a five-year-old sees the ocean for the first time

ROILING AZURE WIZARDRY


• On a beautiful sunny day when I was five years old, my mother decided to take her children to see the ocean for the first time. We were living south of Los Angeles, so she drove us to the beach in San Diego, where we would meet the sprawling blue ecosystem called the Pacific Ocean. The first time I saw the ocean, I was awed and dazzled. Its vast blue pulse enchanted me. Its deep salty coldness enthralled me. Its bountiful life bewitched me.

• The sea was magic: a vast flexible blue bubble that swelled and rolled and that came crashing ashore in a curling roil of white foam; and then it ran back out, sucking at the sand and the pebbles glistening with dampness. How could such a thing be! It had an aroma that pulled at me – an odor of worlds unseen, exotic places, great depths, briny, fluid powers of ebb and flow – an odor that drew me to touch its liquidness and feel its fluidity.

• However, when I touched the saline ocean, I fell into it. Its watery fingers grabbed me and pulled me down onto the wet sand and then drubbed me like a giant washing a sponge. I was amazed at its power, but I fought, digging my own fingers into the sand and emerged dripping wet – and cold! The coldness was startling, it was deep cold, a dark cold, a cold that said it had come from far below where no light shown and where everything was darker and colder yet. And it tasted so salty, as if after washing me, the giant had powdered me with a gargantuan shaker of salt.


• Then I became aware that an astounding number of creatures lived inside and around that cold, blue mass of liquid. Beside me on the wet sand scuttled crabs, and in the toss of surf I could see whorls of small fish like massed shadows in the water. Other fish with long fins like wings leaped out of the liquid and splashed back in. Dolphins rhythmically rolled in and out of the water, swimming swiftly. In the distance gigantic whales surfaced and blew spume into the air. Above the sea flew a multitude of birds, hovering, gliding, dipping and diving into the sea. I gaped and shouted, awed by the marvelous life I saw.

• Ever since that first encounter with the ocean, I have adored it. I have always tried to live near the mystical, magical sea. I have traveled over it, sailed and surfed on it, dived into it, pulled fish from it. Most of all I love to swim in it, or sit next to it, look at it and think. I think how endless and wonderful it is, how small I am, and how all life is possible on earth only because of our vast enchanting oceans.

2008

The End
 
I decided to add this essay before the Tanka Time poems because it shows my impression of the Pacific Ocean when I first encountered it and before we sailed across it to Japan.