A Song of Seals
It's a Sunday. He asks around. Surely someone wants to go. But no one can. He goes alone. The silence surrounds him of a sea on which almost no wind is blowing. He rows out farther than he usually does. A couple of miles out, as the lighthouse on the seaward end of Betty's Island heaves into view, he hears a sound arising farther out. Is that someone moaning? Someone hurt? Someone dying? He changes course. Can he manage a rescue? He rows harder. The sound swells and now he hears multiple voices. Good Lord, a shipwreck? He gives it his all. And then he hears the truth.
No one is hurt. No one is dying. The voices are not those of humans, nor even of animals in pain.
They are seals, and they are singing. On a rock the low tide has exposed, a few seals are there basking and singing. What he heard as moaning is simply the quality of their communal chant. Is it pain nevertheless? Is it joy? It's certainly not birdsong. What does it express?
He wants to get it. But he can't get it. When finally he realizes that, he lets go. The choir is other worldly. His voyage has taken him beyond. So now he just listens, and looks, and like a child is amazed.
The small waves lap against his hull, an unintrusive percussion.
The concert of evermore keeps him there for a while. When he returns, he feels the warmth that too much sun has stored inside his face. He touches his skin and shakes his head.
What kind of idiot, he thinks, forgets his hat?
It makes him laugh.
28 October 2019
Texas Jim
Near Betty's Island, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca