Sea Monster
by Jeff Weiss
Time travel backward to Halloween 1983 and join a Caltrans maintenance crew poised on a hillside along Highway 1 overlooking Stinson Beach. A burnt orange Volkswagen Rabbit buzzes past, and you hear Bow Wow Wow's jaunty "I Want Candy" blaring from the radio.
Halloween night's ghosts, goblins, and werewolves seem ages away from this sunny afternoon as you watch a few puffy clouds drift over the sparkling ocean. That is until someone points and shouts, "Do you see that?"
Below is a reprint of a story from the January 1984 issue of Fourword.
THE CREATURE THAT FEW HAVE SEEN
It was huge. It was fast. It was magnificent yet horrifying. If anyone had a camera to take a picture of it, he or she would have dropped it on the ground.
Words were not enough to describe the creature, according to Marlene Martin of the Novato Road Maintenance crew, who saw it along with her co-workers as they were working on a slide removal job on Shoreline Highway last October.
It was what all the newspapers called the "sea monster" that they sighted near Stinson Beach.
Marlene became an instant celebrity with newspapers, radio and television stations, and even scientists from here to Maine. She received calls from Texas, Florida, Oregon, Utah, and Southern California later that day.
Naturally, there's disbelief and even ridicule since so few have sighted the animal, which disturbs the crew members who saw it.
"You really can't understand what we're talking about unless you've seen it yourself," Marlene said.
Marlene had heard that an artist in Bolinas had sighted a similar animal a few years back and had made a wood carving to capture its likeness. "The shape of its body was almost identical to what I saw," she said, "although he (the artist) didn't get as good a look at its head so that part wasn't very detailed."
Maybe not, but it sure made Marlene feel better about the sighting. So did a Methodist minister's declaration that he had seen it two years ago when he was new to Bolinas, afraid of rumors that might be spread about him if he announced such a sighting back then.
"I hope no one tries to find it to destroy it for scientific purposes," Marlene said. "I don't want it to be harmed in any way. It's a frightening-looking thing, but it hasn't done anything to warrant any cruel treatment."
It's easy to be skeptical of such a story. Was it breathing fire? Were mermaids sunning themselves on the beach?
Yet if you read the San Francisco Chronicle and a pair of blog posts that reported on the incident, you sense the witnesses were anything but publicity seekers.
Marlene Martin had to be coaxed to come forward with her story. Perhaps she feared ridicule. Or maybe she was struggling with cognitive dissonance, unable to reconcile what her eyes beheld and what her brain said didn't exist.
It didn't help that the San Francisco Chronicle's Steve Rubenstein began his story with, "A 100-foot sea serpent was reported off Stinson Beach by five people who had not been drinking."
But what do you expect? The Bay Area's leading newspaper cannot buy into sea serpent sighting hook, line, and sinker. The wisecracks allow Rubenstein to have some fun while keeping his distance in case the sea serpent turns out to be a hoax. On the other hand, the Chronicle carried the story, wanting to avoid being caught flat-footed on something that might be big news.
A sea serpent sighting on Halloween seems too coincidental. But how could it be a hoax? Anyone with a Bigfoot costume can traipse through the redwoods and be convincing from a distance. But who has the time or resources to design an enormous, waterproof sea serpent costume? Who has the motivation to jump into bone-chilling water just to fool a few people strolling on the beach?
Witnesses say that the serpent was trailed by flocks of shorebirds. An entourage of birds is not part of sea serpent lore - not the kind of embellishment that someone would invent.
Rubenstein interviewed Jack Svenson, a Point Reyes Bird Observatory biologist who provided some professional credence, saying that periodic sightings of strange creatures off the Marin coast have occurred and "no one ever figures out what they are."
"A whale surfacing in the sunlight silhouetted with a lot of glare could look like the Loch Ness Monster," said Svenson. "On the other hand, there may be all sorts of prehistoric creatures swimming around out there that we know nothing about."
I like the idea of prehistoric creatures swimming around - as long as I'm not floating nearby. More to the point, Svenson's comment about such creatures rings true.
For example, in 1995, a 23-foot oarfish washed ashore on a San Diego beach to the fright, astonishment, and likely revulsion of beachgoers. An oarfish is a very long and somewhat flat fish with strange feelers on its head. It puts the phrase "Everything is beautiful" to the test.
Before 1995, there were reports, but no hard evidence, of an oarfish longer than ten feet. The 23-footer on the San Diego beach lends credibility to reports of even larger oarfish or other sea creatures breaching the surface of the vast ocean.
Was our sea serpent an enormous oarfish or something else? It's hard to say. I've paged through a stack of Fourwords and have yet to find updates on the 40-year-old story.
If any Caltrans District could be considered the "Water District," it would be Caltrans Bay Area. Highway 1 stretches 170 miles from southern San Mateo County to the northern edge of Sonoma County, providing spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean. District 4's none counties encircle the San Francisco Bay, and two of the state's largest rivers form a county-sized delta before emptying into the bay.
So, if you are parked at one of the scenic turnouts along Highway 1, keep your eyes peeled. I hope you have a zoom lens for your iPhone. We don't want another 40 years to pass before we update this story.