The Ocean
A Series of Bits On a Lifetime
of Drinking Sea Water

  John Graham

featured in Pax Americana
Issue No. 5, February 2, 2007
paxjournal.com

IN THE EARLY-70S, my dad and his business partner owned a boat together they kept in the port at San Pedro, California. It was one of those Criss Craft, single cabin, thirty-two foot cruisers into which casual fishermen like themselves were apt to sink much time and money. I don’t recall whether they ever took any classes in navigation or motorboat mechanics, but they seemed to know what they were doing. They were, after all, our dads, and when you are eight years old most dads seem to know what they are doing.
  As the children of these weekend sailors, we were drilled on the Three Basic Rules of Middle Class Boating for Minors: stay out of the way; do what you are told; and don’t fall overboard.
  There was not a lot of high seas wrangling associated with our maritime activities—at least not at first. Our usual routine was to putter around the port, looking at the opaque green water, guided down harbor channels with giant hacks of granite on either side—in the port at San Pedro, the only suggestion of the natural world was the sky above and the water we floated on. Everything else was iron, cement and fiberglass. As kids, we would check out other boats—anything looking like our boat rated low on the scale while old, two-masted ketches made of teak rated the highest. Boat owners, on the other hand, were rated by our dads. As we motored by, waving nicely to a man on his well kept yacht, the pithy commentary would slip just under our fathers’ breath. “That guy there? Total asshole. But his wife’s got a set of hee-haws you wouldn’t believe.”
  These three-hour parades around the harbor were essentially designed to teach us what the boat was like and how we should behave on it. We would dock and redock just for the drill of it (drill, drill, drill) and practice knot tying. By the second year, we were good enough—I think—to head outside the breakwater, into open ocean, where the real adventure was.
  One Saturday, mid-morning, we headed out of San Pedro and into the channel between Catalina Island and Palos Verdes. Out there the water is very deep and blue. Thick glasses of ocean rise and fall gently. You can actually feel how large the fluid mass below you is. Creatures thirty feet below the boat are visible as they pass by.
  Now that I look back on it, I have to say that my father was probably a skilled, small time adventurer—or just perfectly nuts—as the two traits aren’t mutually exclusive. What these two ant farmers were doing out their with all of their offspring plunking along in a bucket the size of a small garbage truck is beyond me. I guarantee you that nobody wore life jackets (were they even on board?). Sunblock? Forget it—it wasn’t even invented yet. We had windbreakers, Vans tennis shoes, wore no hats, ate tuna sandwiches full of mercury and drank water full of lead. Diesel fumes? I kind of liked them. Thankfully, we could all swim, as our fathers figured what the hell—if you couldn’t swim after the boat sank then what were you doing out there to begin with.
But we trusted them, because they were our dads. This was their fantasy, playing Captain Ahab, kids scallywags at their feet, jockeying to please the commanders.
  “Dad, look!”
  “Get down from there.”
  Suffice to say nobody ever went kerplunk.
  Out in the channel, we mainly caught bonita or blue sharks. Mostly bonita, which are kind of queened-up mackerel, plumper, with a better name. Still, you could hear the other boats around us catching sharks. There would be conversations whose tension increased as the fisherman on these boats reeled in the submerged fish until they finally saw it. They would be horrified by the animal’s scowl. “Look at the bastard!” they’d cry, swinging at it a few times before finally cutting it loose.
  The blue shark (Prionace glauca) is part Aussie Shepard and part Roy Cohn, with the physique of a barracuda, lacking the big bully look of white, tiger or bull sharks. They’re all eyes and long body. And as the name suggests, they are actually blue, even indigo, on top allowing them a degree of invisibility. The shark skin suit befits them.
  Now, did I mention that Mr. Sarn, my dad’s business partner, had brought a shotgun onboard? What better device to have on board a rocking boat with eight kids between the ages of seven and thirteen than a loaded shotgun? This was the high seas, after all. Lawlessness prevailed, anything could happen. You never know when you might need a shotgun or have to keel haul a crying ten year old.
The old man hated the idea of the gun on board. On this particular trip, Mr. Sarn began discharging his firearm into the tail feathers of some hovering seagulls. Now don’t get me wrong—I love blowing shit up, always have and have indeed blown up a lot of shit—but shooting at sea gulls tailing your boat seemed to have some sort of biblical no-no built into it. That’s when my father stood up.
  “Dick, goddammit. Put that fucking thing away,” a short but decisive proclamation. He turned to us. “Sorry kids,” more mournful of the gun than the swearing.
  Minutes later the shotgun went down below, wedged between bags of potato chips next to the stove, the shells stored above the fridge.
