Spirited Waters by Jennifer Hahn

Author:Jennifer Hahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Mountaineers Books
Published: 2011-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Floating through the Inside Passage, taking on the work of a fisher or a gatherer, I felt like a sea otter or weasel searching out, capturing, and killing for my life. Cunning and patience evolved. The five senses bristled awake, growing eyeteeth, sprouting whiskers.

I know this much: there is nothing quite like hunkering over a beach fire tending a freshly caught lingcod resting in a fry pan atop a quilt of coals, then afterward leaving shore to paddle over some icy strait. I feel the vigorous sinew of the fish swelling inside my own strong arms, the eyes seeing again through my own cod-black pupils. The fish resurfaces.

Every wild creature has to fuel itself. Glaucous-winged gulls tweeze crabs from kelp beds then drop them like hand grenades—ker-splat — on headlands before devouring their demolished victims. At low tide, black bears paw over beach rocks and nuzzle up shore crabs. A weasel runs away with yet another sea star.

Wendell Berry said it well enough. “The shortest distance from the earth to your mouth is the best.” The interstate miles stretching from my mouth to a vacuum-sealed soup packet is a lot greater than the distance spanned by a clam to my cookpot. Biting into an apple plucked and airlifted from a tree growing seven thousand miles away in New Zealand requires some innate imagination to be thankful of its roots. And so, traveling along this fecund coastline, I started to follow my external cues.

I took my seat at the intertidal table. Plucking mussels from white-whiskered headlands where waves soaked my sleeves I felt a kind of belonging—belonging not just to my appetite, but to the tide, moon, and booming waves. The boundaries separating us fell away like scales.

At its most basic, eating urchin is refueling. At its most profound, eating urchin is shape-changing, carrying the wisdom and muscle-twitch and perspective of another being inside of you. Eating with thankfulness that which grows close at hand became a prayer of sorts.

It was a good sixty feet from the water’s edge to the kitchen beach log I straddled. I set the animal in front of me. Surprisingly, the sea urchin tiptoed on its red stilts across the log’s curve headed straight for the sea. How amazing that it teetered toward the ocean side of the log, not the forest. I watched it tumble off, uninjured.

Solomon Wilson, a Haida elder born in 1887 and hereditary chief of Haina Village or “Sunshine-house Village,” said that urchins, abalone, and cockles found alive in the woods were revered as good omens by the Haida. If a person ate the animal raw on the spot, carried the shell home, hid it in some secret place, and never mentioned it again, good fortune would follow.

I scooped the urchin off the beach. Dozens of scarlet, blunt-tipped spines danced against my soft palms. Fine grooves like those on a knife-sharpening file were etched in the spine’s surface. A sheath of magenta skin shone with life. Where each spine spoked out from

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