Is The Sea Dope?
“The sea is calm tonight.” — Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
“Do you feel small when you stand beside the ocean?” — Le Ann Womack, I Hope You Dance
List of people who disappeared mysteriously at sea — Wikipedia
“Is the sea dope?”
When Chris Ryan asked this question, arguably the most important inquiry of the 2010s, in 2014, the answer, to me, was an clear and resounding “Yes.”
It was around 2014 that I first found out about the Mariana Trench and its Challenger Deep. Did you know the ocean floor is 80% unexplored? Here’s a fact, Jack: The largest mountain in the sea is nearly twice the height of Everest.
When did you first see the ocean? Do you like the sea?
I’m not talking about the beach. Beaches are objectively dreadful — beaches are an arenaceous hell, and beaches’ granular specks follow you around like annoying ghosts for days after visiting. Guess what’s terrible: When you try to apply sunscreen lotion, and bits of sand get in the sunscreen, and it’s like you’re rubbing sandpaper against your skin. Please wear sunscreen. UV rays are dangerous. I went to the dermatologist for the first time in years a couple of months ago, and he wore a headlamp like a coal miner.
But the sea? The sea!
Perhaps this is just the perspective of a landlocked Midwesterner (although I do believe I’ve visited the ocean a generous amount of times), but there is something about the ocean that allows me to viscerally conjure most of the memories I’ve captured when I’ve been near it.
In Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck says that “Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.”
How old do you think the sea is? Some scientists estimate water’s been around 5 billion years. That’s an elderly Americano, a wise ol’ bottle of Evian, a long-in-the-tooth slip and slide.
Have you heard of the concept of “deep time”? It’s an approach toward considering time on a scale of geological happenings — which is so unthinkably more complex and vast than our perception of personal years, months, and minutes.
In Underland, Robert Macfarlane says that “deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall.”
“Things come alive that seemed inert.”
Inert is a potent word here — it doesn’t mean lazy or still, but “lacking the ability or strength to move.”
Let me share three sea stories.
In 2013 my wife and I were living in West Virginia. We came home for the summer, then drove from Kansas City to Savannah then up to Charleston, South Carolina, to spend a weekend in the Holy City with friends. Jason Isbell’s Southeastern had just come out, and I remember the brine in the air and seeing rows of kudzu while listening to Cover Me Up on the highway. We went to Sullivan’s Island and ate Publix sandwiches on the beach and splashed in the water and crisped in the sun.
In 7th grade, just three months after 9–11, my family went to Hawaii and took a cruise through the islands. I had just turned 13 and thus welcomed into the ship’s “Teen Club.” There was a fellow teen with a group of his cousins there, and each night when we’d all get together, he’d pretend like he was going to jump off the boat and into the wine-dark water of the Pacific. It was not funny. Can you imagine ever getting on a cruise ship again? Do you know how many people disappear from cruise ships each year?
In 2008, I became obsessed with finding the wreckage of a Spanish boat named the Galleon, which sank in 1715 in the Caribbean sea. Upon finding a clue to where ship’s whereabouts, I convinced my ex-wife to join me on my quest for the treasure. My wife found the gold, but a rival hunter stole it from us and kidnapped her. Eventually, we reunited, got back together and donated the treasure to a museum.
Something dope about the sea; it’s never not moving. Even when the surface seems calm on a still, windless day, the current is churning under the top, and its marine contents are humming with pulses of plankton and molecules. The sea’s been circulating like that for…well, let’s just say, it’s been a while.
“Things come alive that seemed inert.”
Does the deep time of the ocean cast a spell?
When you start recognizing epics and eons along with semesters and seasons, your world might get jumbled up. Your day-to-day, if you’re paying attention, perhaps looks a little different. Maybe you start feeling small when you stand beside the ocean; maybe you recognize what a unique invitation it is to live because of the grandness of this earth whose long-lasting history you’re a piece of.
The sea and my memories of it resonate as a reminder. When I lack strength or lose confidence in my agency, or get tricked into believing I’m trapped in inertia — things are still going to come alive. Living lasts a lot longer than we remember.
It just takes some time.
