west coast note

The Beach Comber Goes West-written from San Diego a couple weeks ago

Recently two refugees from winter's gloom visited San Diego's Balboa Park. We're from a rural area where the less worldly natives are called 'woodchucks'. I'm a transplant from the suburbs, so I consider myself a woodchuck in training, but on this day the big city glitz and glitter had overloaded and crashed our sensory input capacity. Mildly dazed, we meandered on to the Prado and I paused to peer into the tranquil depths of the pool in front of the lath house. Why do people throw money into pools? They should just buy a boat, I thought.

While I was counting the dimes, a monster fish swam slowly past. It was at least two feet long and splotched with black white and flaming orange. Look at this huge goldfish I called out to my accomplice. Another tourist also gazing into the pond said that's a coy.

I fancy myself as being quite the nature nerd. I took college courses in biology (forty years ago) and I can tell a raven from a robin. But I had never heard of a coy fish. It looked like a carp to me. A colorful shy carp? What was it feeling coy about? It was actually quite pretty and it seemed fairly bold. Several more lunkers drifted by, a pure white one shimmering like a ghost, a dark gray one, and a really fat blotchy black and orange whale that must have been a twenty pounder. They all looked like carp. They appeared to think I might have something to feed them as several hung in the water and gazed up at me open mouthed.

When we got back to our North Park base, I fired up the computer and Googled coy fish. It turned out to be 'Koi', and yes they were carp. All dressed up in pretty colors but definitely good old Cyprinus carpio. I also learned people selectively breed them, and some of the patterns and color combinations of these gaudy fish are highly prized by carp connoisseurs. People pay thousands of dollars for a specimen with a particularly perfect pattern. And one Koi was reported to have lived in a royal pond in the Orient for 226 years.

Just what makes a “perfect” pattern isn't real clear to me. While I couldn't quite see shelling out the price of a half decent used car for a glorified goldfish to brighten up my frog pond back home, I did enjoy watching them. These one percenters of the carp nation floated like brilliant fishy flowers in the tranquil pool next to the lath house and its botanical displays.

Urban carp are thriving in elegant carefully kept park and garden ponds simply because of their pretty colors. Beauty, they say, is skin deep. But it's also in the eye of the beholder. I enjoyed the koi of Balboa Park. A lot of other tourists also admired them. Despite their gaudy garb they were still carp, though, just like the ones back home that lurk around in the weeds under my boat dock each summer.

PS since this was written I've returned to my neighborhood beach and am hard at work on a new venture tentatively titled "Dangerous Waters". Check the log on line at www.silverwaters.com for more on this project-