santa maria, ca

If you've spent time in the coves of northern California, and looked up close at the endless lines of scrubby cliffs falling into the ocean, you may have discovered a curious crustacean clinging for breath amongst the mussels, anemones and seaweed. It's name is the gooseneck barnacle, and it looks somewhere between a sharks tooth and dinosaur skin. In a way it's a little bit of both.

The gooseneck barnacle is a rare species found only in the pacific northwest and the chilly waters of Portugal and northern Spain. In the old days, Gooseneck Barnacles were a delicacy. They were harvested to near extinction and steamed, fried, battered, and boiled to the delight of their sophisticated European clientele. Like their brethren the oyster, as the allure of the gooseneck spread further and further away from its natural habitat, the gooseneck found it harder and harder to please all its hungry admirers. Unlike the oyster, the gooseneck wasn't endowed with so vast a domain. By the early 20th century, the clanking chatter of discarded gooseneck crowns was so rare that it was all but forgotten.


I discovered the gooseneck after paddling in from a big day at Graywhale, about two kilometers south of Pacifica. It was dusk and I was exhausted. Endorphins were coursing through me as I carried myself out of the water and behind a big rock outcropping with the swell wrapping around both sides. The sun was all but down and in my shady enclave I examined these strange dinosaur tooth animals with a child's curiosity and sense of wonder. I was in rapture running my hands across their pearly calcium scales.


They were beautiful, and the desire to take a couple home with me was equally as strong as the desire to leave them in their pristine state. I was reminded of a time a couple years back in Stockholm, when I ducked into a courtyard fleeing some enormous 17th century block palace, only to find a miniature bronze statue of a little boy, hands around his knees gazing up to the sky. The statue is called pojken som tittar på månen (the boy who looks at the moon) and it's beauty is due to the expansiveness of the boys universe and the vulnerable humanness of his pose.

The endless ocean beyond and the wall of rock above make a similar statement to my gooseneck.