by Brenda Miller
“My mind naturally speculates whenever it wanders from the task at hand. I’m always in the ‘what if’ frame of mind.”
We’ve kayaked out from the Bowman Bay boat launch in Deception Pass State Park, my friend Nancy and I, wrapped in life jackets and spray skirts, our paddles held lightly as the guide instructed: push with the top hand and twist, igniting the big muscles of the back and core, rather than straining the smaller muscles of the hands and arms. With nine other boats, we finally edged out from shore, all of us smelling of damp and tides and beached seaweed—awkward animals in these first moments of transition from land to water—but once we start paddling in a rhythm that works, we glide as a flotilla out toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
It’s 8 p.m. on an August evening, after days of smoke have dimmed our summer, winds shifting to bring evidence of wildfires all around: British Columbia, Eastern Washington, Oregon. We’ve come to expect it these last few years: that at some point our Pacific Northwest summer—the season we look forward to all year during months of rain and dark—will be shut down by smoke, and we’ll huddle inside next to air purifiers if we have the means to afford them, or fans, windows shut, blinds drawn. Quarantined once again. But today, at the edge of the earth, the smoke has begun to rise from sea level, and we set off gamely, paddles dipping into the bay. The more expert among us are able to do so with little splashing, but I already feel my nylon sleeves soaking with cold salt water. It feels good, though, after so many days of unprecedented heat.
We nose our way through the center of the cove, following the shoreline of Rosario Head. I crane my head to make out the trail I’ve hiked dozens of times through those stands of Madrones that lean forever precarious over the bluff—trees that have been there for as long as I’ve known this place, their bark peeling and peeled, orange wood smooth as skin. These trees only grow well in the wild and usually in places of transition: earth to air to water. Whenever I find myself next to an elder Madrone I stop and place my hand on a hefty branch, feeling the slight tremor of ancient life. Madrones glow in the light off the water because they are often so naked.
We paddle along until the bluff opens up to reveal a bright red sun. We all gasp at the sight of it melting toward the horizon, some taking videos with their cell phones. It looks (there’s no other way to say it) apocalyptic, like the cover of a science fiction magazine. Its beauty is the beauty of the unnatural, of something gone terribly wrong. Coral red, alive with movement that I know must be smoke or clouds, but looks like the lava I saw once on Hawaii’s Big Island as we stepped carefully over volcanic stones in the dark. The lava flowed beneath us, an incandescent river of heat, yet somehow we walked there with hundreds of others, taking our chances, wanting to be in the presence of something this big and primal, something that cared little for us humans who hopped along like fleas. As the sun reaches the lip of the water, light oozes out as if the orb has cracked, fire flattening until it disappears.
Dusk. Twilight. High cirrus clouds glow with red curlicues. We’re out in open water now, rounding Rosario, waves swelling and crashing against the rocky black shore. Our guide, Melanie, leads us to a kelp forest as we wait until the full dark that will reveal what we’ve come out here for: bioluminescence. I’ve never seen this phenomenon before and have only a vague notion of what it will be. Melanie tells us this particular bioluminescence happens when small plankton that live in coves like these create a chemical reaction in response to intrusion, sending in effect a “burglar alarm” that lights up the swarm. We’re out here during the best window for seeing the water alive with light. This light carries no heat, and can be the only source of illumination undersea.
While we wait for optimal viewing conditions, our kayaks bump over immense stands of bull kelp, with thick stems and shaggy manes. Melanie tells us these groves of kelp provide shelter for many creatures, such as the kelp crabs. She invites us to lift up a bunch and I do; the shafts are heavy and cold, thick as rope, and the bouquet of olive-green strands drips across our hulls, uncannily like the messy tresses of a woman’s hair. Melanie tells us the myth of the seawoman whose likeness is depicted on a large totem at Rosario Head; the maiden who sacrificed herself to the sea in order to save her village; she became more sea than human and transformed herself into these strands of kelp to protect the creatures who sustain life. I pull out a strand from water, tear off a strip to taste its salty flesh.
The darkness deepens, and with it a hymn begins to unspool in my mind, a hymn I’ve often sung as part of a group known as the Threshold Choir; we hold vigil at the bedsides of those who are nearing death. Abide with me, fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, lord with me abide… We blend our voices into one voice, the vibration more important than the words as we put our full attention on the recipient of our songs. Often, we can see their bodies changing bit by bit, a glow radiating from a source that is no longer the body or mind. The darkness deepens, and it’s often only in darkness that we can discern this kind of light.
The waves seem to swell bigger now as we paddle back toward Bowman Bay, a gentle roller coaster that makes us feel a little seasick. Melanie asks us to crack the glow lights she handed out earlier so that we can keep track of each other through the gloaming. One by one, small beads of light pop up around us, but try as I might, my arthritic hands aren’t strong enough to crack the hard plastic tube. I resign myself to unglowing until I can catch up to Melanie and ask her help. The guides’ lights are blue so we can distinguish them within the flotilla, and we keep aiming toward Melanie as she bobs ahead of us.
