A Visit to Cannery Row’s Crown Jewel

Seeing the sea at the fabulous Monterey Bay Aquarium

Jimmy FlynnTHE SANTA CLARAApril 21, 2016

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel “Cannery Row,” he describes the titular area as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

Today, Cannery Row is a boulevard full of suspiciously smelling seafood restaurants, knick-knack shops and cheap clothing stores, where T-shirts in the window say stuff like “I Got Crabs at (Insert Restaurant Name Here).” However, in the center of this prefabricated paradise stands a crown jewel: the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

I last came to the Monterey Bay Aquarium during my early childhood—when I called it a “water zoo” because I could not pronounce the word “aquarium.” Fifteen years later and armed with the ability to pronounce polysyllabic words, I made my triumphant return.

Like any tourist destination, the entrance has an obscenely long line. Fortunately, I had purchased my tickets online and printed them out at home, so I could opportunistically cut ahead of all the hopeful and expectant children.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is organized into multiple exhibits. The most famous is the Open Sea exhibit, which features a two-story tall tank filled with a variety of sea life, including sunfish, sea turtles and, my favorite, the hammerhead shark. Smaller fish dutifully follow around the lurking hammerhead—a beast who everyone secretly hopes will snap one day and attack a fellow creature.

Another exhibit, ¡Viva Baja!, displays desert dwellers such as the mountain kingsnake and the desert tortoise. Seeing land-bound creatures in an aquarium was a nice change of pace, and watching the desert tortoise move so slowly and deliberately transfixed me into losing track of time.

The well-regarded Sea Otter exhibit is the clear-cut crowd pleaser, particularly for young kids, since their adorable cuddly grapples were heightened by their sleek fur and smiling faces.

The newest of the exhibits is the Tentacles exhibit, which showcases the slow-moving majesty of octopuses, squids and cuttlefish. The main draw is the Giant Pacific octopus, a pinkish behemoth with a frowning face and sucker-covered tentacles that allow it to methodically move along the glass display case.

My personal favorite was the Jellyfish exhibit, which exuded a psychedelic vibe typically reserved for opium dens. The translucent creatures moved gracefully, disregarding gravity and colorfully contrasting the immersive blue-tinted background. It made me realize that my new professional goal in life is to make enough money to rent out the exhibit for a few hours, just so I can toss on some Pink Floyd and selfishly stare at the hypnotizing jellyfish.

Big crowds gather every hour or so to witness the various feedings that occur throughout the day. I was fortunate enough to watch penguins gulp fish like they were downing Jaegerbombs, while staff members answered questions and cracked lame fish puns to enlighten and entertain the audience.

At one point during my visit, I looked around and realized that the number of people under the age of ten equaled the number of people over the age of ten. Kids rule at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, taking full advantage of every opportunity to touch display cases and stick their hands into water tanks, just to watch the fish swim away in horror.

The whole aquarium vibrated with a sugar-fueled, frenetic energy. Kids ran around, shoved each other, cried—one even splashed water onto his mother.

At that point, I couldn’t imagine myself ever being a parent.  As someone who originally planned to wait until 30 to have children, I have to say that my visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium has pushed that age back to about 45 or 50. If nothing else, the Monterey Bay Aquarium is terrific birth control.

As I left the aquarium, I was blinded by the irony of the dozen neighboring seafood restaurants.

Not one to complain, I entered a beachfront eatery, where I ate Oysters Rockefeller and pondered the ethics of housing sea creatures a mere stone’s throw away from the Pacific Ocean.

Contact Jimmy Flynn at jflynn@scu.edu or call (408) 554-4852.