tiny bites of seawater (kind of a memoir)

This is an essay I wrote for the Creative Nonfiction Writing class I'm taking. I haven't gotten my final draft back yet, but I worked hard on it, and I'm rather proud of the end result.

It took me a long time to get the hang of revising things I'd written, but I think it's finally starting to be something I can do effectively (and even, in some cases, enjoy, if in a slightly self-flagellating & masochistic way).




Ten Fragments From a Kaleidoscope of the Atlantic




Look

I must’ve seen it for the first time, once. There always has to be a first time. My family has never lived near any beach, but we went to visit the Atlantic on the east coast of North Carolina every summer for years and years. We’d rent a little beach house with my dad’s sisters and their kids, all my younger cousins, and run barefoot between the sand and the street for a week. How old was I when I saw the ocean up close for the first time, heard sea sounds, felt the salt and the sand and the back-and-forth pull of the water on my feet? I must’ve been very young, because I don’t remember. I can’t remember having never seen the sea before. It feels like something I’ve had in my head for as long as there’s been a me to hold it there.


Listen

I’m not a person who likes loud noises, on the whole, but I’ve always loved the crash of waves. The steady, grainy sound of the tide coming in to meet the shore, hitting it hard, and rolling gracefully away. Hissss-boom. Like a rainstick being swirled. Like a drum. But really, there is not much that’s like it, not wind or thunder, not the sound inside a shell when one put it to one’s ear. The sound of the sea is the sound of the sea. Once, I was given an alarm clock that claimed not to ring or buzz or beep sleepers awake, but to usher in the morning with the noise of waves falling down on a beach. It wasn’t the same at all. It was like being woken up every day by television static, amplified in volume to almost intolerable levels.


Drifting

There’s a space between dreaming and the harsh alarm where I drift some mornings. It’s
watery there, or maybe womblike. I rock and float behind my eyes, in the dark. There’s a tide that sweeps me forward towards full consciousness, the weight of my limbs and my
waking and my senses of self and linear time, then pulls me back into the low susurrus of unconnected sounds and images that float into the in-between space from my
subconscious, then resubmerge. Back, forth. Back, forth. It’s gentle.

The sea is not always gentle, but it can be so.

I would run to the water, laughing, even before I could really swim, even when I was still afraid of the deep end of the pool, of having to jump off the diving board in physical education. I would splash past the foam, heedless of the cold and the sting of salt in small cuts. I’d let the sea lick my calves, knees, navel, waist, armpits. When it swelled, I’d jump so as not to swallow the gritty salt water, kicking my feet like a bird. When a wave was big, towering above me, about to fall, I’d hold my breath and take myself under, as close to bottom as I could get, eyes squeezed shut against the sand. Sand in my suit, in my hair. I’d shoot back up with a gasp when I felt the wave rumble over me and away towards shore. Sometimes, though, I’d try to ride them, to body surf, an endeavor which usually resulted in me falling head over tail, seawater up my nose, bruised ribs, coming to a graceless, tangled halt back on the beach and unknotting myself shakily, laughing.

Sometimes I’d just float, when the sea was calmish,, half on my back, legs dangling like bait. I’d close my eyes and imagine the dark blue water stretching away past all the corners of the map, myself tiny in it, tinier than tiny, not even a speck. I’d open my eyes and watch the big white clouds and the small black silhouettes of pelicans drift across the sky, and I’d drift too, with the sun on my skin, daydreaming of whales and sailing ships. I’d drift and drift and drift, letting the current carry me like its own daughter.


Salvage

I had to be pulled back by a lifeguard more than once. I’d go out too far without
realizing it, or they’d see that I was thrashing in a wave, or lying motionless and being carried outward, and they’d assume: drowning. It never occurred to me that I might drown. Never occurs, I suppose I should say. The last time this happened, I was eighteen. Hands on my shoulders, what do you think you’re doing? Come back to shore, now.


Mutability

Cruel and kind. Green and gray. Sometimes the ocean looks dark blue, sometimes
obsidian, sometimes the color of an empty beer bottle held up against a light. Sometimes, from far off, at sunrise or sunset, it seems silver, like a huge wash of glinting tinfoil undulating into the distance. Sometimes it seems still and smooth and flat. A sky below the sky. A floor or a ceiling. Floor for the birds, maybe. Ceiling for fish. Sometimes it thrashes and roars, chops and curls, rages, rages. It can turn on a dime, change in an instant, and even in relatively calm water a riptide could tug you under, fill you up with salt and brine and sand, stop your breath, break your legs. It happens. The sea is powerful. You can’t go thinking that you are its master, that it is your friend.


