The Sea

Is this how the real world feels? Idle, awake but still sleeping, clicking away at the computer screen, these fearsomely dull trappings of cubicle life. I’ve  just started another 25 minute session on the confounding metal apparatus that has become my sole charge over the past three days. Eyes trained on the pressure gauge, I let the arrow glide into place, stopping it just short of the tick mart denoting 75 kilo pascals. I turn the shiny black knobs clockwise to block off certain parts of the tubing, glancing briefly at the voltmeter for fear of that sudden harsh change, the jarring spike in pressure that paints a saw toothed line across the graph that plots itself. The sibilant hiss of escaping air heralds the uncorking of each gas cylinder, one Carbon Dioxide, one Nitrogen, reminding me off belching Champagne bottles and the sulfurous reek of lurid sweet port. This is my workday in its monotonous rigor. In the lab I wear plastic safety goggles and read my library book, legs crossed snuggly beneath the low desk. My mom makes the ionic liquids I’m testing in her lab. She’s probably there right now, wearing her baby blue lab coat in F-15 one corridor down. I’m in corridor E and my lab is cramped with strange metal fixtures, class 4 lasers and compressed gas cylinders that look like oversized fire extinguishers. Shannon my mentor is my dad’s second-in-command, the quiet, balding right hand man who epitomizes loyalty and discretion. My lab is really his lab, and most of the metal fixtures I’ve struggled to understand this week are of his make, compiled with his own tools, his own physicist’s mind.

I never thought I’d be here, in such surroundings. I’m not sure I like this little family operation we have going on here; I can’t shake the feeling that I’m falling into my parents’ rut, sitting in their world, their lives, betraying who and what I am as I stare at guileless valves and dimpled glass equipment for hours on end. So I let my mind wander. They can have my body, my hands and eyes, but not the consciousness that flows out of me now, out of this red brick lab and away to the coasts.

You see, I’m reading John Banfield’s The Sea right now. I’m not very far into it but all I can think about is the ocean already, it’s mysteriously churning waters, the emphatic roar of its foaming hide. How many shores have I seen I wonder? How many Oceans have greeted me with that terrific inbound rush of water followed shortly by the curious sensation of rapidly receding water eroding away the soft sand from beneath my soft soles. Soon enough I am ankle deep in the wet maritime clay and all I want and wish for are to never leave this lovely place, where purple little clams scoot through the sand that quivers, so alive in your hand when you dig it spade-like into the strand.

I remember the boardwalk in New Orleans where I ate golden brown beignets at Café du Monde. The leftover scraps of sugary dough went to the gannets and gulls circling overhead like a maelstrom of whirring grey speckled bodies and orange webbed feet. Standing at the wooden railing, I stared down at the barnacle encrusted pillars that reared all scabbed and slimy from the water. What was the green ooze that crept up to meet me I wondered? I was still young yet.

There was the time in Vancouver when my sister and I spent a long afternoon crawling over a Rocky shore on the Puget Sound. The tide pools were rife with life, tidewater crabs, Pacific Sea Urchins and strange green worms that looked like elongated strands of geese dung. Minnows flashed in the shallows, evading capture, and suddenly I was reminded of a shallow seaside lagoon in Waikiki where in much warmer water the same minnows barely escaped my intrepid attempts at incarceration. Back then I had barely been Ashley’s age, a slight, dark child who loved to get drown himself in Hawaii’s raging surf. In Hawaii, I floated daringly above the jagged, organic escarpment of Kona’s reef, near enough to touch the green sea turtles as they grazed on the sparse sea grass. Later that week mom took us all to a black sand beach on the big island’s north face. Instead of swimming I just walked along the obsidian shore, wiggling my toes in the volcanic sand. A sweep of mountains was visible at the far end of the all but deserted beach and I thought about going there, scaling those towering cliffs and trying to see where the ocean ends, where sky begins and water disappears in one austere line.

Maybe I would’ve looked as far east as California’s shores, where the water was so cold that one day in December that I only dipped my feet in for a second before desisting with an indignant shriek. And maybe there would’ve been someone looking back, our eyes trained on the same horizon but from opposite sides. I like the Ocean for its continuity. It spreads across our earth unbroken, with land just an island in its midst. I like to think that maybe the button that ripped from my shirt pocket in whales, where the waves crash down upon charming beds of pebbles rather than sand, may wash up one day on the sandbars of North Carolina’s Outer Banks where maybe someone will pick it up someday, warped and wafer thin and carry with them to wherever next they go. The ocean lets me dream in this way. I can sit here, in this dimly lit lab and wonder when next I will be by the sea. The last time was in October, when I went out to the Boston Harbor Islands to take samples and make observations of the wildlife there. When next I go, I want to actually swim maybe; Or perhaps I’ll just stand at the brink to feel the spray hitting my face and the watery infinity coursing dizzy and mad once more in my life.

And always, always I’ll remember my sixteenth birthday, how I ran out alone at dawn, just so I could be alone on my patch of rocky shore in British Columbia. I brought my journal along and wrote something or another, something commemorative, artful I guess in that trite kind of way. I was sixteen and I fancied myself an adult already. I was impudent and rail thin and all torn up inside with feelings that I didn’t know what to do with. So I just sat on a rock right up near the sea, shivering in the morning chill. Everything was quiet except the water. Grand ideas unfurled in my mind, trying to catch flight, to dominate my now. But I let them go, let them sputter to a premature death. I was here, by the sea, and I wanted to know nothing else at that moment.