Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

Holdfast

m 7 Holdfast The sea otters at the coast aquarium drifted slowly in the currents, floating on their backs with their eyes closed and their hands clasped across their bellies. One bumped against a kelp, then gently rotated and drifted away. Another floated around the tank until its feet bumped into the wall. It ran a hand over its face and went back to sleep, peacefully pivoting across the bay. I made my way to where my daughter was watching the otters from an underwater viewing window. Silhouetted against white fog, the otters appeared as dark shapes drifting unmoored. I wondered how they ever got to sleep, resting on something as insubstantial as salt water. To slide unconscious on a shifting surface that carries you out to sea—it’s a human’s nightmare. Do the otters wake up startled in an unknown place, with no home port and no influence on the direction of the tides, with only the entangling kelp to keep them from drifting down the coast or washing up on rocks? I wanted to gather the otters in my arms, bring them to shore, and wrap blankets around them. A sleeping otter, a sleeping child, moves me deeply, dim light spreading from the open door on the face of a child kept only by some miracle from falling through the surface of the earth. I looked over at my daughter, who had just turned twenty-four. “What are you thinking about?” I asked. “My carburetor,” she replied. 8 m Holdfast I didn’t like the idea of getting in one car while she got in another, waving good-bye at some gas-station crossroads, and simply driving off in different directions. But Frank and I were leaving for a camping trip along the Pacific coast, and Erin was heading for Boston. She had given herself two weeks to cross the country, move into her new apartment, and start her first job. Already her car was pinging under the weight of what she thought she would need for her new place— books and music and a rack of spices, binoculars, a giraffe lamp, and a pet scorpion named Buddy. This will never work, I had said. If we all cut our connections to home, how can we keep our connections with each other? But there was nothing to worry about, Erin had said; our answering machine wasn’t going anywhere. Each day she would call to check in, and we could call the machine to pick up her messages. As long as there was a message, we would know she was safe for another day. We could take comfort at least in that, imagining the dark shape of her car drifting slowly across the continent, windows open, heater jammed to high, tape deck pouring country-western music into currents of cold air. That first afternoon, we called our message machine from a pay phone at the Dairy Queen in Reedsport. “Hi. I’m in Richland at Aunt Nancy’s,” Erin’s voice said. “So far so good. The wind was fierce in the Gorge, but you should have seen the eagles!” I called her aunt’s house but no, she had gone out, her uncle said. “But hey, she ate a good dinner, so don’t worry.” Frank and I drove on and set up camp next to an island of shore pines in the dunes. All that night, wind gusted in the trees and sand rained on the tent. By morning, the dunes had moved a few inches inland, uncovering old driftwood and burying beach grass in loose sand. I walked the beach to see what the storm tide had left behind. Windrows of by-the-wind sailors. Clumps of mussels, blue and stony. The torn body of a common murre, its head drawn back, its Holdfast m 9 throat exposed, its feathers touched with foam. Herring gulls pecked at detritus tumbled in the high-tide line, and sand fleas popped and clicked, snapping up and falling back, making the sand tremble. At the highest reach of the surf, I found a stranded bullwhip kelp, a rope thirty feet from its flat fronds and air bladder to the holdfast at the end of its stem. The holdfast clung to a broken chunk of bedrock. I turned the holdfast over in my hand. Each winter, mature kelp plantsshedthousandsofsporesthatdriftoffinthecurrents,gradually settling on the ocean floor. Wherever...