Illusion Island (Anacapa)

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10/30-31

Ecology class field trip to Anacapa Island, an hour’s ferry ride from SoCal’s vast, vulgar, meretricious landscape of freeways and single-family homes. If Colorado led me to believe that ecological devastation is nearer to us, more widespread, and more uglifying than people sitting indoors realize, Anacapa showed that undreamed-of beauty still exists in our backyard.

Special treatment: craning our stuff from the boat landing so we didn’t have to carry it all up the stairs. It helped that our professor is friends with the people who work here.

We saw hundreds of common dolphins and three humpback whales just on the boat over. The island’s brown pelicans, formerly endangered due to DDT-weakened eggshells, lorded over the cliffs in their thousands. We put on snorkels and climbed down the rusted ladder from the boat landing into the heaving turquoise. The cold seized control of my gasping lungs. Ropes of kelp tugged at my treading legs. Afterward, back on land, my whole body shook for half an hour. But when I reined in my breath enough to submerge my face, the clear water made a window, and through it I saw a fat orange Garibaldi fish and tangled kelp stretching down to the bottom swaying far below.

The freestanding slant-topped rock at left is called House of the Pelican. The main landmass on the right is Anacapa.
These shrubs aren’t dead, just dormant. Most of the plants on Anacapa enter a phase like this during the dry part of the year, just like trees lose their leaves for the winter. The beige stuff on the ground is dead, though — killed by Park Service herbicide. Most of it is ice plant, a South African succulent that grows in an impenetrable carpet and has invaded much of the California coast.
It was a hazy, overcast weekend. They say it’s usually windier on the island. Container ships passed in the distance.
The vegetation on this cliff is ice plant, living (unfocused) and dead (in focus, farther away). If you’ve ever been to Big Sur, you’ve probably seen it in a similar setting.

It’s always a good idea to get out and go searching. Is SoCal sitting on an underwater Serengeti? Were Ventura and Los Angeles this rich abovewater, once? Anacapa’s name comes from the indigenous Chumash people, who called the island Anyapax — “Illusion.” Where the illusion lies depends on which way you look.

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