Red Tide

1.

It’s my first morning this time around in San Diego, the sun is barely up, and already I’m doing the stingray shuffle into the water (don’t lift your feet, ski over the sandy bottom). It’s easy to get up early when I’ve just flown in from New York to see my parents, and so I use jetlag as an excuse for my urgency to get down to the beach. I don’t want to tell my parents: it’s not till I step into the ocean off my home beach that I can finally feel like I’m home. Then again, they know.

Everything that’s ever happened here has happened along this stretch of coastline: a few miles of disappearing sand strewn with pungent beach-cast kelp and tangles of surfgrass, sandstone mesas gashed by canyons and broken open by shallow, brackish lagoons, scarce remnants of vast salt marshes hemmed in by proliferating malls and condo developments. In this constantly shifting landscape of active tectonic plates, eroding sandstone, and receding sand, some of my most permanent, defining memories of myself have formed, scattered like beads along the coast. Each time I’m home, I’m gripped with a compulsion to re-gather the beads and can’t settle until I do.

Today, I’m swimming out to see my grandma. I mean, the place where we scattered her ashes, a short swim from here due south. Past the break, I turn left, put my head down, and get to work, finding my rhythm, calming my breath. My heart is still racing, from the work of breaking through the surf, from the momentary panic of finding myself alone in the immensity of the Pacific, some 500 feet from shore. The fear gives way to a tenuous comfort as I focus on the familiar colors of the water here, an opaque, deep pewter green. Sand swirls like eels along the perturbed bottom. I recognize the familiar contours of the reef, the dark fingers that jut out from shore, the sandbar up ahead where the waves break further out, and I have to curve around them. My body knows what to do here. I’m sighting off the old power-turned-desalination plant on the headland above the lagoon, feeling the swell roll under me. These waves have crossed 6,000 miles of Pacific to arrive here, meaning that the energy I feel move under my body was generated by winter storms off the coast of Aotearoa, maybe even Antarctica. I’m swimming through a force field of the past.

At my grandma’s, a spot I locate by the way the bluffs here drop down and level off, I stop, pull up my goggles, float on my back. I’m wearing a neoprene shortie that leaves my legs and arms free, my compromise between shivering in just a swimsuit and cocooning myself in a full wetsuit. Floating, I soak up the warmth of the rising sun on my belly, as the black material heats up. A caravan of pelicans skims the water on my ocean side, close enough to hear the whoosh of their wings. On the land side, the waves peak then peel left. The sharpness of the grief startles me, the rediscovery of it here every time. The last image I have of my grandma was here, her remains streaking down to the bottom as I dove down to follow them and watch them dissolve. Her ashes may now be swept up in the North Pacific Gyre, drifting somewhere south of Hawai‘i, or they might’ve gotten swept down off the coast of Mexico into the North Equatorial Current, which connects with the Kuroshio current, which means she could be somewhere off the coast of Japan or even the Russian far-east. Ever the immigrant, she’s still on the move. The Pacific is now my grandma’s forever home.

I continue south, my mind still somewhere across the ocean, and so don’t notice the change until I’m in it, this underwater sandstorm that’s blown in. Suddenly, I can’t see my arms under me. All is monochrome reddish brown, so dense it feels like both sensory deprivation and sensory flooding. The smell of sulfur and fungus turns my stomach. I know what this is, I know it won’t necessarily harm me, but I can’t calm my mind enough to continue. I make myself stay in, though all my instincts say get out. Sharks have been known to confuse humans for seals when the water is murky, and there’s no murkier water than a red tide.

