What the Really Low Tide Revealed Downtown

The air smelled fantastic when we got off the Waterfront bus line at its northernmost stop yesterday. It was muddy, salty, with notes of decomposition and extreme biological activity. Low tide. Near-record low tide, and what would be described as a stench if it were in your house, for example, was overpowering and fantastic along the waterfront.

During an extreme low tide at Discovery Park you can walk way, way out on the sand and every rock has crabs and big cucumbers under it and the barnacles are scratching and popping. It's like the water is an old rug and you can peel up a corner of it and see what's been swept under there. It's cool. Discovery Park, at noon on a Wednesday, though, was out of reach of the Downtown office yesterday. We thought that maybe the little Disney beach between the Sculpture Park and Myrtle Edwards might be interesting--even though it may not the best place on the Sound to witness an extreme low tide--and so hopped a bus up there to check it out.

The beach is pretty abrupt, not to mention completely fake and just installed about a year ago. There were a few interns from the Aquarium there with "beach naturalist" hats and badges and field guides. They pointed out a sea star the size of that thing from Alien that locks onto your face under the large rocks nearest to the water, and there was significant barnacle buildup all over the place. It was more life than we had expected by far, particularly for a tiny, man-made beach completely surrounded by piers and marine industry in downtown Seattle. There was a even an octopus relative that turned out to be an unimpressive little blob. The Earth, though: a resilient little guy.

Deeper into the park we stopped in a somewhat-isolated area to peer down at more rocks for awhile, and watch some photographers pick their way through them when we noticed a guy making a bee line for us. He was stocky in tracksuit pants and a sloppy sweatshirt with a much-abused face.

Uh, oh. Keep this one in front of you.

"Any seals?" he asked. There weren't, but he explained how sometimes there are. Usually they're off Alki, he continued--indicating West Seattle across the bay--but depending on what's happening with the tides and traffic on the water occasionally their fish dinners sit off the Myrtle Edwards shore and the seals follow. When that happens, he explained, you can lure them up onto the beach by imitating their calls. Which he then imitated, pretty convincingly.

Wow, totally misjudged this guy. He's an unmarked naturalist.

"I can't believe I'm this close to the shore," he started up again after a brief silence between us. We were on top of one of the little bluffs with small boulders leading down into the water, away from the trail and the runners and walkers. The low tide? Can't swim? Attack seals? "The rocks," he said, "Who knows what's under them."

Somehow it was clear he wasn't talking about sea stars. "What do you think might be down there?"

"Who knows, who knows. That's God's house under those rocks. Whatever terrible thing God can imagine is under there...coming up to eat people."

Uh, oh. Keep this one in front of you.

"I had to tell myself, you know, 'it's not hungry' just to get here," he explained. Know the feeling, except when we've had to convince ourselves that something that was not there was not there it was in the woods at night (and it probably was there, and it was probably this dude). He wandered off and we spotted him again on the way out of the park, talking to the beach naturalists. His kraken or whatever probably wasn't in their field guides, but they should have enjoyed talking about the seals.

Not a bad haul, considering we never left Downtown: a few crab shells, an octopus-like mollusk, a huge sea star and a future Cthulhu pellet.

Extreme low midday tides continue through today. Don't wear your nice shoes.