It was a sunny seaside afternoon. After five months of hunting, I had finally found a shoreline replete with purple sea urchins. Tidepool invertebrate collection has become something I do; if I called it a hobby then I’d have to say buying groceries is one of my favorite pasttimes. I go to the coast to get food. It is healthy, extremely fresh, and usually sumptuous. Of course, there are regulations from the California Fish and Game Department in effect, and these are designed based on a lot of science to maintain balance of the marine ecosystem, as well as to protect you, the consumer.

     Tidepool invertebrate collection is not a winner-take-all sort of thing. For one, there are some critters which you should not eat, period. California mussels, for instance, during the warmer months of the year can ingest and store large amounts of marine biotoxin from blooms of algae and diatoms. Toxic algae can cause Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP, which can cause varying degrees of paralysis depending on how much of it you eat and could potentially kill you) and diatoms with the name Pseudo-nietzschia contain the toxin domoic acid which causes Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning (ASP also has neurological effects on humans, and it too has the potential to kill you). Crabs can also store large quantities of domoic acid, especially in their buttery guts. However, the fishing regulations are very conservative in accounting for these risks. The season for abstaining from mussels goes from May 1^st all the way to October 31^st, which is more than enough time on either end of summer to prevent laypeople from accidentally getting PSP or ASP. They also have a phone hotline where they give regular updates on their marine biotoxin monitoring. (If now you’re concerned about eating invertebrates at a restaurant, you don’t need to be since those animals are commercially farmed in more controlled environments; and if they aren’t farmed, the fishermen know what they’re doing. Put it this way: if your crab dinner killed you, the fisherman would lose his job.)

     Then there are critters which are unfairly small to eat. Smaller animals have not reached a big enough size to have had many chances to reproduce, and eating them too much can artifically select for the bigger critters, since they can more easily outcompete their smaller kinsfolk. Over a long period of time, this could have negative effects on the diversity of the gene pool. Moreover, it’s just plain mean to not give the little guy a chance to mate before you eat him.

     Then there are critters which are illegal to eat. Abalones, small crabs, small clams, and barnacles come to mind. Abalone supposedly taste really good, but there are so many regulations associated with them (and there are so few of them left in the wild to begin with) that I don’t even bother considering to ever eat them unless I was served some at a restaurant or by someone who knows what they’re doing. Crabs and clams are illegal to eat under a certain size (with specific rules for each species) because they deserve to mate a few times before getting chomped. Gooseneck barnacles are illegal to eat because—well, for no good reason at all. They are perfectly safe to eat, are consumed as a delicacy regularly in Spain, France, Italy, and Greece, and are supposed to taste somewhere between scallop and lobster. It just so happened that when California made its fish and game regulations, there was nobody who piped up about barnacles and so they never set regulations for them.

     Also, each animal has its own take limits. Fishermen must have a license while fishing and they should understand the rules in place for each species they harvest. The more commonplace edible species have a take limit of thirty-five individuals. Fortunately, along the Central Coast, there are many rocky outcrops in the tidal zone, upon which critters make their homes, and the tourists do not go marine invertebrate harvesting after getting Scout Coffee and going winetasting for six hours. If more people went fishing, the regulations would need to change to account for that. So I usually have a wide variety of places I can harvest from. (I am not advocating you take up marine invertebrate collection. It is risky and it takes a lot of time to do. You are better off buying clams and crabs from your local seafood market.) Purple sea urchins are hugely overpopulated in California right now because the century or so of poaching sea otters for their pelts drove their biggest natural predator, the sea otter, to the brink of extinction (thank God for the Monterey Bay Aquarium staff, who have almost single-handedly brought the Southern Sea Otter population back up from a few dozen individuals into the thousands, although that’s still just a fraction of their population before the poachers). Because the urchins don’t face many natural predators other than sea otters, they get to pig out on the kelp, so much so the forests are significantly smaller than they could be. Smaller kelp forests means fewer fish off the coast, and fewer fish means less food for everyone. So, the urchins are overabundant and we should kill and eat them. Although it is true they are overpopulated, apparently everybody knows that sea urchin row—uni, in Japanese—is utterly delectable, so tasty that scientists named the chemical that gives it its unique flavor Anandanide after the Sanskrit word for bliss, ananda, and therefore I could never find them in any of the tidepools I visited—until, that is, one fateful sunny seaside afternoon.