A red tide is the name we give to an explosion in the population of one of several species of phytoplankton. Off the coast of Southern California, the dinoflagellate most commonly responsible for the bloom is Lingulodinium polyedra, a single-cell organism with red organelles that help the cells capture sunlight for photosynthesis. The red color, actually more brick or mud, does not mean danger, at least not to humans, contrary to what our senses tell us. The red tides of Southern California are not toxic like the ones off the coast of Florida, produced by a different dinoflagellate. Still, I was open to any encounter, but I didn’t think it would be a microorganism that would send me racing back to my beach, indifferent to reason. While swimming in the ocean, statistics and facts are a cold comfort, and it’s my body that has the final say about what’s safe or not. My body, and the way it reacts to the body of water I’m swimming in. So much here is not up to me. Water temperature, animals and algal blooms, currents that slow me down, wind that messes with my stroke till I want to cry and slap the water in frustration. I may know in theory that I’m safe, but so often out here I’m afraid, or cold, or seasick. Or terrified by plankton.

After my swim, over a cup of coffee up the street as my nerves finally settle, I do some quick research on my phone. I need to know: is this red tide natural or human-made, a recurring event in a succession of seasonal rhythms we haven’t yet managed to break, or a symptom of the climate crisis? I tend to believe everything is the latter, and mostly my suspicions turn out to be correct. I’ve learned from Bill McKibben that we’ve broken nature as a force that exists beyond human reach.

I learn that L. polyedra are so much more than a foul-smelling soup. These dogged cells are actually accomplished swimmers, migrating daily from a depth of about thirty to forty meters, rising to the surface during the day to soak up the sun. Their swimming ability is extraordinary—they can cover about ten body lengths per second—which is why they’re able to out-compete other types of phytoplankton for resources, contributing to their bloom. “In the plankton world, they are Michael Phelps,” an oceanographer observes [1]. Or Katie Ledecky, I’d amend, for their unsurpassed distance, speed, and stamina. The bloom, it turns out, is the visible manifestation of swimming success, a notion that endears me to the red tide, but not enough to make me want to join these intrepid swimmers.

I find it harder to sort out the evidence for the impact of the climate crisis on algal blooms. On the one hand, these microalgae, along with the hundreds of species of phytoplankton, form the base of the ocean food chain, and a bloom, I reason, must be beneficial for someone up the ladder—crustaceans, fish, birds. Red tides have been documented off the coast of Southern California for well over a century, but this statistic doesn’t take into account Indigenous knowledge, and we know the tides extend much further back [2]. On the other hand, we’ve seen an uptick in the frequency and duration of red tides, partly due to warming sea temperatures and increased nutrient runoff into the ocean from bigger storms, upriver agricultural pollution, and the destruction of wetlands that would otherwise buffer the storm runoff. And these factors are all intertwined: nutrients in sediment such as phosphorous and nitrogen equals food for phytoplankton. These nutrients get swept into the sea in greater quantity with more intense storm runoff, as well as more up-stream development. More intense storms are caused by warming sea temperatures. And warming sea temperatures cause, among other factors, sea levels to rise, which worsens coastal storm impact.

Kelp forests also play a role, I learn. The historically dense, abundant, giant, and bull kelp forests, which grow along the coast from Baja to Alaska, help absorb nutrient pollution. A reduction in the size and resilience of kelp forests also accounts for the over-abundance of phytoplankton [3]. Kelp decimation means more severe storms, and more severe storms means more runoff into the ocean: a feeding bonanza for plankton. Prolonged, massive algal blooms deplete the water of oxygen as they decay, and fish and invertebrate populations are killed off en masse in the wake of a bloom. But kelp helps offset some of this deoxygenation as it produces oxygen during photosynthesis. The red tide, I conclude from my panicked post-swim research, is like littoral drift: both natural and unnatural, not good or bad in itself, but devastating when thrown out of balance by human activity. And everything in the ocean is thrown out of balance by human activity.

My senses, in the end, are right to more readily believe the story of the red tide’s destructiveness than its relative harmlessness to humans. My immediate bodily feeling swimming through the red tide is of something greatly, unambivalently askew. Like some Old Testament plague, oceans running with blood. It’s the first time since scattering my grandma’s ashes that I’ve gotten out of the water here feeling unsettled, as though the ocean rejected me.

2.

