Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  That spring, I borrowed a kayak, tied it on the top of my car, and drove up the highway. I camped alone on the far side of a small lake where red-necked grebes were busy building floating nests and savannah sparrows called from the tops of chest-high spruce. In the morning, I hiked to the next lake over, stepping between brown bear tracks freshly laid in the muddy trail. Proud of my initiative to explore, yet terrified of the prospect of bears, as I walked I sang to myself, to the bears, to the kinglets that weren’t listening up in the trees. It was a thrill to learn I could heave the boat onto the top of my car and take it down alone. It was a thrill to learn that my own knots held.

  Newly alone, necessity required me to adapt, and there were times when I felt like an amputee learning to do those mundane things that had been so easy before. I had to figure out how to get the hundred-pound rototiller I’d rented at the hardware store out of the back of my station wagon. The hardware guys had helped me get it in, but in my driveway, I was on my own trying to get it out. Suddenly simple machines rigged out of scraps of wood were invaluable. Each solution I engineered became a small victory. The diaphanous shower curtain I’d bought used at the Pick ’n’ Pay for ten cents billowed to the ceiling once I turned on the water. So I thought of an economical solution: I slid a row of pennies into the bottom seam to weight it down. The coins made a racket as they banged against the inside of the metal tub, but at least my bathroom was dry. I figured out how to conserve heating oil by keeping my small, drafty place freezing cold, and spending a fortune on custom-made, insulated curtains I’d ordered from a catalogue.

  There were many things to figure out: how to move a free couch into the house that wouldn’t fit through the front door, how to get help from strong men without leading them on; and how to live separately from—but in such close proximity to—a man I had loved and left only a handful of months before. I saw John’s car around town more than I saw him. I fought the urge to spend time with him, although a few times, when we did see each other among friends, we orbited around each other awkwardly.

  Those months, as I bounced between trying to be the alluring bar girl, the proficient gardener, the solo explorer, and the resourceful rental house fixer-upper, I felt kaleidoscopic, but not in a dazzling and beautiful way. I felt fragmented into parts, the constant shifts revealed pieces of myself that hadn’t been seen—even by me—in a long time. Weekend days opened empty with just my own whims to follow. I wanted most of all to feel independent, but so much autonomy left me dizzy. On the most beautiful days, the sunny and still ones when the perfectly blue sky seemed to be saying there was no reason to be anything but perfectly content, I felt the worst. I wanted someone to whisk me off on an adventure of their devising. No one showed up. So I worked to make headway in the garden. The twenty by twenty–foot patch became my distraction, my refuge. My moods changed like weather, my barometer dependent on so many small things. The garden thrived, but I was lonely. I constantly asked myself: Should I stay?

  ON THE SOUTH side of the bay, we were a loose group of friends who seemed to be linked by a penchant for being on the outer side of doors. A few years before, Dale and Sharon had invited John and me to join them on a full-moon skate on a frozen lake where the night was silent except for the groaning of the ice and the scrape of our blades, which wrote a language on the surface of the lake that seemed to be the only thing worth saying. That night cemented a sporadic friendship. Later, we had gone on a too-long spring ski deep in the hills behind town where we crossed and recrossed a river on ice that was dangerously thin. We ran out of snow a half-mile from where we’d parked the car the day before and had to carry our skis the rest of the way, postholing in patches of rotten snow up to our thighs. Along the way, we did not see anyone else, but we saw a dozen moose grouped up along the river, strangely social in a way we’d never known about before. When we finally reached the car, we were exhausted to the point of tears, linked by extreme hunger, crankiness, and eagerness to do it all over again the next spring.

  They were all good people, but no one wanted to perch themselves at the bar with me, scanning the room for eyes that were also on the roam. They’d outgrown nights at the bar, they told me. I was a few years too late. I either went alone or stayed home. Loneliness flushed in and out of me.

