Swimming with the Sharks

beach chairs — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Linda L. Crowe

2015 should go down in history as the Year of the Shark. The Atlantic was eerily vacant of swimmers last summer because of all the shark attacks—even in North Carolina, where our family has vacationed every year since 1963, the year my little sister, Laura, was born.

“Are we going to swim this year?” I asked Laura in June as we planned for our August week at the beach.

“Linda, we’ve got to!”

In July I told her what my boss said when he called from his vacation at Baldhead Island. “It’s weird.” I imitated his soft southern accent and the way he emphasized certain words. “You look up and down the beach and there is not a soul in the water, as far as the eye can see.” Baldhead is not far from Kure Beach, where we go.

There are always sharks, my sister reminded me. But last year, the predators seemed to be a bit more aggressive. In fact, the number of attacks at North Carolina beaches in 2015 set a state record.

They bit surfers, of course, but ordinary swimmers, too. Even waders. They bit the arms off two teenagers.

And not just in North Carolina. Shark attacks made headlines in Florida, South Carolina, Malibu, Hawaii, Australia, and South Africa. Great whites were sighted off New York beaches. Cape Cod, too—the setting for Jaws, a book I first read on the beach at Kure when I was in high school. A great read, yes, but it did not keep me out of the water. It was fiction, after all.

In the newspaper and on radio and TV, experts cited theories on why the sharks were so bitey:

Climate change was making it hotter, so more people were spending more time in the ocean, upping their odds of getting bitten.
The sharks’ normal food was in short supply, so they were changing up the menu.
Low rainfall was making the near-coastal seawater saltier, which the sharks just loved.

I believed that the sharks were pissed off. That this was their well-coordinated revenge for all the fishermen who caught them, sliced off their fins, and threw them back in the ocean to die. One hundred million sharks a year are killed for their meat and/or fins, according to recent estimates. So many that shark populations are taking a dive. If the same number of people were getting killed each year, America would send in troops or provide air support to rebels.

The conspiracy theory made sense to me because what else can sharks do? They can’t make bombs. They can’t take hostages. If this is the reason, it serves our species right, I said. My sister seemed doubtful.

•••

August rolled around, and Laura and her gang made the annual trek on I-95 from Virginia over to Wilmington and down to the beach. I joined them a day later. By the time I arrived, everyone had been swimming, and no one had been attacked. I raced in, too, and the sharks did not bite me.

We floated, splashed each other, and frolicked in the temperate, briny goodness that is the ocean at Kure. But mostly we waited for just the right wave, then swam like hell to catch it the moment before it crested—our bodies stiff fleshy spears, shooting forward as the water surged landward.

At last we tired and, one by one, each of us rode one final wave back to the beach. Except me. I wasn’t ready to go up yet, so I treaded water alone and gazed out toward the vast horizon. A pelican hovered in the sky above me. I watched as it locked in on a target and folded its wings, then plummeted headfirst into the water and disappeared. Rising to the surface, it pointed its long beak toward heaven and gulped down a luckless fish. Just me, the pelican, and the distant horizon. And all that lurked beneath us.

I was not afraid. Or maybe I was a little, but the odds of a shark attack were miniscule compared to the wonder of bobbing in the ocean, salt on my lips as pelicans and gulls swooped and dived overhead.

Without the exertion of bodysurfing, I was soon covered with goose bumps, so I caught a wave in to shore. I dried off with my beach towel and plopped down in a canvas chair next to my sister. When she asked if it was scary out there all by myself, it occurred to me that she was watching me the whole time—once a lifeguard, always a lifeguard. Not really, I told her. It wasn’t that bad.

Laura was a certified lifeguard—the real deal—and this was how she made money summers during her college years. Even though I only took Junior Lifesaving, I’ve always considered myself to be a lifeguard, too, particularly where she is concerned.

•••

Maybe because my big brother ran out in front of car when he was eleven (he lived to tell about it), or because my little brother got shocked when he stuck his finger in the electrical outlet in the hall (he’s fine too—sort of), but I was always afraid that something dire was going to happen to my beloved sister, the baby of our family. And because a neighborhood kid was profoundly disabled by a hit and run car when their family was on vacation in Florida, I was especially nervous about our annual trips to the beach. How awful would it be for Laura—for the whole family—if she were maimed or killed while we were all enjoying ourselves?

A hard time would seem even harder if it happened on vacation, the same way it was worse if someone died on Christmas day. A tragedy must be avoided at all costs, and in my mind, it fell to me to keep Laura safe.

