Oceans (Full Text)

Publication note: “Oceans.” ARNA: The Journal of the University of Sydney Arts Students Society 1 Revived (2008).
Winner: 1st place Literature, The University of Sydney Union PALM Awards & associated grant.

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On the coast of Maine, to live without the ocean is as improbable as breathing without oxygen. I saw the ocean from my parents’ bedroom window, ran by it on my way to school, played in its tiny ripples where our lawn ran down into the water. The smell of wet mud, of salt and fresh fish (which is almost not a smell at all, as fishermen will tell you) crept into every corner of our little town. One of my earliest memories is of cracking open mussel shells that my brother Max and I picked from the end of our town jetty, looking for seed pearls. I found perhaps six or seven in that entire long childish summer, and stored the odd little lumps away in an empty film canister as carefully as I would have had they been round, fat South Sea gems.

The following winter Max’s sled skidded out from under him and shot out onto the ice covering Tenants Harbor. He begged my father to walk onto the ice and retrieve it, but instead my father bought a new sled. The old one sank when the ice broke that spring. Also that spring an unfamiliar sailboat beached itself on the little strip of sand in front of our house one night. We woke up to a bedraggled couple who wanted to use our laundry and the phone, hoping for a tugboat to tow them back onto the water.

When we moved from one little coast town to another, very little changed. Max and I took sailing lessons in J8s, minuscule sailboats that would flip on a moment’s notice and dump us in the cold salt water. On hot days in the summer we would flip the boats on purpose and plunge ourselves into the harbor. Max joined the race team, and won constantly. His neck became a permanent reddish brown color from the sun.

At night when we rode our bikes home from the edge of the water, we would smell the fish cooking almost before we’d made it up the hill. Heavy chunks of tuna steak or pan-seared wild salmon would greet us. We were a family so steeped in fish it would not have seemed strange if Max had been born with gills.

It wasn’t simply that my brother and I reveled in the ocean water as children. My parents shared in our inheritance.

When my father was 25 he was manning a little lobster boat out of the port of Gailiee at Point Judith. He’d just moved back to Rhode Island from Hawaii, where he spent equal time going to classes on maritime law and surfing. His first boat, the Eileen Mary, was a 36 foot novi with a wide flat deck and an engine that rolled over more than it started. His lobster pots were marked red with a wide blue stripe on the top, bobbing like children’s candy all over Block Island Sound.

One Friday morning, achingly early when the tides were running, he pulled his decrepit station wagon up to the dock house as usual. Buck, the harbor master, was leaning on the rail outside.

“Morning,” my father said.

“Mornin’,” Buck answered, puffing on his pipe and smiling. Buck rarely smiled. It looked painful.

My father clattered down the gangway and skirted piles of traps. His slip number was 18. A rig had finally taken up in 17, he noticed. And their lobster pots were all over the dock between his slip and theirs. And the captain was on deck in a red sweater. And his boat was missing.

My father made a panicked sprint down the rest of the dock, skidding over coiled lines and seeing, as he ran, that his boat has definitely sunk. He could see the roof of the front wheelhouse still above the water, and the bumpers were floating upward to the surface. He was still running, squinting into the thick green water, when he reached his slip, pulled a sharp left turn, caught his right leg on a pile of traps neatly stacked, and fell, headlong and head over heels onto the back deck of the rig in slip number 17.

He lay tangled in a mass of lines, sitting for a moment as his eyes refocused on the sky. The sky became a brown head. A brown head with a red sweater, and very blue eyes.

“Hi,” my mother said.

“Hi,” my father answered.

They looked at each other for a moment. My mother was trying not to laugh.

“That’s about all I’ve got,” my father said.

“I think that’s enough.” She laughed out loud at last.

“Once I caught a fish that could talk,” my father declared to me.

“You did not!” We were in the new furnace room of our new house, stacking old books into new plastic tubs we bought at Wal-Mart, to stop the water damage. Max was sitting in the hallway. The light from the bay windows of the first floor was blue in his hair. He was seven. I was ten.