Weather

But. I am a foolhardy girl. Always have been. I tend to lose myself in things. I lose
myself best in water. One of my fondest, most vivid memories goes like this: it’s early
summer and I’m sixteen. I’m camping on Assateague Island with a church youth group,
which I attend largely because it means I get to do things like go camping on Assateague Island. We have seen wild horses run across the beach in strong-legged herds, feral in their knotted manes and wide eyes. We have at least tried to cook hot dogs over an open fire. We have sung slightly drippy, Simon and Garfunkel-esque songs about Jesus’ great and miraculous love for us and bowed our heads over our charred wieners. We’ve gone swimming. Only a few of the most appearance-concerned teenage girls are bothering to shower or shave. We have the whole Atlantic to keep us clean! It’s been sunny, till today. This morning we woke up to a slate colored sky, slate colored sea. As above, so below. It’s still hot and muggy, though, and it’s stayed like that all through the afternoon as the clouds up above have gathered and darkened until they seemed to sag towards us like sacks of pennies, or peer down like stern magistrates. I’m sitting crosslegged on a picnic table under that sky, my hair coarse and standing up in all directions from five days of much salt and no soap. I’m talking to an older boy in my group, an older girl, and the boy says something that makes us both laugh. I don’t remember what. It isn’t important. I remember the other girl’s pale throat stretched back, her pale teeth parted as though to catch the rain that suddenly dropped from those clouds in sheets and sheets and sheets, drenching us all in an instant. Cooling our skin. Thunder ba-roomed so loudly I honestly thought I’d lost my hearing for a moment after. It smelled of sea, that fishy, salty scent, and it smelled like clean water, like fresh rain, grassish, and it smelled like copper and ozone. Thunderstorm smell. If that were a perfume, if somebody stuck that in a little glass bottle with a fan-shaped lid, I might just swipe it behind my ears.

The good part starts here:

It’s raining. It’s thundering. People are yelping and whooping and running for tents and vans. Joel, the pastor, is trying restore calm and order, get everybody inside—inside something—but even his strong voice is drowned out by everything else. I lift my arms. I stand up on the picnic table and spin around. I shout into the thunder, trying to sync it with my lost voice, my open mouth. I am having the time of my goddamn life. It’s beautiful, wild, unapologetically inhospitable weather. I can hear the sea getting riled up, singing with the storm.

And then the lightning makes its debut.

My god.

I cannot describe this lightning to anyone who wasn’t there. You’ll think I’m
exaggerating. You’ll think I’m rhapsodizing in some hippy-dippy ambiguously stoned
way. You’ll think I’m using poetic license. No, I tell you, and no, and no. This is how it was.

It was all colors. One flash would be green, the next a streaky purple-red. They filled the air, if only for a few seconds, lit everything up brighter than could be bourne. You had to close your eyes after a moment. They branched into skinny, twisting columns in the sky where you could see the shape of them, these lightning bolts. They ran above our heads in shaky, sparkling waves, incredibly fast, but detailed all the same. Their passage seemed to open up time and expand it. They burned themselves into the dark of our brains, or at least, of my brain. This lightning still comes down in my dreams sometimes. It went on, and on, and on, and the thunder followed it and heralded it and followed, and I stood there, I don’t remember how I was standing or how I was moving or what my face was doing with itself. I just remember the sympathetic swell of electrical feeling in my lungs and legs and shoulderblades, the joy in this cacophony and tumult, like I could be lifted off the ground, like I could be fried to a cinder or carried off and dashed against the rocks at the other end of the beach or drowned by rain at any time, any time at all, and it would not matter. It wasn’t quite a nihilistic feeling. It was more that, as long as the storm filled my heart and head, I was the same as all nature. It did not matter what became of the shock-haired bipedal mammal on the flimsy wooden table below. It did not matter. I never wanted it to end.

I told this story to the first man who ever fucked me. “Oh,” he said, nodding, “so you like to be overpowered, huh? You get off on it?”

Talk about missing the point. The weather is not a man or a woman, though maybe
teenage girls of a certain temperament can temporarily lose their minds in empathy with
it.


