Outgoing Tides | Olivia London
I paddle toward the osprey perched on its piling above the docks where it watches over us, watches over me, I like to think, all the times I’ve been here moodily pacing the dock or sneaking off on the boat with my dad. I pass the salt-worn, sun-bleached branches of the submerged tree reaching out over the marsh like witch arms from a haunted house. It’s October and for the first time in my life I find no joy in the monsters and skeletons and bloody gravestones popping up, disconcertingly, everywhere. My eyes linger on the rugged tree, holding its place through high tides and low, until one day pieces of it will wash up on a shore somewhere as driftwood. I kayak past boat lifts and backyards where children play with a golden retriever, unconcerned that somewhere inside their home their father’s heart ticks toward an end date.
I’m wearing my dad’s neon green sun shirt from Steinhatchee, the one I picked for him with the image of a girl snorkeling downward in search of scallops. At the time, I’d asked if he would prefer one of the more macho designs, a speargun or a shark. But he liked the one I chose. My dad was always easy to spot in his neon shirts and I know now, as I kayak past the porch where his widow sits, glaring out over the water from the depth of couch cushions and glasses of wine, that she can see me passing like a flare. His widow. I struggle with what to call her now, whether to say his wife or my stepmother, when the name for our relationship was fraught even before. I fix my eyes on the water ahead as my kayak slices through the canal toward the Intracoastal Waterway.
It has been three days since my dad died and I am in limbo, staying in Jacksonville at my uncle’s condo, just a cluster of docks away from where my dad lived, waiting for something to happen next, though I don’t know what. My aunt has been chain smoking on the porch while I sit with a book in my hands, pretending to read. At thirty-two years old I feel too young to know how to handle any of this, yet know I am too old for anyone to handle it for me. Neighbors stop by and, when they realize who I am, awkwardly hug me. One presses my head into her shoulder so I can barely breathe and begins to pray while I wait to be let up. The kayak is an escape, a chance to stir up the silt of misery settling in around us.
My uncle told me to paddle away from the bridge where the current rips. And he made me take my phone along in case anything happens, my phone on which now two of the people on speed dial are unreachable. For six years I’ve kept the tiny image of my grandma’s face smiling out at me from the screen. Now she and her youngest son sit beside each other in their glowing circles that lead to disconnected phone lines.
I paddle south along the wide stretch of Intracoastal Waterway until I find a quiet entrance into the marsh. I wind my way into its narrowing channels until only wispy needles of marsh grass stand tall beside me and my vision is nothing but grass, mud, sky, and the water reflecting it all back again. It’s hard to find places where only nature hems you in and, in truth, I have to sit at an angle to avoid a building entering the scene. I rest a moment, drifting and trying to settle, to feel a sense of peace, a sense of anything. Only later will I be able to look back and see myself in shock, at a loss, still unaware of the many shapes and forces of grief yet to hit me.
I paddle back to the main waterway and see the fins of dolphins pursuing food, lazily rising up, cruising alongside the marsh. I follow, weaving in and out of muddy islets. I want to believe this is a sign from my dad, but I am not sure yet whether I will be a person who believes in signs. I want to see ghosts and surely believing in signs is a prerequisite to seeing ghosts. I conjure memories of my dad at the wheel of a boat on this same stretch of water, betting me a quarter that he’d see the first dolphin of the day. I remember the chill as my t-shirt blew in the December wind and he pushed down the throttle to catch up to his friend’s tugboat, saying something I couldn’t hear over the sounds of the motor and wind. The memory is like an invisible layer over the water and maybe that’s all a ghost is, another layer, or the echo of my dad’s voice barely audible over wind and motor. But today there is no sound of motor or wind. Or my dad. Today all I hear is the quiet dipping of my paddle into calm water. I watch the dolphins’ sleek gray fins rise and fall and I think my dad will never haunt me.
***
When I was young, maybe 14, my dad, my uncle, their friend Jeff and his son Sam, and I went fishing a few miles off the coast of Jacksonville. I was at the wheel puttering endlessly in the sun as my uncle pointed for me to go one direction and Jeff told me to go the other. My dad and I silently locked eyes, him giving an eye roll and an impish grin as if to say these guys.
I suddenly caught the distinct roll of fins splitting the water near us and I turned the boat to drift in their direction. Though unaware that conservationists would prefer we not approach wild dolphins, I knew enough to quickly kick the engine into neutral to stop the propellers before a pod of dolphins surrounded us, including a baby’s fin surfacing alongside its mother. My dad immediately went for his mask and fins stashed in the back of the boat, fishing instantly forgotten. He told me to get in the water with him. I must have been a little hesitant, miles offshore among wild animals, but I handed the wheel to my uncle and put on my gear, my dad already holding his mask against his face and tipping backwards over the edge of the boat. Sam and I followed.
