Author Archives: John's Book of Life

Why I became a marine biologist

07 Saturday May 2016

Posted by in Education and Teaching

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THE FISH

 This story makes me cry every time I think about it, but then I cry easy.  I’ve never been ashamed to cry when I encountered a happy or a sad circumstance.  If someone laughed at me I just figured they hadn’t experienced that particular circumstance, or were to macho to show their emotions.  I felt sorry for them and hoped they would mature soon.

I was about five years old when one of the most significant events in my life happened to me. My father being a welder and mechanic for Blue Diamond building materials only had a two week vacation each year and we spent it camping at a beach close to home in San Diego County, California.

There was no campground, just a beach and some cliffs that would shield us from the north wind that blew most every afternoon.  The campsite was free, and the fishing was good. It just doesn’t get any better than that.  There is a state park there now.  It is San Elijo State Park in Cardiff, California.

The great tent sites, back in the dunes have been bulldozed flat now so the RVs will fit on them.  The four or five families that camped there every year has become four or five thousand and there is a traffic problem in the campground.  I don’t go there anymore.

My story is about a five year old boy fishing in the surf with his father.  The accepted procedure was to wade out to about your waist and cast your bait out so it landed just beyond the first breaking wave.  My father taught me to cast sometimes before I can remember, and I was a good fisherman, (in those days you could still say the word fisherman and you wouldn’t get sued, or fired, or anything.

Early one morning, just as the sun was starting to spread its gold across the land, (all of us that didn’t have any money to spend always had the suns gold to make us rich), I hooked a fish.  Little did any of us know that it would set the entire course of my life.

I remember the fish didn’t fight very much.  I could feel he was on the line because of the jerks he managed every once in a while as I reeled him in through the surf.  I was taught to be cautious when landing any fish in the surf because the action of the water could rip a fish right off the hook.

I got the fish coming towards the shore, then I reeled as fast as I could and backed out of the water as I had seen my father do all my life.  The fish came flopping out of the water onto the sand beach, and I ran down and grabbed it.

I ran back up the beach so the next wave wouldn’t get me, and looked at my fish.  It was awesome.  I had never seen a fish that looked like this one before.  It wasn’t very big.  Perhaps 12 or 14inches, but it was so silver and bright, and such a strange shape.

It had very big eyes and they were green.  The body didn’t have scales on it like most of the fish I was used to catching, and as the sun shined on it, many colors glimmered and then disappeared.  It had a head that seemed out of proportion to the skinny tail, and a big spine that stuck up out of the back.

There was a line that ran down both sides like a lot of fish have, but this one was really easy to see.  There were spots all over the back, and as I held it in my hands it seemed to lose its color and turn more grayish.  I realized as it was dying all the beauty it had in life was evaporating like a puddle of water as it dries up.  It made me sad but my excitement at catching this stranger from the sea overcame the sadness, and I ran to show it my dad. (He became Pop later in life to everyone.)

He looked at it, scratched his head and said he didn’t have a clue as to what it was.  He had been fishing these shores all of his life, but this was a new one even for him.  He suggested we walk down the beach and talk to a man who was fishing a few hundred yards away. He might know what it was.

We waded out into the water and met Mr. Sergeant.  It is strange that I still remember his name.  When a child is excited they remember everything.  After careful examination, Mr. Sergeant said he didn’t know what it was, but he knew how we could find out.

He asked if my dad and I would like to ride over to the marine science school that was just a few miles away in La Jolla.  He said someone there was sure to know what it was.

We check with my Mom and she said it was okay with her, and off we went to the marine science school to find out about my fish.

The marine science school turned out to be Scripts Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla.  It wasn’t the big impressive campus it is today.  It only had a few building as I remember.  The place we went was a low woden building with a lot of offices off either side of a long hall.

There was a lady at a desk as we came in the door, and she greeted us with smile.  Her smile got bigger when I proudly held up my fish and asked her what it was.  She asked if that was why we were there.  Mr. Sergeant told her yes it was.

She leaned over and looked at the fish and said it was far too strange a fish for her to know, but she knew a man that would know what it was.  She picked up the phone and spoke to someone for a couple of minutes and then told us Dr. Hubbs would see us.

I walked down the hall with my dad and Mr. Sargeant to a door that had, ‘Dr. Hubbs,’ written on it.  I remember thinking he must really be important to have his name written on his door.  When we went in I saw books everywhere.  They were on the desk, on the table, and in bookcases that covered all the walls.  I was sure this man would know what my fish was.

He was very nice and talked to my dad and found out where we caught the fish and how excited I was about it.  He then turned to me and from that moment on he paid no attention to my dad or Mr.Sergeant.