To the west the moon has appeared, a waxing crescent gilded in gold. Again, I know that dirty smoke cloaks this moon in unearthly beauty, but it is beauty nonetheless. The gold finds its way to the water, glitters there on the rippled surface. I turn my gaze away from it, afraid my eyes won’t acclimate enough to see the light we’re seeking.
We’re out here in an element not our own, at a time of day we’d normally be inside doing whatever it is we do in the privacy of our homes when darkness falls. We’re out here in August 2021, at a time of strange transition and uncertainty. The fourth (or is it the fifth?) wave of Covid is surging in our county, just when we thought the vaccine had freed us to leave our homes and resume a semblance of life as it was in the before-times. At the hospital down the street from my home, over a hundred anti-vaccine protestors rally in front of the ER, while inside that building nearly every bed is filled, and the staff cares for 37 desperately ill Covid patients, including breakthrough cases of the vulnerable vaccinated. A new death is recorded nearly every day in our small county.
Yet, here we are, a couple of dozen people gliding through dark waters, waiting for brilliance to show itself.
I’m seeing it, Nancy calls out from her seat behind me. Look at your paddle. I watch my paddle dip and pull, but I see only what looks to me like bubbles roiling in the disturbance, or the reflection of sunlight on the water. But then I remember there is no sun; this light is coming from below the surface. I’m still not sure what I’m seeing. Melanie leads us to the darkest part of the bay, in the overhang of a wooded promontory. We can’t really see each other now, just faint outlines of boats, the glow sticks, the swish of paddles in the water. I’ve gotten disoriented and really have no idea where I am, where the landing place might be in all this darkness.
When I thought about bioluminescence, I imagined it would be a floating blanket of luminous algae, like the northern lights in liquid. I thought this scrim would part and rejoin with every swipe of the paddle. I saw the northern lights once, decades ago, after a season of working in Alaska, around a bonfire with my co-workers as we said our goodbyes. We looked up and saw ribbons of red, purple, and green unfurling across a deep black sky. Like any sighting of something normally hidden, we whooped and raised our plastic glasses of wine in a salute. To what, I’m not sure—to each other, to a glimpse of whatever watches over us?
As we head deeper into the darkness of Bowman Bay, I see it now: bright confetti, sparkles of light that infuse the water. It’s hard to assign the proper simile: like stars, like diamonds? None of these captures what I can only call the purity of it, the way light scatters in the sea and rises toward us. These sparks bloom in darkness always, but we see them only when we make an effort to venture where we don’t normally belong.
Even Edith Widder, a marine scientist who has made it her life’s work to study bioluminescence, finds the image difficult to describe: “Since my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task.” She has invented submersibles that go down beyond 350 feet in the ocean, that area called the “edge of dark”; she then extinguishes any manmade light to see the varied glows of this alien world. It turns out that so many creatures make their own light from within, such as fireflies on land and many species of underwater translucent creatures, such as the firefly squid or the comb jelly. “It's a little-appreciated fact,” she writes, “that most of the animals in our ocean make light.” And each light, each pattern, communicates different purposes; it is a complex language, conveying danger, desire, or hunger.
The prow of our kayak makes a brilliant white wake, and when I drag my hand in the cold water my skin sparkles like a cartoon. We tip our heads back to see stars above mirroring stars below: Big Dipper, Cygnus, faint wash of Milky Way. They all make a timid appearance, glowing dimly then slightly brighter as we watch. The moon sidles closer to the horizon, backing away, making its exit from the party. We’re out here during the annual Perseid meteor shower, and so for a few minutes we keep our gazes upward, hoping to see a star detach from its mooring, but all that activity is happening behind closed doors. Our eyes have adapted to darkness only as much as they can; we don’t yet know how to look beyond our own limitations. So, we turn back to the salt water, where thousands of glowing creatures hang suspended now, visible even without our bodies to disturb them.
We won’t stay out here much longer. We’ll land our boats in the dark, after passing underneath a pier slated for demolition. The guides will drag us ashore, and we’ll once again be land-based creatures—damp, lumbering awkwardly in our water shoes over stones and driftwood in the artificial beams of our headlamps. But for now, even in a world that seems to darken by the day, we’re allowed to glide a few moments longer between layers of light—illuminated above and below—aglow.
My mind naturally speculates whenever it wanders from the task at hand. I’m always in the “what if” frame of mind. In writing, I aim to show not the “truth” of experience, but the possibilities of experience—how to find a center point in a world that is increasingly fragmented. As I kayaked in the bay, there was so much I could not see, and this essay is my attempt to peer around the edges of things, find a different kind of light.
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Brenda Miller’s most recent book, A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing on Form, was published by University of Michigan Press in July 2021. Her book of collaborative essays with Julie Marie Wade, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, is forthcoming from CSU Poetry Center in Fall 2021. She is the author of five more essay collections, including An Earlier Life, which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her poetry chapbook, The Daughters of Elderly Women, received the 2020 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and, with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Brenda’s work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a professor of English at Western Washington University and Associate Faculty with the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com.