At age seven, my options were somewhat limited. I attended Sunday school and church, so I prayed that God would preempt any harm that might come to her. But our mother had told us of another neighborhood kid who had been killed when his bike slid under a steamroller, even though his mother had perfect attendance at First Methodist. To me this meant one thing: God might have his eye on the sparrow. He might be all knowing and all-powerful, but he was not to be trusted when it came to little kids.

As luck would have it, I was superstitious. Certain things had to be done each day without fail. Once Laura was big enough, I taught her how to leap onto the mattress from a foot away, so the cannibals who lived beneath our bed could not eat our feet. And how to shut the closet door at night so the man with the axe could not sneak out and chop our heads off.

The dangers of vacation required different strategies that I shared with no one. As the first week in August drew near, I would be especially careful not to step on a crack, drop a mirror, spill salt, or do any of the things that might bring bad luck. For additional protection, I developed a system where each night after I slipped beneath the covers, I’d select a number at random, then I would softly kiss my sleeping sister that many times. If she woke up, I’d have to wait for her to fall back to sleep, then start all over.

All of this, I believed, would weave a cloak of safety around Laura, providing that extra something which, along with my vigilance, would keep her from harm.

Obviously, it worked.

For fifty years, at least. But now sharks were biting people like their lives depended on it, and I needed a new strategy.

•••

It seemed disingenuous to pray for something when I no longer went to church. And I couldn’t very well sneak into my sister and her husband’s bedroom to kiss Laura a random number of times. Even if the thought wasn’t Manson-family creepy, I was too old for such superstitions.

Instead I armed myself with the various ways to avoid shark attacks, according to the experts.

Don’t swim after dark when sharks are most likely to feed. We used to sneak out late at night and swim in the ocean, so it was a wonder we’d survived to adulthood.
Schools of baitfish or pods of dolphins (which, like sharks, eat the baitfish) could be a sign that sharks are in the area, so stay out of the water if you see them. I wondered if the same were true of fishing pelicans.
Don’t swim near fishing piers, or near people who are surf fishing. We’d always obeyed this commonsensical rule, mostly to avoid getting hooked.
Stay out of the ocean if you’re bleeding. No duh.

I knew the rules. I also knew that, while extraordinary times called for extraordinary measures, there was no way the Lundquist clan was going to stay out of the water.

Once Lifeguard Laura took note that I survived my solo swim, we basked in the sun and relaxed into our read/doze ritual of vacation at the beach.

“I see one!”

Everyone sat up, eyes trained on the area just beyond the breakers. Erin, one of our gang, had spotted a shark. Or so she said.

Are you sure it was a shark? Not a porpoise? Not a dolphin? Erin assured us she knew what they looked like. Other families on nearby beach blankets shaded their eyes with their hands and looked seaward. Some swimmers got out of the water. I glanced toward the lifeguard stand, but the lifeguard had that devil-may-care affect that came with his certification card.

The shark was spotted once more before it vanished into the murky depths. Thankfully, it was late afternoon—time to head to the cottage to help with dinner preparations and line up for showers.

That night, we all walked up the beach to the Kure pier. We purchased ice cream cones and cotton candy and strolled down the weathered planks spotted with fish scales that gleamed under the lights. The air was redolent with saltwater, guts, and the occasional waft of cigarette smoke. We stood at the very end as we always did, and I felt the faint rocking of the pylons from the push and pull of the wind and waves. When we turned back, a crowd was gathered at the rail. We joined them to watch the phosphorescent glow of the breakers below and, just beyond, a large shark patrolled back and forth like a white ghost beneath the water.

We stared, fascinated. It wasn’t that far from where we swim.

“My God,” I said.

“There are always sharks,” my sister reminded me.

The next day, the whole gang headed back to the surf, making sure to arrive just as the tide turned and the waves started rolling in. Here comes the one that sunk the Poseidon! We all stampeded into the water and did the turn/swim-like-hell/catch the wave routine we’ve been perfecting since childhood. An hour later, the crowd thinned out as tired bodies migrated back to the sand. And then it was just the pelicans, Laura, and me.

The years have rolled by like so many summer waves. My sister tied the knot and had three kids a full ten years before I met my husband. As I navigate the sometimes treacherous waters of family life, it’s Laura I turn to for advice. I showed her how to avoid cannibals. She shows me how to be happily married.

While we floated up and down on the lazy swells, we caught up on hometown gossip, dissected our kids’ lives, and enjoyed easy silences.

Until I had to go the bathroom.

I ran up to the cottage. It was cold in the air conditioning, and my bathing suit was wet. I figured I was done with swimming for the day, so I changed into a dry suit before I headed back. It was so wonderful to be out of that damp suit, I could hardly stand it. I ran down the boardwalk to the beach and there was Laura—still in the ocean—looking out to sea all by herself. Just my little sister and the sharks.