He took the fish in his hands and didn’t seem to worry about getting the fish slime on his hands at all.  He looked at it for a long time.  Finally, I couldn’t wait, and I asked, “Do you know what it is?”  He could have said, a rat-fish, and we would have been out of there, but he didn’t.

He said, “No, but I know how to find out.”

He then led me to a stack of books and we started looking through them.  He didn’t just find a picture; he took me through a biological key.  We had to decide if it had scales, and what a lateral line was, and did it have rays in the fins or not.  He made me see the fish, not just look at it. At long last we discovered it was a rat-fish.  I was elated.  The book even told us all about the fish.

We said goodbye to Dr. Hubbs, and as we left he asked if he might keep the fish for the museum.  I was proud he wanted it, and was happy to leave it.  He had said it wasn’t good to eat anyway.

I stayed fascinated not only with fish but with the fact you could take any fish and find out what it was by using the right biological key.  My interest in biology dominated my school years and, twenty-five years later, I finally became marine biologist.  Dr. Hubbs never left my thoughts during all those years.

That should be the end of the story but it is not. You’ll have to read my next post in a week or so to find out why I cry when I think about this story.

A TEACHER TO REMEMBER

26 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in Education and Teaching, Uncategorized

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A Teacher to Remember

(I love this story)

Two years after I retired and moved to Port Ludlow in Washington State on the Olympic Peninsula, I got a call from Peninsula College.  They needed a part time Marine Biology teacher in a hurry.  The teacher they were planning on to teach a marine biology course off the main campus in Port Townsend became unavailable.  The class was in their class schedule and was full with 25 students.  It was to start in four weeks.

I hadn’t been teaching for a while and jumped at the chance to get back into the classroom with the future leaders of our country teaching my favorite subject.

The class was to be held at the Marine Science Center on the end of the pier at Fort Warden State Park in Port Townsend.  That was good news and bad news.  Being 45 miles away from the main campus, all the normal lab supplies were not available.  They had microscopes and a few prepared slides but that was all.  The good news was there were a dozen major aquariums in the building that we could use, and being my only class I had time to collect live specimens to use in our lab sessions.

It worked out well and I had a great time mixing with the younger generation again.  I stayed for six years.

Like in any class there are things that occur that were unplanned that you remember as special.  This is the story of one of those occurrences.

The lab session for this particular night was to look at live plankton.  Plankton is mostly very small animals and plants that drift in the ocean.  To catch and look at it under the microscope we use a ‘plankton net’; which is a very fine mesh butter fly type net.

This evening my plan was to have the class go down to the dock on the pier and pull the net along the dock, then go directly to the classroom (100 feet away), and watch the live specimens swimming around through their microscope.

Not wanting to get caught flat-footed I came an hour early and went down to the dock to check if there were enough plankton in the water to catch.  Sometimes the water was clear and almost no plankton would be in it, then I would switch to a different exercise.

The ramp down to the dock was forty feet long and as I walked down, the eight river otters that were resting on the dock all went back into the water.  They used the dock all the time and it was covered with otter poop.  As I was tiptoeing between the piles, I had a sudden realization that the poop on the dock looked exactly like the ‘Cliff Bar’ I was in the process of eating, as my ‘before class’ snack.  I broke off a good size chunk and placed it on a ‘clean’ spot at the edge of the dock, and went back up the ramp to meet my class.

An hour and a half later after my lecture, the class got their plankton nets and we all marched out to the dock to collect our lab material for the 2 hr. lab that was to follow.

There were a couple of otters on the dock that hit the water when we came down and I announced to the class to be careful not to step in the poop.  They all became very aware of it all over the dock.  I had them now – the con was on.

I said, “I wonder if they were males or females.”  I was sure one of them would take the bait, and one did. College students are always interested in sex.

“How can you tell?” was the question from the crowd.

I said, “It’s easy, the females have estrogen in their feces and it makes it sweeter than the males.”  I bent over, picked up my planted Cliff Bar, and popped it in to my mouth.  “This one is a male,” I said spitting it out, and going on with the class collecting like nothing had happened out of the ordinary.

Those 25 students may not remember much about marine biology as they grow old, but they will never forget the teacher, and have a great story to tell to their grandchildren.  Don’t you just love it when a plan all comes together?

