Photo by Robert Burroughs

I got a little self-conscious walking back into “civilization” from Bravo Beach.

I remember when the seals would follow me like a band of dogs. I would swing my kayak in by the Children’s Pool at La Jolla, or past the rocks off Rosarito, and see the seals peeling off to chase after me, frolicking and spinning underneath me. They would poke their heads up to stare at me curiously. Their heads look like dogs’ heads, like dachshunds or wet bassets. I’d whistle and tell them to roll over and play dead. They’d tail along after me for miles.

I used to wonder what I looked like to them. From underwater there was no question about it — I looked like a 15-foot lens-shape, moving along smoothly if not fast by their standards, the trajectory of my symmetrical bullet flanked by flashing splashes of paddle. For all I know they admired the beauty of my hull, even smoother and more efficiently shaped than themselves. I might have been a fiberglass cartoon of sex appeal to them, or a heroic abstract sculpture, or even an object of worship. They seemed to be looking at me very respectfully, as dogs do. I laughed at them and called them “Rover” and “Mutt.”

I took a great shot of a very big male seal just off the arch at Cabo San Lucas.

I had swum out there from the Hacienda Hotel, taking my daily constitutional. I rounded the giant, flat slab of rock that rings like a bell when the waves drive on it, stroked around to where I could see the arch in front of me and, a hundred meters to my left, the last stone of the Californias — the size of an ice chest and almost awash. Then I looked across at the tall rock spire with the ramp that sloped into the waves, and there were two seals lying on it, looking at me from eye level.

I’d been hoping to see some seals there. It was their calving time, and I’d seen a pup, only days old, on Lovers’ Beach the day before. It’s a time when things get active around the Capes. Sharks come in, for one thing; drawn by the birth blood and because baby seals are their favorite food. It’s said that sharks attack surfboards because they look so much like seals from underwater. I rinsed my mask and moved towards the seals, slowly breast-stroking with my head above water so I could watch them. I worked my camera — a waterproof Nikon autofocus — out of my trunks and brought it up just as the female rolled off the rock, dived to about 15 feet, and headed off to deeper water. The male moved to the edge of the rock shelf and leaned over, staring at me, then slithered off and went straight to the bottom, about 25 feet down.

I gulped air and went right after him with the camera still up against the face plate of my mask, hoping for an underwater portrait. He swam slowly, turning to watch me kicking after him. It was almost as if he was leading me, encouraging me to catch up. He was keeping eye contact with me. I was as exhilarated as I’ve ever been in my life. He was interested in me, playing with me, trying to communicate with me. He did a roll, returning to his position of observing me. I rolled too, trailing a helix of bubbles behind me. Communication! Primate see, primate do. The second time I went up for air he lost interest and moved out of sight after the female. I hadn’t been that promising a pupil anyway.

I only got one shot, but it was a beauty. He’s suspended in turquoise Cabo water, a few feet above the trademark yellow Cabo sand. He’s looking across at me, inclining his head to stare along his nose. His eyebrows are quirked up into little question marks, giving him the look of a quizzical professor examining a strange specimen. It was one of my greatest dive experiences ever, and the last for a long time.

Not long afterwards, dark currents tugged me down into madness and prison and despair.

But even at the worst of it — recovering my wits to find myself soaked in the blood of a woman I had loved so much I had to stab her, locked down in the air-conditioned nightmare of the county jail, drugged into oblivion in the name of sanity — through it all I could just close my eyes and see myself flashing down into the jewel-like waters of Cabo San Lucas, see that seal sliding effortlessly ahead of me like a guide.

I survived my latest and worst yet burst of lunacy, and I am starting to plant my feet to resist the next one. Each time the world starts slipping gears and shaking away beyond reach, it shakes a man’s confidence a little more. And confidence is the only real coin of sanity. As therapy, I was directed into writing (you are reading part of the treatment; I can’t guarantee the results) and started walking the beach. I preferred the isolated stretch between the Imperial Beach pier and Silver Strand Park.

That zone of dunes and straight, flat surf with no street access suits my mood exactly. As soon as I’d made the walk a routine, I started running into a lot of seals. One day I saw six seals along that one beach. All of them dead.

It’s an isolation very rare in urban areas, a stark regularity divided only by the lines between sand and sea, sea and sky. The dunes are regular and stable, making little pockets of shelter from the wind or view. There is no reason not to lie naked in the dunes or swim naked in the sea. It’s known as a nude beach, and like most nude beaches, it’s becoming a gay beach. There’s a regular crowd, lounging up in the dune pockets, each nest marked with a distinctive hat or T-shirt, perhaps to announce occupancy or identify the occupants. Maybe the colors of the “markers” carry heavy and appalling significance. I don’t know.

I’ll admit there were times I got a little self-conscious walking back into “civilization” from Bravo Beach. A thirtyish man alone, skulking out of the playground. I wondered how I looked to the lifeguards at the YMCA camp. And why I cared. I wondered how I looked to the men in the dunes. Scary misfit? Queer, but too ugly to notice? “Curious,” but unlettered in sign language and mating movements? None of the men who wait there have ever approached me, spoken to me, or acknowledged my presence. They pay no attention to all the dead seals.

I found a recently killed seal with a woven wreath of staghorn kelp around it. Somebody had placed several red roses on top of it. Where did they get roses on the beach? Had the flowers washed up further along and been picked up casually? Had they been brought here especially for this purpose? Whatever explained the roses, it showed a respect that quite impressed me.

Another time I found a seal that somebody had laboriously buried in the sand. I walked up and saw that birds had been picking at the sand by its head. I could see its jawbones from where I stood, protruding from gelatinous, maggoty flesh. 1 reached down and tugged at one and it slid easily out into my grasp. I used it to poke a little, and the other mandible came free. Both were almost clean. I washed them in the surf and later put the large front “fangs” on the band of my hat. Mounted base to base, they curve up like a bull’s horns. The tips are still sharp, the edges still cleanly serrated. It was so easy it was as if the seal had donated his teeth to me. I didn’t say, “Thank you,” but that’s what I felt like. I wear them proudly. It was my start of taking the teeth from all the dead seals.

I found two corpses within about 40 feet of each other. The big one might have died of natural causes. His teeth were worn and discolored, the oldest ones I’ve ever seen. I pried off his lower jawbones and crumbled them away with a can opener to extract the lower canines. They were savage and graceful things, delicate sculpture with every line stating function. I eventually made them into a fetish bracelet with black and red coral limbs. The other seal was very young, its body the size of a Doberman. It had died of a large-caliber gunshot wound through the body just below the rib cage. Since then I have seen several seals on that beach dead of gunshot wounds. Who is killing these animals? Who in hell would shoot a seal?

My collection of teeth was growing, and I noticed two different types of dental arrangements. Some are not really seals, bull sea lions. The two are very similar but have very different teeth. The lower canines look the same in place, but when pulled the sea lion fangs are hollow — the brave, satisfying shape of a tiger’s tooth; the seals’ are solid and taper at the base like a dolphin’s. There might be other species than harbor seal and grey sea lion involved, but it’s hard to tell. The teeth are more easily differentiated than the battered and decayed remains.

Confronted with so many carcasses, I moved my tooth fetishism from harvesting to actual extraction. I started carrying a serrated diver’s knife and Zip-lock bags on my walks. Equipped less for naturalism than for butchery. Or call it surgery. Or amateur shamanism. I often found myself squatting on my heels, smeared with blood to my elbows, breathing a hideous stench, rooting among swollen intestines teeming with maggots. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you about that. Maybe there’s no way to explain it. But I had seen it before. It’s a standard late show in the closed mental wards, thorazine or no. But here it was real; I could touch it with my real hands, see it and smell it on that Fellini-like beach. And I could cut through it, destroy it, penetrate the whole rag and bone shop with a stainless steel blade, come up with the treasure — the ivory tusk of a holy sea beast, an amulet against dark currents. 1 don’t really expect you to understand. I don’t understand myself. But I’m learning what’s good for me.

The only person who ever witnessed whatever it was I was doing was a very slender, almost campy member of the Boys’ Club in the dunes. He was interested as soon as I pulled out the knife, and when I began incising the extremely bloated body of a sea lion, he walked over and asked if I minded if he watched. I grinned internally and told him to step right up. It was the worst one ever. Internal decay had progressed substantially in the water and under the sun. Yet the jawbones were still attached to the main cranium; they usually break off very quickly in the buffeting. There was a lot of blood (also unusual), which ran out thick and slick and sickly carmine, not sinking into the sand but standing on top like an oil spill. My viewer started getting queasy when I exposed the jawbones, which had maggots crawling between the teeth. In trying to lever them off the skull, I broke it, and the brains flowed out looking exactly like a mixture of chocolate and strawberry ice cream. He hated it but hung in there. I pried the bones loose, slathered in gore, and showed him the teeth. He admitted they were an elegant prize and would look fabulous on a gold chain in a plunging collar. Then I started slitting the seal’s body, hacking the furry skin into strips.

