seals

by Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff

Come to the Seaside Aquarium and feed the seals! There are yellow arrows on postcards and flyers and the words are painted on the walls of the streets that lead to the Promenade, which fronts the beach.

A block north of the westernmost point reached by Lewis and Clark in 1806, there is a small square green building with a yellow Aquarium sign that juts out over the prom. Inside are the promised seals.

The building has a plate-glass window that faces the waves where they will never swim, have never swum, decades of seals, generations of seals, seals upon seals upon seals, all sealed in that not-even-Olympic-sized pool, just out of reach of the sea.

When my father was four, my grandparents drove him and his brother from Alliance to Seaside so they could see the ocean. The Studebaker’s fine prow crested waves of grain through Nebraska to Wyoming, coasted the dunes from Nevada to Idaho, until they reached Oregon, where my father and his brother, intrepid explorers, would first dip their toes in salt.

In the black-and-white photograph, the coastline is deceptively similar: a slow swoon from north to south, the clamshell curve stocked with sand and rocks and driftwood and ashes from the fires that dot the horizon after sundown on those precious evenings when there is no rain.

More of those this year than ever, try not to count as umbrellas dusty in the stand and jackets mold to the back of the closet. Also, the king tides are higher, the threat of tsunami a more possible possibility in this increasingly impossible world.

One day waves will break through the walls, rush up and over the prom, crash through the glass, and carry the seals back to the ocean. They will float on their backs and bark and clap, toss their balls into the air like confetti, celebrate the win of which their ancestors could only dream.

My father and his brother certainly visited the aquarium. They threw fish to the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents of these seals, which circle endlessly, now, crying out for the sea.

Photo of Rachel Sarnoff

BIO: Rachel Sarnoff is a journalist and climate communications director who published personal essays in the Washington Post, Northwest Review, and Hippocampus, among others, but it took a global pandemic to force her to take creative writing seriously.