John Wise

This is one of our crazier trips, no doubt. We are going to the movies. But there’s an ocean in this photo you say? Well, the movie is not playing in the Phoenix area yet. Yesterday, we left Scottsdale at 2:15 p.m., and by 10:30, we were getting a room for the night in Bakersfield. By 7:00 a.m., we were on the road again, and now here we are at Pomponio State Beach, about 80 miles north of Monterey. Sadly, there won’t be time on this trip to stop at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

A little further up the road, we stop at Moss Beach as we can see that low tide is occurring, and going out to explore the tide pools is one of the things this stretch of coast is famous for.

While we love seeing sealife, and this anemone is certainly a great specimen, it is not the reason we’ve come up here; we didn’t even know when we left that we’d have the chance. The movie we are going to see is Spirited Away, and we are heading for San Francisco. I’m telling you this now because, for some reason, beyond my ability to explain it, I never took one photo in San Francisco to capture the moment.

Unlike this gastropod stuck in a place, we went from here at Moss Beach directly to the Castro Theatre, and following the screening, we bolted for the exit of San Francisco. We were the first in line at 3:30 for a showing that wasn’t scheduled until 6:30 p.m. The screening is being shown in Japanese with English subtitles and is the first time the movie is being seen in America, three months ahead of a wider release of a dubbed version.

This long-spined bullhead was trapped in a small pool and had nowhere to go, which allowed me to check out this peculiar-looking fish for a good long time. We’re only about 45 minutes from the Castro, so instead of wandering around the city for a bit, we’ve opted to take our time and leisurely hang out here at Moss Beach.

After finishing watching Spirited Away, we left San Francisco right away. The traffic in and out of the city is often horrendous, and we were intent on getting home Sunday night, so we needed to get as far south as we could. And in any case, we only took off on this 1,600-mile (2,600 km), 23 hours of driving trip to see this one particular movie. Yes, we love Hayao Miyazaki’s films that much!

So, try to understand our perspective. We get to be two of the first 1,400 people in the United States to see this movie. The Castro seats 1,400 for a sellout show. While there’s a Sunday screening, too, we snagged tickets for the first showing on Saturday – score! Either we were going to have a few hours in San Francisco to goof off, or as luck had it, we got to spend nearly three hours on the coast exploring sea life. The alternative would have been staying at home and conforming to our routine, which is far too simple and easy.

Matter of fact I happen to see most of my fellow citizens of Arizona as being like this lichen that is even more firmly attached to this rock than the snail I referenced as being stuck in place. While we may move slowly from time to time, we do get up and go. And who wouldn’t trade a few hours in front of a television to being blown away by the patterns and colors we are finding in the shallow waters of the Pacific Ocean here just south of San Francisco?

I already know the answer to my question and the answer is very few. We are creatures of habit, and when intellectual stagnation, habituation to the comforts of home, a tradition of passively watching others play some sport or other, combined with a generalized fear of what bad experience might be had when venturing outside of our norm and over and over we see a general lack of participation while we are out on the road. So, in light of that, we feel quite lucky and privileged that we have the wherewithal to go out and do such crazy things.

If I had to guess, I’d say this is a fragment of abalone shell, a well-worn old piece that has seen its fair share of tumbling through the ocean until it reached Caroline and me here on the shore, ready to be discovered.

And then there was this rock loaded with fossils of sea life locked into stone now. So this is going to be pure speculation, but I’m thinking that somewhere long ago, there was a mudslide that scooped up a bunch of mollusks, and as it rolled along with its river rocks (well, that’s what they look like to me) it all came to settle down for a very long time until the whole thing turned to a petrified chunk of stuff we are seeing here this afternoon.

I’m obviously not an expert or even an amateur paleontologist, but these look like shells to me.

I’d swear I saw more than one of those tentacles wave goodbye to us, thus prompting Caroline and me to return to our car so we’d not be late to see the movie we’d been traveling so far to see. As for our impressions of Spirited Away, we can let you know that in our book, it is another Miyazaki classic and was well worth our investment of time and effort to be some of the first people on Earth outside of Japan to see this beautiful heartfelt story.