The Sea Lion

Memories of Alaska: The Sea Lion

I have never been an exceptionally happy person. Since my too-serious childhood, this pattern has persisted into my adult life. I noticed that I was different at a young age; others seemed give themselves freely to the feral abandon of delight while I watched, nervously chewing at my fingertips and smiling when they did. It was not for a lack of trying that I was unhappy, indeed my attempts at contentment seemed so consuming that I ended most days exhausted and misery-rich with failure. A dull grayness rolled over the evening of my life as surely as stormclouds fill a blue sky until the very air seems covered in film. Even now my horizons are not clear, but now when the color begins to drain from my existence, I think of the sea lion.

* * * * * * * * * *

Sea spray lashed my body. I gripped the ladder to the flying bridge and swayed with the Ginny Lee, that tiny and foolish bit of debris in the cold, dark ocean. The winds ripped open the buttons of my raingear but I dared not loose my hold for fear of tumbling into the troubled sea. Through the squalls, I could see the dark band of Togiak bifurcating the hostile collusion of sky and water. Tears may have streamed down my face with the choppy waves, but they had long ceased to be a concern to me. Tears and seaspray were identical in those days, and equally suffocating.

My captain and I were alone in that brackish and monochromatic purgatory. When he shouted to ready the nets, the wind tore the suffixes off his words. Expediently, I timed the waves and thus lurched myself to the deck just as he joined me, urging haste. The roller whirled and began to spool our empty net in the center of the deck. This lack of fish – profit – angered my captain, who took out his frustration on his young deckhand.

Earlier in the day, the local NPR broadcast announced the wind speed as forty-five miles per hour. Now, these violent winds slapped the remains of a jellyfish into my eyes, temporarily blinding me. This was not an uncommon occurrence, so I knew to ignore the pain until my streaming eyes lapped the toxin away and wavy vision returned.

I had not slept for more than four consecutive hours in weeks. My body felt as though it was no longer my own, as though this labor was squeezing my muscles and bones into an entirely different form. I cursed myself for choosing this sparsely cruel existence. Whether through depression or exhaustion in these last few weeks of July, I rarely ate. For the first time in my sheltered life, I had a genuine reason for misery although I found no comfort in this fact. I was attracted to the mysterious constancy of waves, and occasionally the inscrutable ocean seemed like sweet respite.

Since my unfamiliarly masculine hands no longer required the active leadership of my brain, I was left with much more time for the contemplation of my unhappiness. Callous fingers ripped off gills and expertly removed our mangled catch without my active participation. I had become so accustomed to arterial spray that I now only noticed blood when substantial amounts spurted into my eyes and dripped down like tears.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The rollers stopped pulling in the net. I looked to my captain, fearful that he would berate me once again for failing to live up to his forty-year expertise, but his eyes were focused beyond the stern of the boat. I followed them to the buoy at the end of the net, saw what he saw.

A small black and embryonic head bobbed near our brilliant orange marker, oddly fragile in that harsh sea. "Baby sea lion," my captain announced with wonderment in his voice.

Heedless of our observation, he circled the buoy and danced in the tossing waves. Reedy bleats vacillated between amplification and near-mute in that howling air. "Calling for its mother."

I could see the adult, monstrously large in the distance. She cried to her pup, too wary to approach our boat. The pup seemed to hear her cries, but could he understand? Both seemed lost, unable to determine the origin of the other's calls.

We stood on the stern of the Ginny Lee, nets piled at our feet like sweaty clothing torn off after a hard day's work. We watched the pup play sweetly with our buoy, occasionally remembering to mewl to his mother, and we watched the adult keep pace with him at an anxious distance and beg his return. It could not have been long that this drama danced before us, but on the ocean, time is measured in the quality of each raining and rocking moment rather than in minutes and hours, as on land. We watched these selchies bob in the waves until they sank and disappeared to their underwater homes.

My captain and I grinned at one another then. There are no words we could have said. There still aren't.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Now that I again measure time with the minutes and hours of a clock face, I think about those wet and miserable days and nights on the ocean. In memory, time aboard the Ginny Lee is draped in the monochromatic seiche that drains color from periods of hardship. Although then I knew brightness and I knew darkness, now the hours seem to blend into one long overcast evening, wet and cold in the forever of my mind. However, there are brief moments in this evening when the sun catches the waves a certain way and made them glimmer like precious things. The sea lion caught the sun like that, and still does. When I am trapped in the long gray evening of my life, I think about the sea lion and I think it is good to treasure those moments when the sun breaks through the clouds. Or sometimes, I don't bother thinking at all, I just remember and smile.