  AFTER PITCHING OUR tents, we took off on our own. Dale and Sharon took the kayaks out; Joel, Marla, and Sue went to scope out a hiking trail up the ridge. I clambered over fallen spruce to a spot at the top of a rocky bluff where the sun fell on a soft patch of yellow-green moss. From here I could see the mouth of the bay, how the inlet on which we camped split into two narrow fjords separated by the green backbone of a mountain ridge, scoured long ago by glacial ice hundreds of feet thick. Three islands anchored themselves near the mouth of this inlet and a rock the shape of an elephant’s head reared up out of the water. Although a breeze was raking the water into whitecaps, I was sheltered from the wind. The sun lay across my lap, my chest and face. And so I began to take off my clothes, layer by layer. First the rubber boots and wool socks. Then my fleece coat. Undressing here felt like a supreme luxury; there were so few opportunities in this cold climate to feel the sun on your skin. As I undressed, I heard the emphatic call of a kinglet, and then the spiraling melody of a hermit thrush. Its song turned in on itself and then wound up, higher and higher until it dissipated into the sky. I lay back on the pillowed ground.

  Cushioned by moss, I found it easy to forget how thin a skin of green there was between me and the rock which made up the south side of the bay. All of this life—the nuthatches, nagoon berries, devil’s club, and thrush—was a simple layer of life above the bedrock. It had accumulated slowly, first with wind and rain turning rock to dust; lichen turning the dust to soil, which provided a bed for things to grow and reproduce on. But now there were columbine and cloudberries, marten and Steller’s jays. There were watermelon berries and moose and voles. There was sorrel, and goose-tongue. This whole ecosystem was a fresh cast of the primordial dice. It amounted to a dense but narrow tangle of life above the bedrock and beneath the sky. It was amazing that we had gotten here at all. Maybe it was the sudden burst of vitamin D on patches of my skin that hadn’t seen the sun in a long time that made me feel a surge of strength and independence lying there naked by myself. But a short gust of wind set off goose bumps on my skin, reminding me that each feeling was hitched to its opposite, the way centripetal and centrifugal forces keep our universe from collapsing as well as from scattering apart: Strength came with vulnerability, independence with loneliness.

  THE NEXT MORNING, we woke up after a night under spruce and sat on the beach with the day, just after 8 A.M., feeling well under way. Marla boiled a pot of water for tea, coffee, and hot oatmeal. She was efficient at the stove—at clearing away cobbles to make a level spot for it on the beach. At priming the pump and lighting it. Water came from a creek down a short trail that led away from our tents and the plywood outhouse a bit farther into the woods. The sky had been peeled of clouds, which had gathered the evening before, and it was already a brilliant blue. I wore all the layers I had brought and sat cross-legged at the top of the beach with both hands clutching a warm mug of tea. I spread cream cheese on a cold grocery store bagel and ate it quickly. The tide was on its way out. I’d checked the tables the night before. Low was a minus 4.7 at 9:58. My watch said 8:11. As the tide retreated and I drank my tea, the dropping bay left a wet edge on shore. There was still over an hour left until the tide sunk to its lowest and as I sat at the top of the gravel beach, rubber boots outstretched before me, the bay continued to drain.

  When tea and coffee were done, we headed down the beach to where the damp margin was widening. I stepped across rocks studded thickly with barnacles, which crunched beneath my boots, and walked through shards of clamshells strewn between the rocks. Cockles gaped open, revealing a yellowish tongue of flesh inside their deeply grooved shells. They tasted like clams but were chewier; people put them in chowders. Clams shot streams o
f water from the sandy places between rocks. You could look across the beach and see dozens of them firing off like a timed performance. I wanted to get to the water’s edge, where I could see things revealed only at the year’s lowest tides. Then I would follow the water back up the beach as the tide changed. Farther down, boulders were embedded in the beach and covered by barnacles and popweed, seaweed with air bladders that looked like pea-sized bubbles within their fronds. There was more than a two-story drop in elevation from the top of the beach to where I squatted at the water’s edge. These were two worlds: one tied to land, the other a limb of the sea. Here, I was entering the sea.

