peterography

This is our anniversary. 22 years.

Our marriage is a free verse poem scribbled in the fractal geometry of coastlines, as salty and sparkling and stormy and enduring as the ocean. The South China Sea. The Great Barrier Reef. Huahine; the coral reefs of Bora Bora and Moorea. The Isle of Skye. Key West, Key Largo, and Long Boat Key. Miami Beach, Guadeloupe. Saint Martin. Kauai and the Big Island. Sanibel. The North Sea raging by the Ijsselmeer. Acadia. Montauk. The Gulf of Maine. Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Block Island. The Cape York Peninsula, Cape Ann, Cape May, and Cape Cod.

Time and again we’re drawn back to the sea. Whether it’s a luxury hotel with a view of the Sydney Opera House or a hot, cramped below-deck cabin in an old 3 masted schooner on Maine’s rocky coast, we require that transfusion of seawater. As weird and mysterious as the cross-currents of our own lives seem to be, we need to witness the greater mystery and deeper depths of the ocean. In church and synagogue they talk, they sing, they theorize; the ocean provides the practicum. All life came from the sea; sooner or later the good and the bad, the waste and the wonders and all of our sins flow back to the sea. Power, majesty, and awe. Reflection, contemplation and peace.

Years ago we were hiking by the Grand Canyon, in northern Arizona. It was a June day and we stopped to rest in the shade of a cliff when we glanced at the rock wall. It was festooned with fossils of sea shells and the skeletons of ancient ocean creatures. It didn’t seem strange to see this in Arizona, 7000 feet above sea level. It felt comfortable and familiar. I could almost hear the sound of surf.

My own mother was a farm girl from upstate New York who never learned to swim, whose parents were from landlocked countries, who had no special love of boats or nautical pleasures. She had lived briefly near Tampa as a young woman and often described to me the waterspouts she saw out to sea. She longed to return and finally did so when she retired after my father died. And when her time came she had her ashes scattered over the Gulf of Mexico. Some members of my family thought this was a bit odd, but it made sense to me. Walking the beach at Sarasota, collecting shells, she felt at peace; she felt at home.

Today, after a morning of snorkeling off our beach, where we saw squid and parrotfish, trunkfish and sergeant-major fish, we went to Horseshoe Bay and hiked to the east of the main beach, discovering smaller inlets and beaches guarded by great volcanic stones. We found a secluded cove all to ourselves. The waves crashed and rolled, thundering around the black rocks and shooting towering plumes of spray high into the air. Inside our cove, fresh waves from the ocean were met by the earlier ones echoing off the tall black stone walls, cascading and crashing into a swirling cauldron of bubbling, roiling seawater. But despite this, and with my wife at my side, I felt at peace there.