Monterey: Squid Boats at Night

Every night, fishing boats rumble and creak out of the harbor, sounding echoing pings to locate schools of bass or salmon or squid.  Then, encircling a roiling churn of fish, they cast their nets and wait.  Men gaze at the oily black water.  At night, intense white lights lure masses of squid upward, the sea's deer in headlights.  Seeing the shimmering blaze above them, squid swarm into the nets cast in wide circles.  They dart, peer with strange eyes in bizarre bodies, hunters hunted.  Night after night, the lights glow silently, a bright stadium of 20 or more boats, a deadly game thrown into sharp relief.

It's quiet when you stand on shore and watch, picturesque and quaint to passersby.  When the fog settles down low, the boat lights form halos on the underbelly of the cold gray mist.  The glow is beautifully sinister, otherwordly in its attractive force, both to people and sea creatures.

Ghostly and strange buoy bells clang forlornly on the rocking swell.  Low waves send a stinking salt mist laden with kelp and fish and guano up and away, as if it were the rank perfume of ocean flowers.

How strange this scene, and how stark the visible kill of sea life so we can eat.  Not like distant slaughterhouses far from our view, the ocean is immediate, cold and embodies the plain reality of life and death.