Twenty-five years ago, the water had rejected me, or so it felt to my body that had lost its feel for the water. Thanksgiving weekend of my freshman year in college, I told my parents I wanted to quit swimming. I’d gone away to the Midwest to swim on a Division-1 team on a full ride. My new coaches had invested in my ability to keep getting faster, but my body had other plans. Just a year earlier, I’d narrowly missed qualifying for Olympic Trials. No problem, I have time, I thought. I’m still getting faster, my body trained to lock into a pace, then hold it steady for an 800, a 1500 meters free. I loved the water, and I loved the way I knew how to insert my body in its flow, grab on, pull myself through. To feel accepted by the water was joy and power and all-out aliveness.

And then, starting the summer before twelfth grade, the joy started to ebb away, one terrible practice and meet at a time, until I wanted out of the water, forever. A pain with no apparent source traveled around from my shoulder, up my neck, and down my back. It was all I could feel in the water, and yet, no one else could see it, and no diagnosis could explain it. Pain is a source of absolute certainty for the person experiencing it, yet a source of radical doubt for everyone else, as philosopher Elaine Scarry has pointed out [4]. I became the subject in pain, a hysterical teen girl who just couldn’t hack it in the sport any longer, and whose claims of pain seemed like excuses for not trying hard enough, for not being able to control my moods. I had all the certainty of sensation but no language with which to explain how weak, how heavy and wrong I felt in the water. “I just thought you were trying to defy your mother,” my coach apologetically told me recently, when I asked him what he made of my horrible races at the time. By college, almost every practice had become a slog through a red tide, the water menacing and toxic.

Thanksgiving weekend of my first year in college, I sat on this beach, not far from where we’d scatter my grandma’s ashes twenty-five years later. I was dry and miserable, having just broken the news to my parents that I wanted to quit swimming. My mom, one of the fastest distance swimmers in the Soviet Union in her day, still lap-swam every morning. I wasn’t in the mood to go with her. She dropped me off, then went on her way to the pool, where I no longer belonged. The sun rose behind me from over the Laguna Mountains, lifting the shadows from the water. Surfers paddled around in the line-up, reading the incoming sets. Everyone eventually found their place in the fold of a wave. I wanted to feel that at home in the water again. There was so much water, and yet I told myself I was locked out of it forever.

I didn’t swim again for twenty years. And when I first went back, it was to the kind of swimming I’d always known—laps in pools, masters swim team workouts, the rigors and discipline of organized practices and timed intervals. Swim meets, too. It didn’t take me long to burn out again. In the pool, I didn’t know how not to struggle with my body and lose. Most days, I couldn’t lock into that magical, coveted feel for the water, and most days I left the pool feeling rejected by the water, again. I kept swimming through a force field of the past. What I craved, some new relationship to my body and the water, kept eluding me.

New York City is a beach town, an archipelago surrounded and threaded through by water, but I never knew it. After moving here in my mid-twenties, it never occurred to me to swim off my city’s coast until well into my thirties, a few years after I started pool swimming again. New York, and specifically the coast of South Brooklyn, is home to one of the most vibrant open water swimming communities there is, and to find my people out here, swimming off Russophone Brighton Beach, was a revelation. I never thought when moving to New York that what I’d love most about my new city would be swimming off its edges. I never thought I’d be hanging out in Brighton Beach, a former-Soviet enclave that felt both intimately familiar and depressing, as if all our efforts to immigrate from Soviet Russia had only served to land me here, in some Odessa forever stuck in a perestroika that never changed anything. But here I was, swimming past the Coney Island amusement park rides, between the pilings of the pier, to the last jetty out at Seagate where the tide pulls you out toward Verrazano Narrows, where enormous container ships lumber past, so close you feel the rumble of their engines in your eardrums.

