At 5:00 a.m. the Pacific Ocean was onyx black, illuminated only by the small globe lights along the pier.
Stacey led the way into the water, advising, “Make sure to slide your feet along teh bottom. There are lots of stingrays here. They look like small bat rays, but they have a long tail with a stinger at the very tip, and they’ll zap you if you step on the It’s just a defensive mechanism – they don’t attack – but if you get stung, your foot will become as large as a football. If you slide your feet, you’ll stir up the bottom sand and scare them away.”
– Swimming to Antartica, Lynne Cox
image source
I remember now going to Mandurah one still, hot afternoon when all the fish were hiding from the white hot heat, and all that we hooked up were blowies and seaweed. You can’t relax completely when fishing – at least not this kind of fishing, on the rocks, by the river. You have to be alert at all times to the possibility. I am an impatient person by nature but something about fishing does calm me, allows me to focus my intensity down to a tiny nib, on the tip of that rod, angling for the tiniest change of the strain on the line. So I wait intently, my mind never off that fine point. But no bite, except for the infuriatingly strong tug of the blowies chasing my line near the surface. No bite.
Then this large diamond of dark water floats by , nearer, nearer, along the path of the great Swan River, but but it was too purposeful, too concrete a dream to be just a dark patch of rock. Besides, it was moving, much faster than shadow could, faster than the current. “It’s the ray,” someone said, and it was – a majestic glide of dark water, patrolling up and down the river in deep water. Moving so swiftly it was like a testellating shape dancing before the eyes, like a dazzling pattern that throws a different diamond into relief each split second, only real. You’re almost sure it’s an illusion – are more willing to believe the illusion, than the thing itself.
“Has anyone tried to catch it?” I ask, and almost immediately regretted my question. Everyone laughed at the evident newbie on the river.
“What would you do with it – eat it?”
I realized the profound bravado I’d just let show, the disrespect I’d expressed for the great ray. How could I, new to fishing, new to Mandurah, expect to catch, much less cook and eat the monarch of the river?
And besides, wasn’t it just cruelty, a callous greed, to imagine taking up that flat slab of a head for the sake of being able to say I did it – just for the sake of a good story I could tell friends, on the other side of the world?I felt a little like Job, being told to consider the Leviathan, the sea boiling like a pot.
The afternoon lazed on, and we tanned on the fruitless docks of the Swan. Fishless, we trooped back to the cars, sweaty and a little burnt, some of us, gulping from the big bottles of water we had hauled over and had been too absorbed to drink from, laughing at our empty handedness. But some of us were determined to get at least some action, to have something to show for the whole day spent in pursuit of invisible fish.
We packed up and drove ourselves to Freemantle, where the mighty Indian Ocean lapped at the great skull rocks, unobstructed for miles and miles, to try our luck there.
And I realize if you live in a place for long enough with an eye for beauty always staring wide open, you realize that the thing inside your heart for it has an ancient, ancient name – the thing growing inside you without your bidding – and that that name is love.
