SEALS????

“I had heard that….I was hoping it wasn’t true….”

“Yeah, well, I’ll know more tomorrow when I talk to her. I think that it wasn’t a bad bite, but it definitely broke the skin. At first she said she just felt something swimming next to her, you know rubbing up against her, and then she felt a couple little nips and then, yeah, a bite!”

“I think there are lots of pups out there now. The seals may be protecting them.”

“Or there are fish. And the seal just thought she was one!”

“There are a lot of people swimming out here now that didn’t used to.”

“Yeah, that’s true. I just hope that a seal doesn’t bite me!”

            In my hazy eavesdropping mode after another arduous swim to the Pylons here at Keller Beach, I listen in horror and fascination about the Seal Bite Incident. Man! I would be so creeped out if I were swimming along and then felt something alive underwater rubbing against me. I’d just scream! Then I’m sure the seal would bite me.

            I tell Ian what I just heard after all these swimmers don their gear and head out to the water. Undaunted by any potential threat of a seal bite!

            “I would like to see a seal,” Ian mused, staring out at the water.

            “Yeah, me too, but I wouldn’t want to get bitten by one!”

            “No, that wouldn’t be good,” he agreed.

 I  think of the seal games we used to play in the pool in Hacienda Heights. My father could make the best seal barks. “Arrrrfff arrrffff arrrffff!” Then he clapped his hands, grinning and floating, while I and my sisters laughed in utter delight and enchantment. Swimming with my dad was always so much fun. The seal game. The Dead Bug Game. This is when we would all just float on our own separate beach balls in the pool as ‘dead bugs’. It was a very relaxing and quiet game. I remember it came about because it was so smoggy during the summers in Hacienda Heights of the 1960s and 70s that we were instructed by my mom to not move much in order to not breathe the bad smoggy air.

            Kinda like it is today in the Bay Area from all the fires. Our air is so smoky! I probably shouldn’t be swimming so hard outside to the pylons and back, breathing in all that smoke, but when I’m in the water, I just don’t want to get out. A little smoke? So what? A lot of smoke? So what? A seal biting? Now that would get me out of the water!

            I wonder if I should do a bit of research and find out where the seal biting was exactly. Was it on the swim to the pylons in the direction of SF? Or was it in the other direction, toward the Richmond Bridge? This seems more likely as I have noticed how the seals roost—is that the right word?—on the rocks below the bridge when I drive over. You can hear them barking. Just like my father!

            So, it makes sense that the seal biting was in this direction. But….I have to admit I’m a little creeped out. I can’t see a thing in the water when I’m swimming! In fact, today, I swam right over this old guy who was doing a lazy breaststroke without a bright cap or floaty. I just felt the water move and then stood up (I was almost back to shore) and glanced over in the direction of the movement and saw this big brown back. At first I thought it was a body! OMG! A corpse floating in the water at Keller Cove! But then it moved and I saw it was a man just meandering through the water without any notice of me whatsoever!

            It wouldn’t take much for me to be right on top of a seal before I knew it given the murkiness of the water!

            I sometimes wish I didn’t eavesdrop so much. But I just can’t help it. And then my ‘hearing ear’ has to write it down, so it’s like documented eavesdropping.

            Next time I’m on the beach, I will try to close my ears.

            Hah! Just kidding. The hearing ear is always open for business unless I’ve got my earplugs in and then forget it, I’m just in the water. Seals beware. I may swim right over you. Just don’t bite me. Please. I mean no harm. I’m not really a fish in the sea. I don’t taste good at all!