While we can all trace our origins to the sea - to some adaptive creature dragging its evolving ilk from surf to dry land - I owe my existence more directly to those aquamarine depths. Or at least their shores. In the summer of 1954, a young Navy officer stationed in Virginia Beach met a woman on the beach with a broken transistor radio. He promised her that he could fix it. The fate of the radio remains a mystery, but the man and woman fell in love, married, moved to New Orleans, had two sons, migrated deep into the heart of the landlocked south (Atlanta), and had a daughter (me).
By: Andrea Cohen
MIT Sea Grant
Raised in an inland city, I inherited a sense of the sea that my parents had inherited from their parents: the sea as beach, as vacation, excursion, a balm in August, a walk on the boardwalk, inflatable rafts and dime store goggles, plump paperbacks with slim plots, sunburn followed by suntan lotion, and a treasure trove of broken sea shells, odorous sand dollars, and hermit crabs that would inevitably sneak off at night wearing the paper bags meant to cage them. If summer was an amusement park, then the sea was its best ride-the one we'd stand in line for all year long. We'd pack up the station wagon for the edge of the earth-a small island off the coast of South Carolina-loosen our feet of clay, and abandon ourselves to a sea-swept realm.
And then we'd go home.
Considering the infrequency with which my parents found themselves seaside, a disproportionate number of snapshots in our family albums are given over to seascapes. The earliest picture of my mother shows her at Atlantic Beach on an August afternoon in 1940, flanked by her parents and older brother. There's my grandfather, the Florsheim's shoe salesman as I never saw him: young and barefoot. And there's my mother, plastic shovel in hand and pail at the ready. A banner raised behind the famous boardwalk reads simply: A Vacation in Itself.
The serious shutterbug may opt for the least intrusive background: a white or black screen on which to freeze the subject's true self, a setting incidental to subject. In my parents' seaside photos, everybody's got an arm swung around the scenery; they wrestle and roughhouse and have a swell time. The pictures capture the face of fun, the look of leisure and limbs akimbo, of letting loose and laissez-faire, of bodies and souls plucked from home, from work, from the streets and street clothes that define them. The smiles are real and unrehearsed. There's a shot of my mother reclining on Daytona Beach in 1958, in swimsuit and bathing cap, leaning on my brother Bruce's baby carriage. Less than 20 feet behind them on the beach sits the massive family Buick, driven east from New Orleans and pulled up to the sea as if at the ultimate drive-in theater. My mother is slightly blurred-arrested, but still in motion. With so much salt air to ingest, it would have been hard to sit still for posterity.
In many of the photos the sea itself is invisible. The reason is simple. We are witnessing the subjects' gaze-the waves and far horizon in their faces. As the viewer now, we occupy the same space as did that long-ago anonymous photographer inserted between the viewer and the view. And we measure the sea by its effect on the seagoer. There are my brothers at three and five: geniuses in the design and demolition of sand castles. And there I am in an orange life preserver, sitting in my father's lap in a small sailboat, his one hand around me to steady the jib, the other guiding the rudder.
One photo that shows only a gray sea and sky is really one of my father. He is hidden in the far-off hollow between two waves, swimming alone and farther out than the mandates of safety would allow. And he is basking in both the distance and solitude, knowing that they are short-lived, that on shore, we watch and wait.
These trips to the sea were an annual week-long tradition. During the rest of the year, I roamed the familiar woods around our home: the cradling, shaded interiors of swaybacked pines, wide-bellied oaks, wild dogwoods, and the velvety mosses and ferns that lapped at their roots.
A sense of place is a little like religion. Both entail the possibility of belonging, of home; both attract fanaticism. Each is a primary fold, entered at birth. Conversion, however, is possible. We can move from mountains to valleys, from Mississippi to Monte Carlo, but the sense of belonging generally comes-if it comes-with the passage of time. While living in Iowa, I was wooed by fields of fiery green whose undulating looms of soy and corn, wheat and alfalfa wove their own rich sea. The fields were an ocean that beckoned entry; I could walk into them and keep walking, whereas the literal sea, while spectacular and inviting, remained a spectacle removed.
That sense of boundary began to break down 10 years ago, when I moved from Iowa to Massachusetts. During my first spring here, while writing poems and slinging hash (well, sushi; it was Cambridge, after all), I happened on an ad for sharing a house on Cape Cod. I arranged a meeting at a dark bar with a stranger who flashed a photograph of a dark house on a dark hill. I handed over $500 in exchange for a small, worn key, and on a cold, rainy night in early May found myself driving up a twisting, washed-out dirt road to a deserted hillside overlooking Provincetown Bay. There I found a house that resembled the one in the photo, only in real life, it was darker.
So began my acquaintance with summoning a summer house from winter's bleak and lonely hibernation: hunting down the water main and fuse box, contorting over pilots for the water heater and gas stove, inspecting the chimney flue, pondering the ex-lives of rotted remains in the icebox, shooing spiders from the bathtub, and throwing open the windows to exchange dank, airless disuse for the still-brittle promise of late spring's sea breezes.
