Sealy, a Rock
by Patty Morris
My head bends forward, feet scuffle through pebbly sand, eyes sweep left, right, left.
Not a big beach. Descend from Cove Road, heels slide on dirt-packed rock—go slow, don’t break another wrist. Four or five paces more—now, plant your feet on the mudflat.
Familiar crunch of seaweed. Trudge my way over eroded channels from upland runoff. September sun cooks up a sewage-like smell—a brew of clams, wildlife droppings, and brine. Blended music of wind-birds-surf, few human voices this time of year.
Two dozen years ago, I’d lace up running shoes in my Ebb Road mudroom and soar to Milestone Beach, ten minutes flat. Now? Add another dozen minutes to get here and many more to complete my search.
There are thousands of rocks. I seek just one.
Its particularities—
-Tar black.
-Length a tad shorter than my palm’s width.
-Flattish on one side. (If you find it, try standing it on that facet. Falls over? Not my rock).
-Once so placed, it should rise three-quarters of an inch at the butt end, one and a quarter inches, and a skosh more, at the head.
-No rough spots. Smoothed by sand for a time—a number of lives by my measure, a mere blink should you ask the Atlantic Ocean.
-From tail to head, it torques—contrapposto. (If you do find it, pick it up with your right hand, palm downward, rock’s flat side facing down as well. Your fingers will wrap top to bottom. Its leftward curve from tail to head will cradle the inside of your thumb, the opposite side will gently bulge into your palm just under your middle, ring, and pinkie fingers. If it does not cradle your thumb, if it is not transformative? Not my rock).
Bent forward, head a pendulum, I scan left, scan right. Scuffle forward. Scan. Scuffle. The rhythm hypnotizes me. Cries of gulls, washing of waves, scent of seaweed usher me into the skin of a young girl, in a place like this, nearly three quarters of a century ago.
***
“Look for things in the rocks, living things and not living things.” Our fourth grade teacher, Mrs. O’Toole, stands large before us, our scrawny frames arranged in a semicircle on broad ledges at Lighthouse Park. Boulders tumble together in tiers that slope upward from crashing waves below. My classmates find sticks, play sword fight—spring sunshine makes them giddy. I break away to search tidepools a tier or two above them.
I scan right, left, right. Quiet life calls to me—periwinkles, blue muscles, tiny pale green fish. Living things as inconspicuous as non-living things. They hide in plain sight—from predators, crashing waves. Tilting 10 year olds.
Each flora- and fauna-ed pool of salt water leads me to another, where, no matter what I discover, I search for something—else. The voices of my classmates weave with wave-against-rock booms below, gull squeals above. I find an arm-length stick, dip its end into a pool, stir until I see rippling life—my reflection. It whispers, “Wouldn’t you like to join them?” A voice answers from tidal muck in my mind, “I am not missed.”
That is when salt enters my eyes and a wave pulls me under. It surges over the rocks to reach me even as it misses my classmates. They play, unseeing, while I vanish—can you vanish if no one has seen you? Oceanic fingers push me down and down, press me underneath and out and out into the wide waters, where searching for something seems trivial—and yet.
I wipe away the salt to see that the hand of the ocean has carried me back to the stirred pool. My eyes find their focus on something tar black and sleek, in a crevice, next to a pool of seaweed and snails. Knees bent, steadying myself with the stick in my left hand, right hand extended, I pluck it up. My fingers wrap around the sun-warmed upper length—the spine, if rocks that resemble seals have spines—my fingertips touch the flat brine-cooled underbelly. My thumb finds an inward curve to rest in. My invisibility disappears.
A cowbell rings—Mrs. O’Toole is ready to shepherd us to the bus. I reach to set my rock back in its nook. Another ring of the cowbell, louder. I push myself to a stand with my stick, gaze at my right hand. It still cradles my new friend, Sealy.
***
A buoy’s clang brings me back to Milestone Beach. My left hand grips a stick, hip height. Did you pick that up? Did someone hand it to you? I straighten, swivel my torso to look behind. A woman and two children ascend the path to Cove Road, a third of a mile back. I twist to look ahead twice that distance to the beach’s end. The ledges look small from here—I might clamber over those today—they are low, my stick will prevent a turned ankle. Continue my search there, among crags and bluffs and pockets of garnet dust.
Long ago, I learned that these are metamorphic rocks, evolved from sedimentary beginnings, meaning pressure and heat changed them. I think, Even now they change and shed garnet to stain the sand around them a gorgeous red, and what if humans could re-become from our heat and our pressure. And shed our most treasured parts for others to touch.
For now, I continue to search the shore. The rocks that might be Sealy in the sand or surf are not Sealy in my hand. Gray not black, salt-pocked not smooth, they torque in the wrong direction or hardly at all. The ledges begin in another quarter of a mile. I am running out of beach.
I look away from the ocean to the dunes and see I’ve just passed the snack house. My socks are soggy, sneakers weighted—incoming tide has washed over my feet. I turn to the Atlantic, bow deeply and ask the dead Merganser, “Will you coax the ocean for me?” I’d found him—the Merganser—in this spot, a month ago, wounded. Avian Rescue told me they could not save him. Still, his mother, the Ocean, might look favorably on my trying to help. Maybe she will cough up Sealy in today’s gentle-rough surf.
Neither the dead Merganser nor the Ocean delivers Sealy from the wide waters to my shore-soaked feet. Instead, they carry me to a place between where a ten year old lived and where I now stand.
***
Years after our divorce and decades before now, my ex-husband said, “I don’t know.”
I’d asked him where my remaining items might be. Were they there, still, in the house we’d shared? In the basement? Or in that storage space, knee high, that ran behind walls like a secret passage from the tiny door in the bathroom to its twin in the farthest bedroom at the end of the hall? Where the kids hid? Where they might have squirreled away my abandoned treasures, felt the magic of connection when their small hands cradled the rock that looked like a seal?
“I don’t know,” he said.
Unresolved loss. Not unlike tangible loss, as when your mother dies in hospice or your true friend, Holly the dog, dies, suddenly, in your arms. Not unlike when the loss is you, and your kids need to know they can connect with you, naturally and fearlessly, rather than be confused by murmurings of, “She is always with you.”
***
At the end of the beach I say out loud, “Yes, today, keep going.”
I trip over bumps and grooves where stony slabs of purple, rust and slate gray meet and part. A vision—Jordan and Alice, 7 and 5 years old, bend their heads forward to examine the red sand. A cinemascope trick later, they are high schoolers who’ve indulged my wish to return here, a picnic. Between my two visions loom divorce, diagnosis, remission—leavings and threats of leaving.
A gull drops a crab on a boulder in front of me, crack. Ahead, a rocky strip of land, a spit, points like a finger to the wide waters of the Atlantic. I scuffle to its tip, where land becomes ocean. I bend to pick up a rock, half submerged.
It is not my rock.
My eyes close. Muted sounds merge—voices, waves, gulls—from now and from three-quarters of a century ago and from an ancient time when sedimentary became metamorphic rock. My body sways slightly. I can’t tell if it is me or the rock I hold that changes. The curve of my thumb nestles into soothing concavity. My thoughts forget to churn, grind, stalk me. A wave surges.
Salt is over and under and around—but it does not cloud my eyes. My stick floats away, my right hand holds a rock. My hand feels cool, my spirit warm. I am something.
Patty Morris
Patty Morris writes stories and songs that call for reflection and, often, for activism. She lives in Maine, where she is writing a nonfiction book about three mothers’ quests to access a lifesaving drug for their children against enormous obstacles that include Russia’s war on Ukraine and pharmaceutical greed. www.pattymorrisauthor.com