In the summer of 1983, I taught a field methods in underwater archaeology course for the USC History Department, with the classes and diving all at USC’s field station at Big Fisherman Cove on Catalina Island.
I focused the classes on real-time scuba diving in Catalina’s entrancing offshore waters in the San Pedro Channel stuffed with golden Garibaldis, leopard sharks and tasty calico bass.
Most days, the 12 students and I — all duly certified PADI divers — met early for a brief class after breakfast, then hurried down to the cove in our wetsuits, grabbed our dive gear, and hopped into the small boats, since the wind often came up in the afternoons (reducing the underwater visibility).
As I noted sarcastically to the students, “If we can’t see, how can we locate anything at all down there?”
Artifacts, anchors, coins, amphora, submerged walls and harbor installations disappear easily in disturbed waters, especially near the coastline (as I also learned diving at Cape Kiti on Cyprus and later at Caesarea Harbor in Israel).
Given this easy access by USC’s largesse, we were out in San Pedro Channel several hours a day, both before and after lunch.
I demonstrated some basic underwater mapping procedures, shallow-water search techniques, underwater photography (pre-digital; and we had our own excellent darkroom), and artifact comparison and analysis.
Since Big Fisherman’s Cove faces San Pedro and Los Angeles, we were diving on the “inside” of the Channel — sometimes heading down to Ripper’s Cove or even farther south in the university’s small boats.
Along the pristine — this is 1983, remember! — and fairly unspoiled coastline, the 12 diving students and I witnessed many colorful miracles of marine life, including moray eels, bat rays, spiny lobster and kelp bass.
We also noticed leopard sharks and other denizens I wasn’t educated enough to identify, but my simple child’s eye enjoyed the variety, the colors and the darting movements. At times, we were very close to the intertidal zone in areas quite difficult to reach from the shoreside.
Among the anemones, mussels and other critters there, we all noticed the slowly creeping abalone (haliotis), sea snails or gastropods (stomach-feet) — camouflaged as they were by encrustations on their rounded shells.
At one time, the various abalone species were highly abundant, and they formed an important part of many indigenous people’s diets, especially the Chumash and Gabrileños. The Chumash called them t’aya.
Equally important, abalone shells were prized in themselves and specifically for use during ritual ceremonies (e.g., white sage was burned in them). White abalone have been known to live up to 40 years, and most humans have found the nutritious meat of the abalone flesh delicious and full of protein.
As we walk around our local mountains or swim beneath nearby ocean inlets, the array of life-forms presents itself and vanishes before we can properly assess or fully enjoy this overflowing cornucopia of life-forms. The sheer variety of living species was one of Charles Darwin’s greatest discoveries and joys, as he remained in awe of this “principle of plenitude” his entire life.
Recently, acclaimed nature writer Elizabeth Kolbert quotes documentary filmmaker Thomas Mustill about nature’s hallowed variety:
To be alive and explore nature now is to read by
the light of a library as it burns. [4.1.1.]
I immediately think of ancient Alexandria’s famous Hellenistic Greek Library, which, with the adjacent “museum” complex, formed one of the earliest research centers known to world history.
The apocryphal and Islamophobic story used to run that the conquering Moslem Caliph Omar burned the Alexandrian Library down in 640 CE because Islam wasn’t mentioned in it, but that is not true. What we do know is that in these centuries of the Common Era, the world lost the ancient world’s single greatest archive of knowledge.
Without much awareness or forethought, my team of students and I sometimes “harvested” a few of these large red or green abalone, and kept them in saltwater on the dive boat until supper. That evening we would assemble at my spartan apartment to pan fry the delicate abalone.
In 1983, environmentally speaking, I was still an ignorant and callow ancient historian and marine archaeologist and had just earned a Ph.D. from UCSB the same year.
Despite helping clean up the beach after the great oil spill of Jan. 28, 1969, and then witnessing the disgusting dead marine life and oil-soaked croaking seabirds along the shoreline, my ecological consciousness had not matured with my 36 years of life.
At the time of “collecting” these precious abalone 14 years after the spill, I had no idea they were threatened, the big reds (haliotis rufescens) most of all, and selfish hunters with scuba gear like us had been cleaning out all the marine canyons along San Pedro Channel.
By 1997, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife had banned taking any abalone, by either sport or commercial divers, in Southern Californian waters. The ban remains today.
Fish and Wildlife did this since it was becoming very clear in 1997 that most abalone species were dying off. All of the big ones had been taken, much like the depleted Pismo clams near San Luis Obispo, the ongoing saga of the threatened snowy plovers, and I note that the U.S. Forest Service still wants to “thin” (read clear) 750 acres of old-growth conifers on Pine Mountain (California).
At one time, I had saved 11 of the prettiest abalone shells and, when we moved into our current Westside home, placed them as border-markers in our minuscule backyard. While the Chumash utilized them for bowls, hooks and jewelry, I was happy to have them in the yard as mementoes of wondrous California sscuba diving and important friendships (I taught the summer course twice).
Forty years later, only five heroic shells are left to decorate my backyard.
Did I write “decorate”? I had no idea when we harvested them that they were already threatened, but I should have surmised it.
My ignorance, despite Earth Day 1969, kept the self-conscious awareness from cognizing that a clumsy human using scuba could “bag” six to eight big abs in under an hour. The pre-Contact Chumash harvested limited numbers at super-low tides by simple collecting and by free-diving off their tomol canoes.
To be alive and explore nature now is to read
by the light of a library as it burns.
That “library” Mustill refers to is the entire catalogue of living species existing on the Earth today, and we’re literally heating it up and observing fragile species falling entirely out of existence.
Within 25 years, will roaming herds of wild elephants be gone forever? What about our local arroyo toads and the California condor (facing new threats from windpower blades)?
With a freshly-minted Ph.D. and a few summer seasons at archaeological sites in the Mediterranean, I was able to teach my students the rudiments of the emerging field of marine archaeology in 1983. Yet my ignorance of the planet’s damaged resources let me drift into selfish usage, scarfing up on thin, delicious abalone steaks with good company on glorious Catalina.
Yes, we can hide in a progressive dream, imagine our own life spans as eternity … yet the numbers of humans and their dependent cows and pigs continue to soar today and crowd out other living forms.
What examples are we setting for our children, and what beauty and natural resources will remain for their children?
4-1-1
» Elizabeth Kolbert quoting Thomas Mustill in “Contact,” The New Yorker, June 13, 2022, p. 26; Luciano Canfora, “The Vanished Library” (UC Press, 1990); Dan McCaslin, “Cape Kiti 1977 Underwater Report, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology XLV: 4” (1978).
» Directions to cook abalone: Slice thin (very sharp knife); bread them a bit; cook in very hot olive oil for a short time — less than 90 seconds — flipping them once with an iron spatula. Eat immediately accompanied by an organic green salad, bread, and copious quantities of chilled white wine or doppel-Bock German dark beer.
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
