Dr. Gary B. Griggs

Leslie Ewing  0:12  
Welcome to shorewords the ASPN podcasts on coastal literature, the factual and fictional accounts that transport us toward the shore. I'm Leslie Ewing host of shore words. And each month I'll be talking with authors about their coastal writing, and with coastal leaders about the tales and stories that inspire their chosen path. Today, it's my great pleasure to talk with Barry Briggs about his career, his writing, and some of his favorite coastal books. But first I'll take a short pause to introduce our sponsors.

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Leslie Ewing  1:34  
Gary, you're no stranger to most of the aspm audience, probably a quarter to a third have either been students of yours or have colleagues who are students of yours. And you publish my account 27 articles now in short beach alone, well, two book reviews and one book cover. So it's quite a great accomplishment. Your short bio is perceived to be a and geoscience from the University of Santa Barbara. And then three years later, you got your PhD in Oceanography at the Oregon, Oregon State University. You're looking at some of the early sediment cores in the Cascadia subduction zone area. And then, from graduate school, you got an offer that you accepted to come teach at UCSC, University of Santa Chris. And somewhere along the line, you became a distinguished professor of reverse Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. So to me, you seem to be like the epitome of a renaissance scholar. You're doing fieldwork you're teaching, you've got classes, you've got lecturing mentor students, you're writing, you're possibly still surfing a little bit. But you're also involved with your community. And it seems like you do all of this with the same calm demeanor as you're taking the toy in this interview. So thank you. So some of this probably comes naturally to you sometimes work. But when did you know that to coast and UC Santa Cruz, who would be the constants in your life?

Gary Griggs  3:07  
Well, this is a funny story, I'll make brief but it has to do with books. As a kid my dad was a high school teacher in Southern California when he finished teaching every summer we look forward to this camping trip up the coast. You know, Oregon, Washington, California. And the first night from Southern California we'd always stay in Berkeley. And my dad had been a student to graduating in 1938. But his college roommate ended up getting a PhD in geography and staying on the faculty here for 4045 years. He's quite well known a guy named Jim Parsons. And they had this wonderful house in the Berkeley hills with lofts and books and things. He traveled all over the world and collected and he always would tell us stories and wonderful adventures. I think he made them up. It was great. And I knew he had a doctor's degree because he was a professor. So I asked my dad once and I was probably 10 or 11. I thought wow, this would be a great profession. So I asked my dad what Jim had to do to get a doctor's degree. My dad said, Oh, he had to write a book, which a thesis is about. And I thought at 10 or 11 years old, that was way off anything I could ever achieve. So I kind of checked the idea of being a professor off of my list of future professions, and I'm just finishing up my 12th book. So it was a I think my dad was being honest, not discouraging, but it was not necessarily a dream to become a professor. And as I finished up at Oregon State. Most people in geological oceanography were going into offshore oil. And it was sort of ironic that I had this all set to make that an interview with humble which now became Exxon Mobil ideas, though set to get a plane ticket to Houston, go for it. This in depth interview, give a talk. And professor who had been sort of a guiding light at UC Santa Barbara would come to start a graduate program, Aaron waters had just been invited to come to Santa Cruz, which was just opening to start a new science program. We've been here a year, I think, and he calls it you know, I think we may have a position for an oceanographer. And that day my course changed. And I ended up coming down getting hired. And that was 51 years ago. But in retrospect, I never taught a class I'd never been a TA. So I walked into my first oceanography class here in the winter of 1969, with 250, long haired, wild, you know, radical students from the 60s and I, I had, you know, they were all in tie dye, and they had dogs along here was, you know, Oregon State is, anyway, sort of a pretty standard, you know, Pac, a, fraternities, sororities, sports, and we had none of that. And all of a sudden, I'm in this very liberal, progressive institution, which was fine for me coming from Selma, from Southern California in Santa Barbara. But it was just wonderful decision. And as I look back and think about, well, I could have done any of 100 other things. But the reason I think I'm still here, one of the Pioneer faculties, sort of, for 70 years, because it was a perfect opportunity for me in combining Geological Sciences and undergraduate with oceanography, and then a minor in civil engineering. Everything sort of came to the coastal zone. So I mean, in some ways, it's a straightforward story. But in other ways, there's so many places I could have done, take another turn in my life would have been totally different. So I sort of I feel very fortunate to that all those things worked out. Yeah. Even from the discouragement of they will never write a book.

