Darwin studied barnacles, and thus chronicled them in line drawings. These are a few of them-
I will now begin using these images to create plates for my own book. I can't imagine Darwin would have objected. My objective with this book is to blur line between story and knowledge. At any point along the adventure the facts stand true- the steamship Princess Sofia (an installment I'm still working on) did sink in 1918 off of Vanderbilt Reef in Southeast Alaska. Barnacles do gather in colonies, feet facing up, heads firmly planted down, for the duration of their mature lives. The facts are true- but the stories are fictional. I am attempting to cross back and forth between that boundary. We know so little about the lives of simple creatures. Quantum physics teaches us that the simple act of observing something, changes it. We unintentionally impact our subject matter. With this knowledge I feel more justified in adding personality to biology. And although my dramatization gives them distinctively human emotions, I like to believe that unbeknownst to the human radar aquamarine creatures are living a life far more diverse then we give them credit for.
So here is another installment of our fated barnacle's story. I'm a bit of a patchwork writer. So the pieces rarely come together in chronological order. It will have to suffice, therefore, to know that at the time this insert come along our barnacle, now know as Odessa, is floating along the wreckage of the Princess Sofia and she has just been delivered bad news from the mouth of an unruly sea lion.
A Great Tragedy
“Great tragedies befall those who cling too dearly, and only the sea is left at fault.” The words echoed in Odessa’s ears for many hours as she contemplated the loss of her family. She had grown up knowing the dangers of travel; she had come to accept the air of fatality lingering about her as she roamed. But it came as a great shock to learn of the carnage that befell her home.
Odessa had grown up at the 12-foot mark of an intertidal piling. A large pillar as it were, the diameter at 16 inches was large enough to isolate westward facing barnacles from their eastward, and thus inland, facing neighbors. And even though the two never knew each other first-hand there was a certain rivalry between them. The westward facing barnacles gloated on their view of the sea and the sun, while the inland facing barnacles reveled in how few deaths occurred due to evaporation or predation. And while it was true that the westward facing barnacles lost a few each day to the terrors of exposure, they reassured themselves with the fact that a life well lived was worth the risk of death, while a life hidden away was in fact not worth living.
Odessa was a westward facing barnacle. I suppose she took the credo much more to heart than her neighboring community had hoped. It nearly destroyed her family the first time she merely mentioned the thought of undersea exploration. In fact, it was the day she mentioned her eventual intention to travel that one of her siblings was devoured by a hungry raven. The family blamed her, tacitly of course, for stirring up bad air.
It had been rumored for years that one day a storm would come that would trouble the westward facing barnacles… though few, even among the inland community, put much stock in its validity. For barnacles are commonly the only survivors of the fiercest hurricanes. And it was certainly not the assumption of the barnacles that the dock itself, their home, would ultimately grind them into a fine dust tinged purple for mixing with the shells of the resident mussels. You see, the piling that the barnacles resided on plunged directly into the sea below, but it did so through a carefully instructed 24 by 24 inch square hole cut through the wooden dock. The dock was free to rise and fall with the tides, as was the ramp connected to it, so that it might be accessible despite the daily lunar tug. A typical Alaskan railing, wooden, mossy, guarded the hole around the piling, damp, but extremely durable. Never before in the history of barnacles living on this piling- and to ask the barnacles their history is to beg a very long story- had there been contact between railing and piling. The communities were separate, civil, but separate. The railing, being permanently exposed to air, was free of barnacles. Occasionally a crab would ride on it, and often it acted as a resting spot for cold beer and other human victuals, the banister’s only permanent residents were immobile, laconic, sea lice. So the barnacles historically viewed the railing as a danger only in that it provided an excellent perch for food-maddened sea gulls to pick off the blue mussels and gobble them down. Barnacles were considered edible only in the direst of famines. Blue mussels, however, were an avian delicacy.
I digress. The October seas are dangerous in Southeast Alaska. Even the most nascent sailor has heard the tales of whipping winds and cruel maelstroms. This October proved to be an unusually tragic one for the small community. Under a 90 mile and hour gust, and at the height of an incoming wave the free floating dock was pushed off her normal course of rise and fall and made, for the first time, direct contact with the life encrusted piling. As the dock was pitched about in the torrential sea the heavy railing pulverized the westward facing side of the piling, scraping the metal clean of any creatures, young or old, and turning them into a silty powder to be blown about the pier. The communities living between the seven-foot mark and the eighteen-foot mark were in a single storm demolished.
** insert more here**
Do not let Odessa’s sentiment about the loss of her family distress you too much. It is important at this point in her time line to give you a bit of information on why it was she was prone to leaving. Yes, her adventurous behavior combined with an ingrained pride in taking risks all had to do with her desire to take to the sea, but for anyone who has taken an invertebrate zoology class you might remember a few shocking facts about the reproductive life of a barnacle. For the sake of propriety I will omit the details and only allude to the fact that if all humans were as endowed as barnacles we wouldn’t need muscle cars or Harley Davidsons.
In every species courtship is an issue- but Odessa was not prepared in her adolescence for the repeated probing her neighbors so unabashedly exhibited. Barnacles are stationary creatures. They keep their heads firmly planted on the ground leaving their waving feet to catch edible passersby, and keep their unmentionable region easily accessible for raucous nighttime behaviors.
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