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HOLDFAST -- AT HOME IN THE NATURAL WORLD |
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HOLDFAST The sea otters at the coast aquarium drifted slowly in the currents, floating on their backs with their eyes closed and their hands clasped across their bellies. One bumped against a kelp, then gently rotated and drifted away. Another floated around the tank until its feet bumped into the wall. It ran a hand over its face and went back to sleep, peacefully pivoting across the bay. I made my way to where my daughter was watching the otters from an underwater viewing window. Silhouetted against white fog, the otters appeared as dark shapes drifting unmoored. I wondered how they ever got to sleep, resting on something as insubstantial as salt water. To slide unconscious on a shifting surface that carries you out to sea -- it's a human's nightmare. Do the otters wake up startled in an unknown place, with no home port and no influence on the direction of the tides, with only the entangling kelp to keep them from drifting down the coast or washing up on rocks? I wanted to gather the otters in my arms, bring them to shore, and wrap blankets around them. A sleeping otter, a sleeping child, moves me deeply, dim light spreading from the open door on the face of a child kept only by some miracle from falling through the surface of the earth. I looked over at my daughter, who had just turned twenty-four. "What are you thinking about?" I asked. "My carburetor," she replied. *** I didn't like the idea of getting in one car while she got in another, waving good-bye at some gas-station crossroads, and simply driving off in different directions. But Frank and I were leaving for a camping trip along the Pacific coast, and Erin was heading for Boston. She had given herself two weeks to cross the country, move into her new apartment, and start her first job. Already her car was pinging under the weight of what she thought she would need for her new place -- books and music and a rack of spices, binoculars, a giraffe lamp, and a pet scorpion named Buddy. This will never work, I had said. If we all cut our connections to home, how can we keep our connections with each other? But there was nothing to worry about, Erin had said; our answering machine wasn't going anywhere. Each day she would call to check in, and we could call the machine to pick up her messages. As long as there was a message, we would know she was safe for another day. We could take comfort at least in that, imagining the dark shape of her car drifting slowly across the continent, windows open, heater jammed to high, tape deck pouring country-western music into currents of cold air. That first afternoon, we called our message machine from a pay phone at the Dairy Queen in Reedsport. "Hi. I'm in Richland at Aunt Nancy's," Erin's voice said. "So far so good. The wind was fierce in the Gorge, but you should have seen the eagles!" I called her aunt's house but no, she had gone out, her uncle said. "But hey, she ate a good dinner, so don't worry." Frank and I drove on and set up camp next to an island of shore pines in the dunes. All that night, wind gusted in the trees and sand rained on the tent. By morning, the dunes had moved a few inches inland, uncovering old driftwood and burying beach grass in loose sand. I walked the beach to see what the storm tide had left behind. Windrows of by-the-wind sailors. Clumps of mussels, blue and stony. The torn body of a common murre, its head drawn back, its throat exposed, its feathers touched with foam. Herring gulls pecked at detritus tumbled in the high-tide line, and sand fleas popped and clicked, snapping up and falling back, making the sand tremble. At the highest reach of the surf, I found a stranded bullwhip kelp, a rope thirty feet from its flat fronds and air bladder to the holdfast at the end of its stem. The holdfast clung to a broken chunk of bedrock. I turned the holdfast over in my hand. Each winter, mature kelp plants shed thousands of spores that drift off in the currents, gradually settling on the ocean floor. Wherever a spore lands -- on a cobble or a pile of broken shells or on bedrock -- nit grows strong green fingers that hold on tight, while the plant grows quickly toward the light. In this narrow subtidal zone, where ebbing tides pull the kelp toward the dark sea and storm tides threaten to toss it onto shore, holding on is everything. But what can you cling to, when even bedrock gives way to the tide? What will connect my daughter to a place where she belongs, this daughter who is driving east, holding tightly to the steering wheel of her car? Carefully over algae-slicked rocks and mussel beds, I picked my way among tidal pools, stopping to pry at a patch of crustal algae spreading across stone like pink paint, an alga reduced to nothing but the capacity to stay in place. A green anemone flinched when I touched it, and suddenly I understood that all the plants and animals at my feet, the periwinkles, the urchins, the acorn barnacles and rock-wrack, all of them have evolved ways to hold against the surf -- thousands of tube feet on a single starfish, suction-cup stomachs for gastropods, tufts of black hairs to hold the mussels, bony tubes, sticky feet, and calcified plates. What chance do we have, we humans, born with two feet and an imagination light as a bird? *** When I was a child, I couldn't bear to leave home. If our family went for a week's vacation -- to a cabin in