Lives buffeted by the forces of nature

THERE’S NOTHING royal or brave or beautiful about dead purple sailors. What’s left of their bodies resembles jelly -- boysenberry or plum -- smeared into sand. What’s left of their sails crinkles underfoot like dried bits of cellophane.

It’s springtime. I’m walking at Glass Beach, just north of Mendocino, a destination my father, who’d known of my interest in shoreline debris, had suggested some years ago. Though he’d sailed the East Coast waterways for decades, it was the Northern California coast with its undeveloped beaches that he’d urged me to see. Now that I’m finally here I find myself less taken by the smoothly eroded glass underfoot than by the wreckage of purple sailors all around.

What has caused an ordinary beach to be so fouled by decay that I want to hold my nose? And to be so littered by ethereal wing-like things that I can imagine them as intricate mobiles swaying above my granddaughter’s crib? No masts or bowsprits, no washed-up captain’s log with warnings of inclement weather. Just thousands of these purple sailors in various states of putrefaction, blown ashore by winds for which they had no strategy. I can’t call their deaths a surprise. They have a simple design flaw, the kind that keeps me alert to those inflexible habits of my own that I’d much rather deny.

Also known as by-the-wind sailors, Velella velella are jellyfish-like creatures of the phylum Cnidaria -- stinging animals. But it’s their sail that interests me, this now-dried bit I pick up and rub between my fingers. It feels like a cross between papyrus and plastic film. On a live purple sailor, the flap of cartilage, upright on the flattened oval body, acts like a rigid mainsail, propelling the animal far out at sea, where it spends its days miles from beachcombers and surfboards, dining on fish eggs and plankton.

Picture the scene from the air: a flotilla of purple sailors so large and color-soaked that it’s been reported as a blue-tinged oil slick. Remember, though, they have no rudder, no boom, no way of turning hard-a-lee, of tacking closer to the wind to keep away from land. So when the wind shifts, they shift, at one moment on port tack, then starboard, their clear sails and purple bodies milling about in the uncertain breeze, a high seas ruffle of chaos and papery collisions.

Imagine, then, in this case, here on Glass Beach, what might have occurred as the wind at sea shifted and the flotilla pivoted toward the east. Helplessly they would have run before the wind as the swells of the open ocean grew more pronounced and began to break, bearing the creatures into shore.

To run aground is every sailor’s humiliation, a sign of misreading the chart, the current, the wind or, perhaps most egregiously, the depth of your own hull.

I remember sailing with my father once when the keel thudded hard against the bottom and our forward motion abruptly halted. As the boat tilted awkwardly, wedged in a sandbar, we hoped no other ship would cruise by before the tide returned and we could slink off to some deep-water cove. Did we later review what had happened? Try to pinpoint our miscalculation?

My father was the problem solver. I, however, was stuck in my mystical stage, less concerned with faulty depth-finders or outdated charts than with the way I might find spiritual, perhaps paradoxical, significance in “being grounded.” For both of us, a matter of control. Neither of us would ever have mentioned shame.

No possibility, of course, of embarrassment in these brainless Jell-O things that lie grounded at my feet. No point, either, in waiting for the tide or another change in wind. Their bodies are 99% water. Pulverized by sand and surf, the gelatinous ovals collapse like punctured water balloons. They decompose quickly, evaporate into sand.

If they had been any sailor but the kind they are, they might have been able to jettison the sail while still out at sea. Seamen in a storm have been known to do just that -- cut the halyard or the sheet of a mainsail they couldn’t lower to the deck.

Who among us hasn’t done something similar, chosen between two wretched alternatives because we couldn’t help but believe our choices might matter? Even when it became clear that my father was facing his final, unfixable problem, he believed he had options and exhausted them all -- radiation, chemotherapy, prayer.

With the toe of my sneaker, I nudge the remains. The degree of decay suggests it must have been yesterday, maybe the day before, when they came ashore. The color has begun to fade.

What remains most intact are the sails, which have at last detached from the bodies. They blow around in the sand like crinkly goose down, triangular reminders that biology and the vagaries of wind are the fate of creatures like these.

It’s tempting to think our fates are never so capriciously determined.

Barbara Hurd is the author of “Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark” and “Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination.”