A Match to the Heart

by Gretel Ehrlich

  chapter 13

  On December 21, no one mentioned the winter solstice. By “no one” I mean the nurses at the doctor’s office or the young man who came to wash the windows at the house, since they were the only people I talked to that day. While the earth was working on its solstice balancing act, the flow of electricity inside my body was not. Instead of taking my usual walk, I tried to stand perfectly still without losing consciousness. An extreme high tide broke over the seawall, spreading white foam at my feet. At the moment of the solstice, when the earth shifted into its axial equipoise, I fainted.

  When I could see again I saw dolphins arching by. Dolphins bring luck. The appearance of a fair-weather mackerel sky seemed like a conciliatory gesture in mid-winter: a delicate balance between wet and cold was held, but a balance maintained too long dies. California had endured an eight-year drought. But later that day, storm clouds blackened the West. Rain let down north of San Miguel, right where the sun sets at this time of year, but on the beach where I stood with an aching heart and clammy hands, sun prevailed.

  Christmas came and went. Of it I remember little except that when my parents and sister came bringing dinner on Christmas Eve, I could not even manage to set the table right, and in the morning, when I tried to bake a chocolate cake for my father, in thanks for his lifesaving flight to Wyoming, I failed.

  On New Year’s Eve the chest pain and light-headedness was so bad I went to bed at eight. Sam’s body was pressed against mine. Did I really need anything else, anyone else in the world? At midnight I woke, stirring to the faint noise of firecrackers, looked at the clock, rolled over and kissed Sam. I wondered less about if I was going to die than if I was already dead, but my body told me otherwise: my whole left side felt as if something had been detonated there. I wanted to be held, to be pieced back together and fastened to the realm of the living by another human being, but there was no one, and there would be no one in the morning.

  Sam sighed deeply and lay on his back, feet in the air, teeth showing. Waves rocked the house, which rocked me. At dawn a slim moon floated above cerulean water, and bright Venus was the pinprick of promised love that had failed to appear. In my version of things, the new year would begin not with drunken abandonment but with burning: great bonfires up and down the beach, into which people would toss the detritus of the old year—relics of habitual thought and spiritual materialism. Then there would be food cooking over flame: meats and cabbages, potatoes and corn, as we nourished ourselves with the new emptiness, and, finally drinking and dancing as high tide came in, until every bonfire had been drenched by a wave, we would dance in water, underwater, nearly drowning—until the dogs came for us and swam us home.

  New Year’s morning I stood on rocks and burned a photograph of a man who had jilted me but to whom I clung as a friend out of hope that his affections would rekindle and fear that I would end up alone. It was not him I was burning but my own habit of attachment.

  The tides know everything about habit, but also everything about cleansing and healing. Ash from the photograph fell into the foamy edge of a broken wave. Sam jumped sideways to keep from getting his feet wet. I was sure he would have laughed at my clumsy ritual if he could have, so I laughed for him. Then we walked to the estuary, where a Chumash village once stood, its hunchbacked huts made from whale ribs covered with a thatch of reeds. Having risen from my ashes several times, I found there was still more burning to do, more fresh starts to make, but before long, I felt too tired to contemplate such enterprise. We were well into New Year’s Day, and the starting line had already been crossed.

  I was blind, or at least I felt that way. The calendar was blank, no numbers to differentiate days, and I still couldn’t read, couldn’t use fictional structures to scaffold my interest in life. My friends, Noel and Judy, came and took Sam and me out—I wasn’t allowed to drive. Even though I had lived through Wyoming winters, the California nights felt cold, and they built a fire. We broke bread, ate soup, drank red wine. At the movie theater I carried Sam under my arm like a lamb. They said, “You can’t bring him in here,” and I said, “He’s blind and I’m his seeing-eye human,” a joke they liked, so they let us in. We saw a Mongolian film whose wide open landscape reminded me of Wyoming. It was almost too much to bear.

  On the ranch, Blue, my seventeen-year-old sheepherding horse, had often come halfway into the kitchen looking for dry dogfood, which he liked. His head was so big, it threw everything else in the room out of proportion. The dogs went crazy with delight as he stuck his Roman nose into the fifty-pound bag of mini-chunks and basked in their loving gazes as he ate.