Ice Cream

There were twee little cottages and surfshops, sure, but once we’d crossed the dunes to
the beach, there was just beach. Us, seagulls, sand, sea, scattered sunbathers with pasty bottoms or weird tattoos or screaming toddlers. And the one, tiny ice cream stand at the end of the old pier. We’d pester our parents till they gave us quarters, then sprint over to order our red-white-and-blue rocket pops, our ice cream sandwiches, our Creamsicles, our Klondike bars. My siblings, my cousins, me. We’d run back over the seashells, ice cream in our hands, on our mouths, melting fast. If we dropped it, well, the grit just added some needed texture.

It was nice, having that one ice cream stand. When I was ten or eleven, I went to a beach with a real boardwalk for the first time and I was horrified. There was so much noise, so many carnival lights, all these people meandering around, throwing trash on the sand, in the tidepools, munching unidentifiably fried things, utterly unawed by the ocean stretching into forever before them. Beside them. It seemed obscene. I temporarily lost my appetite for rocket pops.


Below

You should be awed. Water covers most of this planet, and the oceans are deep, deeper
than you can really imagine. Deeper than the distance from your airplane window to the
patchwork of farmland stretched out beneath you. They are populated, those depths. It is not just a dark susurrus. Slow, singing whales, distant, behemoth cousins to goats and deer navigate their wet roads. A blue whale is so large that it would be possible for an average-sized human being to swim through parts of its circulatory system. There are cuttlefish, signaling to one another with beautiful bioluminescent light displays rippling up and down their skins. There are ecosystems that don’t depend on the light of the sun. Squids bigger than busses, animals that have grown to meet the challenge posed by the immensity of the space they inhabit. Scientists are unsure of all that lives in the sea. Creatures appear briefly in the lights of submarines, huge and bizarre, then vanish into the cold black water, never to be seen again. It’s like an alien planet. More is known about the surface of our moon.


Beginning

Life came from the sea, as we all know. Bluegreen bacteria discovered photosynthesis in
the salty waters of early Earth. Fish were swimming millions of years before anything
with a backbone crawled up on the ground and breathed in air. At one time, oceans
covered even more of the planet than they do now. Today, we find fossilized seashells in Appalachia. In a sense, we’re all the sons and daughters of the water. Trace the long lines of anyone’s ancestry back far enough, and you will discover a thing with gills and fins.

In many creation myths, the sea existed before anything else. Sun and moon must be
caught in a fishing net and dragged into the sky in these stories. The land must be built up upon a turtle’s back. A floating goddess cracks an egg into the infinite ocean, and the yolk becomes the world.



End

Other stories, other myths, the sea is what rises up to drown the world, to purge it, when gods grow displeased with what they’ve fished up from the deep. Floods and tsunamis— there’s the great deluge of the Old Testament, of course, and similar stories are recounted in Hindu mythology and in the ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. The ancient Mayans believed that our world was preceded by four others, each of which was ultimately destroyed by a natural disaster to make room for the next. One was covered by the sea, in the end, and one was drowned by ceaseless rain.

So many ancient maps show the sea circling the world, spreading from the known
landmasses outward to an edge, and perhaps beyond that. Who could have guessed where
it ended, or lapped itself, came around in a circle?

The Celtic peoples of Ireland once believed that the island of the gods and the blessed
dead lay on the other side of the Atlantic. I have stood on the cliffs of Moher, lain in the yellow flowers and trampled earth at the unguarded edge and looked down, looked out. I could see how the view before me might seem to be that crossing, that last road that can only be sailed in one direction and goes until the end of all things.

The sea is big. The sea is deep. The sea is wild, and awful, and majestic, and mysterious. It’s hard to believe that we, we puny little human beings, could ever have any real effect on it, could ever poison it or clog it with garbage, kill too many fish, kill too many whales, kill too many anything, shift its currents, which tug our boats and our bodies along so easily.

The island of the gods and the blessed dead turned out to be America, and my living,
mortal, not exceptionally virtuous or fortunate ancestors sailed there hundreds of years after their ancestors had forsaken that old religion in favor of one which points upwards to indicate the spatial orientation of heaven, in the sky with the clouds and stars.

And much later, a slight, freckled little girl opened her young eyes at Atlantic Ocean for the first time, from the other side, and fell in love. She did not conceive of the world as a round blue thing floating in the vasty emptiness of space yet, did not know that there was no heaven. The water was bright and a few shades darker than the sky and it seemed to go on and on forever. The air was full of wings and the crying of gulls.

Sometimes, lying on my back with the water on my skin and in my ears, I think it would
be a fine thing to float away as though I had sails, just to keep on going and going, not dying, exactly, but allowing myself to be carried off the edge of the known world, to a place no cartographer can describe. Yes. If it were possible, that would make a fine and fitting end.