I had romantic ideas for this month’s column of exploring the sea in children’s literature. I have an almost constant yearning to sit at the edge of water, staring into a blue horizon. Give me a beach or pile of rocks in front of a large body of water and leave me there for a few hours. You will return to encounter the best version of myself.
Then a flash flood dropped three inches of water over my town in what felt like 20 minutes, although it must have been longer, say 50 minutes. I watched helplessly as water gushed up from the floor drain into my basement. “on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.” Only it was the 15th and June. And I was not inside the Ark. As I hauled up every wet thing to either dry or pitch and washed the floor with a diluted bleach solution that burned my sinuses, I struggled to wax poetic about my favorite of the four elements.
After a few days, I’m ready to wrangle the complexity of the sea into about a thousand-word essay; rather like trying to wrestle the immensity of “life, the universe and everything” into some brief but profound missive. The sea is best considered in small tidepool bites. There is no shortage of-
Water, Water Everywhere