Nothing prepared me for what it would be like to swim in the ocean. To share the water with moon jelly and blooms of salp larvae and lion’s manes, with dogfish and bluefish and menhaden, and occasionally, dolphins wandering into the channel. To almost run into a floating cormorant only to watch it duck and dive and vanish under me. To dive down and stalk a spider crab scudding across the rippled bottom. To swim above horseshoe crabs treading their way along the sunlit sand. I’d never used my swimming body for something other than speed, results, achievement. I’d never used it for noticing the non-human world, for seeing my city from the water and finding wildness just dozens of feet from land. Through my swimming body, I was learning to discern the daily and seasonal patterns of the ocean. For the first time in many years, I started to feel the water again, to regain that elusive sense I thought I’d lost for good. But now, it wasn’t just my body I was feeling, or the water as some utilitarian medium to grab onto and force my body through. What I was feeling when I was feeling the water had more to do with gravity and tides and atmospheric pressure, with the cycles of upwelling and cooling, the warming touch of the Gulf Stream and the cold arctic reach of the Labrador Current, the blooms of larva and the migratory patterns of seabirds.

3.

None of us had ever seen the ocean until we immigrated, my mom, grandma, and I, Moscow to San Diego, in 1989. My grandma fell in love with it instantly and deeply. She hauled in bean, clam, and limpet shells, pebbles and driftwood, from her daily walks, and arranged them in the soil around our garden like she was trying to plant the ocean in the backyard. She persuaded all her friends to drive her to the beach, and so there was always a rotating cast of cars stopping in our driveway, here to fetch my grandma for another sunset. In the final independent years of her life, when she lived walking distance from the water, she’d make the trek twice a day, out to the end of the pier and back, greeting the fishermen by name (and they’d call back, “Lookin’ good, Lana!”), and wouldn’t miss a sunset if she could help it. Even when she no longer knew how to turn on the TV or make phone calls, she still knew the way to the water. “Scatter me in the ocean,” she told me once at some neighbors’ backyard barbecue in my parents’ development, and I held her shrinking hand and gulped down my wine to stop thinking about the inevitable swim out with her ashes.

I was slower to fall in love. Growing up in San Diego, I never swam in the ocean for fun, or surfed, or went to the beach to sun and play. In the beginning of a training season, in September while the Santa Ana winds fanned fires to the east, our coach would have us run down to the beach, swim a couple of miles, then jog back up the hill to the pool, where we’d finish off the workout. The ocean was little more than a backdrop for training, and I noticed it so little, it might as well have been a pool.

As my grandmother’s life drew to a close, I went back to San Diego and became possessed with a compulsion to map the coast with my swimming body, from the low-lying, shingled and shrinking beaches of Oceanside down to the imposing headlands of La Jolla Cove. Every beach held so many stories—here, my boyfriend and I used to park in his dad’s minivan and make out. Here, my friends went to a bonfire and didn’t invite me, and I found out about it and went anyway, spending the night sitting off to the side on a beach chair, shivering and stewing. Here, I came to journal and read Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea novels whenever I’d skip practice, imagining the wizard Ged’s boat, Lookfar, out in the dense fog of the marine layer. Here, my grandma and I miscalculated the rising tide and had to wade knee-deep under the bluffs back to the beach, stubbing our toes on the submerged rocks and laughing all the way. It was one thing to remember from land, but in the ocean, I came unmoored from time and so could revisit these memories not as completed events but ongoing dramas touchable only through water. Along with my grandma, I was engaging in what, in hospice, is called life review, reanimating and stringing together the beads of a life. Swimming in the ocean, with the fear and the fog and the surrender of control, I was trying to swim with my grandma into this place of death that she was entering.

After we’d moved her to a care home, I’d visit her after a swim and tell her stories of seal and dolphin sightings, about the sanderlings and willets dashing in the surf. I’d show her the twenty-second movies I’d made for her, turning up the sound so she could hear the rumble of cobble on the backwash, the boom of crashing waves. We’d lean into my phone together, our heads touching, and I’d see her smiling. I’d hold her hand and without fail, feeling my cold post-swim hands, she’d say, “ROOki khoLOdnye, SERdtse goRIAchee!” Cold hands hot heart [5]. And then, she’d try to rub warmth into my hands, but to no avail, since she too had cold-hands-hot-heart syndrome. “All better!” I’d lie to her, and she’d pretend to believe me.