Leslie Ewing  7:02  
So you write a lot about the coast, you've written a lot about the coast for most of your career. A lot of things are the same as physical laws are still the same. But seems like everything else has changed, right? What? What do you think has been the biggest changes for good or for bad?

Gary Griggs  7:21  
I think what is clearly happening is still happening is the coastal zone is where many people want to live. I mean, if you're in California, or coastal counties make up some small percentage of the area, but 68% of the population and most of the gross domestic product of jobs. So as people have migrated the coast, I think the issues that weren't apparent, and there's this interesting now that we've understood climate change and all ninos, and Pacific Decadal Oscillation cycles, the period from about 1945 to 1978, was a call out sort of stormy cycle. And that's exactly when California's population exploded. So people subdivided the cliffs in the bluffs at a time when the climate was pretty reasonable. So I think a change has been in 78, we flipped to a version three and seven. And we went through another calm, cool period, now we're back into a warmer stormy period. So I think that's been one big issue is a realization that climate change along the coast, and what may seem reasonable at one time, all of a sudden, we're doing a paper now on sort of, called hardening the coast or sort of change things or changing these permits, we kind of track as the Commission has, you know, the number of miles armored in the 70s, versus what it is today. And today, about 14% of the whole coast is that for Southern California, the for Southern California counties, it's 38%. So and now we're putting the brakes on that and say, wait a minute, we're not going to do that anymore. That has big effects. Unless you were built before the Coastal Act. I think the other is the whole climate change sea level rise issue, which wasn't that we were ignorant, it just wasn't sort of as obvious as it is today with contains. So that seems to sort of be sort of an umbrella over everything else now. We didn't look 20 years in the future 30 years in the future. Now, you know, those projections are concave up. How high by what period is affecting virtually everything on the coast. So I think that's been another big issue. And those are the two I see the sort of climate change, sea level rise and our understanding of Pacific Decadal Oscillation. And it's those short term cycles that are the ones that have really created the damage a few millimeters now. But in the long run, those are additive. And I think just with the, the Coastal Commission came into being not long after I came here and started working, but I think that definitely changed our overall sort of process of what we do along the coast. And there's some considerations now that are weighing in, that everybody has to kind of figure out how to deal with certain population keeps going up. So yeah, more people, but the amount of coastline doesn't go up.

Leslie Ewing  10:33  
Not at all, fortunately. So you mentioned you've written 12 books, I know, many, many articles and science papers and all of that. So I was watching a movie recently, where there was this sort of social gathering scene, this fictitious character, sort of, in the vein of Tom Clancy was saying, he didn't believe in writer's block. And actually, he said something, I don't even consider the possibility if you think about it, and it might happen. That's a direct quote from Tom Clancy. But how about you? I mean, what's your writing process? I'm not going to ask this of many people. But you've got so much of the work that you've done, to force yourself to sit down every day and write or?

Gary Griggs  11:20  
That's a good question. I've also been writing these bi weekly newspaper columns for almost 11 years, there's I just finished my 282nd column. And I've actually been jointly sharing those every other week with Dan hayflick, who started save our shores. And then the head of the OCLC Odyssey program, he writes on a more little more conservation, environmental, and I tried to do science. And the first one, I wrote, realizing that it was going to be in the newspaper, where your friends and people read it, versus an article insurance feature, which really should be more, I'll be more pressure because those are your colleagues. And I had my wife read it, and I had our public information officer read it, and they made a few things. And then the next time I send it to our local public information officer on campus, I don't get to refuse you know what you're doing. But I thought I could probably find enough to write about for six months, and two years ago. And I think for those articles, there's so much going on. Man, every time we turn around, there's up the ocean for plastic, okay, that project and we've got the, you know, the BP horizon blowout, or the newest stuff on sea level or whaling on the bay, or fisheries that every time I turn, I mean, I've not duplicated articles. But I've written a lot of history. Those are kind of fun, because they're about six to 700 words. And I find I turned it on Thursday night for Sunday. As soon as my partner's article comes out on Sunday, I start thinking about the next article Monday or Tuesday, I rough it out. And I look at it again, we write it on Wednesday by Thursday. So those are kind of fun. Books. Boy, I don't have a writer's block. And I tend to think about things a long time before I finally do it. So I'm, I'm the artist wants this. Well, I did a accommodate Well, the first six years of my newspaper columns you put out and I just put together the next 40 years. That was easy, because we're just trying to work with InDesign, which is a challenge. Those are easy, because we'll have to write them all over again. But a new book is like sort of a combination of things. I think about a lot long enough that I know what I want to do, but I don't really write outlines. I don't really have a method I can see. Okay, this new book on sort of natural disaster history, stuff, I've been looking for 15 years. So I've got files on earthquakes and floods. And I'm you do some research, but it seems to kind of flow pretty well. And I don't try to make it perfect the first time that I probably go back through it a number of times. And I think now I'm up to I don't know, 190 articles published. And those are different because researchers are thinking about things and it's sort of finite. It's I'm really big on illustrations. So I sometimes think about, well, you know, a picture of say, the apartments on the cliffs in Pacific. That's a whole story. And once you've had that picture in mind, I kind of think, okay, what's the story, the message around that. But I've also gotten much more interested in sort of science communication. One of things I've tried to get into my graduate students is, you know, if you can't communicate, clearly, what you're doing, then it's never going to be read are never going to be understood. So that To me is really important. That's what these newspaper articles are really about is anybody in the city should be able to read that? I find we have this local paper that's getting smaller and smaller, because it's an out of town owner, and they're cutting budgets, but the number of people who I wouldn't even nobody have read my writing. So that's the best part of the paper. That's why I look forward to. So I think getting a little bit of feedback every once really helps you see this is worth doing. I'll keep doing it. It doesn't seem like work. But by the end of a whole book, you realize, yeah, it took a while.