 

Pop and the Bucket

15 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by in Personal Philosophy, Tips for a Happy Life

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This story starts with my dad, (Pop), asking me to come to Cardiff in San Diego County where he and my mother lived in a mobile home park, (long since torn down and made into a state park). It was located on the water at the foot of the cliffs leading to Solana Beach.
There was a rock reef, exposed at low tide out in front of their mobile home, and we often fished from it. My dad would go out when the tide was real low and collect mussel, (a type of bivalve/clam), off the rocks, open them up, take out the meat, salt it down, freeze it, and it became the bait we used to fish in the surf and off the reef. We caught a lot of fish over the years and it was nearly the only thing I ever did with my dad as an adult. He was 70 when this story took place.
It took me about an hour to drive down to their place from Santa Ana where I lived and taught at Santa Ana College. He was waiting for me when I got there at 6 a.m. so we could catch the low tide, walk clear to the end of the reef, and cast way out to where some big calico bass and sheep head lived. Later in the morning, as the tide came in, we would move off the rocks to the beach and fish for Corbina and perch in the surf. The rocks became very dangerous when the waves started breaking over them as the tide came up.
I was watchful of Pop, at 70, he wasn’t as steady on his feet as he used to be, but he knew this reef well, every crack and hole in the rocks. He was born in 1899 and raised just a few miles back from this beach on a farm. His brothers and sisters would hike to the beach and fish off this very same reef when he was only seven. It had been his friend for sixty-three years, and still was.
We caught a few nice bass and the waves were getting where they were washing over the reef, I shouted over their noise, (my dad called it the “Sea Serenade”), and said, “Pop, let’s move over to the surf and try for some surf perch.” Pop liked to eat the perch and so did I. I walked over to him and picked up the bucket with our bait in it. Pop had his hands full with a 12-foot fishing rod in one hand and rod holder in the other. He made his own rod holder. It was ½ inch rebar three feet long and sharpened on one end with a two foot piece of two inch steel pipe welded to the other end, to put the butt of his surf rod in. It weighed at least seven pounds and he was using it as a walking stick to get across the uneven rocks, which were now under water as each wave passed over them.
Back to ‘The Bucket.’ When I picked up the bucket I was caught off-guard; it must have weighed about 25 pounds. It was like lifting one of my diving lead weight belts.
After we walked a hundred yards down the beach, and set up our gear, I asked, “Pop, why is the bucket so heavy?” The bait in it couldn’t have been more than a few pounds, and his spare reel he always took along was only a pound or two. He always carried some extra sinkers he molded out of lead from old tire balancing weights, but not 20 pounds worth. He was on his way to wade out into the surf and make a cast.
He glanced back, looked at the bucket, and said, “Those old metal buckets (he got it before the days of plastic), don’t last as well as they should. That one rusted out in the bottom. (No kidding, he had been fishing with it at the beach in salt water for 15 years). I fixed it so it will last at least as long as I can still carry it.” He laughed, walked out waist deep in the water, and cast out. He backed up so the water was only knee deep, which is what we always did when fishing the surf. I did the same thing and came back and stood next to him.
I just had to ask the question. “Pop, how did you fix it?’ I couldn’t imagine what he had done.
The answer was simple and matter of fact. “I poured three inches of concrete in it.” Just then he hooked a two-pound Corbina and we never talked about the bucket again. He was still using it when he fished with me for the last time at age 85. The only difference was I had to climb out on the rocks and get the bait.
Whenever I get the urge to buy something new, I remember the bucket…maybe you should too.

Tomorrow is Easter

25 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by in Tips for a Happy Life

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I wrote this last year and it seemed like a good way to start out my Blog. Hope you agree.

Tomorrow is Easter. April 5 2015. This morning I got up at 4:30 am and watched as the moon hid in the shadow of the earth, an event that helps us to define who we are and what we are.  It made me reflect back on my life. What popped into my head was the Easters I spent as a child. They were some of the happy times in my life that we old people that live at the end of the street enjoy, in our travels of memory.

In my family we all gathered at my aunt Aggie’s house. There were about 20 of us. The years were in the early 1940s. She and Uncle Leo had about an acre of land right on the Los Angeles river somewhere in “the valley,” I have no idea now where that would be but it was rural. She had a goat that she milked and my cousins and I would go out and see if we could milk it. We were primarily city kids and milking a goat was a skill we didn’t possess. My aunt would squirt the milk in our mouth from three feet away. Of course it would get all over us and that was part of the fun.

Being right across the street from the river, the cousins (there were four of us that lived close enough to be there), were given the duty of collecting enough crawdads to put in the salad. The L.A. River was all mud banks in those days and it was full of crawdads.  We even had a swimming hole in it, and went swimming if the weather permitted us to without our mothers thinking we would get too cold and get sick. My mother and all my aunts would prepare the meal and of course the crawdad salad was my favorite part of it.

As I write this there are tears running down my face. These were wonderful times. Now the river is all cement. No more crawdads. No more swimming hole. No more goat milk. All of those people are dead now, except me and two of my cousins. I don’t think any of us have had a crawdad salad or gone swimming in a swimming hole or milked a goat for a long long time. What a travesty that is.