I was used to diving in places like the Keys, seeing coral, or seagrass, or sandy bottom beneath me. But here, in the depths of the Atlantic, I looked down into deep cobalt blue pierced with rays of sunshine and then dark abyss. We swam toward the dolphins who stayed near the boat, curious. Sam and I glued ourselves to each of my dad’s hips like pilot fish to a whale. My dad, the point of our triangle, swam his little human pod toward the dolphins until the mom turned her body to cut us off from her baby. But they didn’t leave.
My dad shoved his hand into my side, pushing me almost violently away from him. I sprang my head out of the water and looked back at him wide-eyed. He popped his head above the surface and, talking in a garble around the snorkel in his mouth, said, “Liv, swim over there without me. The mom is letting you kids get closer.” He pointed toward the side-by-side fins – one big, one small – yards away.
My dad’s large, bulky body looked like a predator underwater while my gangly body was hardly bigger than the baby dolphin. But the idea of going anywhere without my dad in water thousands of feet deep surrounded by nothing but more water seemed unthinkable. I was only brave based on proximity to my dad. But now he was shoving me from the safety at his side, suggesting that some experience awaited me if only I would leave him behind.
I tentatively swam in the direction of the dolphins, more out of a desire to show my dad I could do it than a need to get closer. The mom and baby, gray faces in the deep blue, watched my masked face approach as I breathed softly through my snorkel. I didn’t look back to find my dad, though surely he watched the whole time. I focused on the dolphins a few yards in front of me, trying to keep my body calm and easy in the water. I stopped, hovering with the sun on my back and cool waves rippling around me, as though the dolphins and I understood this was as close as we should get, gazing into each other’s eyes the way people linger in front of a mirror. I wondered if the younger dolphin, tucked beside its mother, felt curiosity and awe like I did. I realized to the baby dolphin I might be the first human. Then mom and baby swam away, and I hurried back to my dad as if pulled by an elastic band. I never did care for the kinds of experiences that would require leaving him behind.
***
I kayak back to my uncle’s condo and quietly slide the yellow Hobie kayak alongside my uncle’s slip. He must have been watching because he walks down and silently helps me pull the kayak out of the water. I realize he is always watching for the people he cares about. I realize I’ve probably missed many of the silent ways people love each other. I realize he might not know how to handle any of this either.
I tell my uncle that I saw dolphins. It’s a common experience on the water here and one I’ve always met with delight. But today I hear my voice exit my body as something flat and empty. I’m afraid that without my dad in the world I will no longer love everything left in it, even the dolphins. My uncle probably already knows, and I have yet to realize it’s up to me now whether I go out to places where I might be surrounded by dolphins, whether I jump in the water, whether I will be brave enough to do it alone.
We drift like it’s us who have become ghosts, me carrying the paddle back to my uncle’s porch. I feel the cool dampness of grass against my bare feet, perhaps the first sensation to reach me since hearing my dad died. The sun is setting, casting the marsh beyond the docks in a soft shade of purple. I look up at the clouds in this big sky. I wonder if, on the last night of his life, walking from my uncle’s condo back to his own, my dad paused like I have, to admire the sunset. And amidst so much I will never understand, I do know this one thing: my dad always stopped to look at the sky.
In a few weeks, when we scatter my dad’s ashes in the Atlantic Ocean beyond St. Augustine inlet, there will be no dolphins, only hundreds of jellyfish under a bright sky and a rainbow of light that encircles the sun and then is gone. My uncle will mysteriously get a call from my grandma’s phone number, the number I still have on speed dial and I imagine he does too. Only silence on the other end.
Months pass. Shock wears off as if by erosion, waves crashing against and reshaping every day, every experience. Grief, I find, has no ending. Only lines of life meandering onward like the channels I paddle through the marsh, searching for a passage through: through the phone call that changes everything, through the body that becomes ashes, the ashes that mix with the saltwater of St. Augustine inlet on an outgoing tide. Somewhere out there in that ocean is a dolphin that met me when it was a baby and I had a dad who made me go on without him.
Bonus audio of Olivia reading from her essay…
about the author:
Olivia London earned a degree in creative writing from Carnegie Mellon University, where she received the Hilary Masters Creative Nonfiction Award. She also received first place in the fourth-grade Invention Convention, for which she is perhaps most proud. Someday she will have a website, but for now, you can reach her at olivia.e.london@gmail.com. She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.