Many Shades of Ocean

The number of blues the ocean holds always catches me off guard.  A coast-ignorant, land-locked girl, I always expect the sea to be a flat blue, the only gradation caused by the wave-texture of the surface, like wrinkled blue cotton, or weathered blue flagstone. Growing up with the dammed-river lakes of southeast Ohio, I expect bodies of water to deepen evenly from the shore to the center.  Wherever I touch the bottom—whether wiggling my toes at the shore, or diving-fingers first in deep water—I expect the same silky silt, rough sand, protruding driftwood, entangling plant life.  Where the bottom is too distant to touch, the murky water makes it far too distant to see.  Whatever lies at the bottom bears little on what we see from shore.  Take a canoe and slide across the still surface, except for the six-inch shallow inlets thick with reeds and algae, the water about the prow stays the same shade of blue, gray, green, or brown, wherever the paddle pushes it.

Silly Ohio girl, to expect the ocean to be the same, to make the Atlantic comparable to a man-flooded valley.  And yet every time I come to the shore, I expect that flat, uniform blue stretching from my toes to the far horizon.  I forget.  At the Outer Banks, Manhattan, Tel Aviv, the Costa Brava, San Sebastian, Cadiz, and here in Ireland, the ocean reminds me—it is not like those little inter-hill likes of my childhood.  Instead of one flat slate, the ocean at Howth spans like a polished cross cut of lapis, it’s deep blue streaked with the bright turquoise of shoals, the deep black of plunges, a sparkle where the clouds open miles away, a green swirl where a current emerges from below.  I stand with my boots balanced across the rocks, wondering how I ever forgot.

I left Dublin in early afternoon, walking up past St. Stephen’s Park, Merrion Square, and Trinity to the train station—one ticket north to the headland that curls above the city harbor.  On the walk it rained of course, not enough to soak me through, just to dampen my hair and the backs of my legs.  Then into the brick and iron station, into the train with the schoolboys in their navy uniforms, young women with their hands hooked through their sweetheart’s elbows, grinning at their outstretched iPhones as they snap photos—look at how happy we are today, right now.  I stared out the window to watch the city dwindle, first to warehouses, then another stretch of suburbs, and suburbs, more suburbs in brick, plaster and gray.  Spread with tennis courts and parking lots, a green rugby field.  And then we passed a long apartment building, with nothing visible behind it but the cloud-knit sky.  I sat up a little straighter, straining to see beyond the shingles.

As someone who grew up among hills, I can feel flat spaces before I see them.  I know how rare it is to see a row of houses, a low hill, a high wall, and not see a single roof, tree, or telephone pole beyond.  That’s how you recognize the ocean before you see it, when nothing lies beyond these short obstructions but the sky, the airy emptiness that belies the water.

And then a cove to the left, tangled brown and black with low-tide debris.  Then a gasp of blue on the right, a bit of ocean seen—flash—down a side street.  Then the houses stopped, the tracks running right along the buff colored beach, an ocean inlet, hemmed north, south and west by rising headlands.  The train ran up the south edge, approaching the fishing town of Howth.

I disembarked and walked the stone pier lined with seafood restaurants and fish markets, the salty-flesh smell of the day’s catch blowing off every deck and out every door.  Something comforting about this reality, comforting the same way walking into an old fashioned butcher shop—“Whatcha got?”—is comforting.  No standing in the freezer section in front of dozens of apparently identical meat cuts only differentiated by brand and price sticker.  You want the $3.48 not the $5.34, right?  But that one has a picture of a cow and this one of the sun?  That one says 2.3 lbs, this one 2.26?  Go ahead, decide.  Not like walking into one of these little fish shops—“What’s fresh today, Patty? Any good cod? No? I’ll have the Haddock then”—the same way these lucky Howth dwellers have done for generations.

            At the end of the pier I paused to admire the Eye of Ireland, the strange rocky island half-lit by the sun.  Watched the primary-painted boats chug into the protected harbor, cranking up green nets on huge wooden wheels, splitting the water into two licks past their prows.

Then back towards town, past the purple, yellow and blue of the storefronts and restaurants, all the swinging signs—Catch of the Day, Caught this Morning, Fresh.  Day-trippers crowded around paper menus taped to the windows.

            I hurried past to the eastward beach, unbroken water from here to Great Britain.  The gulls sounded so romantic to this life-long-land-lubber.  The rocks formed a rough mosaic—blue, white, gray, brown, and pale orange, an occasional green here and there.  Bright bits of broken shells, black and tan tangles of kelp, a bright skew of ship’s rope.  Human forgetfulness enhancing the landscape.  I’ll stand here and look a while.

Up the shore a group of young Spaniards carouses among the rocks, pushing each other towards the water, shouting laughing, the young men hurling dares to climb this kelp-covered rock or that one, leapfrogging further into the surf.  Their dark hair lifts and waves around their strong-boned faces.

Down shore a young couple lifts their toddler over the stones, each holding one hand.  Her red-stocking legs splayed as they hoister her along, her little tennis shoes thrust into the air.  The ocean unimportant, only the boulders are part of their game.

I leave to start my hike down the rougher coast, feeling that human magnetism towards tall, neck-breaking places.  Winding my way up through town, taking a haphazard zigzag through the pastel cottages, which eventually give way to great, ivy-covered homes with garden-grounds and stone gates.  Up and east, the road ends in a dirt path snaking through the low bushes of tiny yellow flowers.  Tourists, families, couples, loners clamber and hunt among the rocks, peering down the cliffs into gull-filled coves, the turquoise-shallow ocean of the beach lost to the indigo depth frothing around the cliffs.  Hiking on, I eventually leave the crowd behind, meeting few people beyond stray hikers, a few picnickers, a tattoo-covered man singing to himself, and one seal who pokes his silver-sleek head through the waves for a few moments, the rest of his rolling body visible beneath the water, glistening in the sun.  Then he sinks and swims away.  I round another promontory, find another cove, look out to find another shade of blue swept across the water.  I breathe in the salt smell and sweep my eyes across the swirled expanse.  How could I ever forget?