Category: Uncategorized

Autumn along the California coast can be spectacular. With the cessation of northerly winds and coastal upwelling, ocean and air temperatures rise. September and October typically offer the sunniest days of the year. Summer tourists who shiver in their jackets in July might be surprised to know that in September the natives run around in shorts and flip-flops. The ocean itself tends to be calmer now, and combined with the end of the seasonal phytoplankton bloom presents some of the best conditions for SCUBA diving.

Without the onshore air flow that results from coastal upwelling, it can get quite warm here; it’s not for nothing that the marine layer is called Nature’s air-conditioning. Yesterday and today the afternoon air temperatures have been over 95°F right next to the ocean. That’s too dang hot for my tastes. I miss the fog already. For those who dislike fog and complain about being cold all summer, though, these weeks of Indian summer must be heaven.

Unfortunately, the heat of Indian summer coincides with the driest part of California’s dry season. Without a blast of cool, damp fog every week or so the landscape desiccates and fire becomes a daily threat. This year the fire season has been intense, with the Soberanes fire near Big Sur (started by an illegal campfire on 22 July 2016) having become the costliest fire to fight in U.S. history as well as other large fires scattered throughout the state. Cal Fire anticipates full containment of this fire in the next several days.

Closer to my neck of the woods, Cal Fire has another tough battle on their hands. Yesterday afternoon at about 15:40 I noticed a big plume of smoke rising straight up from the Santa Cruz Mountains to the northeast.

Because there was almost no wind at ground level the smoke rose straight up quite a way before dispersing laterally. It looked like a mushroom cloud of death.

The Loma Fire, as it is now called, is burning in rural Santa Clara County along the Loma Prieta Ridge. Fortunately this are is not heavily populated. I kept an eye on the smoke yesterday and took a series of photos from roughly the same spot on my deck.

To escape the heat in the late afternoon and early evening yesterday we borrowed a friend’s boat and went for a short cruise at dinnertime. The smoke in the sky did make for a very nice sunset.

When we got home after dark last night we could see flames along the entire ridge. Wildfires always seem more menacing at night. When I got up this morning I could see that smoke from the fire had been blowing out over the ocean. This is fortunate for the people living in Santa Clara County.

As of 12:30 this afternoon, the latest update from Cal Fire reports that 1500 acres have burned and the fire is 5% contained. The weather is supposed to be cooler tomorrow, with a chance for some fog, which should help the firefighters. Indian summer may be lovely, but it comes with risks. Fire is scary stuff in the Golden State.

In addition to being the autumnal equinox, today also marks the four-month anniversary of the car accident that left me with bruises, some cracked/bruised ribs, and a concussion. All of the physical injuries have healed by now, except for some residual soreness when I push on the left side of my rib cage, but the concussion continues to be a pain in the head. While the overall trajectory is up, I still have bad days when I can’t do much of anything. I feel like I have an invisible disability because I don’t look sick or injured, but I’m definitely not functioning normally. For example, I can physically walk from the far end of any parking lot to the front door of a store, but having to negotiate walking through traffic and cars looking for parking might get me killed.

Headache: The headache has gotten much better in the past couple of weeks. I never was on anything but OTC pain meds and now I’m not taking anything on a daily basis. The headache has become more localized lately, and moves around. Usually when I’m aware of the headache it feels very concentrated through the top of my head. Sometimes it’s concentrated around my temples, and sometimes it feels like a really tight band around the crown of my head. The constant dull ache has ebbed, though, and that’s a good thing.

Now that I don’t always have the headache I’ve been paying closer attention to what triggers it. This helps me avoid situations that I know will be headache-producing. Unfortunately, not all of the triggers can be avoided, or at least avoided without major inconvenience. For example:

• Noise. Background noise remains extremely problematic for me. Any restaurant with a “lively” atmosphere or acoustically reflective surfaces will be hell. A social gathering in which multiple conversations are going on at the same time makes my head hurt. I don’t think my brain is currently capable of distinguishing between background noise and sound that I’m supposed to pay attention to. It all gets overwhelming very quickly, and once my brain can’t manage my head hurts.
• Light. Light itself is not a headache trigger, but rapid shifts between light and dark definitely are. Strobe lights would be awful, and riding in a car at night is bad, too. The lights of cars, traffic signal lights, and lighted buildings on the side of the road–my head can’t tolerate any of them. Even riding as a passenger with my eyes closed I can’t keep from seeing the flashes between light and dark from behind my eyelids. Wearing dark sunglasses at night helps a bit but doesn’t eliminate the problem. A similar thing happens in daylight when I’m riding in a car through alternating strips of sun and shade, as in a forest.
• Mental activity. Having to concentrate for more than about 10 minutes at a time starts my head throbbing. This means not much work is getting done. No real science, either. I have started spending a couple of hours at the marine lab two or three days a week, just to get back into the swing of things. This week I’ve been cleaning things tanks, tables, and the little dishes I keep some of my animals in. In the process I’ve gotten nice and dirty, which makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something.

Cognitive deficits: In my nonconcussed state I have a pretty good sense of cardinal direction and elapsed time. These are still scrambled. From anywhere in the area I should be able to point to the ocean without thinking, but now I can’t. I can navigate to places I know well, but getting any place new to me is a crap shoot. The same thing has happened with my sense of time, although that does seem to be improving a bit. I still have to use timers and clocks more frequently than I used to.

I still feel extremely slow and stupid. In writing and in speaking I often can’t find the words that I know are there, and I can’t explain things very well. I’ve asked friends–people who are used to conversing with me–if I seem slow to them when we’re talking and they’ve all answered ‘no,’ so my own perception of how long it takes me to find words must be warped by my messed up sense of time. Or maybe they’re just being kind to me.

The neurologist has told me that I shouldn’t try to learn anything new while my brain recovers. To pass the time I’ve been knitting and listening to audiobooks. It would be nice to say that I’ve been doing housework while I can’t do much else, but that would be a lie.

I’ve come to appreciate exactly how much concentration it takes to drive, and exactly how little attention most drivers pay to what’s going on around them. There’s a lot to keep track of–the general flow of traffic, pedestrians, cyclists, and distracted drivers in other cars. It drives me crazy to see drivers fiddling with radios or phones, or simply not paying attention. Any time a car makes an unexpected movement my heart jumps. I don’t trust anybody on the road these days. The guy who hit us wasn’t driving distracted, so far as we know, but now I know how little time it takes to get into a really bad accident even when you’re not doing anything wrong. I no longer listen to anything while I’m driving, and I’m not driving any distance at all these days.

Executive function: Making decisions is incredibly difficult and painful. I can answer ‘yes or no’ questions better now than I could a month ago, which is a welcome improvement. I deal with the complexities of a dinner menu by ordering the first thing that catches my eye. If I put much more effort than that into the decision my head starts hurting. I’ve been telling people not to give me options other than ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and it actually does help me cope.

In a similar fashion, prioritizing and multi-tasking are also difficult. I can just about manage a short string of consecutive activities if I tackle them one at a time. I’ve also gotten worse at knowing how long a given task will take, even if I’ve done it many times before. That’s probably the wonked-out sense of time at work.

Psychological effects: These have improved, except for the stress of driving or even riding as a passenger in a car. I have minor panic attacks when something unexpected happens. It’s much easier for me, psychologically and mentally, to ride with my eyes closed. I think this is a minor case of PTSD. For the most part I don’t feel depressed but sometimes I think I’m not making much progress and that’s a bummer. Patience is not one of my virtues, but I am trying to be patient with myself. On the days that I feel good I can get things accomplished, which makes it easy to overtax my brain and bring on the headache. I’m having to learn how to pace myself and not do too much at once. My brain seems to allow one excursion a day, and I’m honoring that restriction as much as I can.

So, I’m getting better but slowly. I still have a long way to go.

Some friends have asked what it’s like to have a concussion, and how my recovery is going. I think it’s hard for them to understand why, almost six weeks after the accident, I’m still having so many problems. Since this is my first concussion I don’t really know what to expect, but having consulted with a neurologist last week I feel assured that my recovery is on the right track. As a reminder, on Saturday 21 May 2016 I was in a head-on collision; two days later I was diagnosed with a concussion. The CT scan showed no brain swelling or bleeding.

