Research Station

April 1985

What have you gotten yourself into now, indecisive daughter of dry land? You, crossing Barkley Sound by Zodiac with forty other pampered over-packers and Mrs. Roberts, all in Helox slickers, life preservers, olive Baffin boots, chilled awake and soon to be bored to tears (or puking fits or chants or bathroom fights or Stoli under fizzing bunkbed lights) by lectures on the lives of jellyfish or barnacles or nudibranchs or squid. You wish you chose the physics trip instead.

What’s with all the action at the Station, all those films on salmon, salmon, salmon, waiting, mating, chugging fin upriver? Who cares about the place where you were born when, in the end, the oven keeps you warm? And what about the special demonstration: Holothuroidea, minding her own business, thrown into the ring to match a cod— the whole affair stage-managed by a pod of tittering biologists—the star barfing guts then hanging back awhile to watch her rival munch the drifting pile?

Who rules the waves behind the keepers’ backs? Who is this team of catch and poke and throw that point to waving things in giant tanks, maraca-shake the bags of lunchtime worms? Have you seen them slip their idle arms around the minor girls watching Top Gun, smoking weed, or squealing Uno! Uno! playing Poseidon with an idle net? You doodle in your mind: upend, upset this sleepy school of pasty graduates, deep-six them in the red tide where you live: that overheated tug on Angus Drive,

your crabby cat, your stonefish of a mother, your living room’s enormous SeaWorld windows outside of which the real killer circles. By dinnertime the other entertainers have peeled off; the swots, the queens, the stoners leave you alone on a greasy dock with the bay already going orca dark and Name-Tag-Brad says Get a load of this,

stretches tongs into a clanging vat, and hoists a lamprey, pressing himself against you. O daughter of dry land, under the moon, tooth-bright, its own ravenous chrysanthemum: what vertebrate, after tonight, will you become?