As things turned out, I had the house pretty much to myself for the next six months. Built in the early 1920s, it was a four-bedroom seasonal affair with walls as thin as butterfly wings, exposed wiring, a motley family of swooning couches, and countless cracks and holes through which wind and sand blew interminably. Down the short, steep slope dressed in oaks and scrub pine lay the narrow seaside road; past that was the 1950s relic of the Tides Motel with its churning ice machine and whirring shuffleboard lanes, and beyond that, the bay and sky. Behind the house, an abandoned rail bed had been claimed by wild blueberries. Other claims had been made both in and around the house: the field mice bedding down in the kitchen pantry, wind paddling the window panes, the thicket of wild beach roses hemming in the front porch, and the sweeping glow of midnight's Milky Way.
Provincetown is famous for its light. Tugged from Cape Cod like a string of saltwater taffy, the spit of land is nearly an island, bounded by Truro on its narrow, eastern side, and by the Atlantic in all other directions. Grazing off so much sea, the light is all change, washes of gold and copper that flare into the red of bricks and of fire and settle into azures and greens and grays. The light ignites the dunes and sand flats, the beech forests and moors, the meticulous gardens of lilac and hyacinth and white rose. Generations of painters have flocked to Provincetown to mull over such subtleties. With portable easels and palettes, they fleck the year-round landscape like another hearty indigenous species the wind can't shake loose.
Much of what I've learned from the sea is about seeing. About taking to the sand flats at dusk, peering into a shallow pool and finding Atlantis: the lost city in the eelgrasses and broken starfish, in the common periwinkle and blue tears of sea glass smoothed by waves and daily installments of sand. What I've rediscovered through the sea is what I had as a child, a wandering awe that could locate the universe in a tree trunk.
Like my parents, I too found my sweetheart by chance, by the sea. When not beside the sea, Gail is out on the water, carrying on a long family tradition of fishing for lobster and the now disappearing cod off the southern coast of Nova Scotia. "Tourists think about the surface of the ocean," she muses. "We think about what's underneath." And so I begin to see the ocean's depths, its third dimension. In a place where every life is linked inextricably to the sea, where fishermen pine for open water the way others ache for true love, Thomas Traherne's 17th century observation takes real shape: "You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins."
While recovering from flu on a dreary, winter day, I am visited by a friend bearing a compact disk whose sounds mimic a sailboat journey. The liner notes invite the listener to enjoy "the soothing rhythm of water gently lapping against a sailboat, the creaking of the wooden mast, the cries of seagulls and the sound of buoys." Compared with being out at sea, this 63-minute soundtrack is a schlock imitation, a poor relation, a cheap perfume salesman in a polyester suit come to call. And it is the ship slipped miraculously into the bottle, the conch held to our ears 500 miles from the sea. We close our eyes, we city slickers, we inland ilk, we crooners to our annual sea. We open our minds and dream into the blue.
I have spent little time striding across the decks of boats, partly because of seasickness, a simple ailment conjured by the brain's resistance to the visual images it does not understand. In leaving solid ground, the mind-and its chaperones of body and heart-must adjust to a swaying beneath, to an absence of steady landmarks, and a quivering lip of horizon. But like those first animals that dragged themselves from the sea, the human is an adaptive creature. We can learn to ride the waves below us, we can study the alphabet of wind and tide and current, of rough and sandy bottom, whether the journey is real or imagined.
Shortly after dawn one August morning, I climbed down the steep, sliding dune at Long Nook Beach in Truro. The beach had been closed the previous summer owing to the death of a young boy in an avalanche of sand. I was thinking of this boy as I began what I thought would be a solitary stroll. Very quickly, I realized that I had company. Around my feet, scores of tiny, translucent crustaceans were leaping and hopping. Kneeling down, I trapped one in my hand. Immediately, it went limp. However, when released, it promptly resumed activity. I caught and released many others and found that the smallest, or youngest, continued to hop when snared; evidently, they had not yet learned to play possum. Similarly, the larger, slower, and presumably older animals remained in motion when clasped. Perhaps, their skills compromised with age, they deemed a last-ditch getaway the best shot at survival. My experiments were those of a poet, not a scientist, and my findings will not be cross-referenced in the literature of hows and whys. But there's a lesson here about youth and age, about danger and instinct and motion.
Like my father, I am an avid swimmer, having logged the equivalent of half the earth's circumference in the past dozen years. Most of those miles have been within the clear and chlorinated confines of swimming pools, where-unlike in open water-what's just ahead or beneath is never a mystery. But lately on summer days, I find myself venturing into the ocean for longer swims. I still get spooked in the murkiness half a mile from shore and will swallow salt water when startled by the sight of a mangled dinghy below. But swimming through fear is like maneuvering through a riptide: You can't struggle against it, but you can continue in the direction you were headed.
Breathing only on the right side, I swim north toward Race Point, and with each breath glimpse a shore blanketed by seagoers and bright umbrellas. Improvising a flip turn, I head back southward along the coast, the open ocean all that's visible with each breath. I think of my father swimming out farther than good sense would dictate, how, from off at space, the peopled shore and immense, wild blue are two pieces of the same intricate puzzle, how each is rendered sweeter by the other. As the Spanish poet Antonio Machado writes, those items we consider valuable may serve us least. The good explorer strays from the itinerary, is not afraid to steer beyond science and reason.
Andrea Cohen is an Editor for MIT Sea Grant.