Long Life

WE LIVE, M. and I, about ten feet from the water. When there is a storm and the wind pushes toward us from the southeast we live about a foot from the water. It sings all day long and all night as well, never the same music. Wind, temperature, where the tide is, how the moon is tugging or shoving—each of these makes a difference. The tide going out sounds harsher than the voice of its rising, what seems like a disinclination to leave growls in it, with the sound of dark, thick-stringed instruments. Coming in, it is more playful. Every day my early morning walk along the water grants me a second waking. My feet are nimble, now my ears wake, and give thanks for the ocean's song.

But even paradise must have rules. I do not know whether or not these rules were engendered in the beginning by divine deftness or by chance. I rather think chance was the origin—though perhaps the chance was offered divinely—for the rules are neither nice nor neat; simply workable, and therefore, in the quest for life rather than no-life, sublime. Every vitality must have a mechanism that recommends it to existence—what seems like ornamentation or phantasm is pure utility. It comes from an engine of mist and electricity that may be playful, and must be assertive. And also, against the odds of endurance in the great-shouldered sea, prolific.

On a July morning, after a moon tide, I walk along the water's edge. In the night, thousands of small fish have been caught on the sand. Some, in the morning light, are already hot and have lost the body's capacity to move; others are still flickering, or grinding into the wet sand, or trying, with snapping motions, to move back down the swash. But it is their last hour. It is as if the ocean were spraying forth, purging itself, which certainly it is not. The fish have simply been stranded, by their proximity to shore and the unusually high tide. The sand lance has neither length nor heft, most are no more than three or four inches long. Others, not too many, are perhaps six or seven inches from face to tail. Now, in their slippery huddle, they compose an unbroken rope at the edge of the water. At places this rope is half a foot high.

But even as the multitude attracts our attention, so does the single creature and moment. I am walking with my dogs along the beach at a low and still lowering tide, when a thrashing in the shallows catches my eye. I wade to it; in the water that is little more than ankle deep, there is a stranded goosefish. Such a grotesque body, such a funeral of a mouth, the widest gate to darkness, for the size of the whole fish, that you could ever imagine! Most of the goosefish, in fact, is mouth. But also how glorious a color is each green eye—more vitally green than emeralds, than wet moss, than the leaves of violets, and shining, very much alive. I did not know what to do. One could not pick up that spiny and toothy body. Then a man came walking along with two children. They waded out and looked at the unhappy fish. He asked me for my dog's leash, which was hanging around my shoulders, and he looped it lightly under the heavy body and with the slightest tug drew the fish up, just inches, and slowly, as with a fantastic, footless dog, he led it into deeper water. Hurrah for that man's inventive mind and good heart! The fish, with the great mouth gaping, and the green eyes opening and closing, wallowed along until it could set itself down into the water entirely. Then it slipped neatly from the loop of the leash, and was gone.

Now it's March, the bluebirds are skating the air. Now it's April, and the whales have come home. The finbacks and the humpbacks and the rare right whales, arriving along the coast, coming into the bay, sometimes into the harbor, their massive length and weight churning and breaching as though they, like us, know playfulness. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot, he maketh a path to shine after him, said Job, who, I fear, could not know that there is also a reasoning and a gentleness in these mountains of flesh. Once a whale tangled in line came into the harbor with another swimming just alongside, a companion that would not leave the roped animal but lingered, while brave men went out in little boats and were able to cut the entangling line away. The eye of the humpback is like all the darkness and hope and pain one sees in the eye of the elephant, in whose brain, it is avowed by those who know, nothing is ever forgotten. It is an eye deeper than the deepest well. Once on a late spring day M. and I were standing on a boat deck when a humpback breached—leaped out of the water beside us—and trumpeted. Mist fountained from the blowhole, light flung a rainbow through the moisture; softly the mist rose and rained down onto the deck and baptized all of us.