The Reef

6 7 R T H E R E E F R A C H E L T R O U S D A L E Just because it’s made doesn’t mean it’s anything but natural. A thin line skirting the shore, no matter how long, it appears tiny in the extent of the ocean it inhabits, the water that is the only thing that makes it invisible from the moon. Minute and enormous, to build one would be an impossible ambition, and yet now and then people, who have destroyed so many, try in restitution to drop in old subway cars, holed ship carcasses, their various failed transports, guilt o√erings to the ocean, which does not ask for them, seeded with first inhabitants – corals who never imagined themselves a city or wall but produce their cells and turn the sea salts slowly into limestone. Piece by piece it is unconsciously assembled: if the currents are neither too hot nor too cold, and if those on shore refrain from dumping oil and ashes too lavishly into the streams, if the ocean bed is neither too roughly scrubbed by storms nor too unstirred, slowly the thing will accrete; just as a few minutes turn into a lifetime, a few infinitesimal many-legged brief shy creatures become a reef. Building on each other, each kind makes its own fanciful, bizarre formations: orange antlers; fluted pipe organs; pink hearts; inhabited by eels, which shock, and octopi, which change color and shape at whim, and can compress themselves into a crevice or expand like a canopy, and die in the care of their young; each on its own a study, but each a part, if luck and the currents hold, of mile upon mile of variegated 6 8 Y whole. The fish, who are not concerned with the flick of rainbow white at the surface, pass like particulate smoke; the little striped clownfish burrows into his friendly poisonous anemone. Somewhere in the crowd is every color, but silver and blue predominate, lit with yellow, spiked with vermilion. Here is God’s plenty, if we believed in God. Instead we worry that somewhere must be a barracuda, a reef shark, a magnificent giant stingray; fate lurks – but that is only to say that individuals are mortal, which we knew. The reef is time made visible, its profusion and proliferation, its vivacity, its wealth instantaneous and enduring. To say that it is like something would be presumptuous, but perhaps, in a limited way, a marriage is like it – something that began with a few small motions and has turned, by grace of time, into – not an edifice – a beautiful sprawl, a forest, a live extent. For this, maybe, we fly south, we don our masks and flippers and dive into an element not our own: to see something like, or more than like, the thing we have made. ...