Leslie Ewing  15:36  
couple hours each article, yeah, day each article.

Gary Griggs  15:41  
Yeah. And then I did a book recently with a friend Kim Steiner. illustrated Lodge, and it's a much more personal thing. And that was kind of fun, because we didn't have to feel like you have to cover every aspect of something. But the whale watching sea otters, and we both did when I'm growing up on the coast. And those things in some ways are a lot easier, like writing a biography, than making sure you like living with changing California coast was going to cover every county and I had Charles, come in and do a chapter and people that I kind of talked into doing sections that was that you want to make sure you cover the whole state who wasn't like, Well think about this for a while. And so it's been fun. But I never really saw it as a as a writer's block, I guess. Good. And to think at one time, I never thought I'd read a book, and then I failed the English test. And I had to take subject day in college, you know, you look back and the amount of writing I'd done the first. The first publication I had, I did a handful in graduate school, was from these deep sea corps officers in Washington, and I realized how little I'd written because I submitted this manuscript, and I went to deep sea research and oceanographic, high quality journal, and I had two of my faculty advisors, his co authors, and they were both really young and he hadn't written and the editor, Mary, Sears was classic. We, we had no computers. So it was a hard copy of manuscript. And it was about these cores, which were these rhythmic turbidity current deposits, but in those words, biocuration are these worlds. And in fact, we could correlate the depth in in density of those over about 100 miles, which is really certainly an interesting thing. Why should because they were different from layer to layer, whether it was time between duplicate deposits, or recolonization of these benthic marine organisms, but I use the word Burroughs probably 100 times. And she got back and said, This paper is, is very interesting, but it has all the signs of immature writing. And she taken a red pencil and circled the word Burroughs. And as I read it, I went, Oh, my God. So that was sort of a wake up call. But that stuck with me forever. So I tried and never use the same word twice in one sentence or sentences, and then learn to use other words, and now with online, the services and stuff, but when I see students writing, right, like, I want to use the same words is this significant mature, but also to those little things along the way that you realize? And so different now with computer and pre processing versus?

Leslie Ewing  18:44  
So you mentioned the edge? You didn't mention it by name, which you actually did, that you wrote together? And then the custom crisis, this book came out about the same time. Yeah. And it seems like they're here for very different audiences. How did you decide to do them both together? And then what audiences Do you want to reach? Well, the

