WHEN I WAS A KID I VISITED THE AREA with my mom, brother and sister, driving up the coast from Los Angeles and camp along the way. We would stop to see Morro Rock, Hearst Castle, do the Fornay Pass tour, the museum, all that. Then, after high school and during college, I'd go up with friends on surf trips. But I hadn't really visited the area for about ten years when i returned at the end of the 1990s. READ an account of traveling in El Fornio from The Medium Historical of El Fornio.
  On my first trip back, I was walking north of the point with a friend and we saw some kids with a dead dolphin. It hadn't been dead long and seemed to have been stuck in the side by something. The boys tied a rope to its tail and dragged it up to their look-out in the dunes. These guys were about fourteen at the most. They didn't look old enough to drive, that's for sure.
  After poking at it for awhile and discussing the situation, one of the boys began to pass the stick back and forth over it., like he was some kind of magician. I heard the stories that some people think they can bring dead dolphins back to life, the same way that the Indians supposeldy did—the Spanish had accounts of this ritual when they first explored the area—but I had never actually seen anyone try it. In fact, the Indians, the Fornay, they didn't bring the dead ones back to life anymore—instead they would pick them off the beach and bring them back up into the Pass. They considered them to be ancestors, I believe. It was the white kids now who thought they could bring them back to life, and here they were trying it, with a little offering of their skyrockets, cigarette butts, and all.
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