I was warm and dry. She was a grown woman in her fifties, for God’s sake. With adult children. She was an excellent swimmer. There was a lifeguard, such as he was. I really didn’t need to look after her anymore. No one expected it. Least of all her.

Still…

I raced through the breakers before the sharks could get her. If nothing else, I could help fend them off. I feigned nonchalance when I finally made it out to her. “I didn’t think you were coming back,” she said, with a sidelong glance.

“Yeah, well…” Oh, what the hell—I might as well just say it. “I’m responsible for you.”

Laura just grinned and turned back toward the horizon. She knew that I knew that she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. But after a lifetime of my holding her hand when we were out in the world and keeping the man with the axe out of our bedroom, this was nothing new.

Ever since the movie Jaws came out, my sister does this thing where she acts like she’s being attacked by a shark. She doesn’t scream, she just jerks like she’s been hit really hard under water, like in the film. With each lurch backward, her expression transitions from what the … to stunned terror. She does a perfect imitation and it never fails to crack us up. “I hope a shark does bite you,” our mother would say when she was still alive. “Then we’ll see how hard you laugh.”

We talked about doing it now while it was just the two of us, then decided against it. There had been so many actual attacks this year, we might start a mass panic. Not to mention the embarrassment we’d suffer if the lifeguard dashed in after us, as if Mr. Cool would notice. It pained us, but we decided to bag the routine for now. There’s always another summer. And we’ll be back.

•••

Because of their lifelong fascination with the Gordon Lightfoot song, LINDA L. CROWE and her sister have chosen the memorial to the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald as the destination for their annual sister trip this year. Michigan or bust! Linda lives in Nelson County, Virginia. Her most recent work may be read in Studio Potter magazine; she’s a regular contributor to Full Grown People.

BabyShusher

By Natalie Singer-Velush

To become a parent in a hospital in a city somewhere in the United States you hear: Beeping machines, the institutional whir of apparatus such as a metal birthing bar that automatically lowers from the ceiling with the click of a switch, the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on linoleum sheen, the medical snap of a glove pulled on, the growl and roar of a woman who you are later surprised to learn is yourself, the knuckled clenching of her hands on the metal bar, a pause of silent fear, the bleat of an up-to-the-minute new, miniscule person.

To raise an infant you understand that you must become the owners of mountains of items, gear, devices, such required equipment as strollers (newborn carriage; upright jogger; portable umbrella stroller; add-on car-seat click tray with SafeAssure™ technology), vibrating bouncy seats, bottle warmers, feeding timers, car-seat adapters, and automatic milk pumps. This gear helps you transport, feed, comfort, but it also must be parented in turn—assembled, folded, stored, charged, disinfected, adjusted. You have a whole catalogue of new children now, littered around the house.

You hear: The din of advice from family, advice from friends, advice from co-workers, advice from your husband’s boss, advice from mommy bloggers, advice from elected representatives, advice from newscasters, from grocery clerks, from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, the hated Pinterest, advice to slow down to rock her to sing louder sing more softly to bathe once a week at maximum to vaccinate right away to wait to let her cry try gluten free soy free dairy free to switch detergents, but whatever they say you infer what they all really mean is, never let anyone see your nipples.

As you learn a new, completely clock-worked dance with your partner, there sounds the tinkle of a very old tune, perhaps a Scottish fiddle song, to which couples have been swirling for centuries and the days roll into nights that collapse into days that become nights and you realize at some point that you are not really sleeping or even touching each other at all because she eats and cries a lot and life while beautiful is not really a Scottish fiddle tune but now more of a platonic Metallica marathon.

Someone advises you buy a white noise machine. You learn this is a lunchbox-sized device, available at all baby superstores, takes four AAA batteries. On one end of the cloud-colored box is a speaker, on the other end is a dial that adjusts to the settings: BIRDS, OCEAN, WIND, RAIN, HEARTBEAT. That night after swaddling the baby in the style passed down to you by the ancient tribes, you lay her in her bassinet and your partner switches on the white noise machine, which he is calling the noise maker (this would be funny to you—he never gets the names of things quite right—except that you are too exhausted for funny). He moves the device to the loudest setting and the baby’s crepe paper eyelids leaf down obediently.

In your own bed you lay flat on your back like the mummies, arms by your sides, and you hear the white noise of the noise maker floating down the hallway and into your airspace, sidling up to your ear, rolling in, an auditory fog that lulls you quickly into your own twilight sleep. Next to each other, holding your breaths, your pinkies brush.

