We live on the beach, like Jim Rockford. We walk on it almost every day, and every day it is different. Sometimes it’s the people, like a few days ago a man walking his pet pot-bellied pig named Penelope. Other days it’s the wildlife, a new bird, or the realization that the sanderlings are all gone now, up in Alaska mating, not to return until the fall. Last week there was a baby seal just sitting there on the beach. He drew a crowd, and I was worried that some of the mothers were letting their children get too close. But he wasn’t having any of it; if someone got within fifteen feet or so, he charged at them and they stepped back right smartly. After a few minutes he got fed up and swam back out to sea.

Because the sea teems with life, it follows that it also is a place of much death. The beach, in particular, is a vast boneyard, a lethal environment for many sea creatures. There are mass dyings, when things wash up in their billions for reasons I am unaware of. A few …

There are incredibly beautiful creatures called by-the-wind sailors. These are jellyfish like the Portuguese man-of-war in that they float on the surface, but they are not as large and not harmful to people. They are oval in shape, never larger than six inches on the long axis, flat, with short tentacles hanging from the rim that I presume catch fish. They are that deep, stunning blue of depression glassware, and they have a short sail protruding at an angle from the top, clear and looking like plastic. The book says they can steer with these sails, but some days the steering apparently isn’t too good, because we’ve seen them washed up on the beach in heaps, as far as the eye can see. Literally billions of them.

Always underfoot but usually not seen are billions of "sand crabs," actually mole crabs. They never get bigger than the end of your thumb, and have no claws. They burrow in the sand around the tide lines, and they filter-feed on microorganisms. But at certain times there are conditions so that you become aware of them. One is at low, low tide, what they call a minus tide. Then, the sand becomes spongy and you can see them moving down there. You can put your foot on the sand and see an actual wave front spread from it as a message seems to be passed along a subterranean (or should that be sub-littoral?) grapevine: "I just got stepped on!" "Joe just got stepped on! Pass it on!" "Howie says Joe just got stepped on! Pass it on!" "Frances says Howie says Joe says he just got stepped on!" "Oh, right, that Joe, always with the scary stories …" and the wave of consternation dies out. The other time you see them is when they die, again (and I hate to keep doing a Carl Sagan on you, but no other word will do) by the billions and billions. I don’t know why they die, but they do, in mind-boggling numbers.

Some days no kelp washed up, other days there are great heaps of it. One of those days there was another mass die-off … of ladybugs. Something seemed to draw them to the heaps of rotting kelp, but once they landed on it they got sluggish and eventually died. I hated to see it. Ladybugs are one of the few insects I actually like.

Here is a good place to mention our old buddy, Huell Howser. Those of you who have spent time in California may be familiar with him, he’s become something of an institution. For about 15 years now he has produced a show called "California’s Gold" for KCET, the PBS television station in Los Angeles. He is a cheerful fellow originally from Tennessee, with a goofy grin and biceps like Popeye and all in all doesn’t look like a guy who can be sent into transports of delight by the sight of a field of California poppies, but looks are deceiving. We first got to like him when we checked out library videos of his series of 7 tapes covering the missions. Then we started watching the CG series, of which there are about 200 episodes now. The library system here has 100 of them, and we’ve now seen them all. They make excellent short subject documentaries to our evening viewing of a rented movie.

The best words to describe Huell are "infectious enthusiasm." He really seems to love history, and old things, and beauty, and flowers, and neighborhood celebrations and parades and natural wonders. And the more obscure and unknown the better. Sure, he’s done stories on the gaudy and well-known stuff, the Golden Gate Bridge, Japanese Tea Garden, Capitol Building, etc. But he’s at his best when the subject is obscure or hidden away in some far-flung corner of the state. He has done stories on a desert trailer park in the middle of nowhere called Slabtown, on the creations of monomaniacs who worked 40 years on crazy stuff, like Watts Towers, and Nitt Witt Ridge in Cambria, and a two-mile tunnel through a mountain that no one ever used, and the underground gardens in Fresno, and stories on Tule Lake and Mono Lake as well as Lake Tahoe. We have learned a lot from him, found a lot of places to go when we get the time, and some real close by here that we’ve already visited, like the Motel Inn, the very FIRST motel in America (sadly, closed down just a year or two ago), San Luis Obispo Chinatown (only one building left), and the ruins of the set for CB De Mille’s 1923 version of "The Ten Commandments," only ten miles south of us outside Guadalupe. (De Mille’s agreement with the landowner was to remove all traces of the construction, but when they wrapped he was dead broke, so he had the carpenters simply lower the ten-story monstrosity to the ground, and the sand soon covered it up. Now, if you know the right dune, you can see big chunks of plaster and weathered wood all over the place.) Frankly, I’m suffering a bit of Huell Howser withdrawal, having seen 100 of his shows over about 6 months. I wish I could figure out how to obtain the 100 we haven’t seen.

