‘Oama

Waking up, sound of waves breaking on shore. This almost shipboard life.

Aches and pains. Thinking, okay, we humans are not forever. But how ’bout the ocean? Well, they say that some endless twilight becoming a final dead of night, the sun’s gonna die. Thus I might have inferred life in the ocean will have to go as well. But the ocean dying now, because of us? Or, lest I exaggerate, so much life in the ocean dying now because of us?

“I’m not myself, lately,” they say. I say. All too true, but neither is the ocean itself, lately. Nor is it what it was when I was young, any more than I am what I was. For Henry David Thoreau, a lake was “Earth’s eye.” Can the ocean, to us impassive, indifferent to our concerns... can the ocean behold what we’ve done without a tear in its eye?

There’s Dylan’s line about lost love: “Either I’m too sensitive / or else I’m gettin’ soft.” About the ocean these days, maybe I’m just too sensitive.

I’ve played in / admired / studied / been in awe of / craved / been saved by / longed for / been at risk in the ocean. Needed and loved the ocean, though it never acknowledged me, nor did I imagine it should.

Though I’ve feared for my life in the ocean, it never had anything to fear from the likes of me. But then, people like me—in God’s likeness, some believe—seem hell-bent on killing all life in the ocean. How, then, could the ocean possibly love me back?

________

Again at the water’s edge. On the beach. Which brings to mind the 1950s novel set after World War III’s nuclear holocaust. On the Beach. Radiation, end of the world. Here, today, not the end of the world, but, overhead, the roar of two F-22 jets. They’re flanking an enormous B-2 stealth bomber designed to deflect radio beams. Stealth: think steal. Wingspan: one hundred and seventy-eight feet. This bomber one of twenty-one built in the 1980s, two billion dollars per, able to carry both conventional and nuclear weapons. And why airborne here? Post-Eden Hawai‘i is, among other things, a military fortress, home of the United States Indo-Pacific Command.

O‘ahu, where, in 2013, “cyberstrategist” Edward Snowden worked in a National Security Agency facility located under a pineapple field. After hours, from Honolulu hotels and libraries, Snowden poached wireless signals to send journalists encrypted messages containing classified material.

Re On the Beach. Recently, I’d been up well before sunrise, heard the breaking waves, stepped out on the walkway, located the crescent moon. Went down to the beach as usual. Took my daily slow walk along the shore, mile or so and back.

About an hour later, loud knocking on the door. Very distraught neighbor urging us down to the basement, fast: incoming ICBM missile.

Shelter in place, they say. Seal windows and doors against chemical or radioactive materials. Lie flat on the ground. Do not look at the flash of light. Stay sheltered for up to fourteen days.

But: incoming missile?

It didn’t... quite... compute. No sirens. And the basement? Not where I wanted to be vaporized. Looking out at surfers at the break, I imagined they were grousing about small waves and long lulls, beating up on themselves for not making the drive to the North Shore.

Elsewhere in town, Bishop Larry Silva heard the news, quickly offered the congregation the Sacrament of Reconciliation through general absolution, according to canon law only for use in situations of “grave necessity.” Nearby, a father lifted up a manhole cover and shoved his son into a sewer in hopes of saving him.

But: false alarm. Human error. Bureaucratic error. How have we humans survived ourselves for so long?

Memories: the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, Kennedy’s advisors urging him to retaliate when our spy plane was shot down; various false missile warnings, ours and the Russians’ (computers; micro-chips). Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, 1964. General Westmoreland wanting nukes for the Battle of Khe...