It works. Your daughter is approaching a trimester old now, and she can get her frequency turned up pretty good (colic, they say, or reflux). The magical combination, you have finally discovered, is to turn the bath tap on as soon as the fall sun sets. You sit on the edge of the tub with your tiny person and your sore, flappy body parts, listening to the rush of the bath filling. Her face is out of this world, from another place you’ve never heard of. Her eyes are open more often these days; she looks like an endearing alien, all shock and pucker. In the tub, you cradle her sideways and latch her onto your breast. The tap is still gushing, baby gulps drowned out. It must sound to her like she is eating inside Niagara Falls, or somewhere more familiar, her former planet.

After the bath meal, drying off, the laying of hands, lotioning, swaddling, rocking, shushing, she is placed in her cradle with the noise maker on high. You have become loyal to the OCEAN setting. It works every night, despite the creeping feeling that this enchanted solution could in fact fail any minute, leaving you back in Metallicaland. You and your husband steal into your own bed down the hall. The synthetic, looped surf pipes in through the crackling baby monitor, which has a transmitter in the baby nursery and a receiver placed three inches from you on the bedside table. A fake ocean filtered through a transmitter carried by invisible radio waves, pushed through a plastic speaker into your ear, soothing you all, with a manufactured quiet, into the natural state of sleep.

One night at the end of that first trimester of parenting, you lie in the bed and think suddenly it must be time to give your body back to your partner, to yourself. You hear the faint remembering of a previous system of connection, long slow sessions of fusion, swift slam of thirst-slaking, rustle knock tear knead soft moan all that fucking. As the battery-powered waves roll onto their radio beach you reach for each other, sift around, try to be the way you’ve been before. But your body is an alien, come from a place as out of this world as your daughter. It is in its inchoate state, too, a nautilus. The lull of the ocean of rest is so loud that you cannot hear your foreign body at all. You return to your arrangement as mummies, bound together, and drift off.

More weeks pass. The baby settles in, acts more and more like she might stay around. You hear everyone tell you how to navigate—buy this brand of sippy cup, ask these questions when interviewing day cares, lay her down at this angle to prevent unexpected crib death. A turbulence. But quiet, too, is terrifying. Alone at home with the baby all day, you use as many devices as you can. The TV is turned up. The Internet always there. Tea kettle, radio, coffee pot, the toaster’s glowing coils and companionable ding. A swing that oscillates. Tesellating mobiles.

The energy of the earth is a circuit from pole to pole, you realize: zings and jolts supplying the system, sometimes knocking things out, towers and wires strung over the hills, in and out of houses, of hearts, of tiny pink mouths, an electrocuting love.

One night sleeping to the looped white noise of OCEAN, you dream a memory of the real ocean. You are a girl, about eight, visiting your grandparents in Florida. You have your own bedroom facing the Atlantic, which is about 150 feet from your windowed wall. You lie in bed at night, the giant breath of the sea inhaling, then crashing, in the black just outside. This, the ocean’s waves, its body, shushing, thunders over you, three-dimensional sound, wet and gaping. You remember.

Your daughter a couple of months older now. The world is still talking at you about how to be her mother. The strollers and wipe-warmers have made room, too, for toys―blocks that play “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and baby dolls that go “waaaah.” It is getting busy in the house. You pack a box, items you feel you should let go of, to make room for other items, board books, doorway bouncer, something called a play mat (monographed)—the catalogue children helping you to raise the organic one. You place the noise maker on the top of the storage box.

That night the three of you lie in the mysterious new quiet. The sheet bunches. The baby whistles unconsciously down the hall. A neighborhood dog howls. You hear the zzzzzzt of desire click on, like the buzz of conductivity when a wire in the dark canister of a device brushes against its charged opposite, the sound of a current in a bedroom somewhere in the United States in a house in the suburbs.

•••

NATALIE SINGER-VELUSH is a journalist and writer of creative nonfiction. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Washington Post; Brain, Mother, the blog of Brain, Child magazine; Literary Mama; Alligator Juniper; Clamor; This Great Society; Huffington Post; and the 2015 anthology Love and Profanity. Natalie is the editor of ParentMap magazine, where she also writes about parenting issues. She is earning her MFA in creative writing and poetics from University of Washington and lives in Seattle with her husband and two children. She can be found @Natalie_Writes.

Rockweed

By Jim Krosschell

The rocks we perched on still show at high tide. The rising sea has not yet taken them—as a refuge, or a memory, they may last our lifetimes. They peek out above the waves like a little archipelago, dry and safe.