     Two days later, after finding the watery treasure, I went back to the same location. It was also a sunny seaside afternoon: the hills green-gold shining, the salty clear blue wind, two days before a full moon, lowest tide of the month, solitude. A man in camoflauge waders was way out on the natural jetty, by the cormorants. I had brought my cooler this time, and I was going urchin hunting. The first one I found that looked good to eat I cracked open with a pair of kitchen scissors (remorsefully), and, scooping out the orange row: bottoms up! Zingy, sweet, soft, salty, smooth and buttery. Nothing tastes like it—it is like trying to describe red to a dog. Don’t ask. Eagerly, I collected more of them. A seagull glided by me as slowly as he could, eyeing me. “Sure,” I thought, “I’ll cut one or two open for you.” So I did. I got some of the littler urchins (and there are at least a thousand there) and tossed the opened halves onto a rock his way. He saw, but was too careful to come until I had turned my back and gone a fair distance away. Then, he and his friends gratefully chowed down on the usually too-spiney-to-eat treat.

     Wondering if I had invoked the curse of the Chumash or the nature spirits who live there, in paranoid bliss I gathered up a dozen of nice-sized urchins, plopped them into my sea water-filled cooler, and went on my merry way. The camoflauged man left around the same time, for the low tide was rising. Before driving off, I peaked into the cooler one last time to make sure they were okay. Their little tentacular suction-tipped arms still weeble-wobbled about looking for whatever they look for. By the way, sea urchins wear a majestic exterior of lavendar spines and arms, reddish purple shell that grows darker and redder on the underside, in blood-flushed and dot-spotted rings that open to their hexagonal mouth. Seeing they were okay, I drove off back to San Luis.

     Once home, I entered the door beaming with ananda. I opened up my sushi cookbook searching for uni recipes. Everything said not to do much with them, just keep it light. Put them with a little soy sauce, rice, eggs, avocado, or ginger, but don’t do much more than that. They are such a special taste all by themselves and they soak up other flavors easily, so you don’t want to rob them of the limelight. Then, because I was not yet hungry, I chatted with my friend Wyatt for like two hours—of all our conversations, the one that night was one of our favorites. Being a marine biology guy and avid fisherman, he was super stoked I harvested uni. But that’s not what we talked about. After the phone call, I got to work.

     My papa had given me a set of sushi plates a couple years ago, which I had half-heartedly accepted then but now excitedly took down from the cupboard. They had never been used nor washed. So I took them out of their plastic and started to soap them up. Sushi dishes are more sturdy than your usual plate, with a different moment of inertia. So, when I tried to flip it over under the running tap, it slipped from my grasp, and I, afraid of losing a new plate and ruining the ornateness of my anandanide meal, jerked instinctively to catch it. The plate smashed from the flip and that quick reaction drove my hand into the sharp, newly formed ceramic edge.

     “I need to go to the hospital.” My roommates are used to hearing me say all sorts of absurd things, so they peaked their heads into the kitchen wondering if I was kidding. It also happened to be a night when everyone and their girlfriend was at home either eating or working in the dining or living room. Six heads were looking at me looking at my hand, now streaming with oxygenated red. I could see either tendon or bone in that inch-long gouge along the knuckle of my right index finger. I was not kidding. A minor panic ensued. We had to get our priorities straight and act fast.

