We had the place nearly to ourselves. Walter parked his Explorer beside the only other car in the lot, a red Honda Civic. A blue bicycle was locked in the bike rack.
Owners nowhere in sight.
Probably hiking around the Rock, enjoying this spectacularly sunny morning.
Second sunny morning in a row. This was more like it.
Walter said, “She's a beauty.”
The Rock, not the bright day. Day before yesterday I’d admired this giant from the deck of the Sea Spray but the fog had veiled her.
Today she was naked in the sunlight.
She loomed above us, a five-hundred foot dome, the remains of a twenty-million-year-old volcano whose cone had long since eroded away, leaving behind the rock that crystallized in the volcano’s neck. I looked her over critically. She’d been quarried, marring the symmetry of her shape. Still, the gouges and crannies made pockets for vegetation to take hold on her steep slopes. She was colored in tans and grays, streaked with the rust of iron oxides. She was made of dacite, an igneous volcanic rock composed of potash and calcite and quartz and feldspar.
“Yup,” I agreed, “she’s a beauty.”
She was also, we believed, quite possibly the mother rock to the sand from Robbie Donie's duffel.
We headed for the pocket beach that snugged against Morro Rock.
When we'd passed by on the Sea Spray I'd noticed one hardy swimmer in the sheltered water along this beach. I wondered that nobody was out here on this sunny morning. Well, it was still quite early.
Walter and I headed down to the sand to do a little beach combing.
We grid-sampled and hit the mother lode: grains of glassy quartz and brown hornblende and pale green augite, and long crystals of plagioclase feldspar striped in gray and black like a tabby cat.
This could very well be the place Donie had gotten sand in his duffel.
Or, could be elsewhere along the base of the big rock.
As we shouldered our packs to set off for the next site, I glimpsed someone up on a shelf of boulders at the north end of the Rock, crouching in the chaparral, binoculars raised. Short brown hair, sweatshirt, male. Red-car guy or blue-bike guy, I figured. He pulled up his hood. Two things struck me. First thing: with those binoculars he'd seen us sampling the beach and when I'd looked his way, he'd raised his hood. Second thing: who wears a sweatshirt on a sunny morning like this?
Well, the sea breeze carried a bite.
And this was indeed a binoculars-worthy place.
“Let’s go out on the jetty,” Walter said.
I thought of, and dismissed, mentioning sweatshirt guy. We'd come for the high-energy wave environment. And there it was, at the jetty.
The jetty began at the seaward corner of the Rock and stuck out like an arm into the ocean. Farther south, another jetty projected from the long sandspit that separated the bay from the ocean. The opening between the two jetties was the entrance to the harbor. We ventured a couple yards onto the jetty. Waves rolled in, swelling into beasts that reared up and broke frothing on the jagged rocks.
The sea spray nearly got us. I yelled to Walter, “High-energy enough for you?”
“Out there,” he shouted, pointing to the sea-facing front of the Rock. “The surf will be bigger out there.”
We retreated from the jetty and clambered up onto the broken pieces of boulder that rimmed the base of Morro Rock. We passed a sign that forbade climbing, and I thought so sweatshirt guy's a rebel, and then as we started picking our way along the bouldery fan I thought, there should be a sign saying proceed at your own risk.
Still, this path would take us where we needed to go.
Yesterday, after our analysis with Oscar Flynn's sexy scope, we'd returned to our lab and checked the online Coastal Data Information Program, whose array of floats and sensors could generate a wave-energy spectrum. It gave us a list of likely beach environments along the central coast. That — and the mineral character of Morro Rock — brought us here. That, and the fact that the ocean off Morro Bay was Robbie Donie’s fishing ground.
As we navigated the rough fan rocks I stayed close enough to grab Walter's arm, should he slip. And then I realized I was doing it again, hovering, a bad habit I'd gotten into a couple of years ago when I'd taken notice of his aging, and then again when he'd had health problems, and yet here he was healthy and aging adeptly, mountain-goating his way along the treacherous rocks. I gave him some space and shifted attention to my own footing.
A few slippery yards further, a shower of pebbles rained down from above.
We both looked up.
The flank of Morro Rock here was steep and surely unclimbable without gear. Whoever was up there, dislodging pebbles, must have climbed from the other side, the north side.
And then I saw something skittering up there, from one crevice to the next. Ah. Ground squirrel. Okay.
Walter said, “I thought that might be the hiker I saw earlier. In the sweatshirt.”
So he’d seen sweatshirt guy too.
His eyes were sharp as ever.
We moved on and rounded the base of the rock to arrive at its seaward face and my focus shifted to the big waves breaking onto the fan, wetting the god-awful bouldery footing. We halted.
Walter shot me a grin. “High-energy enough for you?”
I nodded. The waves were blue-green and they rose glassy and then shattered and they thumped and groaned onto the rocks and I looked out toward the horizon where the wave train started, far out to sea with winds upon the water. It was so primal I sank into some kind of sea memory of that dark water we all came from, which left its gill-slit mark on us for a time in the womb.
And then I thought I heard a clattering of pebbles and I turned and scanned up the rock face and saw nothing. I figured, squirrels again. The Rock must be crawling with them.
And then Walter was beside me, pointing out the little beach. It was a few yards farther along, where the jumbled boulders thinned out and then gave way to a slice of sand. We could see the high tide line. We could see where the waves would pound this shore.
Walter said, “Let's go put our eyes on that.”
We clambered over to the little beach. The sand was gold-tan, flecked with dark grains and the fragile bumpy shards of a sea urchin shell.
Flanking the sand were tufts of chaparral and mustard and yellow-green feathery plants that I promptly recognized from my online research as fennel. We didn’t need an immediate source of the seed I’d found in the duffel sand — seeds could be blown on the wind or ferried on bird feathers — but finding the plant right here was a bonus.
We sampled the sand and when we had finished we exchanged grins. Mineral suite, check. High energy waves, check. We'd gloat when we got back to the lab and confirmed the match but meanwhile we turned to the question of motive. If this was indeed the source of the sand in Robbie Donie's duffel, what brought him out here?
Walter said, “It is dramatic.”
I said, “I'd think a fisherman would get enough drama on the water.” Donie sure did, in the end. “What's so special about this place?”
Neither of us could produce an answer so we decided to nose around a little more.
Up from the beach was a vegetated gully that ran into the boulders.
We nosed our way up there, and found a niche between two big boulders. I got out my flashlight and illuminated the niche. Tucked way back in the recess was — the word came to my mind — a shrine. Items were placed in a triangle on the bedrock floor. A piece of fishing net. Chemical light stick. Flotation cushion. Piece of wheel. A glass fishing float. A larger plastic float. An assortment of odds and ends.
“Flotsam,” Walter said. “Someone’s picked it up at sea.”