I can still feel the spray coming off of the sides of the ferry, speeding and slicing through smooth water. As boats would generally go, it's not that large; it's not a cruise ship-I'm frankly not sure if it could be considered a ship at all. But as boats on this small-town docking area go, it is a beast. Here, where the smell of the day's fish crop is strong enough to tear up the eyes of even the veteran fisherman, where the sidewalks are so old that they have been cracked and sloped by tree roots, where the clam shells cut at your feet and the children scatter with fright at the horse-shoe crabs, this ferry is large and unmistakable.
We're coming back from the city, from the hub of Manhattan. Sometimes it seems odd to me that the tourists flock in herds to the city. Every morning, coffee still bitter on his breath, my uncle laments his day's travel and work, while young children in hotel rooms a half-mile down the road rise fresh-faced and glowy-eyed for a first-time trip to the 9th largest city in the world. My uncle would dress up all proper in a suit and shiny brown shoes, his father's watch cutting into his wrist and an old briefcase hanging delicately from his hand. He wasn't rich, never made it high, high up on the company ladder, but he was well-off enough that his children grew up without struggle and that his home could host us for the month of July every summer.
I remember sweating in the middle backseat of my grandfather's old six-seater car, sardined in between my brothers, whose legs seemed to be getting so much longer with each 30-hour car ride to Jersey. Oddly enough, those car rides were one of my favorite family activities. My brothers and I were allowed to eat salty and sweet gas station snacks without reprimands about our health, we were allowed to sing and squabble loudly. We would roll down the windows and moo at the cows in the Midwestern fields, so spacious and fresh compared to the squares of our suburban every day lives. My father would blare loud 80's music and classic rock over our arguments and drive too fast on the highway. All of it was fun.
But what I loved was when we got close, when we had become too tired to squabble and shout hours ago, and it was either night or early morning. I would lean my head against my brothers' warm shoulders, switching back and forth as they shrugged me off every twenty minutes or so. As I dozed lazily, half-asleep and fully asleep at times, I would watch for the Atlantic to drift into view, so I knew when we were close. The measured matched the inner security and solemn calm I felt.
My visits to the highlands are different these days, fewer and further in between, with the strings that tie my family together perpetually straining and tightening. With my grandfather's passing and my grandmother's forgetfulness, my mother and my aunts have grown further in their relationship. My uncle lost his job years ago, though I still do not quite know what he did for a living. With the way that my mother and father discuss his past jobs in the city with hushed voices and weary eyes, I have decided that it's best I don't confirm the likely sins of his previous engagements. My cousins have grown up beside me, and with a toddler in their arms and another little one along the way, I have lost my running partner.
These days, alone on the seashore gravel paths, I gather misty sea glass and falter against thoughts of drunken littering, trying to ignore the broken bottles that are leeching into every corner of our home. I taste the salt at the crest of my tongue and remember how it burned in my throat that one time when the riptide pulled me under. I reach a steep, grassy hill and remember the old dogs that used to chase us down it, now just pots of ash and framed fur displayed upon a mantle in my aunt's living room. The fish smell seems stronger now, something rotten lurking behind it. I watch children turn horse-shoe crabs onto their back with sticks, prodded and squirming, incapacitated with their shells sinking into the sand. I used to revel in the fireworks over the water on independence day, but now I wonder when we, too, will explode.
Where the Atlantic, all sea-spray and rocking waves, once struck me as magical, it now looms stands before me as something so much more powerful and daunting. It lays itself against the crumbling rocks of the shore, and in all its glory it mocks how little I understand. It holds mysteries undiscovered and memories lost, places that humans have never been and can never go back to. It moves the world of it's own accord, sloshing and swaying and rising. I think of the way that a few inches of water in a bucket can drown even a careful toddler, and I can only fill with dread t the thought of what an ocean so magnificent could unleash on our careless lot.
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