  Squatting down to my knees to get a closer look, I parted the blades of kelp at the bay’s retreating edge to find pools of water beneath the damp fronds. These kelp, exposed only during such extreme low tides, had blades nearly a foot wide. Beneath them, a mass of starfish—some purple, others pink, orange, and red—piled together motionless. A green anemone bloomed between two rocks. I put my finger into its soft center up to the second knuckle. It closed around it, folding in its petal-like arms inside. I tore off a piece of the massive kelp and put it in my mouth. It tasted like al dente lasagna cooked in brine. As we moved about among the kelp and rocks, my friends and I strayed from each other, following our own paths of exploration.

  Wet kelp hid crabs of all sizes, which scurried from the light. There were hermit crabs toting snail shells on their backs and a horse crab, which was covered in bristles. I picked it up between my thumb and forefinger, holding it at the back so that its pincers couldn’t reach my skin. Its legs paddled uselessly in the air. A purple sea urchin sat on cobbles beneath the kelp. Eventually, when it died, its spines would break off and the animal would rot away, leaving the graceful ringed skeleton you could find bleached white at the top of the beach. Then an oddly shaped crab appeared, with a shell much bigger than its body—an umbrella crab, with wings of shell that stretched beyond its body. I’d never seen a crab like this before—didn’t even know these creatures existed. I wanted to share this amazing find with someone. I called over to Sharon, but the sound of my voice was lost into the distance.

  A little way up the beach, I lifted a rock to reveal a society beneath. Half a dozen chitons—small, tanklike mollusks with eight-plated shells that clutched tightly to rocks—were clinging to the underside of the rock. There were half a dozen kinds of chitons along this shore; these were in clownish colors: The plates of shell were finely and colorfully striped in pink and white, and the hem of shell around the edge was spotted green, blue, and orange. A sea sponge, which looked like a layer of thick paint, encrusted part of the rock in pink. A delicate starfish with a body no bigger than a dime and arms as fine as dental floss also clung to the underside of the rock. Another starfish—this one with only four legs and the nub of a fifth growing back—made its home beneath this rock as well.

  In the wet puddle beneath where the rock had been, an eel-like gunnel fish the length of my index finger flopped around in its quickly drying world. I picked it up and its slick body flailed against the inside of my closed hand. At the bottom of the palm-sized puddle, pale gray threads radiated from a central point: It was the top of a worm that had built a hard shell in the sand below and extended its tentacles in search of prey. Shrimplike amphipods hopped about in the dampness beneath the rock, and a thimble-sized crab crawled away from the light. Once I had turned over this rock and seen the riot of life beneath it, I wanted to see more. I looked up to see a perfectly clear tidepool just up ahead; I put the rock lid back down on this miniature world and moved on.

  I squatted at the edge of a pool as wide as my arms and looked into its surface. Quickly, my reflection disappeared, revealing the world in this remnant the sea had left behind. Dozens of hermit crabs sped across the floor of the pool. Another crab appeared in the pool—this one wearing algae along its back, a decorator crab dressed in seaweed for camouflage. Then a black leather chiton with a thick black fleshy rim that felt like wet suede around the edge. These were a favorite subsistence food among Alaska Natives of the region, who called them bidarki and ate them boiled. I remembered when John had cut one out of its shell with a pocketknife and we’d eaten it raw while wading in the tidepools. It tasted only of the sea.

  I scanned the pool from end to end. Stock-still at one end, where I’d overlooked it before, a tidepool sculpin seemed to hang in the water. This thumb-sized fish had a large mouth and oversized pectoral fins that waved like hands on either side of its head. Small carnivores, they ate barnacles, limpets, copepods, worms, and sometimes each other. My index finger gently broke the surface of the pool and I moved my hand slowly toward it. I wanted to touch the smooth side of this scaleless fish. Members of a large family of small, darting fish, their cousins carried names that conjured stories: saddleback sculpin, buffalo sculpin, fluffy sculpin, staghorn sculpin, and red Irish lord, which had particularly bugged out eyes. I’d been entranced by this small fish when I’d first encountered it on the Oregon coast, amazed first by its ability to blend in perfectly with the colors of its pool. You could move from pool to pool, seeing the same kind of fish, but each would be dressed up in its own uniform. Regardless of whether its backdrop was dominated by pink sponge, green algae, browns, blues, or gray, the sculpin seemed to wear the speckled wallpaper of its home, dissolved into the pool, and disappeared. And this fish returned to its home tidepool, even after high tide washed in and erased the boundaries of its small world. You could take one of these sculpin in a paper cup, I’d heard, and walk them far down the beach. Still, they would find their way home. I remained otherwise motionless as my hand got closer and closer to the fish. At the last moment, it darted under a rock.

