Rachel Kippen is one of our original founders and represented the Environmental/Ecology sector of nonprofits in the planning and developmnt of our fledgling nonprofit membership organization. This is her final column for the Our Ocean Backyard for the Sentinel, May 26, 2024 before moving to Seattle.
The most precious resource we have is our time. You gift me your time when you read this column. I don’t take this responsibility lightly. We’ve spent more than five years together and I thank you for paying me your mind. This will be my last column, and I will sorely miss our correspondence. I am moving and by the time this article appears in print, California will be in my rearview.
I have been experiencing a series of vivid flashbacks as my numbered days as a Monterey Bay resident drain through the hourglass. I drove down Highway 1 crossing Elkhorn Slough and looked out on the water beside the bridge. I saw myself in my early 20s, cackling uncontrollably, my kayak flipped over and racing away from me with the outgoing tide during a rescue training for my part time position as a kayak guide. I spoke at a Save Our Shores event last weekend and saw my husband in the crowd. I recognized his same slow smile, the one from 11 years ago when he first walked into my office to apply to volunteer for the organization.
I hugged my best friend goodbye. I felt the tension leave my shoulders as I leaned into her familiar, comfortable embrace. I flashed back to crawling through an agricultural ditch in Watsonville with her, the both of us utterly coated in toxic waste, picking through an assortment of debris that no human should ever touch while sarcastically discussing the “other duties as assigned” clause in our environmental job descriptions. I’ve been talking to Monterey Bay. I’ve been telling her my stories and thanking her, for everything that I hold dearest and most hallowed first germinated from a connection to this place. She’s my greatest co-conspirator. She is my kin.
I think I’ve been grieving Monterey Bay since the day we first met. I’ve always known she would never be mine. Sure, a lifetime of skyrocketing rent has certainly reduced my attachment to material obsessions.
But I’ve also felt that our time together would be fleeting because beauty is inherently fleeting. As a result, I have gotten to love Monterey Bay with the abandon and freedom that can only come through this knowing. Nature is holy and wild. It’s impossible to capture as its essence is a state of constant movement, like a firefly in a jar.
This confusion causes suffering for many humans. We try to control others in much the same way we try to possess and dominate nature. All good things must end. All good things transform. To simply bear witness to Monterey Bay in every season – from the nooks of her rocky tide pools to the pedestal of her sand dunes – for me, this has been more than enough.
In order to hear an animal break the ocean’s surface, you have to be quiet. You have to listen. Hit the kill switch on the boat’s motor. Stare at the glassy water and anticipate movement. Observe the horizon for boils churned by schooling fish. Hear the hungered chatter of gulls. The majority of your time is punctuated by what is not there with a parenthesis for what is yet to come. I’ve waited for humpbacks and dolphins and harbor seals to porpoise and periscope, for Mola molas to rise from the depths with gulping mouths. I’ve held my breath for cormorants to slingshot backward, pulled up by the buoy of their rear end, and for otters to saddle in beside me, clutching piles of mussels in their short forearms. I am so happy you are here.
I like the reverse hierarchy when humans wait for nature. I like that this time opens the door for faith and superstition, the fodder that fills the novels and tall tales of sailors and fishers. I like that we often can’t see much of or even anything once an animal finally arrives. A dorsal fin here, an upright duck butt there, the blurred lightning of a flying fish out-of-water, the slick rubber back of a blue whale, a sleeping sea lion’s pectoral flipper lazily splayed out to catch the sun – our imaginations fill in the rest of the scenes playing out below. I don’t have to understand everything. It brings me peace just knowing you exist.
Once, while fighting with an ex-boyfriend I needed to break up with, a sea lion surfaced beside the dock where I was sitting, crying. It snorted loudly, offensively, gross and full of mucus, and then barked with what I interpreted as disdain, “Are you kidding me already?” OK, OK, I get it. I ended the relationship. Thank you for the reminder that I am not alone.
In the months prior to my mom’s death, I was on the ocean in Kāne’ohe Bay. I heard a sea turtle’s sharp respiration before I saw it. It surfaced nearby, flung back its prehistoric head, took a belabored inhale, and dove back underwater. We all take divine breath from this realm before returning home.
For the past 12 years, Monterey Bay and this community has been a sanctuary for me to surface, to come up for air. Its unbounded beauty has shaped my writing, my art, my thinking, and my identity. It has given me a career, and has brought me love and friendship in human form and with the more-than-human world.
My unsolicited advice to you is to get to know Monterey Bay as though she was your mother, your partner, your best friend. Speak to her daily and treat her as you treat your beloveds. Never take one deep breath in her presence for granted.
Rachel Kippen is an ocean educator and sustainability advocate in Santa Cruz County and can be reached at newsroom@santacruzsentinel.com.