The Water; and, In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

 The Water

Tell me. Is it just me? What is your relationship with Ocean? Is it memory, or inheritance?

A New Jersey beach under a full moon

A friend said, “I just love the sea, I just feel the need to be by the sea.” I react with surprise because, don’t we all? 

Another says of a mutuaL relation, “Well, she just loves the shore, so of course she should get to live there.” Doesn’t everyone? Isn’t that why coastline real estate with an ocean view is unattainable except by the wealthiest?

I rarely speak of my own longing because I have always assumed an intense relationship with the sea is inherent in being human, and that even the landlocked would feel the pull if they ever approached, saw it, smelled it. 

My friend who prefers seaside vacations suggests it is our happy memories of fun times with family when we vacationed at the shore growing up.

I don’t know, I don’t believe my feeling for the ocean is merely a matter of taste. For those who experience feeling an ocean connection, (don’t we all?), then I surmise it is a very deep history in us, archetypal. A friend at the pool talks about her love for the water, and says it’s genetic; her father was in the Navy. I see in her perhaps the Irish, and the Vikings, so I wonder if it goes back even further. My own ancestors crossed the Atlantic, all from places of Eastern European mountains, forests, farms--and all with beachy coastlines--the Adriatic, Baltic, Black Seas.

It’s not just wading as a child or building sand castles, or the fondness for long days outdoors with parents and siblings, meeting new playmates on the beach, splashing, sunburned skin, gritty bathing suits, boardwalk rides, lights and music out after dark, treats only eaten there, ceaseless wind, shells, seaweed smells, fish and sea monsters.

For me at least, it’s something bigger than happy memories. The sea is something bigger. 

As a baby reader, my favorite book was a funny one guessing the creature, (a whale): “There’s a hole in my head.” And my next favorite, the abridged Moby Dick my mother read to us, with gory illustrations. And Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea! Swiss Family Robinson, abandoned in a shipwreck on a desert island! Treasure Island. 

I grew up Mid-Atlantic coast. I loved any artifacts of fishermen and sailors and pirates, naval ships and submarines, storms and shipwrecks, marine animals, driftwood and egg cases. Mermaids, silkies. Nymphs and gods.

And next: remember paperback romances sold on a rack in the drugstore? They weren’t smutty yet; anything resembling the spicy romance market currently sold online, would assuredly have been in paper covers behind the counter with the men’s magazines. On the drugstore rack, with the comic books, I found a romance about a whaler’s “widow”, nineteenth century dread and desire anxiously interpreting the sea. I fell in love, with New England. 

And I grew into multiple readings of the big Moby Dick, and obsessions with Gloucestermen and the Perfect Storm, Jaws, The Deep, The Abyss, Titanic museums. And the something bigger: it’s something about awe, isn’t it. I became a science fiction reader and viewer, it was in the culture, with the space program. Space horror. The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. The spooky fun house down the shore on the boardwalk was made over into scenes of abandoned astronauts on stark hostile planets in the vacuum. I’ll never forget it.

I also love John Carpenter’s The Thing. I yearn for Antarctica like the ocean, even though it’s frozen. I could easily live confined in a trailer in a huge hostile winter marine environment, doing science at the interface.

Ocean, mountains, glaciers, the appeal is immensity and power. I want to be one with it.  Maybe it is like my fear of heights, which I experience as an urge to throw myself off the precipice. Sylvia Plath walking deep into the waves? Tolkien’s Western lands across the sea, the end of the elves? More like: the experience of certain music which moves one so deeply. The experience of church. The awesomeness, the awfulness, of an all powerful god. The sinking of ships, twisters, earthquakes. Pinocchio inside a whale.

I remember the shore as a teenager, the deliciousness of being there in the skin. We didn’t need to eat when we were at the beach. Something else filled us. The sun, salt, wind, waves, our only nourishment, no need to leave, dawn to dusk on the beach. I know that if I were there on this very day, for weeks, at most all I’d ever want is a hot cup of coffee.

In addition to The Perfect Storm and Apollo 13, one of my favorite movies is Blueback. It is the fantasy environmentalist beachside living I would choose, had it occurred to me I could choose it. I recommend it because the diving scenes are long and relaxing, soothing. I still sleep best on sheets printed with sharks, with underwater marine footage on TV.

A boyfriend taught me the shocking strength of men, there at the shore, when he picked me up under one arm and ran across the beach. Once, when I was a teen on a date, I had to be saved by two lifeguards, when caught in a rip tide. The guard was so strong and spoke to me so gently until his tension came through in his voice, when he cursed at the other guard who threw a flotation device at my head. I was so embarrassed that I ran off when I hit the sand, without thanking him. My white bikini was transparent when soaked, plus I’d stupidly floundered into the risk zone, at the tide’s mercy, and so I had risked their lives too.  I wish I could thank him, I’ve prayed my gratitude many times, you strong young men. I apologize for my foolish self, who invited the risk when I put myself in the situation. In those days we always apologized, too, for putting ourselves in the situation, when we suffered the force of a young man’s strength. Whether that force is or is not like the risk of the sea is for another conversation.