Four months after she died, on Valentine’s Day and what would’ve been her 90th birthday, we brought her to the ocean, a few fistfuls of ashes double-bagged in sandwich baggies. I stuffed the baggies of her remains down my suit, felt them press into my heart. My cousin did the same with a bunch of red rose petals and marigold heads. We swam out through the surf and, on the other side, dropped her in. Pulverized bone and sand streaked down through the dusky green and vanished into the deep. I dove down to follow them as far as I could. The flowers remained floating on the surface.

As we stumbled out over the cobble, among the petals that had washed in, our teeth chattering, our moms were running down the beach to meet us, pointing out to sea. A pod of dolphins was threading its way out just past the break, swimming through my grandma.

4.

After my unsettling red tide swim, I drive down to the beach and wait for the light to fade from the sky and the ocean to ignite. By the time darkness settles, the city lights have come on, the lights on the pier and streetlights and headlights on the shore road. I walk as far north as I can on the shrinking beach of my parents’ town, trying to get away from all this light pollution. Most of the sand here is gone, replaced by fist-sized cobbles pitching steeply down to the water. I scramble over the rocks until I come up against the jetty where the San Luis Rey River spills into the ocean. The night is chilly and ocean-damp, and out here the only other people are a young couple making out waist-deep in the water. The bioluminescence is faint in the glare of all the land lights, but the longer I wait, letting my eyes adjust and night draw in, the brighter the light grows, until I see it, the crest of each wave and the crashing whitewater pulsing blue-green. It’s hard to believe that the ominous soup of this morning has transformed into this radiance, that the same single-celled creatures can contrive such varied pyrotechnics.

The next evening, unable to stay away, I come back here with an old friend, one of my civilian friends from school. We met in seventh grade, both of us gawky kids with braces and a shared obsession with Anne Frank. She has kids now, four of them, and she’s brought her family to see the bioluminescence. But the light is slow to fade from the clear sky, and the youngest, a toddler, is getting cranky and tired, and it turns out it’s hard to keep an eye on children on a dark beach. My friend and I make the best of it in the narrow window we have before it’s time for them to go home, catching up on months of life between the boys’ bids for our attention.

Just up the beach, shin-deep in the water, a woman is practicing a poi fire dance. The flames trace arcs around her still body, her arms multiplying in motion so that she looks like Durga the warrior goddess. And then, as though the fire brought out that other marine flame, we see it, the breaking waves flickering on in cool blues, the white water rolling in a lighter green, while the dancer traces arcs of flame around her body, and a faint strip of gold lingers on the horizon, as though the ocean too were on fire. We all sit and watch the lightshow in silence, even the toddler, before he decides that he must touch it and takes off in a wobbly trot down the beach toward Durga.

I used to think my civilian friends could never understand what it was like to be an athlete. After school they went to work at Dairy Queen and Olive Garden, to babysit neighbors’ kids, to make out with boyfriends before their parents got home. I couldn’t begin to understand or relate to their lives, didn’t know what it was like to stay dry for more than half a day at a time, or to work for minimum wage. I had the privilege to devote myself entirely to sport and studying, not that I counted it as privilege. I felt both envious of their lives and superior.

When swimming was good, I didn’t mind. My home was the pool and I was good there, and that made up for all the sacrifices. Every now and then, some Sunday afternoon, I’d visit their dry land, and we’d gather at our coffee shop, hike in the sage-fragrant mountains, and it wouldn’t matter that I’d have no idea who they were talking about, had missed concerts, had never made out with anyone. When swimming got bad, it was like their dry land was where I longed to be, but there was a seawall of sharp rocks around it, and I convinced myself my friends were the ones who’d built it to keep me out. And so, I stopped trying with my land friends. And my swimming friends, I was sure, thought I was a fuck-up swimmer, so I retreated from them too. I didn’t have the words to ask or explain, and so the more I lost my feel for the water, the more I also lost my feel for the land and the people on it.

And now, here was my friend wrapped up against the chill in my extra towel and we were trying to find the words. There were so many ways to come home I’d never imagined.

The algae bloom is not an object lesson. But sitting there awed by the way each wave seemed to carry back from the darkest ocean this flash of bright light, I thought about how swimming used to be like a blind, terrified flailing by day, but I never saw this other side, the luminous one, not of swimming, not of my home I wanted to leave so badly. There were red tides when I was growing up in San Diego, and a particularly long one in late summer of 1995, when I was 15, but I never saw the bioluminescence then, probably never even knew about it, too busy keeping my head down in the pool or going to bed early. It’s taken me a long time to close some loop I didn’t know I’d left open, and to do so by using my swimming body not to attain best times, but to be so fully in the world. No longer plowing up and down a black line in a cement tank. It took me so long to grow into becoming this other body, swimming in a different way, in a vastly different body of water.

It never occurred to me back then that I could just get out. Then wait. Then come back to the water and find it transformed with light. Some things just take time. But as a young athlete, I didn’t know the meaning of get out, take a break, wait and see, be patient. I did and didn’t know that you can’t force a feel for the water, that true recovery takes time.

5.

The dinoflagellate bloom dies off. Cooler, cloudier days means the organisms aren’t drawn to the surface to photosynthesize. Or maybe their nutrient supply runs out as the weather stays dry, no rain to wash nitrogen into the ocean. I can only guess at most of what happens in the staggering complexity of the ocean, no matter how much panicked post-swim research I conduct. Whatever the reasons, when I swim with my little pod later in the week, the water is once again a deep, luminous green over the sand break. Fog hangs over the water and merges with the clouds. Everyone’s talking about an upwelling, because the water temperature has dropped from nearly 70 to the mid-60s, unusual for early September. I still refuse to put on a wetsuit. I want to feel the ocean on my bare skin.

We’re swimming a couple of beaches south of my grandma, where the bluffs swoop up, rising to a continuous mesa before dropping down at the next lagoon. On a headland across from the lagoon, a boutique resort has been built, another structure for the rising sea and erosion to eventually topple. A carpet of ice plant spills down the bluffs, a futile effort to hold back erosion with the introduction of an invasive species that displaces native coastal scrub, far better suited to the purpose of cliff stabilization [6]. The north end of the beach, however, remains relatively undeveloped, and it’s there that we like to swim on weekends, when the parking lot is full of surfers wrangling on their wetsuits from the backs of pickup trucks and a swim feels like a water people festival.

We follow the rise of the bluffs south, making a bow around the lineup and the cresting waves, continuing parallel to shore in the line of gentle swell. The reef here looks like long dark fingers or roots reaching out to sea. The surfgrass, growing most lushly around the outlet of the lagoon, is still abundant, swaying above the rocks, and more fish seem to be using the grass beds as a nursery. I see a few garibaldi darting among the blades, their bright orange muted to a greenish blue underwater. An enormous school of sardines shoals under us a while before swerving away.

On our way back, I peel off from my pod and loop further out to sea, hoping for dolphins, a seal. I have a case of lobster-claw hands (lobster hands hot heart?) and numb ice-cream face that’s turning into a headache, but I’m not ready to race back just yet, and certainly not to get out. I’m still not good at letting myself get out of the water. I do know now how far I can push my body into the cold, and I mostly respect its limits. I venture further into the fog. Out here, I love feeling for direction by sensing how the roll of the swell gives way to a gentler rocking. I love being able to tell the direction of wind and swell by how I sense their force on my body. I know when I’m close to the break from the way the swell picks me up, as opposed to rolls evenly under me. Even if I lost sight of shore, I’d like to think, I could navigate back to land. For a moment I can viscerally imagine how Polynesian navigators used their senses together with intricate knowledge of prevailing swell and wind directions in order to locate themselves in the open sea. The wayfinding sense in the ocean is a feel for the water like nothing I’d ever imagined possible from the confines of a pool.

