An “Island” Larger than Land

Some of my most delightful opportunities to see the other-worldliness of Nature have been when I've gone to certain restaurants.  No, it was not the samples of Homo sapiens I was watching (although people-watching can be interesting too).  Instead, these were restaurants that had a saltwater aquarium on display for the entertainment of customers.

After dining, I spend time peering into this saltwater world, watching for movement so that I can spot the life-forms other than the obvious fish.  Did I as a child think of all animals as being symmetrical with a right and left side?  Here, in this salt-water world, that idea is disproved. Here, circular is the game.  Circularity allows creatures that have no obvious face to be sensitive to the world in a full 360-degree perimeter.

I spot a sea anemone, its innumerable tiny arms ready to grab some passing prey.  Most camouflaged is the coral, which has taken evolution's advice to look like a rock most seriously, building its own rock-like castle for a colony of nearly microscopic beings to share.  Eventually, I have to leave this bit of ocean world trapped behind glass and come back to our human world of restaurant and city.

Of course, I have a number of times gone to the beach.  But those seashells strewn on the sand are only stone monuments to the dead, the living organisms that once inhabited them having passed on.  Those seashells are merely hints of the life that lives out beyond the water's edge.  They are only inanimate fragments hinting of the life beyond.

I did once get a closer glimpse into ocean life than an aquarium provides when my wife and I visited the tide pools on the Pacific coast of Olympic Natl. Park.  Roaming the beach, we stopped at each small depression of sand that held some temporarily trapped seawater with living inhabitants.  The best find were tiny starfish with five 1-inch arms.  However, as we examined the life-forms in the tide pools, we knew they would soon be covered over with the rising tide, thus being taken back into their rightful ocean home.

The oceans on this planet are to me something like giant tide pools, pocketed away from our life here on land.  The oceans are like isolated islands of life, even though they cover a greater area of the Earth's surface than does land.

Locked away in their own world of life, the oceans whisper to me some message of eternity for a reason I cannot quite explain.  However, Rachel Carson heard, I think, the same whisper when she wrote:  "To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides... is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.  These things were before ever man stood on the shore of the ocean .... They continue year in, year out, through the centuries and the ages, while man's kingdoms rise and fall."

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How has it felt to you to go to a beach or the ocean?

(The Carson quote is from Under the Sea Wind, © 1941.)