You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
The Monterey Bay aquarium.
World renknowned.
The only aquarium I can think of that is literally connected to the eco system it is affiliated with.
Jelly fish and kelp forests and sea otters and Rock Fish.
The aquarium was built on the edge of the bay. The waves slap against its foundation. The sea creates tidal pools surrounded by an outdoor amphitheater for education and enjoyment.
I love how you can walk by the Sea Otter tank inside the facility, open a door onto the back deck and immediately view sea otters in the wild, floating on the kelp, cracking open abalone with a rock.
The facility is truly a reflection of the ecosystem surrounding it.
It is this symbiotic existence that makes the exhibits that much more realistic.
But the curators of this marine museum are also artists. They have created breath taking and educational presentations.
The latest section is called Jellies Experience .
We stumbled into this section by accident, and I’m glad we did. It is a dark tunnel illuminated by 1960’s era black lighting and neon colored displays.
There are glow in the dark quotes from Jimi Hendrix. How many aquariums quote the greatest left handed guitarist of all time?
There are state of the art interactive displays that make you want to touch them, to learn, almost by accident.
Touch a speck on a wall and it instantly grows under your finger. Suddenly the speck is a living organism, a foot in diameter, and you are in control of it.
You can move it on the wall and examine it from all angles. Let it go and it returns to its near microscopic size and floats quietly on an invisible current till the next curious patron happens by.
Most of the aquarium is set to a tranquil, synthesized, new age harmonic sounds. It is soothing, and seems to perfectly coincide with the undulation of water and slow moving fish.
Not here. In this section, the music is funk-a-delic.
“It’s like an acid trip,” my daughter will say over and over, like she would know.
This aquarium is awesome! And because it is so awesome it is also very crowded.
It is a Tuesday in the Summer in Monterey. The street in front of the Aquarium is packed with tourists. Families are riding bikes built for 6. Buses are pulling around the culdesac. The crowd in front of the facility is 3 deep.
I see 16 year olds speaking German and smoking cigarettes. Odd. I wonder how their parents can even allow this.
I see Japanese tourists with multiple cameras across their chest. They look like Mexican gunfighters with bullet belts criss crossing their torso.
I see families from Iowa shivering in shorts and t shirts. Should have checked the weather forecast Iowa family. Summer time in Iowa is not summer time in Monterey. Isn’t there an app for that Iowa family?
Didn’t you know the coldest winter that Steinbeck ever spent was a summer in San Francisco? Monterey is just south of S.F.
It’s true. The fog is predictable like a protest rally at a gathering of the world’s economic powers. It will come, slowly, surely, and when it arrives, it will be uncomfortable to say the least.
It often rolls in from the 57 degree bay and blankets you in a wet frosty white that makes your bones shiver. Oddly, a block away, the sun can be blasting through the over cast and warming your soul. The fog is capricious and even it doesn’t know what it will do from moment to moment.
So I am inside this edifice of aquatic knowledge tied to the Monterey Bay. One part of me is trying to stay warm, the other part is learning why sea horses dance to attract their mates.
What I quickly learn is that I am hardly alone and people come in all shapes sizes and smells.
Within seconds of entering the airy, spacious, clean facility, I am overwhelmed by a sea of humanity.
I am a cow pushed into a crowded herd that goes in directions I don’t want to go.
I hear the dialects of the world. German by the Sea Otters. Mexican by the gift shop. Something unintelligible by the manta rays, I think the people are from Brooklyn.
As I wander through the darkened hall of a display entitled The Outer Bay, I marvel at the 50 foot high window of water separating humans from sea creatures.
We stare at them and they stare back at us.
Dozens of these sea denizens float by gliding effortlessly on an invisible current.
It is then, in the darkness, with the equanimity of the yellow fin all around me that I smell the aroma of something unclean.
It is a combination of funk and decaying algae. I would like to say it is a sea creature escaped from a tank, decaying on the carpet, but sadly I must report it is human.
Did these people bathe in Kelp?
Did they just fly in from France and rub themselves down with the underside of a manta ray?
I back up to an air vent that blows cool, filtered air over me.
“Did you smell those people?” my oldest son says from the darkness, his face illuminated by an eerie blue glow of the tank.
I laugh out loud.
The moment is so surreal it is amusing to me.
Groups of people, flash bulbs exploding in a darkened amphitheater accentuated by hammer head sharks. There is ethereal music raining down upon us. There are dialects from places I may never visit and a smell that makes me realize humans are not so far removed from the creatures in the exhibits behind the glass.
All in all, the day is a great one. Some attractions bottle neck with humanity, but others open up like the diamond lane on the freeway. Sometimes we have to wait to duck into a glass bubble to take a picture with the penguins and sometimes we can walk right up to the latest iridescent jelly fish portal.
The aquarium is very much like the tide splashing at the base of the rocks below us.
It is rhythmic but also unpredictable. The crowd of tourists surge through the facility like an undulating wave.
Every now and then a rogue wave materializes with a clump of stagnating sea weed, but in a moment, the sea sucks that stench away and replaces it with cool open water and a path unencumbered.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium is a must on your Central California Coast to do list. Perhaps you want to wait till kids are back in school in Europe.
Bring your wallet and some soap.
And that is crazy.