Tabs Open #45: One Forgets The Tiger Heart That Pants Beneath It
Every summer when we’d go to Virginia the jellyfish would come and it was a game with an edge to it, staying in the water long enough to have fun without losing an hour or two to what was, in childhood, about the fiercest pain imaginable. Well, maybe we could imagine worse. But rarely got the chance to feel it.
One summer something changed—the wind, the water temperature, the food supply, I don’t know—and instead of stinging nettles all we saw were comb jellies. Like a starfruit made out of Jell-O. No stingers whatsoever, just lumps in the water.
But at night when we ran down the beach that year we were transfixed. What were in the daytime pitiable, laughable creatures became a source of magic in the dark. With every footfall on the damp sand there would come a flash of electric blue in the places the jellies had washed up. It was like running into another world, dark on every edge with no path at all to follow but the one you lit yourself as your young legs churned, breath ragged in your chest by the end of the final sprint, dead tired but never more sure that you were alive. That red blood pumped in your veins as sure as the eerie blue light pumped in theirs.
I was maybe 15 or 16 when that happened, I don’t remember the year.
Sometimes when we ran at night someone would hang back, slightly, keeping something in the tank. As he ran behind the rest of us out of sight he would strip off his shorts and streak past us all with a final burst of speed, laughing and naked. I was never fast enough to pull it off. It was usually my older brother.
Another time on one of these night runs I practically tripped over two people having sex out in the sand. This wasn’t the comb jelly year and besides the odd porch light it was inky black out everywhere. Neither of us had a prayer of seeing the other and the blood was pounding too hard in my ears for me to hear them. I can’t imagine the terror of footsteps charging you in the blackness when you’re in such a compromised position.
Anyway I just got back from taking my students to the Seattle Aquarium.
Last year, when I tried this field trip out for the first time, we got to witness something I thought was pretty special: one of the two Giant Pacific Octopuses that lived there was sleeping when we arrived. We sat there for a few minutes, watching it dream.
I spent some time with the octopus this year too, and all manner of aquatic mammals and invertebrates, but I think I loved the dwarf cuttlefish the most. Like a squid made for the emoji age.
It’s been sunny and cloudless in Seattle for two days now, and I celebrated by going for a run.
I’m not fast like I was on the beach anymore but the impulse, on sunny days, is the same: a pull from deep within, a feeling like I want to explode in all directions with happiness and longing and restless feverish energy. A non-specific lust for all things. Like my heart might just beat clean out of my chest. In my teenage years this could only be tempered (never cured) by an aimless drive with the windows down, regardless of the temperature, and the radio all the way up.
It was so clear and bright today that every detail of the Olympic Mountains stood out in sharp relief, clean and white against the blue sky and blue water. (If you haven’t lived in Seattle it’s hard to fully appreciate what the first few days of late winter sun really mean to us. It’s like being pulled up from drowning.) I am already scheming again, wanting to be out there. The air that blows into the city on days like these is crisp and clean—mountain air, the kind that makes me feel that 16-year-old feeling again.
It feels worth noting that I have found running—like hiking up mountains, or the aimless urban walking I do when I get weekday restless—actually helps my creative process. This newsletter is already a day later than I usually publish and would have been even more so had I not gone for a run. A few disparate ideas and snippets I had written down over the past few days coalesced into something I finally felt was worth sharing as I jogged. It turns out there is a scientific basis for this, and reams of historical anecdotes and data to back it up. (This won’t surprise my dad, for whom running has been a panacea for a few decades now.) I still don’t love running but I do like the way I feel afterward, and if I can lean into believing it makes me a better writer there’s a much greater chance it will stick as a habit.
Moby-Dick finds its way into my thoughts on days like these. On lots of days, really, from the drizzly November ones to the ones of sunny spring promise.
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow-heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearthstone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
It’s nice to feel some kind of kinship with the ocean in this regard. Winter’s forced tranquility inevitably goes on too long and that tiger heart has to take control eventually. Now’s as good a time as any.
