P.N.ZOYTLOW

For Observer Zoytlow, there was no other way to describe it than “a long and stormy week.” For days the wind had lashed the sea and the tides were higher than he had seen them before on this stretch of the California coast. Daily, great loads of kelp and debris were dumped on the otherwise inviting sands. When the storms of late January ceased, Zoytlow took a walk along the water’s edge. Rocks, shells, and human junk were abundant. On the beach lay plastics in all their contemporary forms: toys, rope, containers and obscure fragments. And wood: soggy lumber, branches from somewhere, and the occasional yellow pencil. Also cloth: shirts, a piece of blanket, hats, a canvas shoe. Each item raised a question: whose were you? Where did you come from? Most of the curiosities were woven into heaps of yellow-brown macaroni that had been part of the offshore kelp forests. In a few days, caravans of equipment and dump trucks would haul it away.

Zoytlow had not undertaken his beach combing with any thought of a Field Report. No, in his researches, he usually hoped for more drama than mere debris; a beached whale, for example. Then he came upon a thing which did not belong on the beach, a thick, flat black slug-like affair nearly a foot long and two inches across. It looked like a large piece of rubber, perhaps a section of a fastening belt off some cargo vessel. It lay there, posing the question: am I organic or inorganic? Have I expired? Zoytlow tapped it with the edge of his sandal and it squirmed and half-contracted briefly in a repellent way. Such an ugly thing, worse than the nightcrawlers that lay on wet lawns on a summer night, prone to elongate and shrink in inhuman ways. But this thing was still alive and not likely to find its way back to the receding tide. Zoytlow was reluctant to touch it directly, recalling that the most unlikely creatures had irritating secretions or hidden stingers. Yet to let it expire? At a moment like that, Zoytlow reflected, anything that one had ever heard about the defense weaponry of the natural world came to mind like a klaxon. He nudged it back to the sea and watched. When the creature lay rolling about in the shallow surf a number of transformations began to take place: the rubbery elongation was replaced by a stout, cylindrical shape while the color changed to a more mottled surface of browns with red highlights. Here and there, small protuberances appeared: feet, horns, antennae? Each receding wave favored its return to the sea and soon it was gone. Initially, he called it a “sea slug” and then refined it to “sea cucumber.” Or was it a sea hare or urchin?

Zoytlow was troubled. How could he be sure the thing was what he assumed? Worse, he had already felt the tug of a new Field Report and this dispirited him. As readers of earlier Reports well know, the Observer has persistent hopes of writing something that would find its way into a respectable social science journal; such a publication would crown his efforts and his method (rapidometrics) with approval from other scholars. Men and women like himself who toiled in the unknown. Like them, he was a soldier in the Army of Reason, bound to the sacredness of “pushing back the barriers of superstition and ignorance” as a biochemist had once soberly expressed it. Too late now to reject this lump from the sea: it was worthy of a Field Report. Of course, Zoytlow never saw that particular “First Cuke” (as he came to think of it) again. Now, more than an hour of the allotted 75 minute research time remained and the chances of seeing another sea cucumber on that beach, unless equally moribund, were slim. Since there was a famous oceanographic institution with an aquarium nearby, his research must take him there.

Standing at the tidal pool among several dozen seventh graders, Zoytlow wished he had come earlier in the day. As it was, the creatures in the tidal pool (a simulated concrete affair) were due their weekly feeding. The crowd leaned over the edge to watch the various starfish, crustaceans, and anemones as the attendant dropped whatever it was into the pool. As the reactions from the pool to these nutrients were too subtle to sustain the interest of the students, they drifted off and Zoytlow peered into the pool looking for something that resembled the creature on the beach. Across the pool, perhaps a meter distant, stood a docent who was also peering into the pool and, as it happened, Zoytlow had first seen the reflection in the still water. It was a young woman, decades younger than Observer Zoytlow (at least that was his sense of it) with flaxen hair, a light blue shirt, dark jeans and the near-mandatory tan UGG boots favored by women in Southern California. Botticelli’s Venus, out of a tidal pool. Her name, according to her badge, was something Irish with the words “Science Intern” in slightly smaller letters beneath it. In the time that Zoytlow spoke with her, the present Field Report twitched to life again.

