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Organizations

Hillary Hauser

Heal the Ocean

Swimming out from shore with the flannel sleeves of my

nightshirt flopping about, I roll onto my back and float with my ears

underwater. I admire the puffy clouds with their golden underlinings,

the Santa Ynez mountains turning lighter purple, a jet airplane far

above on its way to somewhere important.

I turn over and begin a slow breaststroke, and the sea responds

with its old, familiar, swirling sound. The water is crystal clear, the

gathering autumn chasing away the last of the summer plankton

blooms. For the past week I’ve been able to see small fishes flitting

about like underwater hummingbirds, the spotted horn sharks

dashing across the sand bottom at my approach. The clarity of the

water will vanish suddenly one day soon, when a storm wind roils the

sea into winter swells and permanent cold. There will be heavy rains,

and the creeks will flood the sea with debris and mud. For years I

swam during storms, too, because I have always loved the turbulence

of Nature as well as her calms. Today, the driftwood rage is inside

me, an encapsulated storm in the mirrored reflection of the sea.

A sudden memory brings sudden tears. Looking back does no

one any good. Like Lot’s wife, you turn to salt. Saltwater bathes my

eyes from within and without, everything runs down my face and my

tongue cannot tell the difference between my tears and the ocean. Salt

within, salt without, and I am dissolving.

My romantic relationships have sabotaged me! God, I am 51

years old! Time is running out. No, it’s already gone. I have failed in

my earth life to find happiness with any man. I am doomed to

aloneness.

The ocean softens a harsh landscape, makes a desert bearable.

Like the Sinai, or Saudi Arabia. A hundred feet from the shore you

blister, you can barely breathe, but step into the ocean and you are

immersed in beauty and in life.

My husband and I often camped in the Baja desert, where dark-

winged vultures soared overhead, their bare, pencil-thin heads red as

if dipped in blood, searching for carcasses of giant stingrays or

rotting turtles. Where we camped there was not the majestic cardone,

the biznaga, agave, cholla, nopal or yucca. Nor the baffling boojum, a

strange cactus that looks as if it is waving its arms wildly every which

way. All we could see for miles was low-lying thorny scrub.

A hundred feet from our camp, however, a turquoise sea rushed

into a sandy cove, caressing the thorns of the desert, nullifying the

venom and stings of scorpions and rattlesnakes, the disturbing flight

of the bloody-headed vulture. Just offshore, bright orange garibaldi

swam through thick iridescent green sea grasses, and schools of black

and white-striped sergeant majors swarmed in blue sunlight. Huge

lobsters hid in rocks, and big corbina and grouper dodged back and

forth between the shallows and the open ocean, cool and sure.

In the Baja desert, fish camps and sea villages flourish in

contrast to inland pueblos and ejidos whose major business are

llanterias, tire shops. In Baja, the ocean softens the harsh landscape,

washes scarcity with abundance, provides life itself. On this morning

at Miramar Beach, I consider the ocean with new awareness. With

extreme kindness, it soothes the heart that has been severely

scorched.

“It’s Holy Water!” says my friend Tamara. “The very best thing

you can do for yourself is throw yourself into it!”

I throw myself in day after day: into Okeanos, Oceanus, the

origin of all things, including the gods themselves. Hesiod described

Oceanus as a Titan, son of Uranus and Ge, heaven and earth. I swim

in this bond between heaven and earth, hoping for a miracle that the

rattlesnake sting of broken vows will be softened by the magnificence

of the deep and bottomless sea.

In mythology the sea often serves as a symbol of the subcon-

scious mind. Herman Melville wrote that a man in the deepest of

reveries will infallibly be led to water. “Yes, as everyone knows,” he

wrote in Moby Dick, “meditation and water are wedded forever.”

The sea, the sea. My friend the sea. Enveloped in the subcon-

scious, wallowing in this mix-up of heaven and earth, I will float and

meditate and wait for the message from Okeanos.

A pelican as big as a turkey skims along the surface, a perfect

flight machine in which not a muscle or feather stirs. Suddenly, the

big bird rises up, wings back-pedaling, and makes a crash-dive by

my head. A fish disappears down its throat while a scavenging

seagull swoops in for scraps. The Ogden Nash limerick goes through

my mind: pelican, belly-can, hell-he-can. The bird takes off to check

out other possibilities of the morning.

Human relationships are like swimming. You float, you sink, you

never know what lurks beneath the surface. Beware who you kiss!

You may be diving into a current you cannot swim against, your fate

can change in an instant.

The fickleness of vows has changed society, has put women into

the workplace instead of the hearth, and what can we do about it?

Scanning the entrapment of our mothers, who suffered neglect at the

hands of our fathers, we tell ourselves, "Not us, not us!" We will

remain capable of independence. We will have jobs, keep our talents

up. We will keep one foot in the family, one foot in the ability to

escape. The two-edged sword! By being vulnerable and open, what

does a woman do when she has made herself vulnerable to one who

has ceased to care?

One foot in or out, marriage can make a woman soft. I have spent too

much time cooking favorite dinners, cleaning house, and watching

television in tandem when I should have been rustling up writing jobs. I

am not up to earning speed and this scares me to death.

I breaststroke toward the moon, and Fernald Point, where

enormous mansions of the very rich are tucked away amid miniature

jungles of towering pines and cypress trees. Tennis courts, swimming

pools, and beach cabanas with fully stocked bars are everyday

settings for chairmen of the boards, heirs to fortunes and a man who

rented a cottage so that he could easily rob neighboring houses of

their expensive artworks.

There was the multi-facelifted woman who at 80 wore a black

velvet bathing suit to walk her white poodle down the beach, and a

drug dealer who was stabbed to death by his wife’s lover. I remember,

too, old Mr. Bulmash, who would walk each day to the edge of the

sea at Fernald Point with his butler, who would unfold a chair for Mr.

Bulmash, then wait patiently while his master sat and quietly

contemplated the waves.

There is a blue-roofed hotel with a boardwalk in the middle of

Miramar Beach. When I was ten years old my family moved to Santa

Barbara, and we lived for six months in one of the hotel cottages

while my parents searched for a house to buy along the beach. The

sea was a wilder place, then, full of kelp, lobsters, bottom sharks,

halibut, and on either end of the beach, tidepools of anemones,

barnacles, mussels and living shells. I got lost for hours in these

places, lost in solitude and tidepools, and during the other hours I

practiced Beethoven and Mozart on the piano. The solitary life, the

solitary life.

The child is the true inner self. Find the child, they say, and you

are healed. I am alone, swimming off Miramar Beach, I have returned

to what I was doing at age ten, and everything in between has been an

aberration.

There is not a soul stirring in any of the houses on the west end of the

beach, but there is smoke curling up from a couple of chimneys. This

colorful assortment of narrow wood cottages on stilts and pilings are

crowded together porch-to-porch. They were once homes to fishermen,

sea captains and divers who used lobster traps for chairs, wooden spools

for tables, everything moldy, rusty and very real.

Now the houses are decorated in Laura Ashley prints, bought

and sold by rich people from Beverly Hills or Hollywood. The mold,

the rust and the wooden spools have been replaced by glass and

brass. To every thing there is a season, turn, turn, turn. Time moves

on, and we only experience pain when we resist going with it.

I turn over on my back and kick, tossing up the sea from my feet

like a salad. I think of the primitive ocean as a golden heart pure and

undefiled, with a smooth water-skin that has never seen oil, disease,

misuse, tankering, sewage, nuclear waste, accidental spills of lethal

"What Has the Ocean Made You

Realize About Yourself?"