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What is it about the shore?
I am lying on a bed looking through a window that overlooks the Sound. It is a fine summer day. A few fluffy clouds dot the pastel sky. Leaves that frame my view jiggle gently, like heads nodding in a conversation.
The water looks very good to me. Truly I prefer a pool to swim in. I like my water heated and no sharp shards underfoot. The regularity of a pool comforts me.
But limitless water, stretching to the horizon, how it excites the heart! Why is that? Partly, it's the freedom of an empty horizon. The world seems very large at the edge of an ocean, so many places to travel, so many options. Why, a person might go anywhere, be anyone, there are no limits! We know this isn't true: we are limited by time, strength, health, means, obligations. If we just disappeared over the horizon, we'd alarm our loved ones and screw up our jobs and develop a reputation for instability and there would be hell to pay. Almost no one is free, and those who are the homeless, loveless form a sorry crew. We do not really want to be free and yet we do. We enjoy the dream that we can escape our relentless everyday any day we please. The ocean allows us to dream.
The ocean also whispers of great adventures. Columbus, Magellan, Balboa, Pizarro, John Cabot, Henry Hudson, somehow, in our imaginations, still ride the seas. That voyage of discovery from the Old Country to the New World, risking all remains one of the presiding myths in our consciousness. Those crusty ignorant rapscallious seafarers are nothing like we remember them. They stank, they had bad teeth, they cursed, they killed. They were not idealists, but grizzled working toughs, less than happy at home, down on their luck. Lucky guys did not sign onto crews that were unlikely to return.
They were not the discoverers we've enshrined in our imagination. Still, we see them, telescopes extended, glimpsing the first cliff and leaf of an unforeseen continent. (Native Americans, I suspect, see them differently.)
The ocean also feels to us like the place where life began. We are taught this, of course, how fish learned to live on land, and eventually became animals that breathed. There are lots of New Yorker cartoons of fish wearing suits, carrying briefcases, marching out of the waves on their way to work. Most of us accept our heritage. But we also feel the sea as a kind of mother. In the womb we bobbed in dark fluid and the sea is a kind of womb to human kind.
We love the sea. But these days, our happy feelings at visiting the shore may spark anxiety. The sea is getting dirty. The horrible Gulf oil spill is yet another spew of crud into the sea's cleansing depths. Walking the beach we see plastic and Styrofoam and wonder at the idiocy of mankind, blithely destroying what gives us life. Then we read that the sea's temperature is rising, killing plankton almost half the total supply in the last few decades. Plankton feeds fish who feed birds who feed reptiles who end up feeding us and fertilizing the fields from which our food grows. Plankton is the world's most precious food source and it's vanishing thanks to man. Oil, global warming, plankton, carbon emissions, what sane observer can doubt that our planet is sliding in the direction of uninhabitability. Voices are raised in alarm but they are drowned out by the shrill nonsense that constitutes our American political dialogue. We are destroying the earth our kids and their kids will inherit. And nobody much seems to care. Pessimists about the human experiment are derogated as party-poopers. Get a life, Carll, relax, enjoy, it's a beautiful day. I do relax and enjoy myself and revel in the day. But I also worry. Why isn't every American screaming at our President to do all we can all! and then some to protect this earth for our progeny. Yes, I am having a nice day, but why shouldn't our grandchildren's grandchildren have a nice day too. If we love the sea and the leaves and fish and the birds, if we love life, shouldn't we do all in our power so it can continue?
Sometimes I think, thinking about the mess we are making of Earth, why bother yammering about it. It's beyond any person's power to repair human behavior with words. But then I think, to shut up about it is to betray a trust. Hemingway wrote in For Whom the Bell Tolls, "For what are we born if not to aid one another." I wrote that on a post-it and stuck it on my study wall. "For what are we born if not to aid one another."
Another quote I like is repeated frequently in the New York City subways: "If you see a crime, report it."
That's why I write.
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