This is the kind of payment I am expected to make on the debt my body has incurred: Jim wants me to participate in his rituals. He wants me to experience the ritual with him even at the cost of carrying me, and he wants my zest even if I have to fake it. Often I try to worm out of going, but I relent because I’m itchy to get out and see the day. Our kayaking is like sex in that emotional authenticity is not always a prerequisite, though it is supposed to be acquired by the time the activity comes to its conclusion.
Maybe a mile across the water in most directions lies another green mass: other harbors and headlands. This is no big open water; the sport is not heroic. All it requires is a high tolerance for boredom, for not much excitement beyond the occasional wake of a speedboat. Stories are made from one thing happening after another, suspense built from expectations that may or may not be satisfied, but rituals are made from repetition. And from the reassurance of the familiar, which is made holy as it is repeated.
Directly across sits Squaxin Island, uninhabited Indian land where a little state park used to operate, off-limits to the public now — though I did trespass there a few years ago when I could walk. On the island I took off my shirt and lay down on the rocks, and though Jim crabbed about my nudity we both did fall asleep, waking to the sound of footsteps, clack and clunk of rock on rock, and I remember thinking that if I kept my eyes closed I could stave off the inevitable encounter with the tribal police. But when I finally looked up, my eyes opened on the muzzle of a deer, chewing some grass and regarding my breasts. I even have a memory of the deer licking salt from the space between them, but I am pretty sure I’ve made this up.
The Indians native to this place traveled via canoes that were formed by hollowing great cedar logs and filling them with boiling water, wedging the hollow wider and wider as the wood softened up. Women’s canoes were large and used for hauling cargo from place to place. They did the grunt-work of gathering, and the water floated the foodstuff home while they steered with their specifically sized women’s paddles. So perhaps not exactly zest but gratitude is the proper frame of mind. Gratitude to the water that carried their tremendous burdens. And now, me.
Today we are going to a place we call Sand Dollar Beach. Because we’re out in the open water where several inlets converge, there is a protected deposit of sand on the back side of a rocky outcrop. Some combination of currents keeps this cove free of mud, which would choke the dollars, clogging the little orifices that are their mouths, at the centers of their flat undersides. The water has little of the murk we normally travel through in town, down at the foot of the bay, whose surface is covered in the summertime with a variety of scums that I try not to blench when entering. It is a luxury to be sitting on top of this clear water. Normally, you can’t see what dwells inside it unless there is a breach.
It’s not uncommon, in season, to see salmon jumping, heart-jolting eruptions when the big fish breaks through and then whops down on the surface. I’ve been told this is how the females break up the ropes of eggs inside their bellies when it’s time for them to spawn. Harbor seals also poke their heads out of the water as we go. When Jim echoes their huffing noises, they stretch their necks and rise to look at him, before eerily and silently sinking.
Inside the water, most visible are the jellyfish: white ghosts that propel themselves by fluffing. When they drift near the surface, I can make out what the field guide says are their gonads, especially distinct inside the large amorphous jellies whose center is occupied by an orange orb, like an egg yolk. At deeper than a foot, though, even the brightest creature is a blur. Whereas the hiker gets her crisp views in the thin air, the paddler gets mostly ominous portents. And this is not just paranoia — the egg-yolk jellyfish really do sting.
There are birds, of course, who traverse the boundary between water and air. And we who live on the air-side of that threshold tend to be spooked or stymied when we see the creature cross over, say if we see the grebe or cormorant submerge and disappear. We wait for it to come back up, but often it just disappears, refusing to give us a neat ending to the story. Because most birds head north to breed, just a few can be found on the water today, mostly the gulls and an occasional pigeon guillemot, a black seabird that arouses us in a way the gulls do not, when it flashes its glamorous red feet. But my gaze requires constant re-supplying; it digests the guillemot quickly and then moves on.
When I was a college student majoring in wildlife management, a professor once gave us the assignment of observing a bird for eight hours straight, following the same bird for as long as possible. I chose a blackbird and found the tedium unbearable — all it did was sit on a sequence of branches, occasionally giving its reedy tweet. Suddenly I knew I could never be a field biologist, a life marked by plodding most of all. My powers of attention were too deficient for me to ever be a romantic loner female biologist with an unkempt ponytail. What I imagine usually outweighs what I observe because life goes by me blurred.
The common run of us become inured even to the rarity if we are forced to sit with it long enough. I think of Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” (see: in grad school I switched to being an English major), in which an odious duke dwells on his dead wife’s portrait long enough to hint at his having had her killed. But then boredom sets in, and he skips on to some other idiotic rare gewgaw that he owns. And this is part of his offensiveness, that he cannot sustain his attention on anything.
I call this syndrome being “eagle-jaded,” eagles having become common enough around here that they don’t necessarily turn our heads anymore. Sometimes Jim and I will float by one perched on a piling, and the bird will outwait us, staring us down, until we eventually check our watches, then turn and paddle away. How valuable am I? it asks, and we answer: Not worth an hour of our time, bub! This is how it is with elusive creatures: we hunt them with fervor, and then when they appear, if they linger, we pronounce them not quite good enough.
I’m thinking about Emerson and Thoreau as I write this: the two craftsmen of our national mental template when it comes to both individualism and nature. “The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with the independence of solitude,” says Emerson in his famous screed, “Self-reliance,” which gives justification to just about any psychopath who feels he is possessed by genius. Thoreau, famous for his solitary stay at Walden Pond (wherefrom he less-famously frequently returned to his mother’s house for cookies), similarly describes the kind of solitary life that is contingent on good health. To either man, the kind of debt I’m talking about — to someone else’s body — would be unbearable, and it seems downright unpatriotic to live a life of such lopsided physical dependency (in sixth grade I remember learning the fact that Montezuma was carried from place to place so that his feet would never touch the ground; it was understood that his indolence marked his treachery).
But no writer of early America’s vintage fetishizes the body like Walt Whitman, whose body electric is a particularly bad metaphor for someone like me, someone who is barraged continuously by her nerves’ stray volts. If anything is sacred the human body is sacred. . And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful than the most beautiful face. In my copy of Leaves of Grass, the poem that follows is devoted to Whitman’s ideal woman, or more exactly women plural, who stand before him as embodiments of the maternal mystery. “Now I will dismiss myself from impassive women,” he says — the kind of women he wants to rub shoulders with are “tann’d in the face by shining suns and blowing winds”: