The Bottom of the Sea

“Mama, it looks like the ocean just dried up. It looks like the bottom of the sea!”
The words seem matter of fact now. We’ve said them so often.
“Let’s go to the bottom of the sea.”
“Did you go to the bottom of the sea today?”
“You’ve not going to believe what I found at the bottom of the sea. Six whelk shells!”
“Don’t you dare pick up any more of those cockle shells. I already have a huge box full of them in the garage. Leave some for other people at the bottom of the sea.”
Fifteen years ago, the bottom of the sea seemed like magic – words that made me laugh when I first heard them, words that became part of our family lexicon, words that I treasured from my tiny, running, leaping, blond-haired miracle of a boy. They seemed like poetry at the time. They’re still words I treasure today: the defining description of one of my favorite places on earth.
To some, the bottom of the sea just looked like a big sandbar off the east shore of Ocean Isle Beach in North Carolina. It didn’t come up overnight; it had grown over the years. My parents would call me when I was working and they were playing at the beach, telling me about being able to walk no deeper than their knees far out into the ocean, picking up sand dollars nestled under a light layer of sand, even pulling some up with their toes. They found mutli-colored whelks; they could spot some rolling gently in the surf, but others would be buried in the sand, only the tip of a gray-hued knob peaking through the mixture of water and sand that swirled around their feet.
I never seemed to be there at the right time. It was always high tide, or I was busy sunbathing on the pier behind the house, or visiting when it was too cold to even think about wading in ocean water.
But when Connor came along, things changed. We spent more time at the beach, more time with the family, more time exploring and riding in the boat and combing the sand for shells while Connor dug holes or waded or even sat and built giant masterpieces with shovels and trucks and buckets.
We were riding in the boat, Connor with his bright orange lifejacket on, me with my too-tight blue one, the men bravely facing the sea with no lifejackets at all. It was near low tide, and the ocean had receded enough to show a broad expanse of shimmering sand.
“Look at that.” I can remember gesturing to my dad, who couldn’t hear me over the combined whine of the engine and the harsh breath of the wind blowing.
“Yeah, it’s gotten a lot bigger. It’s the sandbar.”
Other boats were pulled up on the steep ledge. I motioned, and we too pulled up our Whaler. The boat bumped into the drop-off, and Connor hovered on the edge of the boat, deciding whether to jump or be lifted by the adults. He decided on jump. His feet hit the sand with a wet thump; his joy was palpable as he began to run – laughing and pointing at the ridges formed by the water beating ceaselessly on the sand – except at low tide. It did look like the ocean had simply dried up – that the shape of the sand was mimicking the very waves themselves.
Bottom of the sea. I loved it. I still love it today.
That first day at the bottom of the sea began a tradition: as soon as possible, often before we had even unpacked the cars or put away the groceries if it was nearing low tide, we’d be putting the boat in the inland waterway heading for the bottom of the sea. The bump of the boat onto the shore, the impatient tugging at the ropes tied to the anchors to free them from the tangled ropes, the hurried dumping of the anchors – always carefully repositioned by my dad while the rest of us ran or skipped or hopped or walked onto the bottom of the sea.
We searched for shells along the edges of the sandbar, seeking an elusive whelk or finding a perfectly polished olive. If you picked up a shell with a live creature in it, first you screamed, then you laughed, then eventually – often with disappointment – you threw it back into the water. Never keep the live ones, even if there were millions of them still alive in the ocean and it seemed like just that one perfect shell.
We picnicked, spreading our beach towels onto the sand and opening up the red cooler to retrieve juice boxes and Diet Dr. Peppers and sandwiches made just a little bit soggy by their ride in the cooler. If the children were content, sometimes the adults would even close their eyes for just a minute, catching the full effect of the warm sun on our faces.
And we walked, walked for what seemed like miles, following children skipping across the wavelets, stopping to wade through the dozens of tiny shallow pools left behind by the retreating sea. The children – first Connor, next his friend Micah, then my daughter Julie, eventually my niece Mia – would flop into the bigger pools and pretend to swim through them, splashing salt and water and sand into the air around them, their bright lifejackets shimmering in the hot sun. It was a rite of passage when Connor first took his lifejacket off at the bottom of the sea; it meant he had joined the ranks of the grown-ups – or at least the near adults who could be trusted not to walk off the deep edge into the fast-moving channel or wander too far into the waves.
We hunted for stingrays along the deeper edges of the sandbar. It was my husband’s favorite thing to do. He’d spend an hour at least walking slowly, stepping carefully, watching for that flash of white when the stingray would be startled into a velvety movement to avoid his foot as it hovered near it. We saw hundreds, maybe even thousands, of them over the years.
We chased birds, both us and the children and the collective dogs. Because the bottom of the sea was separated from the island by a deep channel of water, it was safe to let the dogs run free – the only place I can think of that our crazed, white Jack Russell could rip and roar without being in danger of being run over or without being a danger to someone else. (He liked to bite, especially me.) First Connor, and then Julie and Mia, would chase the flocks of sea gulls and terns and even pelicans that rested on the outer edges of the bottom of the sea. The sea gulls would fly away first, screeching in mock indignation but forgetting within seconds why they were in the air. The pelicans always were the last to fly, waiting with wounded dignity to the last possible moment when it was apparent that the children were not going to stop their pursuit. The pelicans flapped elegantly away – maybe a hundred yards, maybe 500 yards – maybe so far we didn’t see them land.
We were not always alone. Other people over the years discovered the secret of the bottom of the sea, although in my heart I can’t believe it was as important to them. We gave advice to other shell seekers, we talked to visitors to the island, we asked fishermen how the fish were biting, we stopped to pet sandy-wet labs. One time we even saw an abandoned boat; it looked a lot like the one the Skipper and Gilligan were on when they were lost at sea during a three-hour cruise. My husband wanted to climb on board and check it out; I, the reader of many detective novels, was afraid of a possible bomb or a dead body or a lurking detective waiting to pin a crime on us. We left the boat alone.
Each year, the bottom of the sea grew larger, eventually so large that at low tide it touched the end of the island, allowing people to walk over to it who didn’t even have a boat. It was nearing the end of its time, but we didn’t know it then.
My father called me one afternoon. He and my mother were at the beach; it was winter. “I have bad news,” he said.
It was the bottom of the sea. The federal government had funded the island government’s request to dredge the channel between Ocean Isle and Holden Beach. Too much sand had collected, making it difficult for boats to navigate into the inland waterway. The dredging went on for months. It built up the beachfront along Ocean Isle – but not in the way we’d expected. Front beach had a steep drop off, and shells by the millions were crushed into tiny, sharp rocks that cut your feet and made it difficult to walk in the surf. The one positive by-product were thousands and thousands of olive shells – black olives as my four-year-old daughter called them -- that escaped the grinder and were deposited in the sand.
But the damage was done. The bottom of the sea as we knew it was gone. There’s a nice deep channel now, and sometimes, if you’re there are the right time, there’s even a small sandbar that appears at an extremely low tide. It’s a sandbar that you can pull your boat up to, get out and walk on, even find a few shells.
But it’s not our bottom of the sea. That bottom of the sea is gone with the tide. But to me, it will always be there.