I decided to address the “What is it like?” questions by listing the common symptoms of concussion and describing how I am experiencing them.

Symptom 1 — Loss of consciousness. I did not lose consciousness at any time after the accident. I remember quite a lot of the accident itself, the arrival of the EMTs and ambulances, getting my vitals checked in the ambulance, and getting ourselves to the ER.

Symptom 2 — Headache. After the accident the worst pain I had was around my ribcage. Actually, everything hurt. I didn’t notice the headache as a separate pain until Sunday when I tried to grade my final exams. Since then the headache has been a more or less constant companion. It gets a lot worse when my brain has been overtaxed or overstimulated (more on that below). The headache doesn’t feel like a tension headache and it isn’t localized. It’s a dull diffuse pain that feels like my entire head is being squeezed under the skin. The best thing to do when the headache gets bad is to lie down and close my eyes. Looking at computer screens is very taxing on the brain, which is why it is taking me three days to write this post.

Symptom 3 — Amnesia, confusion. I didn’t have any amnesia right after the accident, and I passed all of the cognitive evaluation questions the EMTs asked me (“What day is it?” “Who is the President of the U.S.?” “How old are you?” etc.). I knew where I was and how I had gotten there.

Symptom 4 — Dizziness, vertigo, nausea. This has been strange. On Monday, two days after the accident, I started experiencing a bit of vertigo. I would move my head and it felt like the world was taking a while to catch up. Also, I could read printed words on paper, but when I tried to read my students’ hand-written answers on their final exams the words swam around on the page. I gave that up as a lost cause and went back to the ER. This general wooziness resulted in some mild nausea.

There was a very early morning almost four weeks after the accident when I woke up feeling seasick. I took an anti-nausea pill and went back to sleep, and when I woke up for real a few hours later I felt no seasickness at all.

Symptom 5 — Cognitive deficits. I have these in spades, although I don’t know if anybody else can tell. For the first couple of weeks after the accident my head felt very foggy and it was difficult to process information. I’d walk around with a nectarine in my hand wondering what I was supposed to do with it. Oh yeah, those want to be eaten. I couldn’t really type, either. I could, but letters would come out in strange orders, as though my typing were dyslexic. That has gotten better recently.

I’m still having trouble carrying on detailed conversations. I can think of the words I want to say but they don’t make it to my mouth. And it feels like it takes me a very long time to process an answer when somebody asks me a question. What do I want to eat for dinner? Um. . . .

And yet, occasionally I can act with my usual decisiveness. Sometimes I feel as though I have my act together, and at other times. . . I don’t even know what my act is supposed to be.

My internal clock, which normally does a pretty good job of keeping track of elapsed time, is all out of whack. As is my ability to judge how long it will take to do a given task. This is rather a drag, as I’m used to my brain acting as a clock I don’t have to look at to tell the time. I suppose part of this deficit is due to the fact that I’m not spending as much time outdoors as I normally would in the summer, so I’m missing time cues that I should be catching.

Symptom 6 — Sensitivity to light and sound. As of now, six weeks post-accident, this is the most severe of my symptoms. It takes surprisingly little visual or aural stimulus to completely overwhelm my brain. Crowds, movement, the clinking of silverware on plates in a crowded restaurant, loud music, children playing (I think it’s their high-pitched voices that do it)–all are hell to me right now. There is no such thing as background noise to a concussed brain. Every sound pushes to front and center, demanding attention and energy that my brain simply cannot give. My brain reacts by hurting and trying to withdraw my consciousness from my surroundings. I can cope in the short-term by closing my eyes to shut out all visual stimuli, but I can’t close my ears and there are some sounds that dig their way into my brain. A massive headache ensues.

Right now there are two major construction projects going on at the marine lab, which makes the lab a very unhealthy place for me to be during the week. Fortunately there’s no construction work on weekends, so I can retreat down there for an hour of peaceful time with my critters. But even the running water through the seawater system makes a lot of noise; I’d never paid much attention to it before, except to notice when it was suspiciously quiet in the wet labs, but now it can get to me. I find that I need to minimize my time at the marine lab, period.