Gary Griggs  19:06  
coast in crisis book, I think, I'm done a fair amount of traveling around the world. And I noticed, well, there's a lot of other issues out there that I don't we don't cover when we ideally, I have a class that goes to geology. Long time, you know, there's overfishing, and there's coral reefs, and there's climate change and water pollution and power plants. So I thought, this is an issue that is global, because most of my work has been California, kind of been pretty hard. So I thought it'd be fun to try to do a larger scale, but that would appeal to more people in other places. I'm not sure because University of California Press is not really a marketing agent. They don't really do something that a big publisher might I mean, they put out a catalog and that's it. They do a wonderful job. With the books, so I kind of started on that. And then I realized I needed some more perspective. So my wife and I took a wonderful two month trip, we spent a month driving around the coast of England and Scotland and a month around the coast of Spain and Portugal. And you know, it was salmon farming, and it was mussel farming, and it was water quality, and it was land use. So it came together really well. A lot of things I didn't want. We work with, like invasive species, other things like power plants, because I've been involved in involved with the California coast. Water quality. So the idea was to do it apply to more places and maybe provide fill a niche that I didn't think and feel just because as we started our conversation coasts have become become more aware of them and their issues. And I mean, sea level rise is one issue, but most of our power plants are on the coast. oil comes in our ship traffic is where people are putting on their wastewater, but it's also placed on natural hazards with tsunamis, sea level rise coastal storms. And it's not. I think I when I just talked to the editor, it's sold 1000 copies, which is not really very many. It's been a little over a year. But I think if one's realistic about writing a book in this area, it's really not to make money. So that book anyway was meant to be sort of global. And then Kim Steinhardt is an old friend, we walked around Monterey Bay together times, and he's a kind of retired and is does a lot of photography of sea otters and give him a

Leslie Ewing  21:37  
lot of talks on others. And photos in the book are incredible.

Gary Griggs  21:40  
Yeah, he's got a big lands and fins a lot of time in moss landing. And we had some things in common. He grew up on San Francisco Bay, Strawberry Hill, whatever it is. And he had a lot of interesting adventures and spent his time on the Bexar coast. And I grew up in Southern California, we started talking and he actually proposed the idea. And I said, we'll share it. Let's give it a try. So he was working his part and I was working on my part, and they came off the same time. And he's been really excited about going off and giving book talks. And I've given some together, which is always interesting. Anyway, it's been a fun ride to just go off in a more personal direction. And then my wife and I did a couple books together that went on the California coast from the air. I've been with you seen as the gallon than that. Yeah, no. And then right. And that book is so more than anything, because it's part of this our TV series of old photographs. And so many people love then and now images. And you'll see these articles and magazines, you know, movie stars, what they look like in high school, or whatever. And I thought of outlined another book called The faces of Santa Cruz then and now. You know, our political leaders and stuff and what did they look like and you know, page about their life has nothing to do with science. But the book on the photographs of the old coast is just such a vivid way to portray coastal change. And then we can say it's eroding six inches per year. And what does that mean within zoom? Wow, there's something here. That's perfect. Because we said you can't stand in some of the places where the photographs were taken from fact there's this interesting photos in there. out on westcliffe near natural bridges. There used to be a wave was a wave but it well it was a back in the late 1890s there was a drought in Santa Cruz. People used to go out along westcliffe Drive and wagons to see the cliffs it was the road of 1000 wonders there was arches and bridges and blow holes. And when it got we got into the drought, it was so dusty. People didn't want to go out there anymore. It was just too dirty. So the city said Well, we're losing tourism. So they hired these two brothers, the Armstrong brothers to figure out how to solve this. And turns out there was an Astra blowhole out there. And they was a cave and the waves surged in and they board these two six foot diameter holes into the top of that cave, and then they put these huge pistons in there. So the waves of surge in pretty engineering Lee sharp for the 1890s push the pistons up four or five, six feet and when they came down, they pumped water into a Derrick on top of the cliff, and then they use that water, gravity fed into a water tank and then they there was a horse drawn by And that they spray down Westcliff was wasn't dusty. So we had these old photographs taken from the top of that jury in 1890. And you can see up the coast where the Marine Lab is and the mobile home park and you can see back into Santa Cruz, there was nothing there. So we said, well, how are we going to repeat that? And I started thinking, well, maybe I can get I have a son in law who's a fire captain, his enemies, I said, maybe get the fire truck out, then we'll get the ladder up. And this is before drones.

Leslie Ewing  25:34  
Easy drawing, easy way down.

Gary Griggs  25:36  
So we talked to Kim Gabrielle Edelman, who did the coastal records, budget photos, and we've been up with him flying a number of times have been great, generous with their time. And they were excited about that book because they didn't use their photos and to see him. So we made them sort of go out there. So we came out in the helicopter. We had cameras and we had the photo, we're trying to look at the photo and he just kept lowering, actually was Gabrielle

Leslie Ewing  26:02  
I thought she was the pilot.

Gary Griggs  26:04  
Yeah, usually pilots, she's really careful. And Ken's got his 35 megapixel mic, and pewter, and she just kind of kept lowering it down almost over the path out there. In fact, we ended up getting too low, because the photos weren't quite right. So we find a way to get to photo photo locations that we couldn't get to before. But it was a fun book, just because it was the photos that anybody can look at the old days, very different.