When my daughters, Kate and Emma, were young, we ventured out almost daily, especially in the first blush of vacation. It was an exercise in re-bonding suburban lives fractured by schedules and performances. We could get to the rocks only at low tide, and we would not stay long, for the tide rises quickly on these shores, and the surf is unpredictable, and it would have been a little too adventurous, having to disembark—or embark for that matter—in the wet. No, we climbed up our battlements when the only barrier to access was the slippery rockweed littering our path. The tops of the rocks themselves were weed-free, un-colonized, suitable for timid people from cities south, exciting for two young girls, nine and seven, who liked to pretend they perched on unassailable islands, perfect for their father who knew better but hoped for a different future anyway.

The rockweed presented a problem, though. It looked irredeemably slimy. We stepped around it, in a crooked, almost drunken way, not brave enough to touch by foot and certainly never by hand. “Ewww!”, that totem word of childhood, afflicted my family too. I even warned my girls when we set off down the shore about less obvious dangers: the barnacles that would scrape your skin raw and those black or green mold-like patches on the boulders we negotiated. “Don’t step there,” I said, “especially if it looks wet. It’s very slippery.” Naturally then, I warned them off the rockweed, whose piles appeared bottomless and would suck them in—we were not to test it in our nice sneakers certainly, no matter what live treasures of crab and baby lobster lay all goggle-eyed underneath. In our early pilgrimages we avoided most things organic, which die and rot and stink; our special rocks were dry, clear of processes unknown, safe above the tide.

A few years later, we discovered tidal pools. The three of us had been progressing farther and farther away from home, and about a quarter mile down the shore, past the houses on the bluff and a long stretch of jumbled beach, we found classic Maine pink-granite ledge, smooth and worry-free. The pools were hidden, flooded at high tide, barely accessible at low. But we persisted, older now, less squeamish, contorting our bodies to peer into crevices, where the rewards were hundreds of snails and a score of exotic starfish. I even started combing through the rockweed a bit, lifting it up like great hanks of hair to show Kate and Emma the cute little green crabs hiding in the fronds. I didn’t know at the time that some of those crabs were invasives from the south, pleased to enter the warming waters of the Gulf of Maine and feast on lobster like the rest of us tourists.

We’ve progressed far in fifteen years. The world is hotter, and seems more violent, or at least more instantly connectible to disaster. Maine is now more than a refuge for me, now that my daughters are grown and gone, Kate still on the Atlantic but the wrong side, in Denmark, and Emma just moved to California, an hour from the ocean but the wrong one. Maine is an ark on the floods. This week after Thanksgiving, I sit in the house, staring at water, staring east in fact but both east and west in spirit. The solitude of the shore seems tinged with loneliness today, a place halfway between, and although I give thanks for new lives and exciting independence, I miss my children terribly.

•••

Seaweed is the icon of Maine least likely to star on a blog or a brochure. If you look closely, you might see a frond peeping out at the base of Thunder Hole in Acadia, or a strand or two on the great expanse of Old Orchard Beach, or a discreet pile artfully arranged around a lobster about to be boiled. The photographer or dreamer operates generally at high tide, when seaweed hides, when the lines between surf and stone are clean. Mess doesn’t sell.

But the stuff is everywhere, especially the farther north you go, where the shores wear it thick as an ill-fitting wig, not entirely useless but almost. It is harvested, to be sure, as fertilizer and thickener, and it has achieved a little notoriety as “sea vegetables”—the various kelps, for example, which have long been eaten around the world (the nori of sushi rolls in Japan, dulse as a cocktail party snack in Ireland)—but seaweed is down at the bottom of the roster of marine exploitables. Most Americans like their food familiar, bland, processed by Big Ag; seaweed has a strong taste, and smells of low tide even after drying and processing. The number of evangelists for seaweed, even in Maine with its riches, approaches zero.

When all the fish are gone, perhaps only then we’ll turn to Gouldsboro Bay, where I’ve read of a seventy-year-old man, probably crazy by modern definitions, who cuts kelp by hand, standing in a wetsuit on offshore ledges, buffeted by heavy surf. We’ll believe him when he praises kelp’s effect on his immune system, and we too will pray for the enlightenment of humankind: eat kelp, live long, for it will restore the seawaters whence we came and heal our guts and blood. We’ll believe the research and the analysis, the richness of kelp’s minerals, trace elements, vitamins, enzymes, high-quality proteins, and the ever-sexy phytochemicals, the claims of tumor inhibition and reduction of cholesterol and conquering of viruses. But not until we’re desperate, in the coming dystopia.

Rockweed, however, the most plentiful seaweed, is not very edible, not even by New Age humans, and has been harvested but minimally for fertilizers, advertising no sex appeal whatsoever. Until recently.

It’s one thing to see a man in a skiff scraping rockweed off ledges with a long-handled rake. It’s quite another to see a huge mechanical harvester in your cove. In the new age of peak oil, natural fertilizers look pretty good after all.

