Trickster Ocean
Tricksters are a central component in mythology – ravens, coyotes, Anansi, Kitsune – and they exist in almost every culture. They are deceivers, boundary-crossers, and shapeshifters.
On a recent hiking trip to Newfoundland, I wondered about the trickster on that island. Walking along the easternmost knife edge of the of the North American continent, in almost the precise middle of the trip, standing atop angular rock that fell fifty feet to the cove below, it became clear: it’s the ocean.
The ocean straddles the boundary between the dead and the living; it is a graveyard and a way of life. Maps of the area list shipwreck locations, names and dates and more than forty of them dotted the space right in front of me that day. Most of them came from the 1800s, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped, they’ve just moved further offshore. Conversations with Newfoundlanders were peppered with stories about drownings. The ocean took its pound of flesh in the form of sailors.
But the sea is a way of life too. Since it was first inhabited, fishing was central to sustaining Newfoundland. Fisherman brought back wealth in the form sea creatures - so the ocean was a way of living in a colloquial sense and a literal one. A ban on cod fishing in the early nineties collapsed the economy almost overnight. It has returned to a smaller version of itself and boats dotted the vast surface of the sea during all nine days of our coastal hike. Lobster pots and crab traps sat in front yards as common as garden gnomes.
The sea fulfills the deceiving part of the trickster job description because its sounds can be used to lull us to sleep or bring us to tears. But it winks at us too by bubbling and frothing and throwing droplets into the air. By catching the light just so. It glitters, for heavens sake, and we humans work hard to make material that mimics the ocean’s effect when touched by the sun.
It can make adults into children again when they hop through the waves that charge, retreat, and nip again at unsuspecting feet. One person may giggle, another may be aghast. One person may dive into its waves; another looks out in fear with their feet dug deeply into the sand. It causes shrieks of joy and pensive stares often by the same person, maybe within the same hour.
The sea is a thing of wonder and it is terrifying to our cores. What power we hold over it is fragile and temporary at best, our weakness revealed with a gust of wind or a bit of ice. It possesses death and life, holding the dead bodies of fishermen and the millions of live creatures existing on every link in the food chain.
The ocean is a trickster in material too. At the shore it is more air than water, with the foam and bubbles of the surf. The enfolding of air into the water allows life to exist as most animals need some dissolved oxygen to survive. The ocean shapeshifts between two elements and holds the tension between them in only the way something vast can possibly do.
The ocean, like many tricksters, holds opposites within itself and does so with a wink and a grin.