Funion with the Grunion

Yesterday we told the kids they had to go to bed early; we had a big surprise waiting for them that would require them to be up in the wee hours of the night. This of course, insured that absolutely no sleeping actually took place at 7:00pm when we put them down - rather yielding instead a thinly veiled buzz of chatter and electricity bundled under bedclothes. Eventually the appointed hour of mystery arrived and the well-rested children (Not!) were loaded into the car with blankets, jackets and flashlights, and we set off on our way to our surprise destination. L and N were vibrating with anticipation as we hit the Harbor Freeway and drove in the dark down toward the sleeping realms of San Pedro. They didn't quite know what to expect when we pulled into the parking lot of the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium at the shore of the harbor.

California has its fair share of natural profundities. Among the organic oddities are a small silvery fish not unlike a sardine. These fish, the California grunion, are particularly noteworthy for their California swinger sex life. Each spring, for two or three nights following the full or new moon, these otherwise mild-mannered and respectable fish, fling themselves upon the sandy beaches of So Cal where they wile away twenty minutes of slithering, sliding conjugal bliss before making the flop of shame back to the anonymous depths of the sea. (What happens on the seashore, stays on the seashore.) Grunion runs, as they are called, are so precisely timed that they can be predicted to with an hour - it's one of those freaky things of nature where the animal kingdom slyly lets us know that they are much more on top of the situation than we gave them credit for, and that we should be worried because they probably have something else more sinister up their sleeves. (Or scales, as the case may be.)

We got to the site a good hour or two before the predicted run because the aquarium had all kinds of exhibits and demos for the grunion-uninitiated. We saw a movie clearly made in the 50's where the crisp, big-voiced narrator over a jaunty soundtrack described very matter-of-factly, in details that made us squirm like our focus fish, all the gory intricacies of the fishy fantasy, using words like "spawn" and "milt." Feeling a little dirty, we then went through some of the museum exhibits and displays where we continued to fail to shake the imagery from the movie.

In the courtyard awaiting the big event.

One demo held out in the courtyard was particularly fascinating. Each group was given a little baby-food jar with what looked to be a small clump of sand in it. These were sandy grunion eggs, we were told. A volunteer came by with a pitcher of sea water and poured a little in each jar. We examined the brew, which looked pretty much like what a lump of sand soaked in water would be expected to look. "Agitate your jars gently," we were told. The docent demonstrated covering the jar and swirling it, surprisingly ungentlely, for the crowd. "Now look at it." We did and as the swirling sand slowly subsided all of a sudden all these tiny little translucent commas began to spring out and dart around. It looked, if I can harken back to another 50's video allusion, much like the microscope view of what they probably showed you in the much-too-candid sex-ed videos of the day, if you catch my drift. Again, I felt a little dirty, but at least it was a fascinating sense of moral corruption.

Baby grunion.

While we were exploring one of L's favorite classmates, K, and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tanaka, arrived, the meeting having been prearranged by the Mom's earlier that day. While the kids orbited us in celestial frenzy we adults waited expectantly as the night deepened and unspeakable things began happening on the beaches outside.

The Tanakas and the Perkins

A great white, clearly biting off more than he can chew.

Eventually the moment of truth arrived and the docents lead us down to the beach in the near pitch dark. We were lined up on the sand a few feet from the tideline and were told to keep all our flashlights off and our jumping about to a minimum. (We complied with the flashlight part.) They wanted to let the run build, because evidently the fish are a little shy. Wouldn't you be? Every few minutes they said, "OK, turn on your flashlights!" and everyone would flood the beach to be greeted with a scene worthy of Imperial Rome at its most decadent. The beach was full of hundreds, maybe thousands, of small silvery wigglies getting their fishy groove on.

Pretend you can actually see hundreds of silver shapes writhing in utter abandon.

Grunion are evidently considered a delicacy. The spawning season had actually been going on since April, but tonight was the first night in which the fishing season opened for people who actually wanted to catch and eat the little buggers. The law, which restricts the season to June, allows you to catch all you want (provided you have a license if you are over 16), but you have to do so by hand. So there were quite a lot of people there with buckets and a few with napkins around their necks. After the run had built to a peak the docents turned us loose and there was a wild stampede to the beach with folks pulling writhing romantics from their affairs and plopping them into their buckets anticlimactically. L and N and K plunged into the fray with the rest of them and quickly scored handfuls of the shameful spawners. (They were all subsequently spared and told to return to the sea and sin no more.) N was a particularly formidable hunter/gatherer and would dart suddenly off in some dark direction and return back smiling and dripping with his hands full of fish. If we had any video I'd submit it as an audition for the next iteration of The Deadliest Catch.

All in all it didn't take too long for the beach to be cleared of everything except wet sandy children, leaving only the long fussy trudge to our respective cars to complete the evening. Striped and dusted, the kids were piled into their booster seats and covered with a blanket where they relived the thrills and spills of the evening while we waited to escape the parking gridlock. For some reason, probably L.A. county budget cuts, they only had a single parking attendant taking the tickets and parking fees at the front entrance. With hundreds of cars, all jockeying for position, not unlike the sex-starved fauna of earlier, getting out of the lot was a major ordeal. The park rangers, trying to stem a riot, drove through the parking lots announcing that the wait for the gate would be 45 minutes. They were being optimistic. We parked the car, turned off the lights and put back our seats and just watched all the best and worst of humanity unfold in the writhing lines of cars trying to get out of the parking lot 30 seconds earlier than one another. The kids seemed only briefly interested in the social commentary and soon found other more productive things to do with their time.