Rockweed dominates the intertidal zone of many northern shores. It grows slowly; after a normal life span of ten to fifteen years, its fronds may have reached eight feet long. It survives all but the heaviest of surfs by attaching to rock with sucker-like holdfasts. It sports air-filled bladders along the fronds, to lift it to sunlight at high tide. Scientists say that as many as one hundred fifty species of animals—birds and shellfish and minnows hiding out—rely on rockweed for survival. Thus, Maine’s fishing industry may depend on it. And rockweed protects not only commerce, but the whole shore. Not for nothing is it commonly called knotted wrack, as if to cushion the intertidal zone from the ruin of ocean storms.

I wish that, at the beginning of my years here, those very years while my daughters were growing into their own lights, I had focused us more, found one baby rockweed plant, say, marked its holdfast, and every week crouched at the shore, in the wet, in our old sneakers, to observe its progress to adulthood. That bit of shore would have become precious in an entirely different way.

Stepping back now from that edge, I can at least suggest that “knotted wrack” is a wonderful description of our current dilemmas.

Predictably, every living thing, even weeds, will be exploited eventually. Predictably, environmentalists find a bully pulpit only when the big machines arrive. It’s inevitable that the Rockweed Coalition (“no-cut zones”) will battle the Maine Seaweed Council (“the sustainable use of seaweed”). Our ecological problems are as local as ownership of the intertidal zone in Maine (nobody quite knows who can do what, the law is ancient and not clear); as knotty as livelihoods versus legacies; as intractable as feeding the stomachs and aspirations of seven billion people.

A few years ago in our cove, we could expect to see a moored boat or two almost every summer day. Rakers scoured the sea bottom for sea urchins to satisfy the craze in Japan, and in two years the urchins were wiped out. This past spring the price of elvers, baby eels highly prized in Asia, reached two thousand dollars a pound. I give the fishery maybe five years before it’s gone. An invasive red seaweed from Asia via Europe threatens our New England shores; it suffocates all life in its path, stinks when it dies, and ironically enough, might be controlled by sea urchins. Every day of every year, the U.S. loses five thousand acres of land to development. I listen to my daughters talk about climate change. There’s despair in their voices, a resignation to the inevitable.

The idyll in Maine may last longer than in most places; but we lucky ones have equipped only ourselves to survive, have equipped no descendants to adapt, and we survive mostly by dreaming, sitting on our rocks above the tides.

•••

Rachel Carson, in The Edge of the Sea, called it the underwater forest: “The trees of the forest are the large sea weeds, known as rockweed, or sea wracks, stout of form and rubbery of texture. Here all other life exists within their shelter—a shelter so hospitable to small things needing protection from drying air, from rain, and from the surge of the running tides and the waves, that the life of these shores is incredibly abundant.”

“Small things”: the plainness of prose can sometimes be devastating. The shore still calls out thrillingly, here in Maine especially, but Carson’s simple joy from just sixty years ago echoes today with the terrible probability of its loss. Even the simplest shore will be stripped. I look at it as if some kind of sympathetic pain, some horrible probe from the future is invading our days and fracturing our DNA and our children’s DNA, leaving but a moment or two, here and there, of fullness.

We know we’re failing the forests, yet we continue on raking, year by inevitable year. Which means that the human essence is now failing, which means that I, too, am failing to protect these smallest of things, a minnow, or a weed, or a girl’s touch. It’s so easy to sit by, stunned and timid, just because I can still find a primeval sense of life in Maine, because Maine can offer to my family and to anybody who believes in these words some kind of sanctuary, the way life used to be, a place where blood is still seawater. I respond to the seashore too often just for its beauty, or in fear of its slime, and do little about its exploitation besides manipulate words. And if that’s the legacy I’ve given my daughters….well, I haven’t shown them how to muck, how to see like an animal. We’ve gotten far too used to our lavish city comforts, to our ability to escape in our cars from the cars.

The very nature of our bodies is being altered—that essence of salt water in our veins, those proteins in our brains designed over millions of years to treasure sunshine and open space and the creatures, even the slimiest, of the shore. I wish now that I had taken Kate and Emma squishing and laughing into the forest. I wish we had gone a little crazy in the surf. It might have made these passages a little easier.

•••

JIM KROSSCHELL divides his life into three parts: growing up for twenty-nine years, working in science publishing for twenty-nine years, and now writing in Massachusetts and Maine. His essays are widely published (see his website).

