The ranger directed me to New Year’s Creek Beach for my shift as a docent naturalist at Año Nuevo, a state park in Northern California. It was winter of 2018 and an injured elephant seal had hauled in. He lay amid the driftwood littering the sand after the previous night’s storm. A patch of silvery-black skin on his back had been bitten clean away by a cookiecutter shark, leaving a deep pink wound that made me shudder.
I looked down at my phone. I had no bars. Nobody could reach me there. Año, as the rangers call it, is off the grid. This was partly why I went there, to reinvent myself, to learn a new language and, when there was a lull between visitors or I was posted on a remote part of the reserve, to cry freely about my boy, who has psychosis.
Right then, it was my job to ensure the park visitors gave the seal a wide berth and to pray that he survived — although I made that last part up because, while I am not religious, I didn’t want this marine mammal to die on my watch. The length of his proboscis allowed me to age him as a juvenile and the penile opening just below his umbilicus confirmed his sex. I knew this from my rigorous training, but what I hadn’t been trained to do was accept that I couldn’t save him.