“Yes, yes I did.” He set a tub marked “Crafts” in sharpie marker on top of another marked “Children.” The tubs were nearing the ceiling now. “Six summers ago, on the Nancy Anne before we sold her. With Clyde.”

“Clyde?”

“Yes indeed, you can ask him when he comes for Christmas Eve. It’s late one night, and we’re heading back to Sitka, that’s in southeast Alaska, dawdling because the sea’s like blue glass and the stars are coming out. The nets are packed, no more big hauls for the day, everything stowed, and for some reason Clyde just gets the urge to drop a line in the water, just for fun.” He picked Robinson Crusoe from where I’d put it in another box marked “Children” and moved it to “Adventure.”

“Except, Clyde’s at the helm and he’s supposed to be on it until we’re back in. He asked me to switch with him, but I said no. So he asked me to drop a line in for him, and he’d get to it later on. I pulled up his old pole from behind the head door, strung it with a bit of herring I was cooking, and tossed it over, and I was going to walk away. But just like that,” he snapped his fingers, “the line’s tight and it felt like the whole boat’d jumped over. Almost pulled the thing right out of my hands, but I held on and I got the line back in, and it was crackling like a sea dragon was on the other end.”

“What’s a sea dragon?” My brother had moved from the hallway and was sitting on one of my teetering stacks of books.

“Big thing. Lots of scales. Breathes bubbles. Anyway, finally I fight this fish onto deck, and I was expecting it to be a tuna as big as one of you, but it’s not. It’s a little thing, silver bellied salmon no bigger than my forearm. I scoop it up with the net and plop it in a bucket, but it jumps right out again, so I go after it again and manage to stick it between the net and my hand, and that’s when it talked!”

“It did not!”

“Yes it did. It sounded all rushy, like it was very very tired, and it said, ‘Let me up.’ And I was so startled I jumped right back, but it was still all tangled up in the net and it lay there, looking at me, and it kept talking. ‘Put me back over the side,’ it said, ‘and I’ll give you something.’ By then I was thinking I’d been hit on the head with a flying oar, but I came over to it, and I picked up the net it was curled in, so that it untangled and lay easy. ‘Thanks,’ it said. ‘Now throw me over.’ But I was thinking, this could be a good chance for me to learn a little something about ocean life, so I asked it where it was from. It just kept looking at me, and then it made a little bubbling noise like a sigh. And it said ‘Tomorrow you will go beyond the second reef to the point where the rocks form a star, and there you will make a great catch. And now, you will put your hand under my right gill, and you will find a present there for your wife.’”

“What -” but he put up a hand, and my brother hushed.

“So I did, and I felt something cold, and out dropped a heavy gold bracelet. I figured, that was good enough for me, so I took him to the side and flipped him over, and he sank like a little silver stone. That’s when Clyde hit the gap in the breakwater, and he came down to check the line, but I told him I’d caught a little baby salmon and threw it back just then. And when I came back at the end of the summer, I gave that bracelet to your mom, and she still wears it every day.”

“Did you go back to the star rock place the next day?”

He smiled at me, and began stacking tubs again. “You know, we did, but we didn’t catch a thing. Totally dead day. I figure that fish was a liar.”

That night I stared and stared at my mother’s gold watch over the green beans. At Christmas Eve I asked Clyde, who was blond and had laugh wrinkles like enormous fans on either cheek, where my mother had gotten her bracelet. “Your father bought it in Vancouver, years ago. It’s a Rolex, they’re very expensive, but he wanted to get her a present, so he took all the money he’d kept all summer, what he didn’t send home to you, almost eight thousand dollars, and on our last day flying out to come back to Maine he went to the best jeweler in the city and he bought it for her. Didn’t have barely enough left for a taxi ride home, but the thing still keeps time and I guess your mother liked it, because she’s been wearing it since as long as I can remember. Now open your present, I don’t care if it’s just Christmas Eve anyway.”

That year my brother and I got twin pairs of binoculars. We stood by the big windows, peering out into the night and spotting boats still threading through the harbor in the evening light, a mile and a half away.