  Coming off the mountain, I’d sometimes let Blue take any route he wanted. It was a way to see the map of his mind. He liked to smell pine trees and eat purple thistle flowers with puckered lips. On cold days he’d choose the “steep trail,” which was almost vertical, though it was the fast way home, but on warm summer days he’d use the trail that took him through old hunting camps, because he liked to smell the places where horses he didn’t know had been and he could drink from the creek that flowed through.

  Later Sam and I stood on the seawall in front of the house. I didn’t want to think about the ranch. The continual sound of crashing waves was a vise that held my thoughts in the present. The beach was empty and the houses were dark. An acquaintance who spends time in Labrador said that for help during a hunt, the Inuit people placed bones in a fire and when the bones cracked, they formed a map of trails on which to find caribou, and that as a result, there had been a lot of hunger there. I wasn’t hungry—in fact, one effect of the lightning was to dampen my appetite almost completely, but, living in exile from the only place I knew intimately, I needed a map, I needed the oracle of bones.

  In the morning I followed Sam’s map of smells to rock piles, tide pools. He had been timid at first, then grew bold: the beach was his domain. I tried to imagine how his olfactory sense opened every inch of ground for him—successive explosions at each step, widening into a map of the world, but what a map: guano, salt, fish scale, seal fur, tar, and the mineral smell of sand. The beach was near the town of Carpinteria, named by Spaniards for the Chumash Indians they saw there—the carpenters—who were building their seaworthy canoes called “tomols,” sealing them with the asphaltum that still oozes from a nearby cliff and piles up into a hill of black bubble gum on which sea lions bark and lounge as if waiting for the tomols to return.

  Though Sam is no bloodhound—he’d rather look at a band of sheep and lick his chops than smell the guano of any seagull—when the water went out, his nose took me to the edge of the shore, to exposed rock. Tide pools are another kind of gap—an edge between batholith and lithosphere, ocean and earth. They are ecotones, in-between places like those clefts in the brain and the rug-pulled-out limbos in our lives where, ironically, much richness occurs.

  Down boulders, across sand, between clumps of kelp, Sam’s paw prints in wet sand were dark asterisks on the map marking the trail. That day the beach was a bed of black rock hung with the slanted roofs of barnacles, mussels, and the limpets’ pink volcano shells, and pocked with smooth basins catching the green splash of waves. Each pool of water held an image of the sun; each sun was a lake of daylight, and when the shine of the rock started to fade as it dried, another wave splashed it bright.

  A tide pool is a kind of meadow: rocks bared by low tides are strewn with red algae and green mermaid’s hair—seagrass, surfgrass and eelgrass—which is brushed back and forth in undulating waves. In the splash zone, village life seems to prevail: both shelled and soft creatures hide under rocks, between rocks, or fasten themselves to rocks in colonies, rigid in sweeping waters and in the continual flux of tides. Barnacles, anemones, jellyfish, starfish, sponges, hydroids, worms, chitons, mussels, clams, snails, octopuses, shrimps, crabs, lobsters, sea spiders, urchins, sea squirts and salps, algae, kelp, lichens and grasses—all crowd together in urban densities. Aggregate anemones often live in concentrations of three thousand individ
uals per square meter of rock; they are marine apartment dwellers.

  A tide pool is perhaps the one place where creatures can prosper by becoming completely sedentary and permanently attached. Barnacles spend their youths floating free before coming home to a rock and, once glued, they never leave again, never have to go in search of food because room service is provided by the waves bringing it to them. They merely extend legs to capture floating plankton; these legs are also the apparatus through which they breathe. Mussels are “gill-netters” They catch prey, pump water, and breathe through fleshy tubes that extend from the rear of their hinged shell.

  Because sessile creatures—ones that are permanently attached—are unable to “go with the flow,” they thrive on extremes : they’re either underwater or desiccating in hot sun. To avoid drying up during low tide, periwinkles and limpets keep so tightly closed that their respiration stops. They literally hold their breath until covered by water again.