The first puncture released a puff of gas, and my watcher paled and started wobbling away. I have almost no sense of smell myself. He looked back at me with a grimace. I continued slashing through the tough skin. He stopped and looked back, as though he wanted to ask me why I was savagely knifing a dead mammal. He stared at me with a pronounced distaste but walked off without speaking. I slashed the tough hide, spilled the guts out on the sand. I wasn’t 30 feet away before a gull swooped in and began picking at the easy meat. The flies would get at it easier, too. Which is to say, the maggots. My theory is: let the beast get gone as fast as possible, and let everything that wants to get a piece of it. It’s another form of respect. But I understand the roses and sand burials, too. I don’t understand coffins and caskets and sepulchers at all. For some reason I had a very hard time getting the stink of that last seal off my hands and clothes. It just won’t go away.

As I stood knee-deep in the surf washing the blood and wormy meat off the jawbones, I was surrounded by a flock of wheeling gulls. I stood erect as the water swirled around my thighs, holding the teeth over my head, my arms stretched towards the sky. The wheeling gulls all screamed at once. It sounded like they were laughing. I had to laugh myself.

I turned and looked north along the line of waves. An offshore wind was tearing the tops off every curl, flipping up a kiss of water that the sun glazed with glinting diffraction colors. I felt that God was talking to me, was ringing me in beauty to show me my place in the center of it. I wished I was naked, standing there in a vortex of white wings, on a frothy ring of rainbows. But it wasn’t necessary. I felt absolutely no separation from the light.

Later that night I realized that I needed the teeth, and I had a powerful feeling, quite different from my various delusions and hallucinations, that I was meant to have them; that the seals, the sea, the world had given them to me to heal myself, just as I had been brought to laugh at myself. It was dark when I walked off the beach; I had stayed for the very last colors of the sunset. It’s not that safe an area at night. People live in the dunes, and there have been rapes and robberies there.

I saw a man walking to meet me as I moved along the firm sand below the tideline. He was just a shadow in the darkness, fading in and out of silhouette as the waves moved in and out to wet the sand. And I was afraid. I put my hand in my satchel and touched the hilt of the diving knife. I pulled it out and looked at it. I realized it was a tooth: sharp, serrated, hard. I shook hands with the knife, greeting it in my grip, and I felt its power come right up my arm like an electrical discharge. I looked at the shadow ahead, approaching me, and smiled. And I suddenly realized how I would look to that shadow when it got close to me — an unshaven beach bum with a knife. I laughed and felt the laugh trying to get out of control, turn into some kind of monster movie cackle of power. I caught my breath and dropped the knife back in my satchel. I closed the zipper. I walked towards the shadow, which started looking more and more like an older man in nice clothing. He gave me a nod as we passed, and a warm smile. I grinned back at him, wondering if my teeth shone in the starlight.

A few days later my walk was interrupted; the beach was blocked off for a military amphibious exercise. I stood there with a family, mostly young boys who crowed at the movements of the huge landing tanks. I looked along the strand and thought that I could walk right up to North Island, where the Navy SEALs trained. All those men training their bodies to animal strength and reflex, pushing towards being sea creatures themselves, glorying in their powers and cohesion, becoming sharp teeth in the mouth of something too big for anyone to understand.

Another seal picture^ took was popular. It eventually illustrated a nature magazine article, a new-age greeting card, and the cover of a light jazz album from a Bay Area radio station. And it was a “gimme” — just handed to me by circumstance.

I was just walking along Mission Beach, snapping an occasional shot of children playing or kelp arrangements, when I saw a crowd gathering by the river jetty at the end of the sand. As I got closer I could see the baby seal lying right at the water’s edge, so I pulled out my camera and quickened my step a little. Just as I broke into the semi-circle of people around the seal, a little girl walked over and picked him up. I fired off five quick shots; the fourth one had the special charm. She was starting to turn, her hair twirling out into the light a little, and the seal was starting to twist his head towards her, so they seem to be staring into each other’s eyes. This is what 1 mean by a “gimme” — I could never have set that shot up. Her eyes were even brown like the seal’s. Her cheeks were flushed, and the seal’s mouth seems to match her smile. It’s a magic moment captured forever. In the fifth shot the seal, terrified, turned completely around in her arms and bit off most of her left cheek.

As the blood gushed out and a wave of people closed on the girl, I stepped over and snatched the seal up, carried him out into waist-deep water, and released him. You never know what people will do at times like that. Everyone was loving the scene; her parents never said a word of caution. What people don’t understand about wild animals is that they are wild animals.

I’ve never even printed that last shot, with the long teeth ripping that tender flesh away, the seal’s eyes wild and frightened as he tries to escape. I wouldn’t want to show it to anybody. Or maybe I should say, they wouldn’t want to see it.