I chose a college with the requirement that it have a Semester at Sea opportunity with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Would I major in marine biology, or English? English and poli sci it was. I rejected fields demanding much mathematics. I completed two semesters of core Oceanography, weakly. Friends teased it wasn’t the poetry on the beach I’d anticipated. (All those arrows and currents! Now I wish I’d paid more attention, whenever I am impressed by marine navigators in movies.) I didn’t do the sea semester, calculating that I wasn’t from the economic class with sailing experience, or extra funding, (a la Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws).Mostly I recognized that maybe I tend more toward contemplation, armchair adventure, than action, and doubting I had the physical energy for deck-swabbing. (Though I am never seasick! That’s DNA!)

I never dream of flying; my dreams are often of floating in the open sea. A Jungian friend said an inclination for water rather than the sky was about inner space over extroversion; but what of my mirror of the ocean, in outer space?  I always believed I’d end up living at the shore, but I’ll blame my failure on both my generation and my personal character: we were the first after our homemaker mothers, suddenly expected to compete in men’s professions. I didn’t think about how to make dreams into goals to be achieved. I always floated, waiting to see what opportunities happened by, more a Jane Austen character when I should have been Horatio Alger. So I haven’t made my home on the beach, though the shore is still a short drive from home, a day trip. And for when I couldn’t get there, I joined our local astronomical observatory on top of a forested mountain. But I found that after all, stargazing is not quite the same as the tidal tug on me. Our home planet, after all, is the blue one. 

In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes

I thought this book would be sci-fi. It won the Arthur C. Clarke award this year. It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year. To my surprise and pleasure, the main character is an ocean explorer who ends up on an astronaut mission. In Ascension is a compelling read but its plot arc and meaning are not obvious ones, and I don't promise I really get it. I avoid speculation here about what happens at the end to avoid spoilers.

Because of the deep connection between humans and all life, and our origins under the sea or in the furthest reaches of outer space, the story interweaves complex and mysterious family relations of two sisters, their abusive father and distant mother. The characters never really manage even in extreme travel or isolation to get far away from that family entanglement.

The family are Dutch, with their national legacy of life reclaimed from the sea. Narrator Leigh discovers a passion for swimming further and further out. Under the surface she abruptly encounters what will be her life’s cause:

…I realised, suddenly, with appreciation, that absolutely everything around me was alive. There was no gap separating my body from the living world. I was pressed against a teeming immensity, every cubic millimetre of water densely filled with living stuff. These organisms were so small I couldn’t see them, but somehow I felt their presence, their fraternity, all around me. I didn’t look through the water towards life, I looked directly into water-life, a vast patchwork supporting my body, streaming into my nostrils, my ears, the small breaks and crevices in my skin, swirling through my hair and entering the same eyes that observed it. In what felt like minutes, but must have been only seconds, I saw a completely different world, a place of significance and complexity, an almost infinite number of independent organisms among which I floated like a net, scooping up untold creatures with every minor shift and undulation of my body.

When she returns to her bundle of clothes and dresses, “I felt I was only now inhabiting a personality, that until I entered these pre-set shapes I was diaphanous, and this form did not necessarily match up with who, or what, I was.”

As a marine microbiologist, Leigh joins an expedition where she and other divers explore an unimaginably deep subterranean trench and hydrothermal vent. A discovery of ancient bacteria ultimately weaves into Leigh’s work on growing DNA enhanced algae for a food source for space exploration. When a technology breakthrough finally enables faster and farther human space travel, Leigh trains astronauts in her algae agriculture, not only for food but for the benefit of gardening for their sanity on long voyages.

When a mysterious communication signal is received from the outer edges of the solar system, an investigatory mission embarks, including Leigh.

Ascension is a secret island, a place where even the weeds pushing up through pavement are a "miracle", where Leigh’s sister Helena attempts to investigate, with another relative of the crew, the status of the space mission.She further explores their shared history.  Like the sea turtles Helena sees there, with their “amphibious wisdom of 100-million-year-old eyes”, we have no option not to come home.

I did enjoy reading this book, but felt disappointed afterward, I don’t know why; I think most science fiction ends in some level of disappointment for me. Maybe I want to keep going somewhere else. 

Upon reading In Ascension, I did look at the world with new eyes, maybe akin to how it feels for astronauts to see our blue home in the window set against the blackness of space: a novel sense of relatedness with all inhabitants, and a protectiveness of the world. 

Leigh’s mother had once told her, “Everyone is a parent. That’s what getting old is: catastrophic senescence. That’s what dying is. You become a parent. You fall into the stream.” (I often joke, as a literal parent of children, that we are the dead wood from which fungus springs.) I like MacInnes's take on our universal parentage of what comes next.

I read his lesson about whale breath and navigation as a personal directive to continue exploring the world with language as long as I am breathing:

“...[W]hen whales rise out of the water to gather breath they incidentally collect images – terrestrial and astronomical markers – that become essential in their long migrations. Breath is an opportunity, and whales registering constellations is no more outlandish than the language we carve from air.”

The Sea Spicer

Another beach in New Jersey