Mys. Grey had announced the other day that they would be visiting the beach as part of a new unit on oceanography. It sounded okay. Frankly, Lee didn’t really care. Lee wasn’t really big on science—or any class that wasn’t art. That wasn’t supposed to be an attitude that Enoch students had, but Lee had only joined Enoch because he liked the color blue. He liked the color green, too, and perhaps he should have joined Arkham, since they were green and had art and stuff. But he liked blue better, so here he was, in a blue-trimmed Enoch uniform. Or rather, he wasn’t—today they’d been allowed to wear their sweaters. Apparently Mys. Grey wanted them to be warmer. Whatever.
Sound Lee was just not looking forward to the beach. It wasn’t that he dreaded it, it was just that he didn’t care. He’d never seen a beach or an ocean. Apparently a beach was a pile of sand and the ocean was a lot of water you couldn’t drink. He couldn’t begin to imagine how this was going to turn into a whole unit of science classes. Oh well. He’d muddle through it like he had on every other assignment.
Lee stepped out of the bus into a breezy day. The air was thick with the smell of salt—yes, that was what it smelled like, salt. Lee had never realized that salt had a smell before—and a stinky smell like garbage. He made a face. This wasn’t a very nice place for them to be going, was it? All around Lee was a thick layer of very warm sand that his paws kept sinking into. Sand got between his toes and into his fur in a just horrible way. He took a step forward and sighed at the colossal effort that it took. Why did they have to be here?
All Lee had to do was figure out something by the end of the day that he’d liked about the beach. That was it. He could just find somewhere to nap and bask in the sun, and he could say that he had enjoyed sitting on the beach, or sleeping on it, or he’d appreciated the way that the sand made a good bed—if it was this warm and this hard to walk on, it was probably going to be a dream to sleep on! He just had to find a quiet place out of the way of his classmates. To do that, he wanted to get away from the bus and its gasoline fumes.
Lee set out across the beach, walking towards the sky and where the water was. As he got further away from the bus, he realized that he was hearing a strange sound—a persistent humming, like the sound of an enormous freeway, but somehow softened. The air was full of gulls, each of them shrieking and fighting each other. The combination of those sounds and the smell and the feel of sand was unusual. Lee still wasn’t sure if he liked it or not.
That’s when Lee topped a crest in the sand and he saw it.
It was…
It was big. It was blue, but it was also white. It was water, alright. The water rose up, turned white, and then fell back down in big white froth. The humming sound he’d heard had been the sound of the crashing, endless, eternal, in unceasing patterns. It was mesmerizing. Suddenly the softness of the sand didn’t bother Lee, nor the difficulty in moving on it. He was still sinking up to his ankles, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. He was striding forward, purposefully, his ears turned towards the ocean and his tail slightly curved. Ahead of him the sand flattened out to a smooth surface punctuated by clumps of what looked like plants. Between these mounds, tiny birds scampered in big flocks across the ground, dipping their beaks into the sand, then taking off in a cloud of feathers. Their calls were soft little peeps, gentle sounds, wonderful sounds. Lee reached the clumps of vegetation to discover that they were pieces of leaf tangled in long blades of grass. Enormous leaves! Dark brown, wine red, and a deep purple, while the bright green blades of glass were longer than Lee was tall. They were covered in hard white speckles with strange cross patterns on them, and big spots of orange stuff that was speckled black. He had no idea what they were—obviously, they were rotting, since this was where the garbage smell was strongest—but where had the plants come from? Did plants grow in the ocean? How did they get onto land, then? And what were the white things and the orange things?
The sand here was much, much harder than the other stuff. It was easier to walk on (though still not as easy to walk on as pavement). The ground was wet, too—whenever he lifted up a paw, water filled his paw print, and yet, he could see his paw prints stretching out behind him to the line of leaf mounds. He looked back, then looked at the sea in time to see a big wave barrel towards him. It crashed against his waist, soaking him from his toes to his tummy. His clothes were soaked, and he was almost knocked over by the force of the wave! Then the wave turned back, pulling water and dead leaves back with it, and almost pulling Lee back into the water.
That’s when Lee understood. He’d heard about lightbulb moments, but this was more like a sunrise than a lightbulb being switched on.
Everything…the water… the sea…
Things lived in it, didn’t they? Nixie did, anyway. And other people like that. Things could live there. Fish, right? Everything—
He wondered if the sea was just like the land, then dismissed that idea. The land didn’t pull at you. The land didn’t greet you like an old friend, then invite you back home. Lee was a stranger to the ocean. It didn’t know him. He’d never met it before, and yet, in that wave, he’d felt a joyous love, a want to be with him, a desire. It wanted him to come back to it—yes, to return. He’d been here before. How? When? He knew he’d never physically been there. So how did it know? What did the ocean know that he didn’t?
He’d find out. He’d ask all of the fishes and the crabs and the white things and the orange things with the black speckles, and he’d find out where they knew him from, where he’d been before. He’d find out how they were related to him, because yes, they were his kin, they were his friends, they were his beloveds, flesh of his flesh, magic of his magic! Lee plunged into the sea like it alone held the key to his salvation—for it did. It knew him. It understood him in a way he didn’t understand himself. It was forgiveness and it was love and understanding, it was…
So. Water. Um, apparently you interact with it by swimming. Apparently this takes practice.
“Apparently” because that was what Mys. Grey had said when she’d pulled him, flailing and howling and spitting salty water, out of the waves, out of his new home. She was furious with him—apparently he hadn’t been supposed to do this?
She was wrong, he thought as he sat watching the waves from a log of bleached wood. He was wrapped in an enormous towel. Sure, he was shivering from the cold—that water was not warm! But he was also shaking with disappointment and trembling with awe. He’d found what he wanted for the rest of his life, and what he wanted to do. He was going to find out what the connection between people and the sea was, and why he felt it calling. When I grow up, he promised himself. No one will be able to pull me out of the water when I grow up!
