The Interstitial Zone

 My mother and her mother on a rock in Mendocino in the mid 60s

A couple weeks ago I dreamed that my mother and I were sitting together in Mendocino watching the waves crashing against the surf. The tide was coming in so quickly that the rock we were sitting on had little rivulets of water seeping into it's cracks."Tides coming in," I remarked worried in that irrational way that often becomes a self fulfilling prophesy in dreams. "It does that sometimes," she replied. "Look," she said pointing to my cat nestled next us in the rock, "willy is happy."

This dream had all of the elements that I usually associate with my mother: the sea,  the craggy rocks that arise out of it, her  reassurance in the face of some distant threat. Except for the high tide: she lived for low tides. My fondest childhood memories involve clambering around with her on slippery rocks bedecked with crustaceans and jewel green algae, while the ocean roared in the background. I was safe though because she was near.  Neap tides or really really low tides occur when the gravitational force of the sun cancels out that of the moon. Thus, the veil of water that normally shrouds the more liminal areas of the earth's surface is peeled back. I love this explanation because the idea of these two celestial forces being held in temporary suspension and the earth being exposed to itself could be a metaphor for that fragile and ephemeral place only exists for me in  dreams. In my mind, the most satisfying dreams occurs when the tension between the subconscious and the conscious are in perfect balance. This holds anxiety at bay, while bringing hidden truths to the fore  in a way that engenders self discovery and pleasure.  Certainly, the clarity of vision that the neap tide allows resonates with the momentary feeling of perfection and wholeness that is only possible when I sleep. The tide comes back in, I wake up and my deepest desires are once again submerged beneath the surface. No longer palpable. Reality. My mother is dead. Willy is dead too. I can never go back.

Half Way Point

High tides are like background music that falls in at out  of focus as you carry on with the mundane details of your life.At times you fall into a rut, and the endless repetition of the waves crashing against the surf bores and irritates you. Other times, you pause and look down at the water while folding your socks, drying the dishes, making the bed etc and marvel at how grand you suddenly feel, admiring the rugged and dangerous beauty from a safe distance.

Low tides are much sensuous though. Touching and seeing what you normally don't have access to is, really, when I think about it, the whole point of tidepooling.  I remember that an early morning adventure in the pools would start with me gleefully sticking my hand into a row of sea anemones that would close up around my fingers and squirt  at me.  Thus, satiated I was off to explore.


 Virginia Woolf has a beautiful passage in To the Light House describing a young girl's revery over a tide pool. Notably, this is the only glimpse the readers' ever get into her interior world:

Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubberlike anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows in sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away and suddenly let the sun stream down. Out on the pale criss-crossed sand, high-stepping, fringed, fauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was still enlarging the pool,) and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountainside. And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the smoke of streamers made waver upon the horizon, she with all that sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotised and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feeling which reduced her body, her own life and the lives of the people in the world, forever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves, crouching over the pool, she brooded."

After I read that the first time I immediately typed it out and emailed it to my sister with a note about how it perfectly captured the essence of our childhood. It was finals and I probably should have been laboring on a essay about To The Light House instead of stopping to self indulge like that. On the other hand, if I hadn't paused, I would have missed it. 

My sister, Simone loved tide pooling too. Sometimes our paths would coalesce around a single point of interest. Most of the time though, we would run parallel courses and keep to ourselves. Each of us enveloped in our own solitary world with a poking stick in hand. Yes, a poking stick with which we commanded our private universes. Freud would have a field day. Well, he can put it in his mouth and smoke it, for all I care.

"The Sea" by Simone Meltesen

Or perhaps discovery stick is more apt?  Deep under a rocks near the spray of the surf I would sometimes find a lone abalone. Elated and triumphant, I would call my mom and my sister over hollering at the top of my lungs, "I found an abalone. I found an abalone." Creatures in tide pools seem to represent the most primordial aspects of life in that their senses are highly unsophisticated. You rarely see them move an inch even. Sometimes, they pulsate. Most of the time they latch on to whatever they can and stay there. This ability to cling onto the shoreline and withstand the battering fluctuations of the tide reminds me of the way a human infant attaches to its mother and how this in turn is related to growth.

To illustrate this point  is a picture of me a few days after I was born. As you can see my eyes are shut, and my hands are swaddled underneath that blanket.  My body language shows closed off from the world. Except for my mouth which is poised to fasten itself around my mother's breast. In these early weeks, my ability to survive the transition from her womb to the world contingent upon my physical connection to her. On a more psychological level, I latched onto her values and beliefs, which became the building blocks of my identity. And, like the abalone whose outer shell eventually melds into the rock that it clamps down on, the face that I present to the world was born out a deeply felt connection to her. In effect, it through this strong identification with my roots that I am able negotiate my way in the world and develop with out being lost in the sway of the tide. And my sister was right beside me from the very beginning, gazing off into the distance as she is to this very day.

Her website
After the abalone grows his own little house, he carries it around on his back. My sister's Soft House Series represents a similar effort, I think.

 Isn't it interesting that although creative expression is thought to be volatile and spontaneous, it endows humanity with a feeling of continuity in the face of insurmountable loss? It truly is my 'rock.' A true rock.

You can't coax every starfish that you find from it's abode. It's too much energy, especially if the starfish starts to clamp down. It is selfish (shellfish?!) and mean to pry them because it tears off their feet. On the other hand it's nice to stop and hold and things sometimes. And sometimes, if you are quick enough, the starfish won't have time to tense up. Their little feet are like eyelashes; fragile tendrils that curl upward. Except unlike eyelashes which frame the eye, they intersect the center of the starfish's arms (legs?), and are capped with little suction cups that shudder at the touch. They must feel too.