Driving remains extremely difficult for me. I can drive myself to and from the marine lab, but that’s about it. And even doing that little amount of driving causes a headache and wipes me out for the rest of the day. I’m not having flashbacks any more (more about that below) but my heart jumps every time a white car unexpectedly catches my eye. Driving takes so much concentration that my brain just isn’t up to it. I’m also fairly certain that my brain function is compromised enough to have slowed my reaction time. All in all, I don’t feel anywhere near competent to get behind the wheel of a car and drive any longer than 10 minutes.

Symptom 7 — Sleep disturbances. Dealing with these has been very strange. I’ve been sleeping a lot. At the beginning of my recovery I was taking 3-5 short naps every day, as lying down and closing my eyes was the only way to rest my brain. As the recovery continues I’m now a teensy bit more able to deal with sight and sound, and am down to 1-2 naps a day. But I also sleep late in the morning, which is extremely unusual for me. The past few mornings I have been sleeping past 07:00; usually in mid-summer I’m up at first light, or earlier if there’s a low tide to be had. I assume all this sleep is what my brain needs to heal.

Every night since the accident I have had crazy, vivid dreams. Some of them are borderline lucid dreams, in which I know I’m dreaming. And then things get sort of meta, when I think “This is a really strange dream I’m having right now.”

Symptom 8 — Changes in appetite. I am constantly hungry. All the time.

Symptom 9 — Psychological difficulties. I am definitely more irritable than I was before the accident. The niceties of polite conversation feel like such a chore that they just don’t seem worthwhile. I never was good at making small talk; now I find that having to do so really taxes my brain and gives me a headache. In this particular regard it seems that my natural introversion has been augmented by the concussion.

I’ve also noticed that my language filter has deteriorated quite badly. It is much easier these days for f-bombs to escape before I can hold them back. Then again, maybe it has nothing to do with the concussion but is because I’ve been watching “Game of Thrones” and “Orange is the New Black.” Those shows will definitely increase one’s tolerance for f-bombs and c-bombs.

For about a week after the accident I had flashbacks that occurred randomly throughout the day. I’d feel my body tense up for no apparent reason, then expect to hear the sounds of the collision and explosion of the air bags. I still get that momentary tensing when a white car suddenly appears out of the left side of my field of vision (the car that hit us was a white Honda sedan). And I really don’t like being in a car. The flashbacks aren’t happening nearly as frequently now, though, and that’s a good thing.

Symptom 10 — Hallucinations. I don’t have either visual or auditory hallucinations, per se, but there is almost constantly a snippet of music running through my head. This isn’t all that unusual for me; I seem to be very susceptible to infection by earworms. Since the accident one piece that my subconsciousness is obsessed with is Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien. Why? Who knows. It happens to be the first piece of classical music that I remember from childhood, and maybe that’s significant. Other random bits of music running through my head at any given moment are Christmas carols (“Good King Wenceslas”; “Il est né, le divin enfant”; “In dulci jubilo”), old folk tunes (“My darlin’ Clementine”), the “Et in terra pax” movement from Vivaldi’s Gloria, and lately the opening riff from The Fixx’s “Saved by Zero.” Is there rhyme or reason to any of this? Not that I can see.

One interesting thing that the neurologist told me was that with concussions, the severity of the symptoms doesn’t typically correlate with the prognosis for full recovery or the time it takes to reach full recovery. Very often, he said, patients who report very mild symptoms either take a long time to heal or don’t reach 100% recovery. Of course, this led me to ask whether my symptoms would be considered mild, moderate, or severe. He smiled and said that my symptoms are congruent with a full recovery, then warned that it will be a slow process. I shouldn’t be surprised if it takes several months or a year not to have any symptoms.

One good sign is that my condition has improved quite a bit since the accident. Now that it’s July I need to start working on my class for the fall semester. I’m going to be taking things very slowly and resting/napping as necessary. I will continue to minimize my social activities and very gradually re-enter the world as my brain allows. Although I miss the field activities I had planned to do this summer, I’m learning how to do nothing, which can be sort of rewarding in its own way.

