At Mermaid Ponds, we climb a seacliff of obsidian. Andrew leads the way, crossing a gap to the rockface when the tide pulls out. He doesn’t offer me his hand, and I don’t ask for it. I follow him barefoot, feeling the sharp edges of the hardened lava cut into my feet. The ledge we finally reach is jagged, wet, and covered in barnacles—it’s barely a ledge at all. And looking down, I realize we’re surrounded by water now. The tide has grown stronger, filled the shallow ponds beneath us, the lacuna we crossed. We’re twelve feet up, and the ocean looks like it could surge up and greet us. The ocean looks like the only thing there is. Blue meets blue in the distance, there is no horizon line. We’re on the edge of the world, I think, and it does have a cliff after all.
Less than a mile out, I notice a difference in the waves. I’ve learned to read the pattern, I know what will happen, but there is still no way to prepare: a whale is a miracle every time. The tail grazes the surface. “Look,” I point, as it sinks beneath, gathering momentum. And then the humpback rises, breeching the surface, heaving most of its body into the air.
Andrew has never seen this before: a whale rising and crashing, and rising again, the ocean declaring its secret to the sky. And there’s more than one, the ocean is alive with them: a whole pod, playing and breeching. Andrew is laughing and whooping beside me, and I keep hearing myself say yes. A single, unequivocal word: yes.
I’ve been afraid of the ocean for most of my life. Terrified, even. You become part of the water when you enter it, and no one can say for how long. But something has been changing in me. The ocean is wild. The whales are of that same wild, the kind that clashes against itself just to remember delight. I want the same thing to wake in me. That’s what I’m doing with Andrew on this cliff. That’s why I’ve been throwing myself into the waves down the road, at a beach called Kehena—a Hawaiian word for hell—where people often drown. I used to stay on the beach, never let my feet lift in the water. But these days I dive forward, I plunge under, I open my eyes. You have to want something more than you are afraid of it. It just took me a long time to want it this bad.
I’ve been afraid of the ocean for most of my life. Terrified, even. You become part of the water when you enter it, and no one can say for how long. But something has been changing in me. The ocean is wild. The whales are of that same wild, the kind that clashes against itself just to remember delight. I want the same thing to wake in me.
I am standing on the narrow ledge now. Twelve feet down, the waves hit the rock with enough strength to break bone. I know I should sit back down, but I can see something else moving in the water below us. Andrew laughed when I told him why I wanted to come to this place. “It’s just a name,” he said. Another person would call the figure seaweed, barracuda, maybe a shark. They would be content to watch the whales and lean back into Andrew’s arms. But I am not another person.
*
If you go looking for the origins of mermaids, you’ll often hear the same thing: sailors mistook the shape of manatees for women. But that story ignores millennia of faith. The world over, we’ve believed in a woman beneath the sea. And throughout history, we’ve brought her offerings: sacrifices, stories, even our dead. Children still sing to her, laughing, dressed in her image. Ariel, Atargatis, the nereids in Greece, the selkies in Scotland, the lonely bronze statue of the Little Mermaid off the shore in Copenhagen: mermaids are alive between us, if not beneath us. And our faith in them has a fossil record: fish bones scattered, forgeries buried in the ground, plastic toys piled in landfills, washing back out to sea.
There is so much we will never know about the ocean, so little we control. And the mermaid loves us, tricks us, drowns us, saves us—the mermaid guides us through that unknown.
*
The first mermaid I fell in love with was Daryl Hannah. We couldn’t afford to go to the video store often, so my father laboured to copy Splash off TV, pausing the recording at every commercial break. I watched the movie over and over, holding my breath as it started, waiting for Daryl Hannah’s crimped hair, her naked arrival on land, surrounded by gawking humans. Cut screen to Tom Hanks, young and sad in the city, unaware he’s about to fall in love with a creature of the sea.
Young as I was, with my home-cut bangs and inexhaustible imagination, Splash was the first love story I believed in. But it wasn’t the love between them I cared about, it was whatever that woman had with the ocean. I watched her hide herself in human legs and department store clothing, afraid of being found out. Confused and astonished by the world, breaking TV screens with the pitch of her voice. I waited for the moment she would lock the door to the bathroom and sink into the tub, her orange tail unfurling, the look on her face perfectly content. I had never seen the ocean, except on a screen. I imagined it would be both beautiful and terrifying to encounter, to touch in real life—something like visiting the moon. I was relieved when she finally returned there, to the place where she belonged. But it never seemed quite right that Tom Hanks went with her. He was conflicted, still wearing a suit jacket, forced to jump in after her. I wanted to follow instead. To be there with her, daughterlike, in the glowing ocean. Would I be terrified? Yes. But I also might discover I belonged.
There is so much we will never know about the ocean, so little we control. And the mermaid loves us, tricks us, drowns us, saves us—the mermaid guides us through that unknown.
Excerpt from Imminent Domains, by Alessandra Naccarato (Book*hug Press, 2022)
Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene invites readers to join a contemplation of survival—our own, and that of the elements that surround us. Using research, lyric prose, and first-hand experiences, Alessandra Naccarato addresses fundamental questions about our modern relationship to nature amidst depictions of landscapes undergoing dramatic transformation.
We trace the veins of harm, memory and meaning amongst ecosystems and bioregions; through history and across continents, from the mines of Cerro Rico to the ruins of Pompeii. Arranged by five central elements of survival—earth, fire, water, air and spirit—these essays refute linearity, just as nature does.
Naccarato offers not blanket answers about our future, but rather myriad ways to find our own, individual response to an imminent question. We are being called to work together; to dig a trench deep and wide enough that the fires around us might stay at bay. How do we turn towards the fire?
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