Turn The Tides

“Big catch this morning, eh?” I glanced up from where I was kneeling on the salt-encrusted dock, sorting through a meager morning catch of fish, to see grizzled No-Bones Jones hobbling towards me in all of his ancient former-sea-captain glory. The early-morning sun soaked him in golden light.

“No, sir.” I sighed and dumped the fish into a barrel along with some briny water.

“Never a true catch anymore, amiright?” Jones asked. 

“No, sir.” I replied, brushing my fingers through my sandy blond hair and twisting the crooks out of my back.

“I remember in the good old days…” No-Bones trailed off, tugged back down Memory Lane to when the waters of Seafoam Cove were filled to the brim with fish, teeming with sealife- a time before the pollution.

“Yes?” I prompted, which was more of a ritual than anything substantial. I knew what he was about to say, but it didn't make it easier. Expecting pain doesn't make it fade faster.

“We had so many fish, you coulda taken a bucket and waded out there to scoop one out. Lotta us kids did that, 1950s, 60s.”

I turned to the horizon, where a blazing orange sun rose, leaving streaks of peaches-and-cream and teal staining the sky. A glistening sea, perfect breeze, calm, untempestuous sky…  It would be perfect, if not for the shoals of death hiding under the surface, the masses overwhelmed by decades of unchecked pollution.

“Ay, laddie, you breaking your back out here or what?” I turned to see Grand-Pop shuffling onto the dock, placing his walker with a learned caution, bending one vertebrae at a time.

“There ain't no fish out here anymore, Grand-Pop.” I replied, slipping into an easy banter that I had had with him since- well, since I had been left alone by The Accident.

“Seafoam Cove never has many fish, lad. You know that, doncha, Turtle?” I smiled a little at the old nickname that I was given when I brought home a Kemp's Ridley sea turtle and tried to raise it.

“Grand-Pop, should I go out again?” I posed the looming question.

No-Bones Jones interrupted. “No use anymore, not gonna bring more fish in.”

Grand-Pop sighed and agreed. “You hafta hold the company, what little there is left, on your back, lad. Don't waste your energy.”

I stared back at the sky, where the sun was shooting beams of radiance at everything the eye could see.

“Maybe you're right,” I mumbled, propping my chin on my hands and gazing off into the horizon.

If you waded out into Seafoam Cove now, all you would find were the bare skeletal fingers of coral rock still reaching towards an orange sky, dreaming of the days when shoals of tropical fish in every shape, size, and color flitted between them. Now the only thing that the coral touches is dead, empty, brown water. A burial shroud of constantly moving murky silt embraces once-vivid landscapes.

“Remember the harvest of '87?” Jones asked. It was a rhetorical question; I hadn't even been alive at the time, being only fifteen years of age now, but I could see it clear as the sea in front of me, I had heard the story so many times. A decent crop, plentiful fish, and then came my young, muscular Grand-pop, hauling two magnificent sharks behind him as he strolled through the colorful crowd. Everyone had shark fry that day, and the children of the town left with pockets full of jagged teeth to scatter around. 

“And then I went home smelling like fish fry, like the whole town. Everything smelled like barnacle dust and fish for so long, I can still smell it now,” I finished for him. I had heard the story so many times, it was a part of me now.

Grand-Pop and No-Bones Jones sighed in unison and turned to gaze at the battered cabin that, if Grand-Pop was telling the truth and not stretchin' it the way he did sometimes, “Yer ol’ Grand-Pop's pappy built with his bare hands and the aid of the sea.”

That was always my cue to say, innocently, “But, Grand-Pop, doesn't the sea destroy? And not create?”

He would always tap me on the chin’ and tickle my ribs, explaining, “No siree. This here sea is our friend, Turtle. The Seafoam Cove sea builds just as well as any man can- just look at the fish and the corals and the sun. They all came from the sea.” I would giggle and focus on the dazzling waves, glistening with all the colors of the spectrum and more, filled with endless possibilities and glorious beginnings.

Then Grand-Pop began to add something new as I grew up. The first time he said it I didn't understand what he was getting at.” It's the men that destroy, young lad. You'll understand someday better than your father ever did.” Then he shook his head slowly and gravely, lamenting humanity’s fate.

I pondered that now. It was true, we were slowly but surely devastating the vast wealth Mother Nature had presented us with. Filling the life-harboring oceans with muck and the breath-giving skies with smog until all life was choked off forever and that was all there was to look forward to, the endless uniform grey. Eventually there will be a generation of humans that had never once seen a glorious sunrise or witnessed a grey-blue loggerhead hatching or smelled the miracle that was Cordy's fish fry hot off the ancient griddle that always managed to squeeze one more use out, to last just-a-little-bit-longer, before it gave up and died. It was a survivor, just like everything in this town. Seafoam Cove was a haven for the toughest and bravest, not excluding our elders. They had earned the respect that they commanded. We all did. Well, except for me. 

“Turtle?” Jones asked, his voice wobbling the slightest bit. That there, the tremble in the question of the bravest man I knew, who fought against sharks without a moment of hesitation, who braved riptide to save a toddler, who fought a hurricane down south once because he loved his crew and his boat more than he did himself- that was the thing that terrified me the most. Because if he couldn't get through it, what chance did I have in this great stormy world of figuring it all out?

“Turtle, you hear me, boy? You reach out and grab the sun, pluck it from the sky, you understand? Rearrange the constellations and make your own.” Grand-Pop took a shaky, wheezing breath and continued, placing a hand on my back to make me turn to face the brilliant rising sun. “You turn the tides. Spin the Earth on its axis.” His voice became hushed, and a tear budded in his ancient, wrinkled eye. “Save all the turtles you want, Turtle, because you can. And not only can you do this, but you matter.”

“What he's saying is, Turtle, you can do it. I- we- believe in you. You are powerful. And don't let anybody tell you nothin’ different.” I turned and looked at Jones, not just seeing his outside, mottled with scars and wrinkles, but really seeing him. And Grand-Pop, too. White hair and liver spots, walkers and arthritis, wrinkles and eyepatches and tears and imperfections, they melted away before my very eyes until all I could see was-

They glowed.

Brighter than the sun, they glowed.

I raised my chin in a salute to the universe, to all my ancestors and all my descendants and all of the lives that I could amend, and all the people out there lost like me, and replied, “Yes, Sir.”