  A regimen of daily walks took me into the middle of January. With each high tide more sand was removed, more rocks exposed, more sea creatures revealed. In dense fog a single red starfish, bright on wet sand, was the only thing visible and seemed to stand for the whole unseen galaxy. Up close they’re less than romantic. If barnacles and mussels represent tenacity—not only are they unmoving, but also very long-lived—then starfish are known for their voraciousness. Known as the “walking stomachs of the deep,” they eat continually, devouring everything in their path: oysters, clams, barnacles, and they sift through sand and mud for any bits of bottom garbage and carrion.

  A starfish eats by pushing his stomach out through his mouth, located at the center of his body. That’s how greedy it is: it eats everything whole, shell and all. And just so nothing is missed, the branching tubes in the arms, where its eyes and respiratory system are located, are put to work picking up any dropped morsels. The efficiency of the starfish’s stomach is twofold: waste products are ejected from the same opening through which the meal was ingested.

  Brittle stars, blood stars, ocher stars, leather stars, variable and shallow-water sand stars—the ones seen around here—as well as 3,600 other species, all start out as one of thousands of eggs shed from the underarms of a mother/father (they are hermaphroditic). Once released, they glue themselves to kelp. From “stardust” they turn into odd-shaped punctuation marks until the rays finally emerge; they grow from stardust to gluttony in a matter of weeks.

  Sea stars, as biologists like to call them, since they’re not fish, have an extremely complex nervous system and are famous for regenerating lost arms. They can cast off a wounded ray and regrow a new one, or else grow a whole new body if part of the central disk is included in the cut-off arm. With such powers, starfish numbers could get out of control, but this problem is solved by sex changes—no operation needed. Males can turn into females, and vice versa, an art that regulates population dynamics.

  As I poked through tide pools, Sam began stalking shorebirds. He never hurt one, rarely even chased them, just sneaked up on them, wishing they were sheep or cows. Sandpipers, sanderlings, phalaropes, plovers, godwits, curlews, and pelicans flew in front of him as he ran, circling around over the water and landing behind him. On one of those days I stumbled on something shaped like a tiny leaf, though it felt alive, like an animal in my hand. Animal or vegetable? Less than half an inch high, soft like a cut-off earlobe, with a purple stem, tiny volcano-shaped pores, and a calcium carbonate “skeleton” made of microscopic spicules, it later proved to be a white fan sponge, severed from its other friends: the urn, macaroni, and crumb-of-bread sponges, the purple, yellow, orange, and free-living sponges.

  Sam’s paw marks and my footprints crisscrossed that of a snail, which secretes a mucous trail to trap plankton and small creatures, then reels in the trail to feed on the catch. We came upon spotted nudibranchs that looked like bits of body parts, un-shelled, skinned, globs of flesh exposed to sea and air. They were easy to spot near the sponges, because that’s what they dine on.

  Nearby were brown sea hares, which look nothing like a rabbit but are in the mollusk family—a type of snail. They lay their eggs in long strings that get wound up into spongy yellow balls the size of grapefruit and contain as many as a million eggs apiece. When the larvae hatch, in ten days or so, the young swim free, but most are quickly eaten. This is rather fortunate because if they weren’t, the population of brown hares would exceed the combined populations of animal life on the entire earth in only two or three years.

  Fertility, gluttony, tenacity, and a who-cares-who-does-what-to-whom sex life—that’s what typifies creatures of the inter-tidal zone. No sinner has had a life as rigid and voluptuous as the tube snail, which lives clustered and unmoving, its shells growing entwined, or the sea cucumber, whose water and oxygen is pumped in and out of its anus, or the vaginal-looking aggregate anemone, which stings its prey with a paralyzing toxin and reproduces by splitting in half lengthwise, generating two individuals of the same sex.

  chapter 14

  A black-crowned night heron stood on an apron of wet sand, looking across the channel. The feather plume at the back of his head lifted in a faint breeze. Out there the channel churned its cyclonic eddies counterclockwise. Schools of anchovies, halibut, and sea bass came and went: silver flashes, small storms that well up from the inside of the sea but are short-lived, like lightning.

  A shifting wind sailed up the beach from the southwest, which means rain. As he walked, sand blasted Sam’s face and ears. Spray from the tops of waves blew backwards into the sea and came up again as whitecaps, and the green shoulders of swells pushed hard toward shore but never seemed to arrive. From the beach I could see the plate-glass windows of my house bulging into wide-angle eyes, and wondered what they could see.

