It was a time of uncovering. The earth was giving up its secrets. In northeastern China, scientists were examining an unearthed skull believed to represent a separate human group, long extinct, that lived in East Asia at least 146,000 years ago. More heartbreaking, horrifying, and recent, 751 unmarked graves of Indigenous people, mostly children, had been found at what was once a residential school in Saskatchewan, Canada. Meanwhile, in Florida, rescue workers were digging for victims beneath the rubble of a crumbled building whose sudden collapse might itself be indicative of rising water tables wrought by climate change, warnings ignored, and wisdom disregarded.
Here in Gaviota, the earth was dry, and the green grass of spring had given way to brittle stalks the color of straw. I pressed my finger deep into the soil of the toyon seedlings I was tending in pots, and I knew it was time to soak their thirsty roots. At the shore, we came upon a large chunk of coal, most certainly from the cargo of the four-masted ship called the Gosford that was on its way to San Francisco from Liverpool in November of 1893 when it caught fire and attempted to anchor at Cojo; the coal that tumbled into the sea still turns up on local beaches to this day.
On a different walk, there appeared a strand of fossilized whale vertebrae embedded for millennia in rock. Friends discovered an old copper penny wedged tightly and deliberately into a crack in a backcountry boulder, yet another example of story fragments materializing. And while carrying buckets of water to the oak saplings, I looked down and beheld the newly shed skin of a rattlesnake on the trail, silvery and translucent, just beyond my step, and realized that even surfaces were speaking. The casting away of that which is no longer useful implies renewal, but we must be willing to understand.