  I brought my face closer to the pool—the water was thick with minute clear organisms swimming around rapidly. Between them, clear shrimp with red dots surged about. Delicate crimson flowers opened in one corner of the pool: the fancy tops of otherwise plain worms that lived in protective tubes. I could see barnacles waving thready fronds in the water to filter prey. And then something so easily overlooked: a nudibranch, a yellowish sluglike lump no bigger than the end of my thumb with purple spots. This was an unusual find and I was dying to share it, to show everyone—but we’d all wandered off so far from each other it did no good to yell.

  As I waded through the tidepools, I wanted to see everything—every anemone, urchin, nudibranch, sculpin, shrimp, amphipod, worm, sea cucumber, crab, sponge, tunicate, periwinkle, and triton. I approached the area like a naturalist, wanting to identify, categorize. I tallied the kinds of starfish I’d seen: true, six-rayed, blood, sunflower, leather, brittle. I tallied the kinds of seaweed: winged kelp, popweed, sugar wrack, black seaweed, and sea lettuce, and their melodic scientific names: alaria, fucus, laminaria, porphyra, ulva.

  But names were inadequate to describe these otherworldly creatures. And none of the colors I knew fit either. Nothing was simply red, blue, yellow, or green. There were colors I’d never seen before, colors I’d never even imagined. And everything kept changing: one color when wet, another when dry. There were stripes and spots, fringes and threads, borders and plates. The sea’s varied cast formed a complicated play of interlocked life, each organism adapted perfectly to its role. There were the cleaners, the eaters, the prey, those that converted the sun’s light to food, those that kept the dead stuff from cluttering the seafloor.

  For a few moments at slack tide, the morning stood still. The nearly perpetual wind along the bay rested; the sea didn’t move in or out; the blue sky stared; and I kept my head down, eyes to the pools. But the rest of the world did go on. Pigeon guillemots let out their high-pitched, wheezy cries, and a belted kingfisher flew from one spruce bough to another, calling out in its sharp rattle. And if I were to come back the next morning, I’d see that starfish that had been caught far out of the water on this series of low tides would have migrated down the beach toward the bay’s retreated edge. Their motionlessness was fiction. As we waded through this an
cient terrain, this naked patch of the sea, the world beat on and on.

  I moved up the beach and stopped at the face of a huge boulder—its seaward size was covered in bright orange anemones that drooped like hundreds of pairs of breasts. And over to one side, a rusty-red gumboot chiton had wedged into a gap in the rock. It was the largest of the chitons, and looked like the sole of a boot that had lost its shoe. Beneath the boulder was a wet pocket in the rock where a small pool of water remained. I got on my hands and knees and looked into the darkness. After my eyes adjusted, I could just make out a sloppy mass of red octopus tentacles pocked with white suckers. The octopus shifted when I approached, one tentacle sliding seamlessly against the other, and then was still.

  I was a hulking beast next to these delicate beauties. I was an outsider invading places I should never have been at all. To step solely on bare rock was impossible. Eventually, I’d put my boot into a clear pool, mucking up the water. I’d bulldoze a cluster of barnacles with the bottom of my shoe, erasing years of growth. So I pictured myself as six inches tall, clambering gently among nearly head-high boulders the size of grapefruits and wading through seaweed that created slick expanses I could slide across for what would be micro-miles. Were these creatures—sea lemon, whelk, and moon snail—the vestiges of the Big Bang? Were they celestial orphans fallen from space into the edge of the sea? These gelatinous, eyeless, and shelled creatures—were they what we were a million years ago?…or perhaps what we would become?