Night creatures

Saturday night, went to Seahurst Park for the night creatures beach walk. The crusted stones; the wet dark sand, rippled water climbing to our feet under the lamps and flashlights as we walked. About thirty people present; assorted children; ten "beach naturalists" trained by the Seattle Aquarium. We walked with lights glowing, patches of dark people surrounding central burning lamps, in rings of illumination dotted across the beach.

The rocks covered in enormous barnacles. One of them, the elephant barnacle, looked so like an elephant that before I even knew its name I said, "It looks like an elephant." Fist-sized, protruding from the rock, its hard sharp snout poking into the damp open air. When we touched it, it clamped up tighter, lifting its strange nose closer to the top of the round opening of its tent-like covering.

Crabs in the sand, hunkered down, crouching as we came close. Empty moon snail shells; an occasional hermit crab's claws and staring frightened eyes from within the curve of a shell. The lovely smell of salt in the cold humid air. A wet, decaying scent, the firm sand underfoot taking our prints.

Worms draped about among the barnacles, long snot-textured black slimy thin things that looked like they couldn't be alive. A tiny gunnel, smaller than my pinky finger: a blackish-grey eel-like fish perched between crusts on the rock. It had a little eel's face and staring eyes.

Water creeping into my hiking boots. A Dungeness crab moulting against a rock, the extraodinarily large body beside the ridiculously small hull still dangling from its front. Under a rock, the tiny shore crabs, gray and square, scuttling rapidly into the sand. Anemones, green spotted blobs with a smear of pink where they'd retracted their tentacles, a clamped rosy mouth waiting to sprout a thousand impossible tentacle-arms like a medusa or a monster. We found one lying in the water, opened, and its tentacles adhered stickily to our fingers as we touched them. "They're injecting poison into you; that's what you're feeling," explained our naturalist. We cringed and withdrew.

What else? Strange chitons, like brown growths on the rock with furred edges. Then, after our walk, gathering at the firepit, sitting around it drinking coffee spiked with cocoa mix, and listening to the leader naturalists tell Indian folk tales. The story of how the animals brought fire to the humans in the beginning - Coyote and Crow and Chipmunk, with Chipmunk's long white stripes down his back where the witch guardians' claws scraped down his back when they nearly caught him as he fled. The tale of Salmon-Boy, who became a salmon and lived among the salmon people, then returned to his human people only long enough to teach them all he knew. When, in spring, the salmon returned along the river, he recognized his soul among them in an ancient, exhausted fish, so pale and worn he could almost see through it. So he thrust his spear into it, and at that moment, he died. His people sent his body out to sea, floating, to rejoin his animal people.