But when I see a seal, its shiny head bopping maybe twenty feet from me, I’m startled by the intensity of its gaze on me, the intimate solitude of our encounter out here. So much for all that bravado. I veer back in and feel again my body buoyed up by the gathering waves that will soon peak and break. I’m embarrassed by my fear. I still scare easily, and some days, when swimming alone past bluffs with no beach, where no other human can see me and I can’t just swim in and get out, my body trembles and startles on the lightest graze of something against my skin. Part of me is still a pool swimmer, and I can’t always surrender to the “wild” in wild swimming. Sometimes, too unnerved, I get out early and go home, bereft, like something has been taken from me—worse, like I took it from myself.

The irony is not lost on me. I used to sit at this beach when I skipped practice and long so hard for what I couldn’t then name, for some kind of elsewhere, always beyond swimming. I imagined running off to Paris or immigrating back to some post-Soviet bloc capital where I’d speak too many languages, all of them imperfectly, and write books, certainly not about swimming. The ocean reminded me that I’m stuck here waiting for my life to begin and gave me the vastness on which to stage imaginary escapes. I’d look out to sea and feel so impatient to get away. And now, I’ve returned to this coast, and I’m still gazing longingly out at the water, but what I long for now is not to escape, but the ocean itself. And not just any ocean, but this coast, these beaches, these sandstone bluffs and canyons and lagoons.

The more I swim in the ocean, the more wild and home come to mean the same thing, the circle closing. The ocean is my memorial place, the place where my body feels most at home, but also most afraid, but also most connected, but also most undone. Joy and grief and terror and peace alternate and mix like cold and warm currents. Only the ocean is vast enough to hold all these contradictions.

[1] https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/historic-red-tide-event-2020-fueled-plankton-super-swimmers. Accessed September 18, 2023.

[2] I learn later that Rachel Carson, writing in the late 1940s her sweeping account of the oceans, The Sea Around Us, found evidence for Indigenous knowledge about red tides. She writes, “As soon as the red streaks appeared in the sea and the waves began to flicker at night with the mysterious blue-green fires, the tribal leaders forbade the taking of mussels until these warning signals should have passed.” It’s painful now to read Carson’s beautiful, erudite book for what she couldn’t have known yet about global heating, much less its impact on the ocean. She was reading the signs but didn’t yet have the legend to interpret them, only enough to know the signs pointed to a vaster imbalance.

[3] According to marine scientist and writer Helen Scales, kelp removes enough nitrogen from the water to “reduce the chances of problematic blooms, saving tens of thousands of dollars annually in clean-up costs for every acre of intact, healthy forest” (What the Wild Sea Can Be, pg. 171).

[4] The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1985.

[5] Which, in addition to being a cute folky Russian saying, is actually an accurate description of both the sensation and the function of vasoconstriction, the body’s defense to cold exposure in which blood flow to our extremities is reduced to preserve the heat of our core.

[6] For a discussion of coastal erosion, sea level rise, and California coastal communities’ efforts to address it (or avoid doing so), see environmental journalist Rosanna Xia’s urgent and hopeful California Against the Sea: Visions for our Vanishing Coastline, 2023.

Asya Graf is a writer, psychotherapist, and swimmer. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Queer Love Project, Open Secrets, Cimarron Review, Vestal Review, Gulf Stream, and Santa Fe Literary Review, among other journals. She is completing a memoir that reckons with her family’s tangled up, inter-generational athletic passion, and asks how being an athlete indelibly marks us. Asya received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MSW in Clinical Social Work from Hunter College in NYC. She lives in Brooklyn and Long Beach, CA with her wife and a rock collection from nearly all the beaches she's ever swum from.

Published July 15 2025