This Fiona (as she will be referred to in this Report) had a passion for the things of the tidal pool and quickly pointed out a “Warty Sea Cucumber” and stated that in all likelihood that was the life he had saved, an act he liked to imagine brought him into her favor. They were favorite gull fodder, she continued, and if he had not saved it then a gull would have dispatched it anyway. Part of the food chain, you know. Somewhat deflated, Zoytlow rapidly (rapidometrics, remember?) asked more about the sea cucumber (the Holothurians as science identified them). They were, he learned, the gleaners of the sea floor, essentially nothing more than a mouth, an anus, and a tube between them, Like earthworms, they process matter and expel it. Movement is by means of small tubular legs. They are important to the health of the ocean floor and are as mild-mannered as soft, blind, spineless and brainless creatures ought to be. Their only defense mechanism is self-evisceration: they blow out some guts to distract enemies. Some of these secretions may be sticky. Having performed this partial disemboweling they either shift to an alternate set or quickly grow another. There are many varieties of sea cucumbers, some smaller and some much larger, and they are found in all the oceans. Finally, there is really nothing about them that suggests cucumbers but the term appears in a number of languages.

Zoytlow, was quite taken with all this biological palaver, but he remembered that he was, after all, a social scientist. He asked Fiona what interest the social sciences might have in sea cucumbers. Her answer was terse and he concluded that she had tired of him. “Folks eat them,” said she, “go to a sushi bar.”

There are many sushi venues in the city, and Zoytlow learned that in the tourist districts their menus were slight compared to what was offered in an ethnic enclave. Look for namako in Japanese sushi bars, and ha shen in Chinese restaurants. The Chinese will not serve sea cucumbers as sushi, but there are a number of dishes prepared with it. Zoytlow did not wish to spend the time looking for such places and he contented himself with the description of cooked or raw ‘Holothurians” tasting like nothing more than tofu, quite dependent on what it is cooked with for flavor. Besides, visiting a restaurant just to ask about namako or ha shen seemed too silly and crossed some ethical boundary for this Investigator. [Digression: for a collection of nearly 1000 haiku poems on the subject of sea cucumbers, see Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! by Robin D. Gill which appeared in 2003.]

A better idea, and less compromising, would be to pursue the matter at one of several large Asian foods supermarkets. The one Zoytlow had in mind featured an enormous variety of live, fresh, frozen and canned fish. The heart of the fish department was the long counter where four slender men in black rubber aprons stood and hacked at fish like talapia, sea bass and catfish that had moments earlier been crowded together in glass tanks. Each of these fish had a different style of tank occupancy as did the crabs and lobsters further off. Talapia swam back and forth with their silver sides showing The catfish, black with white mouths all faced front, hundreds of them, each more than a foot in length and with their barbels waving in the current. They were gulping and their homely mouths gave them the appearance of a silent chorus, desperate and accusatory. It was hard to look at them.

Zoytlow approached a man arranging plastic trays of refrigerated minnows in a case. Did they sell sea cucumbers? The man was either deaf or had chosen to ignore the question, or he did not speak English. Zoytlow asked again and the man shook his head as if he wished to free himself from an irritant. Back at the counter, over the din of living fish being clubbed to death (how fortunate for us, thought Zoytlow, that fish are voiceless) he noted a Mr. Fang (“fish manager” according to his badge) speaking accented but obvious English to a woman holding up a squid. Did he have any sea cucumbers? There followed a rapid consultation with a worker slitting the belly of a catfish lately of the tank choir. Yes, in the frozen section. On the way, he verified that no sea cucumbers were in cans. Among the frozen things, he found bags of the subject of this Report either from Taiwan or Fiji. The black sea cucumber seemed to be cheaper than the white and the most similar to that First Cuke washed up after the storm. They were flattened out as well leading to the conclusion that dying sea cucumbers relax their novel endoskeletons. Nothing caught local, presumably, although only a few months ago two Chinese men had been stopped at the U.S-Mexican border with 343 pounds of sea cucumbers (dead) in suitcases which they were attempting to move into the United States where their contraband might have sold for $45 a pound. Or perhaps their fate would have been to be dried and sold as a medicine. Good for arthritis, circulation, cancers, and or as still another presumed aphrodisiac. The men were fined, denied visas, and the cukes were turned over to Fish and Wildlife. [Digression: In 1913, French composer Erik Satie wrote “Desiccated Embryo of a Holothurian” which was inspired by a sea cucumber. It is less than three minutes long and seldom performed.]

Let’s wrap this up, thought Observer Zoytlow. For a moment he had considered finding out what a Federal Agency might do with dead contraband sea cucumbers, but what stopped him more than anything was the realization that anything you get too curious about has no real beginning nor an end. He was peering into a tunnel, gray and endless with permutations of the sea cucumber in politics, art, economy, and (who knew?) philosophy. In truth, the sea cucumber had lead Observer Zoytlow to an epiphany. Hard to ignore was the thought of the Big Bang and this chance encounter with a little-known (to him) creature on the beach. Older than humankind, there it was, by the millions at sea bottom, nearly brainless, endlessly foraging and defecating, ancient and, once one got used to the idea, venerable. Going backwards, somewhere between the Bang and the today’s sunrise, humankind and the sea cucumber converge. Had P.N. Zoytlow not been the rigorous social scientist he was, he might have wept.