a beech-maple woods or the shore of Lake Erie -- it was always the same. I would lie in the backseat of the car, feverishly, desperately homesick. Even now, I sometimes get that same feeling when I am away from home. It's a kind of emptiness, as if my ribs have sprung a leak, and when I try to breathe, there's nothing to hold in the air. Back then, I tried to stay overnight at my friends' houses, settling myself on the floor in a roll of blankets, but it was no use. Late at night, when the other children started to slide into sleep, I would get up, holding the blankets around me, awaken whatever mother was nearby, and tell her I had to go home. Are you sick? she would ask -- a startled mother's standard response. No, I would answer. I just have to go home. My house was always locked, and I rang the doorbell so my parents would let me in. While I waited, I leaned my cheek against the white siding of the only place I belonged, and listened to the screen door open with a squeak I knew by heart. But our children dart from one continent to another, changing time zones and airplanes as easily as they change their clothes. Our son was in Mexico, but he's on his way to Australia. Erin has just returned from Greece. Sometimes, I don't know where they are for days. I look at the constellations and try to imagine what the stars look like from the southern hemisphere. Our house has the worn edges of a turnpike motel. "Give our kids roots, and let them have wings," urges the poster on the inside of my kitchen cabinet, and I read the admonishment with increasing horror, imagining a winged and rooted chimera, an osprey, its overgrown talons grotesquely entangled in rocks and root balls, its wings reaching for air, an osprey struggling to be skyborne but held to the ground by all the connections, flapping desperately, almost tearing itself apart with the effort -- this creature rooted firmly to the ground and capable of great flight. Sometimes I don't even know what to hope for my children. *** "Hi. This is me. You won't believe this. My car conked out in the Rockies and these guys from the park towed me to Bear Lodge. There are no rooms because tomorrow is opening day of deer season, but the waitress says if worse comes to worse, I can sleep on the couch in the bar, so I really lucked out. It's gorgeous here -- you can smell the aspens -- and the hunters are buying the beer. So, don't worry. Love you. Bye." I sat on driftwood and imagined sea otters in deep dusk, washing their faces, getting ready for bed on the sea. An otter reaches for a single strand of kelp and lays it across its stomach. In this unreliable embrace, it goes to sleep. When Erin was learning to walk, we went on penny hikes around our neighborhood, flipping a coin at each corner to decide which way to go, coming home in late afternoon sun that flared through sweet-gum trees and caught in her hair. She learned east from west at the corner where Jackson Street points to the sun falling behind Mary's Peak. She learned to read a map driving red-cinder roads through lodgepole pines at night. But on five-lane inbound Boston highways, will she know where she is? Will she remember what she's made of? -- the minerals from lava-flows that strengthen her bones, the salmon, the winter rain that pushes through her heart. Will the salty smell of Boston Harbor remind her of the times she sat in blowing beach grass, leaning against her father's back? This much I know: Humans don't have holdfasts or suctioncup stomachs, but we do have hearts and minds. We have strong memories of smells that have held meaning for us since we were small, smells that fill us with joy or bring us to our knees with sorrow and regret. Certain sounds go straight to our hearts -- seagulls, wind over water, a child's voice, a hymn. We recognize landscapes the way we recognize faces we haven't seen for many years, and greet them with the same embrace and grieve for them when they are gone. You can put down roots by staying in one place. But my hope for my daughter is that there is another way to be deeply and joyously connected to the land even while she's on the move, a way for Erin to feel at home in the natural world, no matter where she is. It's a kind of rootedness that has to do with noticing, with caring, with remembering, with embracing, with rejoicing in the breadth of the horizon and taking comfort in the familiar smell of rain. In the sliding, shifting world my daughter lives in, this may be the closest thing to bedrock. *** Somewhere south of Tillamook Bay the next day, we pulled into a gas station on the east side of a little lake. There was fog along the coast, muffling the sunset, but between there and where we stood, the lake lay calm, a watercolor of clouds disturbed now and then by rings like raindrops on the water. At the edge of the lake, a little girl waded in a shallow bay. Pink light reflected off the plane of her cheek. Ordinary people in baseball caps, people with dogs snuffing around their feet, people with children of their own, stood around on the boat ramp while my daughter slept in a motel someplace in Ohio or Pennsylvania or New York, while the lights of passing trucks swept across her face. In a phone booth littered with broken glass, I pressed the numbers of the answering machine in Erin's new apartment to leave a message that would be there when she arrived. "Welcome home," I said, and I had trouble finding air enough for two simple words.
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