  A hundred and fifty thousand years ago, southern California turned frosty during two ice ages, beginning a long warming trend that continues today. The sea here was 400 feet lower than it is now: the channel was a mere lagoon, with little surf, and four of the five channel islands were fused together into one large ocean-bound mountain range. The mountains behind Santa Barbara had a covering of pine forests and only in later, warmer years did they change to oak savannah. Despite the mild climate now, this is one of the roughest channels in the Pacific. Two currents, the warmer Japanese current—Kinoshiro—and the cold California current, meet and sheer off at Point Conception and on the northwestern tip of San Miguel Island, and prevailing winds bounding down the coast funnel through the channel at high velocities.

  Sam and I climbed a rocky knob and tried to see out beyond the protective arm of the islands. “If you look hard enough, you can see the Antarctic, Hawaii, or Japan from here,” I told him. But I wanted more: I wanted to see the topography of the ocean floor. Ocean covers 78 percent of the planet and averages a depth of 12,000 feet. Its topography, a frontier now “seen” by side-scan sonar, which produces high-resolution images of the ocean floor, is as grand as the terrain up top, but there’s more of it, since the volume of habitat in the sea is much greater than that on land.

  I thought about all the ways the ocean covers things. Rogue waves can appear suddenly, as if the sea floor had shifted its buttocks, causing an ephemeral ripple that swallows fishing boats, islands and people. Instead of a tsunami I saw only pelicans bobbing on swells that broke into tame, three-foot waves.

  In the evening we went for another walk. Sinking into sand, Sam’s tracks were bright meteors, appearing suddenly, then fading to black. I stood in water up to my knees, grabbing phosphorescence and invisible plankton, squeezing light out of the ocean’s dark brew. Light is chemical, electrical, mineral, just the way memory is, and I wondered if light had invented the ocean and my hand dragging through it, or if memory had invented light as a form of time thinking about itself.

  Down on hands and knees, eye-to-eye with Sam, I tried for an all-inclusive panoramic view. Between tide pool and sky there were rhythms and plasmas holding me up. Lightning, cosmic dust, human b
lood, ash, plankton—these are all referred to as “plasmas” by scientists, as “broths of life” that rocked and rolled to various kinds of music along with the fluctuations of the dinoflagellates periodic light. Did they have the same beat as the electrical firing pulse of neurons in the brain, or did spring tides (those at the dark of the moon, or when it is full) and neap tides (when the moon is in between) match the shifting and quiescence of tectonic plates, or does everything modulate only to chaos?

  The next day the heron was back. In all those rhythms he stood motionless, the solitary observer of a navy sky graying with rain clouds. Between two rocks a starfish righted itself by lifting up on a single ray and flipping over. Earlier, a painting by Picasso had caught my eye: it was a blue acrobat rolling like a wave. I thought of that figure as the blue acrobat of time who had given me a reprieve from death, had lifted itself up on one arm like the starfish and let me slide through.

  The night heron’s white plume moved stiffly in wind like a compass needle: to the west, northwest, then south and east. The sea looked like time, and time was water and tides, the heart’s ardent tick and the sea star’s flip. Spreading his gray wings, the heron rose slowly: the storm he had been waiting for had come.

  chapter 15

  A sound of tearing ripped across the tops of waves like a torn seam. Rain was the thread from which fluted waves had come unstitched. Wind poured down. Lightning cut sprays of rain that fell and lifted and seemed to emanate from the sea, not the sky. Palm tree fronds swept together in green flags and an oriole’s swinging nest made of palm threads swayed with it, carrying unhatched eggs. A wind from the east blew seawater against its own current. Shorebirds hunched down on driftwood and pelicans flew in threes over the roofs of houses instead of shaving the tops of swells with their wings. What had been the waves’ transparencies, through which I could see feather boa kelp and ducks’ feet paddling gracelessly, were now walls of water mud-died with silt. Every few hundred yards another creek carved an urgent route across sand—water thirsting for water—and at the confluence, great fans of suspended earth spread out into the sea.