     Step one: contain the bleeding in a sanitary way. “Kaylee get me some (unused) toilet paper to wrap around my hand.” Step two: eat dinner. (It’s so I could take my antibiotic for the MRSA in both my big toes—yes, I got it in both big toes at the same time; no, MRSA is not superman. Dinner is also so I wouldn’t be hangry at the ER.) “Could somebody get me some food?” Stu makes me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, unwittingly giving me the favored ratio of jelly to peanut butter. Step three: take off my shorts and put on sweatpants, so I won’t be cold in the ER. Step four: obtain volunteers for emergency mission. “Why do you need us again?” “It’s because I can’t drive a car with one hand sliced open.” “Oh yeah, duh.” Step five: tell Caleb he can eat some of the urchins. “How do I eat them?” “Just don’t eat the stuff that’s not orange. Yes, it’s perfectly fine to eat raw.”

     Ten minutes in, the bleeding stopped. Three hours later and I was given a bed in a hallway. A hispanic family with a coughing toddler waited at least six hours. It was the night before the full moon. The ER was bustling, and measures were being taken to prepare for the Almighty CORONA. A kid entered the building and started vomitting profusely, encouraging everyone in the waiting lobby to move to the chairs farther from the door. “How are you now?” a nurse asked. “I ate an edible, but I think I’m okay now. It’s all out.” A sigh of relief waves through our tribe of strangers, and we all silently congratulate each other for not having breathed in his contagious gut-droplets. For the next hour-and-a-half, Eddie, as I refer to him, was adoringly cuddled by his girlfriend (who was probably full of what he gave up). Fifteen minutes after Stu skateboarded off to get Kaylee Taco Bell, the middle-aged man behind me whispers to his wife, “Do you think you could get me some of those tacos from Jack-in-the-Box?” As the clock struck twelve, nothing happened. But shortly thereafter they called me on back. They sat me down on a bed in the hallway, right around the corner from the double-door entrance. I didn’t mind. My case was minor, they were busy, the world was drunk with corona, and I was just grateful to be seen and to not have to keep waiting in that bleak room with a vending machine stock-full of Aquafinas in every slot except D6.

     Five minutes pass; I’m asked about insurance paperwork with Kaiser. Fifteen minutes pass; a nurse comes to me and offers a tray of lavishingly warm water to ease away the bloody toilet paper. “Oh that feels so good. Do you know what temperature this water is? I’ve been doing these foot soaks and it would be great to get it at an ideal temperature like this.” “No I don’t.” She gives me some blue cloths to warm my legs as I lean there in the cold postured like Manet’s Olympia, except it is my hand that is wounded rather than my gender. Ten more minutes pass. Doctor comes to look. The cold and the white and the loneliness. The passing of people. The vanity of lofty goals when faced with simple stumbling blocks. The stoned meandering of Eddie’s girlfriend looking for water. Ten more minutes pass; he anesthetizes my hand. Ten more minutes pass; I glance up to the photograph above me: it is a sea otter wrapped in kelp, arms curled upon his lap, lying just like I was. Urchins were on his mind, and mine. Below that icon, the periwinkle fabric was kelp, the hushed moving of people in blue were kelp-dampened waves, the cold belonged to the ocean, and I felt the unfeelable holdfast beneath me. Outside, the muted sirens coursed like an orca call. The police cruisers had always seemed to move in pods.

     Forty minutes later, I waited with a blue-stitched hand for paperwork behind a female inmate, red-donned, black-haired, light-skinned, hispanic, in chains. She waited where the thirty-something-year-old officer told her. I waited for the officer to acknowledge I was waiting behind her as if she was a normal person in line before approaching the paperwork booth. The attendant and I talked chipperly. The officer, realizing his unnecessary formality toward his prisoner tried to strike up small talk with her. “So, have you been here before?” “Yeah I’ve been here before. Bad meds effect.” Had he said something different, he would have let his guard down. But the young man at the booth had somehow disarmed him. “I’m going to have you move over there.” She had been standing behind me, the chains dangling between her otherwise free arms. She moved to my side of the hall, now facing the officer, back to the wall, her chin and eyes slanted askance. Our peripheral vision overlapped. Drops of ocean water rose into my eyes.


March 26, 2020
San Luis Obispo