the north sea

Upon arriving in Aberdeen, I didn’t go to the ocean right away, even though it’s not so far from campus. If you stand on the rise of the hill at the top of St. Machar’s Drive, or a ways up Spital Walk, you can see it; the curvature of the horizon almost makes the water appear like the rise of a vast blue hill. When the gale winds were blowing last Saturday, the whitecaps on the sea were like a flock of bright distant birds flying endlessly at the shore.

I don’t know the sea very well, having lived landlocked all my life. Sometimes I feel like the ocean’s a sort of unfamiliar animal, something to approach with great caution and respect when you don’t understand it well, don’t know its moods and meanderings.

I was thinking of this as I was remembering a poem I recited at the Kiwanis Music Festival when I was about 8 years old – my piano teacher always encouraged me to enter the category, and I recall quite vividly her finding this particular poem for me, and reading it to me the first time. It’s called ‘The Sea’ and it’s by the British poet James Reeves. She told me she first heard the poem in school when she was quite young, growing up in Scotland:

The sea is a hungry dog

Giant and grey.

He rolls on the beach all day.

With his clashing teeth and shaggy jaws

Hour upon hour he gnaws

The rumbling, tumbling stones,

And ‘Bones, bones, bones, bones!’

The giant sea-dog moans,

Licking his greasy paws.

And when the night wind roars

And the moon rocks in the stormy cloud,

He bounds to his feet and snuffs and sniffs,

Shaking his wet sides over the cliffs,

And howls and hollos long and loud.

But on quiet days in May and June,

When even the grasses on the dune

Play no more their reedy tune,

With his head between his paws

He lies on the sandy shores,

So quiet, so quiet,

he scarcely snores.

I still think of that poem sometimes (It’s rather deeply ingrained – I often get the cadences of it in my head) and I suppose it’s quite apt. I imagine a great shaggy dog with a quicksilver temper, because the poor thing is ancient & perhaps slightly arthritic, but at her heart she is benign & sustaining & gentle. She just commands a lot of respect – offerings of bones, the return of fish scraps to her lapping mouth. You should approach her quietly, so as not to disturb her whistling sighing, the happy breathing of a long deep dog-dream.

I visited the sea the other day, crept along quietly, following the river. The waters were calm, rippling hands smoothing the glassy sand. Sharp smooth tern wings, cutting the air in an imitation of waves, late afternoon sunlight illuminating the dunes.

Karys and I found mica-flecked pebbles, milky shells, pinkish granite & clear polished quartzite like the white of a dog’s eye. & others wandered there too, their own dogs leaping into the incoming froth, frolicking with a welcoming sea-canine.