All this she discloses as we drive the ledge of the coastal highway, the road chipped into the mountains by convicts in the 1930s. She gives me wrong driving directions time and time again. I begin to understand why she spends so much of her life avoiding land.

What I am able to see on this chunk of the Pacific is a minute fraction of what there is to see. At Point Lobos in Carmel, the mist creates false mountains over the water. The waves are humped like porpoises. Kelp, giant forests of seaweed by which Darwin was enthralled, shows only at the top. These plants, which can grow at a rate of 20 in. a day, reach down 100 ft. to granite reefs. The kelp is tethered by stipes-stems, structures that connect the base, or holdfast, to the leaflike blades. Gas-filled floats at the base of the blades keep the fronds standing upright.

Surrounding the kelp is a dense and delicate garden of tentacled plants that sway in unison, like backup singers. Pink, orange, rose, green, lavender. Plants with Einstein's hair, plants with Don King's and Phyllis Diller's--all kept graceful by the water. The garden is vertical as well as horizontal. On its floor sea stars crawl on their bellies like fat recruits in basic training. Above them swim the gulping bells of the jellies. In the intertidal zone limpets and other mollusks graze on algae in the rocks. Cancer crabs attack hermit crabs. An anemone divides to reproduce and becomes its own sibling. On the surface the kelp flattens into canopies, 3 ft. thick, that weaken the waves and provide otters with hammocks, where they snooze and eat.

Otters! Is there anything in nature so ridiculously content? Not enough that they wear leather sleeves; they are their own dining rooms. From the shore I watch a few of them do the backstroke while cracking clams open on their chests. They wrap themselves in leaves so as not to drift away while sleeping. First Russians, then Americans killed them for their fur, and they became almost extinct by the early 1900s. Declared endangered, they now number more than 2,000 along California's central coast. Earle tells me she once saw an otter opening clams with a Coke bottle.

On the swampy inlet of Elkhorn Slough, we putter about with Andrew De Vogelaere from the National Marine Sanctuary in Monterey. The wetland is home to lingcod, halibut and surfperch, a plate-shaped fish that looks like its own fossil. Clams hide in the algae, using a muscular "foot" for digging, and sticking their siphon "necks" out to the world overhead. Mud-flat crabs scuttle across the shoreline. In deeper water, anchovies swim in schools like clouds of silver. All live in the tense company of thousands of birds--avocets, curlews, Caspian terns, plover, brown pelicans, herons, sandpipers, killdeer. Dowitchers use their beaks to tweeze snails out of the mud. Otters are in otter heaven. One catches me admiring as it munches on a clam and registers its absurd annoyance before diving away.