Long shadows and long nights. Ice and stiff breezes. December can feel lifeless.
The sun has swung far south, but has paused the past week or two. Solsticeis here.
The past couple of days I have been fortunate seeing bay life. A couple of whales, a few gannets, a seal (all on a ferry crossing), live barnacles, and a tiny fish that got rolled up onto the beach at low tide.
I picked up the fish, felt it squirm, surprisingly strong for its size, then tossed it back into the water.
People come to Beach Drive to see the water, the Christmas trees, to drink at Harpoon’s, to jog along the sidewalk, to get fresh air.
But walk down to the beach and feel life. It’s windier, it’s wetter, it’s wilder, it’s worth it.
Earlier, when the tide was a few feet higher, I had brushed against a jellyfish and got lucky. The tentacles were drifting away from me.
Getting stung by jellyfish is a July ritual for folks who enjoy bouncing in the bay. Not fun, but not terrible, either, so long as its one of our more common critters.
This particular jelly, unlikely the one I encountered earlier, got too close to the edge, and now it sits under the dying light of last night’s sunset.
As different as we are, we share many of the same proteins, the same DNA code, the same need for sunlight to keep us alive.
Our bay is home to sand tiger sharks–like much of Philly, they love to spend their summers lolling about in the Delaware Bay.
They are not particularly aggressive, and if you pay attention at dusk, you might see a fin slicing through the water. While most fins we see belong to dolphins, sand tigers can occasionally be seen traveling through shallow waters near the beach. They gulp air and hang at the surface, like our Philly friends roasting on floats.
As much as I like spending time under the bay’s surface, I avoid swimming at night.
I think the date says November 30, 1985, almost 4 decades ago,
The tide has risen, the tied has ebbed over 25,000 times since then.
The love lock rests on a sign post facing the bay, a bit rusty, but still holding. A couple likely placed this there themselves, many years ago. (It might have been there for decades, though. The bay is unforgiving.
Kale has kept the Irish (and other northern folk) alive for over a millennia, even before cabbage (at least according to Donnchadh Ó Corráin while he still breathed), but here in the States it’s often used as an an ornamental, and eating it became a fad
Early spring red kale, just about to bolt.
Using kale as an ornamental is like using a Maserati to commute in Manhattan. I mean, yeah, but why would you?
I suspect part of the problem is not knowing when to eat kale–late summer kale can be as tough and bitter as a sea salt’s boots. Best time to eat it is after a hard frost, and it only gets better as the winter melts into spring.
The tide was ebbing. The seahorse lay on the beach, just beyond the reach of the receding waves. I assumed it was dead–until I saw the tiniest movement of its tail.
I picked it up and let a few waves wash over my hand. Its head flicked a couple of times, spasmodically, without intention.
Then I felt its tail wrap around my finger.
Edge of the Delaware Bay, March 30, 2013
I do not presume that this seahorse had any awareness of me. It was in trouble, and may not have survived the day, but that’s not why I am telling the story.
I am sharing the story because I felt its tail wrap around my finger with surprising strength, with an unexpected vitality.
I do not believe that the seahorse was in any sense communicating with me–dying critters do not waste energy talking to alien beings. I had nothing to say to my seahorse, and the seahorse had even less to say to me.
The tail of this seahorse had wrapped on hundreds, maybe thousands, of things before me. It clung to eelgrass, to its lover, and if a male, grappled with other males who dare to separate him from his partner.
If this was the seahorse’s last few living moments, the last thing it held was my finger.
***
Seahorses do not share language with humans, but if they did, their tales would be shared through their tails. If this particular seahorse felt any sense of vitality from the palm of my hand, the only way it could share this would be through doing just what it did–hugging my finger.
Another critter fro the bay
This is not why it did, of course, and that is not the point. But if the only way for a creature to share its world with us is a way that we dismiss as reflex, then we will forever see a mechanistic universe, and we will remain the lonely species we are.
***
We need evidence! Proof! Substantiation! Concrete facts!
Today much of the world rejoices over an event pieced together with the slimmest of evidence–the oldest of the Gospels, written more than a half century after the death of Jesus, ends with frightened women fleeing from an empty tomb (Mark 16:8). The rest is appended history.
I am not going to equate the curling of a dying critter’s tail with the scantest of evidence that (in a perverse form) drove much of European history. Both evidence and faith have their place.
Still, if we cannot allow for the possibility that perhaps even a seahorse has a story to tell, then the slight tug of a seahorse’s tail, a twitch of life on an early spring beach, means nothing, and everything is just noisy chaos.
They come every summer, these magnificent fliers, chomping up flies and mosquitoes as they pass through.
Yesterday hundreds were flying north along the edge of the Delaware Bay, the wings glinting in the late afternoon sun, moving like they had a train to catch in the upper bay.
If you hang around North Cape May, you know the first ferry leaves at 7 AM, because it tells you.
The first short toot comes almost always on the dot, as the captain lets the crew know it’s time to go. Shortly afterwards, there’s a long blast followed by three short (more or less, depending on the captain), as the ferry backs out into the canal, getting ready to head over to Delaware.
When there’s a south breeze, the sound is crisp, even loud. The day is going to be seasonably warm in February as the south wind carries some ocean warmth our way. On days when we hear nothing, the breeze is likely from the northeast, foreboding, dark.
In late spring we sometimes hear a long blast every minute or so as the ferry slips through the foggy mist. We’re about a half mile from the beach, often bathed in morning sunlight, when we hear this.
Occasionally, usually in summer when some smaller craft are piloted by folks with more beer than brains in their skulls, five short blasts remind folks that colliding with a ferry is not in anyone’s best interests.
View from The Lookout (before it was The Lookout.)
There’s free miniature golf at the ferry terminal. It has has everything you need if you want a fairly challenging but spartan nine hole course. No flags, but the sound of the ball rattling in the cup is as satisfying here as anywhere else.
Except for one hole . The Abyss.
The second to last hole, perpetually damp sitting under the pedestrian bridge, is deep. Very, very deep. Deep enough that it swallows light. Go ahead, try to see the bottom. Disturbing.
Even more disturbing, perhaps, is the echoing voices.
Go ahead–stand a foot or two away from the hole and shout something. (Maybe not Beelzebub, why take chances.)
Most folks will look at you as though you’ve lost your mind, and maybe you have. Better to lose your mind than to lose your soul.
