Walking on the Beach I

June 2010

On my first morning’s walk up and down the beach, it was early enough in the tide cycle that there were still pools. The sparkling sun-warmed water felt good on my feet. I looked down at one pool and saw the flash of minnows. This brought tears to my eyes and choked my throat. I walked on and my composure returned.

I am not a stranger to casting tears in with the sea salt. In 1987 my partner decided it was time for me to see the ocean again after years of being landlocked. We had just gotten involved though we had worked together for a couple of years. She knew, somehow, that the oceans were important to me and made arrangements for us to visit the Eastern Shore after a conference in DC. When I walked out to the Atlantic after all those years, I burst into tears. I had come home to a place in my heart that only sea water could fill. That was a period of my life filled with tumult and tragedy and seeing the ocean brought me peace. Brought me back into connection with something deep and real. Brought me home.

So I was not surprised to be so moved by the silver minnows on that perfect morning. My attachment to the ocean is visceral. I suppose floating and bouncing around in liquid for nine months before birth has something to do with it. I was born in Denmark where everyone is close to the sea and knows firsthand its bounty and its peril. Before I was a year old I crossed the Atlantic on a steamship, floating and bouncing again. Photos taken of me onboard in my Moses’ basket—he floated and bounced as well—show a wary smiling smugness that my friends today would recognize. I am told I wasn’t seasick and that babies almost never are as they float above the unseen depths filled with big and little fishes.

I called those flashing — somewhat panicky — fish minnows. I have no idea what they actually were or if several species were represented. Minnows much like sardines may cover a number of small fish with different names. I’d like to be able to identify them. I am a namer and an identifier as most people are — making distinctions, separating this from that, categorizing and labeling. I sometimes wonder if that tendency doesn’t get in the way of experiencing and seeing what we are labeling. Some labeling is of course necessary for survival. Oh yes that is poison ivy or indeed there is a copperhead on the trail.

Martin Luther King quoted Martin Buber in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail and in several speeches. King was using Buber’s I-Thou construction to say why the I-It of segregation was so profoundly wrong and damaging to all parties. Is my need to name the fishes a form of I-It, a device that turns the observed into an object? I don’t know.

Those minnows whatever they are still move me with their darting and flashing. And I feel that what animates them in their days in the water is exactly what animates me in my days. I feel connected to them by the force of life within us both, a force we share.

But when I begin or succumb to labeling others of my own kind I seem to use those distinctions to separate rather than connect. Fat person, Black person, hip person, square person. Ironic that it is often easier to be in an I-Thou relationship with a minnow or an oil-soaked pelican than it is to another person.