Prose by Ryan Woodside
I recently visited my sister in North Carolina and spent a few days with her at Carolina Beach. As my sister and I walked out to the water one day, we told stories about our grandpa who recently passed away. Amid the stories we shared, I noticed a sign with directions for escaping riptides, warning beachgoers to swim parallel to the shore should they find themselves in the thralls of a strong current. As I read the sign, I remembered an article I’d read in college about the leading theories on escaping riptides. Although popular opinion in the scientific community still advises swimmers to escape a riptide by swimming parallel to shore, researcher Jamie MacMahan advises swimmers to relax, “go with the flow,” and wait for the riptide to eventually turn and pull them back toward shore. Though MacMahan’s research has been met with some criticism and a lot of questions, most scientists agree that it carries some weight. In the end, the author of the article concluded that there is no consensus about which escape strategy has the highest success rate. Riptides are too unpredictable for a one-size-fits-all solution.
As I walked out onto the beach, I watched the waves flock toward the shore. I laid my towel down and made my way out into the water to join the crowds of people playing with the incoming waves. These waves appear to simply roll toward the shore, but below the surface something beautiful is happening. Below the surface, there is water retreating, grouping together and heading back out to sea. Because there is a void left at sea as waves drift toward shore, all of that water will quickly rush back out to fill the liquid chasm.
The quick recoil of water back to sea often flows through narrow channels known as riptide currents. In this way, the waves are cyclical and the currents contribute to constantly bringing nutrient-rich water to the surface. This replenishment of nutrients is crucial to the health of our marine systems. Witnessing this rush to shore subsiding to an eventual retreat, John Ashbery writes of a sea teeming with the desire to come up and paint it’s own portrait: Ashbery’s poem “The Painter” begins:
Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.
So often, we look out at the water and wish to personify it. We look out and wish to speak of its nature. For Ashbery, he saw the water’s retreat as a symbol of its grandness and inexplicability. As is seen in this first stanza, that grandness will not be captured easily. Over the years, so many artists have been drawn to the seashore. Lord Alfred Tennyson viewed the retreating waves in a different light. Overcome with grief following the death of a friend, Tennyson comes to the shore to lament. “Break, break, break / on the cold gray stones, O Sea,” writes Tennyson of the unforgiving, uncaring tide.
Looking out at the crashing waves, I could see the inspiration for these poets’ words about the current. I watched as the ineffable beauty and simultaneously cold indifference of waves unfolded before me. But, below the surface, I knew there was more than this in the nature of the water. I knew more needed to be said and that, to me, the edge of this big, warm ocean was doing more than running along the edge of our world, bumping into us.
To put it plainly, it is in the nature of liquid to fill voids. In the case of the ocean, this happens quickly and, often, dangerously; It is no wonder, then, that the English word, “current,” evolved from a Latin word meaning “to run.” We use this same word, “current,” to describe the movement of electricity through wires. Maybe George Bernard Shaw’s description of the electric current passing through the filament in a lightbulb would be appropriate for the ocean as well. He writes,
you will find that your house contains a great quantity of highly susceptible copper wire which gorges itself with electricity and gives you no light whatever. But here and there occurs a scrap of intensely insusceptible, intensely resistant material; and that stubborn scrap grapples with the current and will not let it through until it has made itself useful to you as those two vital qualities of literature, light and heat.
And so maybe it is with the water also. For as much as it seems that the shore is being crashed into by waves, there is that stubborn stream which pulls it all back to fill the sea. And maybe so it is with the soul too. Maybe that void we feel after someone leaves us in one way or another and that stubborn, compulsive stream of thought will help us to feel full again. I tried to write a poem to explain the feeling but couldn’t find the words to finish it. And so maybe for now, what I have will have to do, just an unfinished poem of a few words scribbled at the top of a sandy notebook page:
You will never feel empty for long.
Ryan Woodside was born and raised in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. He now resides in Holland, MI where he coaches soccer, attends seminary, and works for the church. He loves sports, poetry, dogs, science, music, fun facts and trying new things.
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