Santa Maria is the first big town south of us, only about 15 miles. It’s just over the Santa Barbara County line, population 80,000, which makes it much bigger than the better-known towns of San Luis Obispo and Pismo Beach. But SM is a working-class town, and much of that working class is Mexican. Most days you can see them out in the strawberry fields, stooped over. Nobody’s yet made a machine to pick strawberries. Grapes used to be the biggest crop in the area but now it’s the berries, some of them as big as a child’s fist, and very, very good. The annual crop of strawberries in Santa Barbara County is now over $100 million in value.

It’s also a cowboy town. We went to the Strawberry Festival at the fairgrounds a month ago and it was much larger than we expected. There were a dozen varieties of strawberries for sale and of course I had to sample them all. We estimated that 90% of the crowd was Hispanic, and a great many of them were dressed in jeans, boots, and cowboy hats. Some of the outfits were stunning. I stood behind a guy in the ticket line who wore a silk suit trimmed across the shoulders and lapels in yellow ostrich leather to match his yellow leather boots and hat band. We watched a performance by girls in colorful costumes from a Mexican folk dance class, ages 5 and up. The teacher provided introductions in Spanish, not bothering with an English translation, which shows you how predominant the Latino culture is. For all I know we may have been the only monolingual people watching.

The Elks Club had a rodeo a few weeks ago and we thought about going, but went to the rodeo parade instead. It was three hours long, and I’d never seen so many Tae Kwon Do classes and brownie troops and little leagues in my life. Everybody had to get into the act, usually on a crepe-paper-bedecked flatbed truck. It was fun, especially listening to the announcer just across the street from us who kept getting everything wrong. The highlight, for me, and a big crowd favorite, was the very last group. You could hear them approaching from several blocks away, and I thought "What the hell is that?" It was the Danville Devil Mountain Brigade, who billed themselves as a "Semi-precision Shotgun Marching Band." Their act was simplicity itself: they fired shotguns into the air. There were 21 of them, and they had just three numbers to perform. 1) They fired one after the other. 2) They fired in groups of three. 3) They fired all 21 guns at once. (Sometimes I’m amazed at how little it takes to entertain me.) I picked up one of the empty shells that littered the street. It is clearly labeled BLANK. We’re going to make a refrigerator magnet out of it.

And lastly, I must mention "The Great American Melodrama and Vaudeville." This is a small theater just down the street from us, and is consistently voted the best live entertainment in SLO County. It was founded almost 30 years ago by a man named John Schlenker, not long after Angus Bowmer started the much better-known and seriously-intended Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. But you’ll get no Shakespeare in the GAM&V. They specialize in turn-of-the-century melodramas, of the sort where you cheer the hero and hiss at the villain, but we haven’t seen one of those yet (the new production, opening two days ago, is "From Rags to Riches; or, I Will Not Pay the Price You Ask!"). We have seen "The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940," "HMS Pinafore," and "Tom Sawyer." All of them were excellent. The repertory cast are all skilled comics, singers, and dancers, and they always deliver. The formula is inspired, too. First a two-act play, then after the second intermission a Vaudeville show around a theme: USO Show, Old Television, Songs of the South. Guaranteed to leave ‘em laughing.

The theater is small enough that no seat is far from the stage. There is sawdust on the floor and tables are squeezed close together. You’ve heard of dinner theater? This is "snack bar" theater. Hot dogs, popcorn, nachos, soft drinks, beer, and wine. The cast, in costume, ushers you in, works the snack bar during intermission, and sings a song every time a dollar bill falls in the tip jar. Definitely low rent, way, way, WAY off Broadway, but more fun than I’ve had in a lot of more uptown performances. Highly recommended.