Emergency vehicles–2 fire trucks, 2 ambulances, 2 CHP officers on motorcycles–arrived on the scene after about 10 minutes and had the street blocked almost immediately. EMTs decided that the other guy needed help most; the lead EMT told one of the ambulance drivers that he would be a flyer (which we later learned meant he needed to be airlifted to a trauma center). The three of us were checked out by the EMTs (my blood pressure was 180/110, when it normally is in the 110/60 range–amazing what adrenaline will do) on the street and we decided to go to the ER on our own. The CHP officers asked us what happened and took our statements. One of them gave Murray a case number so he can follow up with his insurance company. Rogan came to pick us up. There wasn’t enough room in his car for all of us plus the stuff from Murray’s car so he and Alex took the stuff to Murray’s house while Murray and I waited for the tow trucks. Tow trucks arrived, smashed cars were hauled away, and Rogan came back to take us all to the ER.

What I don’t have a picture of is the passenger side of the car. The rear right wheel, which took the brunt of the force from colliding with the curb, was partially folded underneath the car.

Bottom line: We’re all okay, just bruised and battered. Alex and Murray both have nasty contusions from their seat belts. I have a stiff neck, muscle soreness around my ribs, a small abrasion/bruise on my right cheek, a bruised left knee, minor abrasions on my hip bones from the lap belt, and bruises on my right leg from knee to ankle (I think from hitting the dashboard?). The top of my head is starting to feel a bit abraded, nothing serious. We’ve been told to take it easy and that tomorrow we’ll feel worse than we do today. Ibuprofen + ice is the formula for the next several days. No strenuous exercise, either.

All the safety equipment in Murray’s car worked exactly as it was supposed to. Air bags kept us from being much more severely injured, and given that the other guy smashed into the windshield exactly where my head would have been, I’m feeling very grateful.

I was able to drive home, but confess to being leery driving on Mission Street. Passing within a few feet of cars going the opposite direction gave me the heebie-jeebies.

So, no working the tides this weekend for me. I’m glad it’s not one of the spring’s better low tide series.

At 07:40 on Tuesday 5 January 2016, the sandbar at the mouth of Younger Lagoon broke open for the first time this rainy season. The Younger Lagoon Reserve (YLR) is located directly west (or “up the coast,” as we say; the terminology gets a little weird because the coastline runs east-west in Santa Cruz) of the Marine Science campus of UC Santa Cruz. The actual lagoon is Y-shaped, and while it receives run-off from land, including from the adjacent agricultural fields, for most of the year it is cut off from the Pacific Ocean by a thick sand bar.

This week California has been glorying in the might of El Niño, which has been bringing heavy rain to most of the state and lots of snow in the Sierra Nevada. As the first new moon of the year tomorrow creates the usual extreme high and low tides, we’ve been treated to some spectacualr waves on the coast. However, it’s not the incoming tidal surge that causes the lagoon to break through; if that were the case, then the sand bar would be broken open, or at least seriously eroded, more often than it is. Rather, it’s the surge of fresh water, the accumulation of heavy rain and run-off, coming from the top of the lagoon that breaches the sand bar from the upstream side.

This photo was taken on Tuesday by staff of the Younger Lagoon Reserve:

You can see that the ocean is rushing through the channel and mixing with the brown stagnant water from the lagoon. Those two tiny white dots on the far side of the channel are snowy egrets. The same egrets also appear in this video that I shot from the overlook which is the closest I can get to the lagoon itself without trespassing on the Reserve:

The break through the sand bar is a temporary thing. This photo and my video were taken around mid-day on Tuesday. Later in the afternoon I looked down on the lagoon from a more distant vantage point and already the sand had begun to accumulate again. Today the lagoon broke through again, and the YLR staff took another great photo from down in the reserve:

This being the first break-through of the sand bar this season, the water running out was pretty stagnant and nasty. In fact, as I drove in Tuesday morning I noticed a strong smell of H₂S permeating the entire lab complex, and wondered if the construction workers had hit a sewer line. Obviously, the first breach of the sand bar releases all of that gunky, H₂S-laden water into the ocean, where it flows right past our seawater intake.

