Obi Kaufmann again shares love of natural world in ‘The Coasts of California’
From high above, the coast of California looks like a ragged white chalk line, where the vast, surging blue Pacific slaps into the continent.
Flying in a straight line north to south, you can cover the distance in about 840 miles, and it’s about 1,200 miles by car. But if you were to walk the coastline instead, along the actual intersection of water and land with its meandering coves, points and headlands, beaches, estuaries and bays, the total distance would be nearer to 3,400 miles, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
How many people do you know who have explored the physical coastline of California — on foot? It’s not something most people are compelled to do. But if you did, what kind of perspective would that experience give you?
Obi Kaufmann, artist, writer and naturalist, provides the answer in his latest book “The Coasts of California,” a hand-illustrated and firsthand glimpse of this vast, deeply influential state feature, where salt water and terrestrial habitats meet and overlap.
Kaufmann spent a year, seven days a week, delving into and recording what’s on the coastline, in complex and dynamic detail, to produce a substantive, colorfully interpretive, frequently poetic “atlas.” “Coasts” is his fourth entry in a series, joining “The California Field Atlas,” “The State of Water: Understanding California’s Most Precious Resource” and “The Forests of California.”
The books are an immersive journey, a song, Kaufmann says, “from someone who’s given his whole life to this thing that he loves most in the universe, which is the natural world of California.”
The detail is stunning. For example, Kaufmann introduces Chapter 7 with a short synopsis of his walking journey along roughly 800 miles of the epic yet unfinished California Coastal Trail. It includes nothing less, he notes, than
“ … geographic details from marine environments, intertidal and estuarine habitats and the coastal uplands and ranges. Points of note include wildlife preserves, conservation refuges, parks and wilderness areas, ancillary hiking trails, sites of exceptional quality and sanctuaries of essential value for marine, intertidal, avian and terrestrial systems of life.”
What follows are pages of short and tight but illuminating details, multi-faceted field highlights of what he discovers. Posted sequentially north to south on watercolor maps, they include hundreds of sites and observations, grouped into 24 unique, individual “coasts“ that emerge along the route. Here’s a sample:
“10. Freshwater Lagoon: the smallest and least-developed of three lagoons that make up Humboldt Lagoons State Park; winter storms break open the beaches of the park momentarily to create a unique ecosystem — seawater mixes with fresh water, and more than 50 species of bird make their permanent home; 100 species pass through on their migratory path along the Pacific Flyway.”
And that’s just Chapter 7. The balance of the book is a realistically illustrated natural science tour of the wild diversity of California’s coastal plants, landforms, animals and the often-hidden systems they inhabit.
It is those systems, Kaufmann emphasizes, that truly define the impact the coast has on the character of the state’s unique flora and fauna and, increasingly, its human communities.
Beaches and eroding shores
Take California’s sun-stroked sandy beaches. They’re not entirely what they appear to be to a casual observer. For one thing, they’re not fixed.
Pacific waves, which approach California beaches from the northwest most of the year, push sand grains southward at a steady pace, so the beach sand is actually marching steadily down the coastline every day.
And where does the sand go? Much of it ends up disappearing into miles-deep marine canyons that yawn at intervals along the shore.
The Monterey Canyon beneath the water of Monterey Bay descends steeply into the black depths, and its head almost reaches the beach. Studies suggest it catches nearly all the beach sand washing past, north or south. Roughly 200,000 cubic meters of sand, it’s estimated, disappear down that one submarine canyon every year.
As Kaufmann illustrates in wide sweeps of detailed notes, the coast is alive with these often unseen but vitally essential systems, finely balanced, stacked one within another and always dynamically in motion.
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