I heard the ocean before I saw it. We pulled up to the house well after dark, three states past the furthest east I’d ever been, and unloaded onto the driveway with the excited resignation that comes after reaching a destination after an incredibly long drive.
“Can you smell it?” my friend asked, breathing in deep.
I took a tentative sniff, and shook my head. “I don’t think so?”
My friend grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the car. “We’ll help unpack in a second. It’s right there.” She pulled me past the house and down what, at the time, seemed like a pitch-black slope, until I could make out the faintest outline of a beach not a few yards away from me. Tired, in the dark, I couldn’t be sure what I was seeing, but the sound of it was unmistakable even in the still air and the low tide.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” my friend asked, and I nodded, overwhelmed by the thought that the darkness had no end because the ocean continued long past what I could see.
I was twenty-one, and that was the first time I had ever seen the ocean. I slept that night as close to the window as I could, straining my ears for the sound of waves. The ocean was a poetic trope, the longing of Tolkien’s elves, a setting for adventure and tragedy. I loved the idea of it, and I wanted to be lulled into sleep like the heroes of my favorite books, but that was all I knew of the water.
Habitat ocean at night with moon at Honokanaia, Kahoolawe, Hawaii. December 18, 2012. [Forest and Kim Starr, Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0]
The next time I saw it was in Iceland. Exhausted from the plane, but not yet welcome at my hostel, I jury-rigged a GPS and drove the 52 kilometers in to Reykjavik. During my researchI had seen the Sun Voyager, a statue of a longship that sat on the coast, near to downtown. It made as good of a target as any other, and so I got as close as I could before parking and wandering down to the edge of the water.
A decade had passed since that night in Florida, and it struck me, looking out, how differently I thought about the ocean. It was, in theory at least, the same water that I reached down to trail my fingers through, alone now as I had been accompanied then. But this was a pilgrimage, for me, and I had come to get to know the landwights and gods of this place for as long and as directly as I could afford to do so. I looked out at the mountains in the distance, and the great stretch of water that extended past them, and thought about Aegir, whose visage stared out across the sea from the wall of a brewery bearing his name less than a kilometer away. This was his ocean’s, and Ran, and even Njord’s in a way I hadn’t quite grasped.
And, I realized as I looked at the statue with its ribs describing the shape of a boat that was itself tied up in myth, this was the ocean of a people. Far more than the coast of Florida, which I had visited in a space saved for tourists and retirees, this water felt like food and travel. I knew before visiting that there was a deep relationship between this place and its people. Standing next to the water, I got my first sense of how vibrant that must be, and how little of it I would be able to access. Throughout the next week, I would hear stories that revolved around the ocean and its bounties, all of the ways Iceland had depended upon it. In that moment, I realized that stories wouldn’t be enough.
I didn’t even understand how to say hello. I had brought offerings with me on the plane, but the size of the water made them feel inconsequential, a speck of dust on an elephant. At home, I knew that Lake Michigan was huge, but she could be pointed, as well, physical and intent upon a body moving through her. In Iceland, I could not even begin to imagine that this distant water would notice me.
The author standing near the Sun Voyager sculpture in Reykjavik, Iceland [L. Babb]
It was another three years before Aphrodite appeared in my life, carrying the now-familiar smell of the sea with her. Her altar coalesced from an estate sale and the pieces of the sea I had gathered over the years – shells, a glass float, a cup that looks like swirls of frozen water that I had originally purchased to be my chalice before my teacher informed me it was the wrong shape. I had very little sense of Poseidon, and less of Saturn, but Aphrodite carried the complexity and vastness of love in a way that tasted like brine. I waxed poetic again, thinking about the vastness of the sea and its many moods. “I am the act of love, and the end of it,” she told me, and I watched movies about sailors and thought, perhaps, that much I could understand. So when I visited the ocean again this year, on the other side of several storms that had left me salt-stained and sea-bleached, I expected her to be the one that welcomed me.
This time it was Massachusetts, a nearly-abandoned weekday beach at low tide. My brother-in-law grew up not far away, and he was the one who suggested that we go during my visit. “We just feel like it’ll be a good thing,” my brother explained to me on the way, over the quiet murmur of my niece monologuing to herself in the back seat. “It’s been a rough few weeks. We all need it.” They turned their head to regard me thoughtfully. “You ever had the ocean really in your body? Like, if you go all the way into it and catch its rhythm?”
I squinted at them, trying to imagine what they might be talking about. “I don’t think so.”
They shook their head. “You’d know,” they said decisively. “You’ll never have a better night’s sleep – but you have to go all the way in.”
The four of us wandered down the beach together, my niece darting out to explore tide pools and bring back stones for us to carry as we tested the temperature of the water, all of us damp with salt as we meandered picking up shells and examining places to set up camp. I kicked at the water and felt cold to my bones where it connected, wondering at how anyone could go any further than their ankles.
“What do you think?” my brother asked, eventually, and I squinted at them and then out at the endless water. Feeling a little foolish, I cupped my hand and took a mouthful of surf.
“I can’t get a feeling for it,” I said, with a shrug. “It’s just too big, I think? It’s not a person, the way I’m used to.” I pushed my toes into the sand, feeling it change temperature as I dug deeper. “I mean, I wonder if it’d make more sense for me to try and understand the local-”
“Look,” they hissed, and dragged me around by my arm, so that I could see the wave break, the fish jump, the heavy body of a seal caught briefly in the light as it hunted. We stared as its head crested, peering back at us, and they called for my niece to look as well, come see quick before he went away.
There’s no blood that ties me to this branch of my family, grafted and still green. They’re Irish, by blood if not birth, dark-eyed and broad shouldered, and I could not help but think of selkies as my brother waded further out, their daughter in their arms. “You know in the Dingle peninsula they say the next parish over is Boston,” my brother said, grinning as if they’d heard me. “But I’ve never seen a seal before.”
The day stretched on around us as we dug and scavenged and chased seagulls away from our cooler. The tide came in, and my niece and I saw our first live clam, dug up by their Baba and spitting angrily at the inconvenience. My brother-in-law and I traded sea stones, admiring quartz and granite before tossing them back into the waves. We watched the birds fishing, exclaimed over the shells left by crabs and other beasts we couldn’t name. Slowly the beach started to feel sensible. We crowded close together, drawing each others’ attention to the newest find, in a landscape the opposite of empty.
Chatham Beach, Massachusetts [Bob Linsdell, Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0]
Just before we left, my brother plunged into waves that were too cold for the rest of us to manage. Their husband and I watched, my pockets holding the two shells that I already knew were destined for Aphrodite’s altar, as they yelped and jumped between the waves, surfing back in, as much at home and delighted as I had ever seen them. A few meters away, the piping plovers darted across the high tide line with their odd little legs and my niece gathered up more oddments for the bucket full of water and rocks I’d been suckered into carrying along the shore.
“You sure you don’t want to go in?” my brother-in-law asked.
I shook my head at him, feeling the sand get colder as I sank into it, water up around my ankles. If there were gods here, I had no sense of them, but I was the furthest thing from alone. “Next time.”
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.