Unlike some of my friends, I do not go to see the Ocean to worship its watery depths on a regular basis. I see it sparingly, by necessity, or by travelling from one place to another. It is only infrequently that I set out with the ocean as my destination, or to fling myself into its vast, infinite maw.
For the most part, we have tamed the land. But the zone of transition, between the land and the sea, is a region where our mastery of materials and engineering surrenders to hubris and falls flat against the unceasing tides.
A shoreline isn't always a place littered with bikinis, sunblock bottles, surfboards and romance. In fact, it is probably more often littered with monuments to human failure and ecological and geological process. Other times, it is just rock, sand, or the detritus of human habitation, delivered by currents from the elsewhere.
We never gaze out upon the same sea twice - to steal a phrase from Heraclitus. While the persistence of the ocean - weeping its roiling tears upon the land in great, both powerful and subdued, tempts us to treat it as thought it maintains a personality. Any attempt to give it a personality or a mood, is our humanity attempting to evoke deeper meaning into a mundane fluid that acts upon the mundane solid.
I'm guilty of attempting that with these words. It doesn't stop the ocean from being a beautiful monster.
I saw the ocean today. I saw the point where humanity's effort faltered. I saw an attempt at making artificial boundaries against the ungovernable.
I saw rocks try to tame the ocean. The ocean shifted its form to mist. It persisted. It crashed over the rocks in a violent, pummelling force, reminding them that they will eventually yield to the millennia of force the ocean is eager to continue providing. The mist settled, making the rocks slippery, sure to allow the ocean to claim whatever may attempt to explore its boundary.
I saw the ocean's onslaught upon a fence, erected by man to protect the habitat of a sea bird. The ocean cares not for our fickle attempts at engineering. Water is persistent, insidious, and aggressive. The salt of the ocean sets out to cleanse, yet simultaneously rust whatever it attacks.
The fence, through its ruin, and the ocean's relentless, ongoing attacks, paint a picture where I am humbled, and I know that for all our efforts, as humans, we simply cannot win against the unyielding force of nature.
The fence, through its ruin, is a beautiful monument to human failure, and to a lack of understanding that the planet will do with us whatever she pleases, and that we cannot stop her. Anything we can build, she can destroy. Anything we rebuild, she can destroy.
We must adapt to her, or be swept away.
This interpretation of the Ocean, this fence, this story, was inspired by a recent visit to O'Sullivan Beach, South Australia. Photographs are my own. I am the copyright holder of the images. Captured at approximately: -35.11690 lat 138.47068 long
This region is currently impacted by the South Australian algal bloom.