I’ve long wondered what nutrient levels are in the lagoon at different times of the year, and whether or not conditions in the lagoon affect our seawater quality at the marine lab. I used to think that there might be a correlation between nutrient input from the lagoon and the occasional gunky algal bloom that clouds our seawater and makes life difficult for animals and aquarists alike. However, seeing for myself how little actual water exchange there is between the lagoon and the ocean when the sand bar breaks open, I’m pretty certain now that any nutrients from the lagoon would be quickly diluted to the point of having no effect on productivity in the ocean. Besides, those pesky algal blooms are a regional phenomenon, occurring over large swaths of coastline. Still, it would be interesting to study how nutrient levels within the lagoon fluctuate throughout the year. Maybe I can get a student to take this on as a senior thesis project.

Among some members of my family we have a not-quite-regular New Year’s tradition of meeting up for dim sum in one of the Bay Area restaurants. I’d say we can usually pull this event together 3-4 of every five years. It’s a totally casual affair: anybody who can, shows up at the designated time, friends are allowed, and we all eat monstrous amounts of food. After lunch we hang out, go hiking, visit other friends in San Francisco, or whatever. Today we decided to cross the new Bay Bridge into the City and drive down the coast on Highway 1.

The atmosphere was spectacularly clear. We could see the Farallon Islands, some 30 miles outside the Golden Gate, clear as day out on the horizon. I think I’ve seen them a total of about five times in my life as a native Californian, and never as distinct as they were today. As we drove south the clouds began to gather, first as wispy mares’ tails and then as more substantial masses, although looking nothing like rain clouds. Just south of Pigeon Point I took this photo, where we stopped to watched a dozen or so dolphins leisurely swimming southward:

I have been grateful to see some green along the roads in our area. After four years of drought the recent rains have been most welcome. Keep it coming, El Niño!

From the exact same spot but facing the other direction (north) and letting my phone adjust the exposure to showcase the clouds and the afternoon sun, I got this shot of the Pigeon Point lighthouse in silhouette:

South of Pigeon Point we spotted a few whale spouts and pulled off the road at Franklin Point to take a look through the binoculars. We saw mostly spouts and a few backs, not enough to be able to identify them. While the binoculars were in other hands I took another picture of the lighthouse.

Yes, there’s a lighthouse in this photo. See it at the end of the point, way off in the background? I took this photo from atop the highest dune on the trail going out to my favorite intertidal site at Franklin Point.

And again, because I have become infatuated with clouds, I let my phone work its magic and snapped this shot:

It’s rather amazing the pictures a non-photographer can take with an iPhone, isn’t it?

In the car we talked about how fortunate we are to live in such a beautiful place, to encounter such natural splendor on an ordinary drive from Point A to Point B. And I still can’t believe that it’s part of my job to go to the ocean and simply marvel at what I see. How did I ever luck into that?

I’m not the sort of person who makes new year’s resolutions, but my hope for myself in 2016, and beyond, is that I never take for granted this paradise where I live. My hope for you is that you find and appreciate beauty in the natural world wherever you are. And please, share it with me and with others.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Today is Monday, which means Scott and I changed the water for our Pisaster larvae. I should have taken some pictures to show you how we do it. Maybe next time.

The largest and most developed larvae are now 2.2-2.5 mm long, not including the long brachiolar arms, which is about as big as they’re going to get. They are still eating and developing their juvenile rudiments. Unlike the sea urchin’s pluteus larva, these brachiolaria larvae lack any kind of skeletal structure and are entirely squishy–they bend and flex along any axis and can scrunch into surprisingly tiny balls. Those long arms are flexible as well, and sometimes the larvae swim around with their arms tucked or rolled up. I haven’t been able to catch them in the act with the camera, but both Scott and I have seen the larvae react to encountering a surface by flipping the long arms around as though doing the backstroke.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much is a video worth?

The weird alien-like effect is enhanced by the dark background I film them against. Except for their guts and the tips of their arms, the larvae are entirely transparent, which makes it difficult to photograph them. The black velvet that I use as a background, combined with lighting from an oblique angle, maximizes contrast and makes the transparent bodies more visible. The little illuminated “stars” in the background are actually part of the texture of the velvet.

To capture this video I shrunk the larvae’s universe into a single drop of water on a depression slide. This means they couldn’t swim too far out of the field of view and would have to bump into each other. Don’t worry, though, after the photo shoot I returned the larvae to one of the jars and let them swim away. They’ll be just fine.