Paddle Magic
It was a Tuesday or Wednesday – one of those insipid days from which I generally do not expect greatness – and Alex and I found ourselves out for our evening waddle. The waddle was our summer tradition in the years we lived near the edge of the sea. About thirty or forty minutes before the sun was due to set, we left home on foot and scrambled down our steep gravel drive. Across the road and shared by the same six homes that shared our drive was a gap in a blackberry and wild rose hedge and a set of crude stairs down to a rocky beach. From here we assessed the evening’s conditions. If the water was unwelcoming, we’d walk the length of the road for as long as it ran right along the water. Twenty minutes down and back again in one direction, twenty minutes down and back again in the other. But if the water was flat, or at least calm, and the tide was high, or at least not too low, we’d toe our way out of our shoes, grab our stashed paddle boards, and venture off to the north, following the gleam of the setting sun as it lay a path across the water. A walk or a paddle. A waddle.
It was August: dry, still, warm. We decided to paddle, and for some reason — it must have been the flatness of the water, or the slack tide — we decided to stay out longer than usual. We found ourselves on our backs on our boards in the middle of the passage. Empty, flawlessly blue skies swam above us, a hundred feet of sea — generally restless and churning — opened gently below. We just floated there, each with a heel on the other’s board to keep us rafted together. It wasn’t a particularly stunning sunset but a quiet affair; the bare bulb of the sun merely slipped behind the line of the Olympics. The sky it left behind darkened in that velvety way.
Watching a clear sky for stars at dusk is a magical thing. The first is slow to emerge, the tiniest irregularity in what has all day been a seemingly empty, unblemished sky. I lay there, scanning for anything but the nothingness the daylight suggested, thinking of my Uncle Jeff, who stood in the front yard of my grandparents’ suburban house and scanned the sky for the night’s first three stars, at which point the day was over and he broke his religious fasting. Though I didn’t share its religious underpinnings, I’ve carried this practice with me as a place to lay the threshold marking the day’s end and the night’s beginning since.
Finally, my eye picked up on the slightest glint and couldn’t set it down again. As I watched it, it slowly developed into the star I knew was there all along. Before too long, I counted three. Soon stars emerged faster than I could note, and in too numerous a quantity to take in. As the sky from which they emerged darkened and the water and air around me held its stillness, the stars danced in the contrast. As the birds grew silent, and the sounds of boat and car and plane engines tapered off, I could nearly hear them, in the words of the poet David Whyte:
like a great crowd / of creation singing
We felt pulled on invisible heart strings deeper into the moment. The darker it grew, the more darkness we craved. As the tide ebbed and pulled us north, we used our hands to shield our faces from the blue glow of televisions issuing from the large picture windows of nearly every house along the shore. I understood something in that moment. Something I can’t articulate but is accompanied by a heavy sadness for anyone who can’t feel this pull for all the distractions the world has on offer.
I stood slowly on my board, ready to paddle against the gentle tide back into the shadow of the pier. Whether we audibly gasped in unison or made no sounds at all, we were both arrested at what met our eyes next. There, on the surface of the placid sea, was the reflection of all the dancing stars overhead, some of which leapt and rolled in the ripples our boards made as we steadied ourselves upright. I stood there between the seas of stars, wordlessly praying for a porosity that would allow them to wash through me as they beamed down and reflected upward again. I thought of Mary, often depicted with a crown of stars, or against a background of stars, or floating on them, or wearing star-embroidered robes. The same woman, at times and in places revered as Queen of Heaven, and in others as Star of the Sea. Maybe she prayed for the same porosity.
In low tones we voiced our delight at the extraordinary nature of the world around us on such an ordinary night and our disbelief that we were the only two out to enjoy it. Just then, a dark round head surfaced ten feet to my left. She blew salt water from her nostrils, eyed me for a second, then dove below the surface again where she was astonishingly visible due to the next of the night’s delights – the water was teeming with phosphorescence. The seal flew through the sea of reflected stars. She whirled and dipped and looked for all the world like a mythical constellation come to life, faintly blue and shimmering.
Our eyes adjusted, straining to see beyond the mirrored surface into the depths of the sea, until we couldn’t tell star from phosphorescence. “Can you believe this?” I whispered. And just then, just as I put the upward inflection on this, a shooting star arced across the south eastern sky streaming a thick tail behind it.
Believe it.
We laughed together. A coyote yipped back a reply. We howled. An owl hooted. I almost died of ecstacy.
We paddled slowly, reverently watching whorls and eddies in glowing blue streaming from our flat blades. We reached the darkness of the pier. We spotted a spider crab, immaculately outlined in glowing blue and scuttling up and down a submerged piling. The Cancer constellation incarnate, his pinchers waved expectantly in the current. He descended a barnacle covered beam, beckoning us to follow.
We began, in hushed tones, narrating our evening as if it were a children’s book. Our protagonists peered over the edge of their paddleboards at the little spider crab in blue. The crab played the role of aquatic Pied Piper, and lured them off their boards into the dark water where they sank to the seabed and found themselves ushered in, by glowing pinchers, to an Octopus’s Garden. This garden was a maritime Eden, where iridescent seaweed shimmered in the blue light of phosphorescence coating everything that moved. And what moved was a Peaceable Kingdom of sea creatures: sea slugs, sea stars, anemones, turtles, fish, seals and sea lions, and a kindly giant Pacific Octopus queen, who provided for her guests to sample a flight of eight seaweeds that she harvested herself, one in each sucker-covered tentacle.
They stayed and stayed until they heard, muffled and from a long distance, someone call them back to the surface. They secured an invitation to revisit this enchanted realm at any time they wished, it was always there for them. Then the sea creatures scattered and the garden dissipated into watercolor pigment swirls suspended in liquid and they floated back to surface where they found themselves, dry and on their boards, peering into the sea wondering if what they just experienced was real.
As we spoke the last lines of our story, a sudden breeze broke the spell, scrubbing the sea of its reflective glass and its translucence. We paddled to shore, a bit dazed, wondering if we’d just experienced the most magical night of our lives.
