Learning the Oceans

We’ve always tried to spend most of our free time on islands in the water that surrounds them. For example, almost exactly a year ago Joe and I went on this adventure: a very different one than in Newfoundland. There, the ocean was always rushing, (VERY rushing!) clear, and warm. But in Newfoundland in March, we got a whole different view of the waters that surround the world’s islands.

Do you ever really know something until you’ve seen it in all its forms? Can you ever know a person until you’ve met them happy, angry, and hungry? Do you know your dog until you’ve seen her burying a bone and shaking at a thunderstorm? You can’t say you’ve known an apple until you’ve had it baked and raw, and mixed with fragrant cinnamon or melting cheese.

And it means we can’t get the full measure of the ocean and of water until we’ve seen it in all it’s different shapes and temperatures. Hawaii’s warm and clear and aqua blue turns to dark and rushing and cold in Newfoundland. But even more than that, in this different place, in this different altitude, it turns white and powdered in snow, and sharp and clear white in icicles.

We saw all these things at Middle Cove Beach, all these different things we hadn’t associated with oceans before. The icicles especially were on a scale I had never seen. These icicles are not the ones that I knew growing up; small, dripping from the eaves of houses or from power lines. No, these icicles cover cliffs and dwarf onlookers and make us feel like it might just be the end of the world, if there can be sheets of ice this big. That maybe we just don’t belong here next to them after all; that they are leftovers from a world we do not know and should not inhabit.

This is such a great big world that we live in, and we arrive anew in it every morning, and some places simply blow me away about how anyone can end up anywhere, and how we can be there in these tiny and remote places with other people and their lives next to ours.

Topsail Beach, on the west side of the Avalon peninsula, inspires these ideas, with its high bluffs beside the bay. Conception Bay, another version of this dark, northern ocean, is calm and clear as glass this far down.

And if you were to get on top of it, in a boat or a kayak, and were to head straight up the middle that slants northeast, the closest land that you would hit would be Greenland. And isn’t that enough to make you gasp? At trajectories that stretch over horizons, at strange places just beyond what we can see.

We’re used to islands by now, and the feelings that go along with them, and often this constant awareness of distance goes along with them. I think there are a couple different kinds of people in the world; the ones that feel trapped on islands because there is water all around, and the ones that feel liberated on islands because there is water all around; the ones that can look past the horizon in amazement that somewhere past that line a new land rises up.

There are other things that go along with islands, things like feeling I am at the edge of the world, or the wondering about how, of all the places in the world, I could have ended up here. That can happen in any place, but it seems to be the strongest on islands for me, maybe because they are remote and less populated, and usually such a random and tiny part of the world. It’s one thing to imagine how you ended up in the middle of one of earth’s biggest landmasses; it’s another to wonder how in the world you ended up on this tiny spit of land just breaking the surface of the water with only a few hundred thousand other people.

And Topsail beach has all these magic feelings, the awareness of its place that is so far from the rest of the world, a place that seems right on the edge of the world. A rock finger reaches out into the ocean, swings are right the edge of the water so the boys felt like they were flying over top of it, and from the shore you can see the shores of other islands in the bay. And the sun set just on the side of us and the boys threw rocks in the water for a very long time.

All this here, as on Middle Cove beach the icicles grow in the snow and wind.

Bit by bit, trip by trip, and ocean by ocean, we learn more than we knew the last time, we become acquainted once again and anew of the ways the ocean fits right up to the land, with the ways the water reaches out onto the land in snow, and rain, and icicles.

What a privilege really, to be able to learn about something so vast there can never be an end to it.