What Living Feels Like

ocean cliffs — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Susan McCulley

My husband, Frank, and I read about the island of Dominica in the travel section of The Washington Post. The article touted the island as relatively undeveloped without much tourism, but with uncommon natural beauty and variety—from beaches and rivers to rain forests and volcanic hot spots, spectacular hiking, and snorkeling in Champagne Bay, a warm cove bubbled by an underwater hot spring. We were intrigued. After our first visit, we were in love. At the end of our two weeks of exploring the island from beach to mountain, we sat in the tiny open-air airport, drinking local beer, absolutely furious that we were leaving. I had been sad and even a little depressed to return home after a vacation before, but at the end of our time in Dominica, I was pissed.

We scheduled our return trip almost immediately.

One of the things that makes Dominica special is that the two sides of the island are vastly different. The west coast is on the Caribbean Sea with calm waves and smooth beaches. It’s great for snorkeling and it’s where cruise ships dock to briefly discharge their passengers for trinket shopping, beer drinking, or whirlwind three-hour touring. The Atlantic Ocean is on the east side and has inlets of craggy beaches with wild, crashing waves. We loved the east side. On our first visit, we played in the rough, exhilarating ocean until we were waterlogged and breathless. When we planned our return, the east side was where we wanted to go.

We rented a small cottage at the top of a tiny east side village. There really wasn’t much there except the astonishingly riotous beauty of the steep, rocky island plunging into the sea. We could not wait to be in it.

The moment we arrived, we ditched our bags and followed the path to one of the beaches near the village. Even the walk to the ocean was intoxicating. The green in Dominica is not just green but glossy, luminous, achingly vibrant green. In back yards and along the road were trees heavy with fruit that we were used to seeing in mesh bags at the grocery store: bananas, mangos, grapefruit, and avocado. Most houses had a garden of (mostly unfamiliar) crops that betrayed the generosity of the soil. Every inch was fragrant, lush, and full of life.

As we walked through town, a boy bounced along with us. Skinny and excited, with huge brown eyes, he looked about ten years old. “Are you going to swim in the sea?” he asked.

“Of course,” we said, and when he asked if he could come along, we were happy to have him join us. He ran ahead, occasionally looking back to make sure we could follow the steep path down to the ocean whose deep, rumbling waves we could already hear. As we wove down the trail, we caught glimpses of deep blue waves edged with white froth against jagged black rocks in the cove below. We could barely keep up with our impatient child of a guide.

As we wound down and around, we could see a small curve of black sand tucked into an imposing rocky coastline with a fresh water river snaking down from the mountain into the sea. The Atlantic crashed, rhythmic and thunderous, against the rocks and sand. It was just as we’d remembered. We dropped our towels and ran into the water.

The water, sharply salty, cold and churning, felt like something alive. We dove into the relentlessly pounding surf, shouting to each other over the roar. We stayed just a few meters from shore in waist-deep water so we could keep our footing on the constantly moving sand. I kept my eyes on the open ocean to evaluate each wave. In the raw power of the ocean, I knew that one unexpected breaker could toss me ankles to armpits, completely disoriented in a swirl of sand and sea. Even with my vigilance, I was knocked off my feet and caught a nose-full more than once. It was thrilling to scout each wave, one after another, and make the split-second decision to jump up and over it, or dive into its base. The three of us hooted and swam, diving and jumping over each successive wave, then coming up again to look out and see what was coming next.

It happened fast. So fast, so suddenly. All at once, I realized I couldn’t touch bottom. I looked toward shore and saw that we were too far out. Way too far. Frank and the boy were just beyond me, also unable to touch. Frank clasped the boy’s hand and started swimming hard toward shore. I turned toward the curve of beach and swam as hard as I could against the harsh pull of the rip tide.

I’m a strong swimmer. I’ve been in the water my whole life and have taken lessons, done laps, and completed life-saving courses. I’m competent in the water, and I’m strong and healthy. But this? This was a whole different thing. Enormous waves kept pounding over my head, leaving me coughing and blind. A pause from kicking and stroking for even a second whisked me quickly even further away from shore. I watched as Frank struggled with the boy. I poured myself into every stroke but the beach kept getting, little by little, further away.

Frank and the boy were just a few feet away from me but I had to shout. “I’m not getting anywhere!”

Frank looked at me with wide eyes. Glancing at the boy, he screamed, “He can’t swim!”

We were in a powerful rip tide that was shredding us. The waves were impossible to swim in and threatened to throw us onto the rocks on either side. Swimming as hard as I could, I was getting nowhere. And now, this child, this boy we’d brought out to the sea with us. This boy can’t swim. “You’re the stronger swimmer,” yelled Frank. “He’s pulling me down. You have to take him.”

The boy shrieked in terror and pleaded with Frank, “Don’t leave me out here!”