Leslie Ewing  26:35  
I also think they make great tourist souvenirs. You go to Santa Cruz, and you've got pictures of what it used to look like. The way it is now. You can go back and look at it five years later and still remember your your trip there and have great memories. And it's kind of nicer than buying candy. And yeah, sure.

Gary Griggs  26:54  
I think you're right. Bob. Yeah, Bob when I got to know each other, and he was never an email guy, but he'd write letters back and forth. And in return, he sent me all of his sand samples. So I have a fellow Well, these are just some of mine. Yeah, but I have a range full of men. He said, I want you to have these and his daughters brought him down with these got all these baby food jars with labels of but we had a lot of good conversations. And one of the things in the middle of something where I was trying to fix something he said, I've used this time time because Gary, for every complicated problem, there's always a simple answer. And it's always wrong. Yeah, so whenever somebody comes up to dive, I figured

Leslie Ewing  27:38  
I know how to fix our beach problems. We just do a little segment there. Hold the sound in place. Yeah.

Gary Griggs  27:45  
So he was one of those wise. amazing amount of stuff. I have his oral history. Yes. kind of fascinating. And he quite amazingly, never got a PhD. I know. He had a master's degree before professor and the National Academy of Engineering and just timing was sets it won't matter.

Leslie Ewing  28:08  
So you mentioned Sam, I do not yet have but I have on order. Gary San journal.

Gary Griggs  28:17  
I think it's a third grade. Okay, fourth grade fifth grade thing.

Leslie Ewing  28:20  
Well, we'll see when I get it. What's your favorite sand

Gary Griggs  28:28  
you know, I started collecting them I think in graduate school and I think I know three or 400 some I put in frames and then I found people handful of people go places that I haven't been Antarctica the Atacama Desert in Chile and if send it back

Leslie Ewing  28:45  
Oh yes, the bottles people sent me

Gary Griggs  28:50  
one of the favorites I have because it's local is the Garnet sand at the mouth of big servers with molera State Park. I can't it's a beautiful beach but it comes out of a Garnet berry rock and the Big Sur river and there's this beautiful and well this is can't show it on the podcast but it's it's really heavy because yeah. So and then over the years I started

Leslie Ewing  29:15  
I have so many striations I

Gary Griggs  29:17  
started messing around and then I got my grandson and he loves to do this and so anyway, and some of the you know some of the tropical ones are pretty exciting. The pink coral sounds a mute I spent a summer in for me two which aren't really coral there for him an afro but they really look different than theirs glass beach, or Bragg which is kind of cool. A lot of the blacks and all the beans pretty amazing. And I didn't realize until I went online somewhere in my history of clicking sound that there's a whole group of people. They're called arena files after era nine, okay, and they have their pictures of their sands and they collect them a different kind of bottles and photo micrographs of them and description. So there's a whole army of people.

Leslie Ewing  30:08  
Actually my favorite, each material is cobble. Okay, I like stand by sit, there's something magical. It's also musical walking across calm, I love the noise, it makes pretty fun.

Gary Griggs  30:19  
I want to when I teach in this coastal geology class, I'm teaching that this quarter and I asked them, I think about the unique sort of coincidence fact that most rocks ran it. So for sandstones break down into 10 size particles, ultimately, and waves are just capable of moving sand sized particles. So why that sort of geological accident we have this, you know, 1000s of kilometer long, Sandy buffer around many of our coastlines and what if things broke down into baseball sized clumps, grains, you know, think of how much more difficult would be to jog on the beach? volleyball. Welcome to

Leslie Ewing  31:06  
Cabo. It's not good for john. Okay. I know what you mean. But yeah. Well, I

Gary Griggs  31:10  
never thought about it that way. They're just nice

Leslie Ewing  31:12  
sandy beaches everywhere. And we build up more and more, our coasts would be expanding and expanding because the waves couldn't move it away.

Gary Griggs  31:19  
Right? Be very different.

Leslie Ewing  31:22  
People probably wouldn't want to live on the coast. That's right. It's big rock piles. So what are you working on now?

