Hawai'i One Summer by Maxine Hong Kingston

Author:Maxine Hong Kingston
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626814042
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

A City Person Encountering Nature

A city person encountering nature hardly recognizes it, has no patience for its cycles, and disregards animals and plants unless they roar and exfoliate in spectacular aberrations. Preferring the city myself, I can better discern natural phenomena when books point them out; I also need to verify what I think I’ve seen, even though charts of phyla and species are orderly whereas nature is wild, unruly.

Last summer, my friend and I spent three days together at a beach cottage. She got up early every morning to see what “critters” the ocean washed up. The only remarkable things I’d seen at that beach in years were Portuguese man-o-war and a flightless bird, big like a pelican; the closer I waded toward it, the farther out to sea the bird bobbed.

We found flecks of whitish gelatin, each about a quarter of an inch in diameter. The wet sand was otherwise clean and flat. The crabs had not yet dug their holes. We picked up the blobs on our fingertips and put them in a saucer of sea water along with seaweeds and some branches of coral.

One of the things quivered, then it bulged, unfolded, and flipped over or inside out. It stretched and turned over like a human being getting out of bed. It opened and opened to twice its original size. Two arms and two legs flexed, and feathery wings flared, webbing the arms and legs to the body, which tapered to a graceful tail. Its ankles had tiny wings on them—like Mercury. Its back muscles were articulated like a comic book superhero’s—blue and silver metallic leotards outlined with black racing stripes. It’s a spaceman, I thought. A tiny spaceman in a spacesuit.

I felt my mind go wild. A little spaceship had dropped a spaceman on to our planet. The other blob went through its gyrations and also metamorphosed into a spaceman. I felt as if I were having the flying dream where I watch two perfect beings wheel in the sky.

The two critters glided about, touched the saucer’s edges. Suddenly, the first one contorted itself, turned over, made a bulge like an octopus head, then flipped back, streamlined again. A hole in its side—a porthole, a vent—opened and shut. The motions happened so fast, we were not certain we had seen them until both creatures had repeated them many times.

I had seen similar quickenings: dry strawberry vines and dead trout revive in water. Leaves and fins unfurl; colors return.

We went outside to catch more, and, our eyes accustomed, found a baby critter. So there were more than a pair of these in the universe. So they grew. The baby had apparently been in the sun too long, though, and did not revive.

The next morning, bored that the critters were not performing more tricks, we blew on them to get them moving. By accident, their eyes or mouths faced, and sucked together. There was a churning. They wrapped their arms, legs, wings around one another.

Not knowing whether they were killing each other or mating, we tried unsuccessfully to part them.

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