Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
It is a special thing to live by the sea. I have often taken it for granted, and I am always drawn back. The changes in the color, the waves, the smell, and the animals all put us human beings in touch with the most basic of Mother Nature’s elements. The sea is where things started; the sea is where we belong.
I grew up on an ocean south of here. The waves of the Pacific on my Southern California town were harsh, hard, and steep. I rarely swam in the sea until I was in high school. Even then, I almost drowned in a riptide. The lifeguards of my youth were never the suave, relaxed guys with zinc oxide smeared on their sneering lips. I always remember them working hard: standing at the shore, scanning the kids in the water, shouting at surfers to clear out of the swimming area, clutching their orange floats, and vibrating from the tension like desperados waiting for Jacques Cousteau’s boat. The ocean was sometimes filled with grunion and ‘red tides†of bacteria that turned the night sky neon green when you hit the sand just right.
The Bering Sea is a magical place, and I’ve only just begun to explore it. When we first arrived, it was a frozen mass of gray, blue, white, and brown; the shoreline indistinguishable from the water mass. We walked out onto the sea in our heavy boots, amazed to walk on the water.
Several weeks ago we raced down to the jetty to see the storm surf. Storm surf. It was a call to trucks and jeeps, all parked along the beach and the Snake River entry, watching the crash of the waves on the seawall with awe and satisfaction. Man was made to witness Mother Nature’s power and determination. She tries to remind us with hurricanes, with cyclones, blizzards, and sandstorms. But storm surf lets us sit on the land and watch her fury as she hurls fist after salty fist of spray at the land that holds her back.
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