’re injured like that. But they can’t catch fish without their beaks and pouches, so they starve. A lot of them weren’t caug
ht and brought in until they were too weak, We didn’t have much luck with prosthetics on the beaks. They’re a lot like a human fingernail. Once broken, they’re hard to repair. We did have some success stitching pouches back together, if the wounds weren’t too deep or necrotic.”

  I looked from her to Donna. “Are they that easy to catch?” Whenever I saw a pelican sitting on a railing at the wharf I never had the urge to walk up and touch it. With their size and those long bills, I’d always thought the birds looked rather fierce.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Donna said, shifting position where she stood in the doorway. “They’re trusting and easily tamed. And they’ve learned to associate people with food. When wild animals lose their fear of humans, that’s an invitation to trouble.”

  Marsha nodded in agreement. “We had quite a problem with pelicans and sea lions on Fisherman’s Wharf.”

  “That was a few years back, when people could still buy fish scraps to feed the sea lions and the birds,” Donna added. “The sea lions started congregating on the marina, even climbing onto the boats berthed there. You get three or four sea lions in one place and we’re talking a ton or so of extra weight. They actually broke some of the decking and swamped a couple of small boats. The pelicans were wandering into the shops and restaurants, looking for handouts. Eventually the merchants on the wharf stopped selling fish scraps and the sea lions moved back to the Coast Guard jetty.”

  “So if I wanted to catch a pelican I could just lure it with some fish.”

  Donna nodded. “Throw a sheet over it to disorient the bird, and you’ve caught yourself a pelican.”

  I turned to Marsha. “When Donna told me about this earlier she said you thought this current spate of mutilations was different from the earlier ones. Why?”

  “Sheer numbers, for one thing.” Marsha tilted her head to one side. “In previous years, the number of injured or dead birds was overwhelming. Counting the one that died this morning, we’ve had eight mutilated pelicans. It’s been sporadic, starting in June. That’s another thing, the time of year. Both of the previous incidents started in the late fall.”