Frank got closer to me and shifted the boy in my direction, “I’m not going to leave you, I would never leave you, but she’s a stronger swimmer than I am!” What he didn’t say, and what we both thought was, “I would rather drown than to have anything happen to you.”

I know what to do with a frightened non-swimmer: hook your arm under his armpits, and swim on your back, pulling him using the strength of your legs and the opposite arm. It’s the most efficient and powerful way to swim someone to safety and prevents the panicking victim from pulling you under. I knew what to do … and I didn’t do it. As Frank handed the terrified child to me, I had this thought: “If I take him in the life saving tow, I’m admitting this is a full-on emergency. I’m admitting that this situation is really, really bad.” I was already scared. Admitting how bad it really was was more than I could take in. So I grabbed him by the forearm and dragged him through the surging water with everything I had.

There was something in the deafening sound of the waves and the jagged dangerous-looking rocks on either side of us that gave the ever-smaller beach straight ahead a hypnotic pull. A wave would crash over the boy and me, and I just kept my eyes on that little crescent of sand and kept pulling. Frank called out, “We’re supposed to swim to the side!” He was right. I knew that when caught in a rip tide, the way out is, counter-intuitively, to swim parallel to the shore to get out of the current. But here, in this narrow, rocky cove, to swim parallel to the shore meant to go straight into the teeth of rocks on either side. I squeezed the boy’s arm and swam harder. But as a concession to the whole “swim parallel” thing, I aimed on a slight angle: rather than directly at the beach that I so desperately wanted to get to, I oriented us a just little to the left. I pulled and pulled the whimpering boy behind me.

It didn’t seem that I’d moved at all but as I made a big scissoring kick on my new, angled trajectory, I felt sand. Incredulous, I dropped my feet and found solid ground. My body and heart surged with relief as I stood and pulled the boy’s body into mine. I could feel his warm, slippery, skinny limbs, his pounding heart. And I could feel my own heart hammering hard against my ribs. I squeezed the boy even tighter, looked to my still-struggling husband, and shouted, “Frank, put your feet down!” He told me later that at that moment, just a few feet from me, he couldn’t touch the bottom. He desperately reached his long toes and felt the sand, then swam another stroke and stood.

The waves were still deafening. The water surged around us. The rocks were dangerously close. But we were standing. In a small, staggering line—woman, boy, man—the three of us walked slowly and unsteadily in to the little black beach. We wrapped the trembling and silent boy in our towel, and he sat on the sand and ate a crushed granola bar. Frank and I stood behind him shakily drinking water and watching as the disinterested waves continued to pound the shore.

The days that followed had a paradoxical combination of feeling both dream-like and surreally vivid. Mangos were some kind of crazy, sensuous, cacophony of sweetness. The sky was so beautiful we could barely look at it. The water tasted like life itself. We would squeeze each other tight and say, “We’re here. We’re okay. We’re alive.” My mind would reel and I’d look at him and say, “Frank, we had that boy with us. What if…” I was unwilling to complete the thought. Frank just shook his head. And then, in his precise way, he would say, “I was seventy-five percent sure I was going to die.” We mostly just held onto each other. We were dumbfounded to find everything from the papaya trees to our land lady’s garden so perfectly normal and yet so extraordinarily extraordinary. The vivid island landscape felt simultaneously unreal and hyper-real. This is what living feels like.

Word of our brush with death flew through town before we even made it back to our cottage. God was praised. Prayers were said. We were invited to church. We nodded and agreed and wore our best clothes on Sunday—the only white people in that pink sanctuary singing praises. We were grateful. We were so deeply grateful for being alive, but also for every taste of food, every bird song, every wave from someone on the road. In a way that I never had before, I felt the intense sweetness of living and the absolute connection we have to each other. In some ways, that day is with me every day. The reverberation of it isn’t as intense, but it’s still there. I still remember. I’m still awake to the wonder that we have every day.

Frank says he took the boy back into the water, just for a few minutes so he wouldn’t fear the sea, but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember speaking at all as the three of us picked up our clothes and slowly walked back up the trail to the village. I don’t remember anything about that walk except placing one unsteady foot in front of the other. If I ever knew the boy’s name, I don’t remember it. But I do remember, as we came to a turn at the top of the trail how that boy, our boy (and he will always be our boy), turned and waved almost imperceptibly and disappeared into the village.

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SUSAN MCCULLEY is a mindful movement educator and a Black Belt Nia Instructor who has been dancing and moving, traveling and teaching since 2000. Her blog, Focus Pocus: The Magic of Inquiry and Intent (www.focuspocusnow.com), is dedicated to taking body~mind practices from the studio into life. Her essays have been published on Elephant Journal, and she is working on a book. She lives with her husband in Charlottesville, Virginia.