Seal Team

As you know, the 35-day partial shutdown of federal agencies has left a legacy of chaos, backlogs and in general the kind of miserable cleanup you find after a Category 4 hurricane. We’re going to be sorting the consequences for months—if we’re lucky.

Here’s an interesting case from the files of the Needless Pointless Waste of Billions Shutdown. In the absence of National Park Service staff, who were furloughed across the country, our national treasures suffered. A hiker died from a fall in Yosemite without rangers able to respond quickly. Vandals cut down trees and off-roaders drove throughout Joshua Tree National Park just for the hell of it; damage that will take centuries to mitigate. At parks around the country, trash and human waste piled up like the aftermath of a Grateful Dead concert.

And in Northern California, Drakes Beach has been taken over by an invasive species and authorities are basically retaining the barricades for would-be beachgoers until the invaders decide to leave of their own accord.

Because the invasion force is a colony of elephant seals, who have thoroughly settled in. They’ve calved, set up their chow lines, measuring for curtains and are daring mere humans to turf them out. When you weigh more than an Infiniti and have the temperament of a longhorn with an abscessed tooth, the humans reconsider their normal beach-clearing tactics (which apparently have involved flapping blue tarps).

I expect that once the pups are of an age to hit the road with the ‘rents, the NPS will start flapping tarps again and the bipeds will be allowed beach access again. I hope to God they don’t trash up the place.