Gary Griggs  31:33  
A couple of papers, actually. Kiki patch was a grad student who's now teaching at CSU Channel Islands, loves it there. She's really a great person. So we've been sort of collaborating on a couple things. And one, this whole idea of armoring and sort of what we've relied on for decades, and for an engineer, that's what you work in working a lot with seal allies. And there's a conference in Columbia University in June. It's called At what point managed retreat. And I think what a wonderful title because it just sort of puts it all out there. And you may know there's it's been UC Irvine conference each year for the last three or four years, I've been asked to speak, spoken together. And I suggested to them this year, I didn't you make this on managed retreat, because every year it's been some connection to coastal resilience building resilient communities. And I have this more realistic view that we cannot build an organic, natural shoreline along the outer California because we can't plant seagrass and mangroves in the San Francisco Bay is different. marshes and weapons, the open coast kill algae doesn't matter. We got a lot of way back. So there's nothing we can plan on the bluffs as much as we would like to do that. So we've relied on farmer, but I think that's an we're at the end of an era. But this idea of resilient communities, I think it's an easy way to sort of dismiss a really complicated thing with a word. I joked when I started my last keynote talk in Irvine, I said, Let's operationalize resilience as the dominant paradigm. That's the kind of language you hear from people. What does that mean? Well, we're just gonna we're gonna make it resilient. Well show me a resilient coastal development. And I, on this trip, we did use it in the coastal crisis around the coast of England, I read earlier about wonderful book written in 1912. It's called loss towns of the Yorkshire forest. And we did an article. We have mobile homes, although they're not these 80 foot long, 40 feet wide. Their little caravan asks you to get the front row for two years, and then you go to the back of the line. And I thought, we're never know do that.

Leslie Ewing  34:08  
What do I mean, if you were to be talking to your students today about communication? What skills would you tell them to focus on?

Gary Griggs  34:16  
Oh, gosh, well, there's three books I really liked that I have read, once by Randy Olson Don't be such a scientist. All right. He's a marine biologist who went to film school discovered he wasn't having enough impact as a young assistant professor. And he makes a lot of really good points about but he calls ABT which stands for and but therefore and it's, it's a narrative. He says, most scientists go to a conference and they say, and I did this, and I did this and I did this. So boring. And he says, you have to make it a story. sea levels rising and it's Rising at a much higher level than we used to. But we built next to the coast. Therefore, we got to do something about it. So it's this abt and then there's the one by Nancy Baron down from the ivory tower. She's a Stanford campus. So it's how you communicate with the media. Newspapers and then the one by Corey de science, right? Yeah. I think Am I making myself clear? And so those are ones I talked to my students about.

Leslie Ewing  35:29  
So just in closing, where is your favorite beach?

Gary Griggs  35:36  
Gosh, let's see. That's really tough.

Leslie Ewing  35:38  
You don't have to tell your favorite secret beats your favorite public? No

Gary Griggs  35:42  
Well, beaches have gotten really crowded in places I think of more places around the world where I've been. I spent a week on a boat with a diagnosis in the Bahamas. And there there's these little marinas where people will pull in in their boats and they anchor there and they go out to the bar and walk down the beach that's two miles long just to a white coral sand why waters there stromatolites out there Precambrian reef sort of and nobody on the beach that was pretty special privileged pretty privileged Santa Cruz that you know I mean, in the middle of the bay we've hiked around the bay five mile walk six times and there's some places you get to down there South with memories into the bay when there's nobody tends to be a little windy or less populated. You know the main beach in Santa Cruz Calif beach are great. I used to surf a lot of the Four Mile Beach up the coast yellow bank. It's got these incredible sandstone intrusions but you know, various members of society choose to come there and sort of mess it up. And yet it's hard to find.

Leslie Ewing  37:03  
Yeah, so that's your Yeah, criteria for favorite

Gary Griggs  37:06  
places where you don't have to deal with 1000 other people. And, you know, we were you know, in the beaches of Portugal and Spain, England, Scotland, the waters go, but there's nobody there. We have a great time in Iceland, which has these very few people on these isolated property icy beaches with icebergs on it. That was kind of unique. So anyway, difficult decision.

Leslie Ewing  37:34  
So thank you so much. Oh, yeah, this

Gary Griggs  37:36  
was fun. Thanks, Leslie.

Leslie Ewing  37:38  
So and also thank you for listening to this inaugural inaugural with Gary Griggs issues shorebirds. Over time with Dr. theory, Gary Vee Greg's, as he signs off for all of his short leash articles that tell you something about California coast about writing and about Gary's life. I also hope that it's inspired you to read some of his books that cost in crisis are only 1000 books sold so far. We can go we can help that with that, let's Oh, but also some of his articles and pick up another coast of work, if not his dive into the shorebirds experience. I hope to be back next month with another issue short words. So stay tuned. Thank you.

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