Bad Back.

It's unfortunate, that idea of a bad back. It's an idea the protracts the misery. My back is good. Its carried me, held me up for more than 60 years. Like most people's, it would hurt sometimes. It had gone into spasm several times over the years ‘til I learned to do exercises minimizing the hurt and duration. Walking barefoot in the sand really cut the recovery time. But this last time it was a totally different order of discomfort; a couple of leaky discs and a fiery sciatic nerve leaving my leg strength diminished by half and a foot gone numb.

The spine with a mainline of organized nerve at the core is an amazing device that gave rise to the codfish, the leaf-nose bat, the ruby throat hummingbird, the swan, the giraffe, and the bullfrog ga-lowming into the deep night. When a great idea like a backbone comes along in nature it makes for a real florescence of species alive now and long extinct. A single Blue whale vertebra can weigh 350 pounds and one from a deer mouse about that of a medium grain of sand. Shark’s backbones aren’t bone at all but made of cartilage so they move like the water itself. The loggerhead turtle has one and the prairie grouse and the giant western salamander, the only creature known to eat giant banana slugs, which have no backbone. We come from a family of creatures that found the notochord, a firm tissue stiffener that allows the larva of the eventually sessile Tunicate creature to swim better to find an advantageous home. Tunicates loose the notochord and become bags of soft tissue filtering seawater for a living. Next up the line of complexity, before true backbones, are the lancets, the blade-like creatures, who have a permanent notochord with the beginnings of a head. Once the backbone came into being it blossomed into fliers, swimmers, fast runners, herds as far as the eye could see, and the biggest animals the earth has ever seen. It's a very versatile body model and we have all seen the pictures of our vertebrate cousins as embryos looking so much like each other with a brainy head, big eyes, gill slits and a backbone with a tail. Pig, cow, chicken, salamander, tortoise, chimp.

It was just a muscle cramp in my hamstring at first and it hurt in my hip joint, then grenades of shooting pain that over the first couple of weeks grew and grew. It hurt when I coughed, a very bad sign I was told. I went to Dr. Chen the acupuncturist who actually stuck a pin in my sciatic nerve; the thing lit up like a lightening stroke caught on film, embedded in my mind forever. I did not go back to him, Then it got to nerve damage with loss of control, I fell down a couple of times ‘til I adapted to a cane. I got an MRI and saw pictures of my spine in black and white on the computer screen; that stack piled up looking like eroded and lichen encrusted rocks. My spine was aging. But not so bad as some, I was told. Its a months’ long self-mending process and a few shots of cortisone in the epidural zone got me going on my way back to long sweaty walks. My back is not bad, it’s just telling me two things in my first bout, round one, with decrepitude; that I am getting on in this lifetime and this pile of bones behind me holding the whole thing together is just a brilliant miracle in the story of our planet.

Duxbury Reef.

Low tide at Agate Beach, where there are very accessible tide pools on Duxbury Reef. Today is a super low tide at the end of May. I'm with my 5-year-old son and we are there counting species, making a game of finding the biggest variety. We are skipping over quickly to get to the wave boundary, thrilled with seeing that hidden underwater world revealed. Then with more focus we see a few scurrying crabs moving like nervous drumming fingers, then the hermit crabs black with worn streaks of pearl, the turban snail homes, tipping and balancing with the burden. We touch jade green anemones. They flinch as they contract like the sphincters they are. We flinch right back. Bright sea stars, purple and red, and orange bat stars catch the eye. Then the focus moves and we loose momentum, slowing, caught by the pull of the eye's gravity. We are looking with more care and turn over a few rocks finding at once a brittle star moving, its pale blue snake arms in waves around its light brown pentagon body. A nudibranch, white with orange polka dots with florescent pink gills waves hello—goodbye in the surge. We look into a still pool and see the telltale sepia bloom of an octopus inking. I search digging around under a ledge with my fingers, careless of a pinch or a sting and pull the little fellow out. It’s gone ghostly white with shock. Then it flashes to brick red. It just covers my palm. Waves of color flash over, like wind over spring grasses, pink then green ‘til it’s a mimic of my palm. It’s like a movie special effect, but its alive and doing all this to survive. We put it back watching it switching colors 'til it gets its bearings and paints itself to match the rock and seaweed and disappears invisible to the eye, but vivid and everlasting in memory.

Velvet Ant.

Velvet ant its called. The solitary fat critter all covered with soft honey colored fur. It looks like the teddy bear of the insect world. I first saw one in a book, a western flora and fauna field guide, my bedtime reading when I first moved to the North Bay of San Francisco. 30 miles north of the Golden Gate. I wanted to know the unfamiliar plants and animals, I wanted to get to know the neighborhood. And who of my intellectual bent doesn't like being an expert and point things out? Half inch to one inch long covered with red or yellow velvety plush looking like the insect bedtime pillow mate. I read not an ant but a stingless wasp.
Three years later with my 6 year old boy I finally see one crawling next to the flagstone walkway in the dust of late dry summer... Pick it up I say, it's a stingless wasp. Attractive, you really wanted to touch it. I had misread the guide, a wingless wasp, though hardly stingless. And reading later sitting with my traumitized son, his swollen hand in a bowl of ice water, that in Texas they are called cow-killer wasps, the sting being of such heft. The big expert, twenty five years later writing this.