I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. I don’t trust the ocean. I don’t like that it’s so big a deep and strong and chaotic. I don’t appreciate any of those attributes in isolation. I especially don’t like the way they mix. I don’t like the way things look or smell when they’ve been in the ocean too long. I especially don’t like things that originate there. I don’t eat fish. Not even tuna salad. I definitely don’t eat shellfish.
I don’t like the way aquariums make it feel like I’m walking through a stranger’s house- through the house of a fish- and acting like I just belong there. Like the fish are the weird ones for being upset at my tapping on the glass. But at least aquariums are safe.
‘The Dock Out to International Waters’ is not.
‘It’s not really a dock, because nothing is allowed to dock there. ‘The Dock Out to International Waters’ is more a raised path, technically speaking, but it looks like a dock and things sometimes dock there anyway so a dock it has become. Regardless, ‘The DOtIW’ is a 12-mile series of metal platform, anchored to the ocean floor and bound tightly enough to each other to remain stable but just loose enough that it tends to snake a little in a storm.
A storm is not the time to visit ‘The DOtIW.’ It shakes and wobbles and is sometimes submerged under a foot of salt water for the better part of an hour. It attracts lightning, as one might expect, but strangely, also, fish which gather at its edges and stare up at passersby, their mouths agape. They gather in such a density that it is difficult to swim near ‘The DOtIW.’ Difficult to pull oneself up from a fall.
For some time the end of ‘The DOtIW’ sported a stamp station for the ‘Passport to Your National Parks,’ but the journey proved so regularly fatal that it has since been moved to the melancholy Massachusetts beach from which the structure juts. Few people walk the length anymore.
I start in the early morning of a day that is meant to be calm throughout and overcast. The ocean is gentle but the sun rises early and beats down on the crowded fish, cracking their lips and making a stink that I don’t get used to. Some of these fish, I see, have hooks in their mouths. I wonder if they’d stay still long enough for me to remove them, but I don’t try.
The platforms are less steady past the seven-mile mark and my walking slows. I’ve seen nobody else in either direction. This bothers me less than everything else. By Mile 10 I feel myself burning under the sunblock, sweating under the layers I wear to protect me from the cold ocean wind.
I see the station like a mirage, at first, the Soldier’s Station at the end of ‘The DotIW.’ It seems to come and go and only the frequency of this hallucination hints to me that it might be reality after all. A mile out and I take in the rules of the Station. The soldier is not to be spoken to unless it is an emergency. The soldier is not to be touched. This is not a stuff British guard. This soldier will break form to put visitors in their place.
I have no motivation to antagonize the only other person out here.
The soldier stands with his back to me, anyway, and the ocean very likely masks my approach. I wonder how he stands for so long without looking back, trusting there is nobody with ill-intent behind him. As is tradition, the soldier’s firearm is in his hand and his hand is raised. He aims the handgun out- out into the ocean. It moves with the waves but doesn’t waver, his finger ready on the trigger.
-traveler
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