Fishing for bonita (Sarna chiliensis) isn’t the sexiest kind of fishing. They’re oily and smelly and not the least bit mysterious when you see them. But at least it’s fishing. One learns to tie a hook, handle the reel and exercise patience. You imagine your bait—live anchovies skewered through the head, barb coming up out of the back—deep below, held fast in the depths by lead. Are the fish around it? Are they smelling it? Is the mortally wounded anchovy giving it his best to look alive?
There’s a tug, a small hit. You yank the line. Nothing. Not this time. Let out the leader a bit and then reel in a bit. The boat rises and drops. You wait and wonder how you might make the bait more attractive for the fish. You slightly move the rod up and down to give the dying anchovy some hint of life.
On this particular trip technique is rewarded with the whir of the reel—one of the other kids has a bite! Mr. Sarn steps forward with advice.
“Let him run. Then pull back.”
He reaches down and flips the reel. The line stops and the pole jerks down hard, harder than a twelve year old can handle, and Sarn grabs the floundering pole from him.
  “It’s a big one!” he lets, looking at my father. “Dave?”
My dad comes over and takes the reel. He lets the line run a bit and then pulls back. “Got him,” he mutters. This goes on for some time as we all watch in anticipation. What has he got on the other end, we all wonder? More line, then reel in. More line, reel in. Finally my dad bends over the side of the boat to see what he has pulled up.
  “Kids, lookit,” he waves. “Shark.”
  We all peer over the railing and see the black-eyed, long white-nosed blue as he looks up, three feet below the surface. Mr. Sarn gets the gaff.
  “I want all you kids up on the top and out of the way,” dad commands.
We make our way up the ladder to the helm, the older kids distance themselves up the cat walk where they hold on to the cleats and crouch low.
  “Ready?” my dad asks Mr. Sarn.
  “Yep,” holding the gaff.
  My dad pulls the shark up and Mr. Sarn awkwardly swings at it, just glancing the shark’s head. My father, figuring that Sarn would have knocked the animal cold, pulls too hard and the shark comes right up over the side and into the boat. Now he and Mr. Sarn are slipping around the stern with the shark jumping around. They seem like two wrestlers who have signed on for some exhibition bout that has suddenly gotten out of hand. The shark’s tail is strong and he kicks hard and forward. My dad and Mr. Sarn battle the fish, the pole, the line and the water that has accumulated under their feet. One tries to hold the tail, the other tries to steady the head. Mr. Sarn reaches for the gaff which has clanged about the floor of the boat ever since the shark’s arrival. He tries for a clean shot to the head, hitting the deck twice for every blow to the shark. The shark is not giving in. Mr. Sarn punches it with his fist and stomps it with his shoe. Both he and my dad then carry the shark up in their arms and thrust it overboard as it gives one last twist, nearly catching Sarn’s right hand.
  When the shark hits the water it can’t go far. My father grabs the reel and begins adjusting the line to let it go. Sarn disappears down below. The shark looks beleaguered but still in the game as he stays upright, attached to the line and banging against the side of the boat. Mr. Sarn comes back up on deck.
  “Back off, David,” he exhalts. “Let it go.”
  My father looks over. Sarn has come back with the shotgun. “Ah, for chrissakes,” my dad says, tightening the line. The shark backs away from the boat. Mr. Sarn aims into the water and fires his first shot. Then he fires again, and once more, each shot causing the pole in my father’s hand to bend quickly.
  “Get that goddamn thing out of here,” he says to Sarn.
Mr. Sarn backs off and the lot of us kids run to the railing to see what’s left of the shark.
  And there it was, a big hole in its mid-section, slowly descending, guts rampant and mouth chomping up and down, eating its own blasted flesh and organs.
  “Ahhh!” let one of Sarn’s kids.
  “It’s eating itself.”
  And sure enough it was, in the clear water, a survivalist’s three hundred and fifty million year old nervous system holding out against all modern sentiment—feeding off of itself as it was living and dying at the same time.
  As I remember, the others wandered off but I hung over the railing, watching the wretching figure sink into the clear darkness as the other fish, sharks, mackerel, anchovy, rose up to eat its guts with him. At that moment, it was the ocean and the ocean was it. And that was really why you didn’t want to fall in—not because you knew the old man would smack you, but because you knew that once you entered the water you became the ocean.
  There are no humans in the ocean. There is no beauty, no civility. The floating extension of land represented by the boat was what kept us human, separate from the shark and his frenzied guts. Stay in the boat and stay human. Enter the water and your body returns to the periodic table.
  While the periodic table has no symbols for Fear or Embarrassment, it does, however, have a symbol for Iron—Fe—which is what Mr. Sarn’s shotgun returned to after two weeks on the boat.
  “Rusted shut,” my dad said, with contentment. “Damn thing rusted shut.”
  He never did like that shotgun on board the boat. On our next trip out to the channel, he tossed it overboard where it too was returned.

—John Graham
   San Francisco, 2006