There is magic in the thick blue New England sea. The kind that shines bright under a cloudy sky. The kind that heals. The kind that grows things that are just good. Good the way milk is good. Or good the way babies are. That kind of good.
This is a story about when I was young, and I had the chance to place back a bit of the goodness where it belonged. It isn't much. But it is what it is. A replacement of what once was. A barter for what might have been.
Sometimes when you live by the ocean, your home is surrounded by bridges and boats. The salt is always stuck to your clothes. It dries your skin tight around your mouth and eyes. Sometimes on those bridges there is traffic. And sometimes the traffic is stacked so high and far you get to step foot on the forbidden road at the tippy top of a bridge that color matches your grandpa's eyes.
Once this happened to me. And when I stepped out the rusty old beat up Dodge 83 my heart moved like an elevator from my chest to the space just below my throat and my hands shook as I grabbed the cold steel rails. It took all the courage I had ever gathered to look down at the toy tugboats and sailboats in the black night sea.
I backed up to the open door of the truck and dangled my feet from the side. I looked around at the strangeness of a hundred people standing on a bridge with their cars scattered around like stones in a river. I peered through the back window down at the big lobster crawling around in the trucks bed like he had lived their all his life. His shell was thick and black and the color of a rusty anchor. His legs scratched along the bottom of the blue truck making the shrill sound of fingers on a chalkboard and the dripping of a faucet all at once. He was supposed to be our supper.
The air was hot and wet. The impending night offered no change. We knew the old lobster would not last long enough to make it to the boiling pot in this weather. I looked at my dad and with out words we swung our legs back into the truck.
Windows rolled, engine roared, and we headed down the bridge. The beach. Doors slammed, bare feet, and I grabbed the fading seagull of the ocean floor by its middle, making sure to steer clear of the crusher and ripper claws. I felt the sand between my toes turn from the grit of the shore to the flat smooth stones that live in the place where high tide ends. I paused in the still ocean, the bottoms of my shorts sopping up the salt water like a sponge.
I floated the lobster down…down…down into the knee deep land of leathery kelp; of razor sharp periwinkles. His legs raised up high as if he had forgotten what to do, or maybe was just so grateful to feel the substance of life. His substance of life. He settled into a cloudy dust of sand and quickly hid under a rocks edge.
I turned around to see my if my dad was watching. He was, and he nodded to me like he agreed. We stood like that, knee deep in it all and watched the sun stripe across the sea, waiting for the traffic to fade.
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