joy
I am exhausted. I haven’t had a hug since March and it’s taking everything I have just to keep from falling off this emotional seesaw. And after finding myself dozing on the couch at 9:30 p.m. on Friday still watching some terrible crime show that was nonetheless a little better than the terrible news show that has been on TV for the past two months, I gave up on the week and decided to drag myself to bed.
It was too early but I was more than ready for the black relief of sleep. I pulled on my pyjamas and tucked myself under the covers. As I leaned over to make sure my phone was on do-not-disturb mode before shutting out the light, I noticed a text from a friend who lives about a block away — in a home with an ocean view. “Have you seen the bioluminescence?!”
One of my earliest memories is chasing fireflies through the tall, humid grass of a late summer evening, so I have long been fascinated by nature’s capacity to make things glow. But I had thought of ocean bioluminescence as a rarity of remote Caribbean coves. It never once occurred to me there was a possibility that I could see it a block from my big city apartment.
Evidently, however, glowing plankton occasionally make an appearance off the coast of California. And they are here.
The Pacific is typically a deep jade green when it meets the Los Angeles coastline, but a recent excursion to Malibu for groceries presented an ocean the angry color of rust. Even the white caps of the breaking waves were tinged with the frothy pink of a well-placed bar-fight punch. I didn’t like to look at it. I had meant to search “red tide” when I got home from my drive, but there are enough things wrong with this world already that I couldn’t handle the thought of some ocean disaster on top of everything else. I put it out of my mind until I got the text.
Google tells me there is currently an enormous bloom of the non-toxic dinoflagellate Lingulodinium polyedra that stretches from Baja to Los Angeles. On sunny days, those organisms concentrate at the surface to create a red color in the water. After dark, the phytoplankton glow a shocking neon blue as they tumble through the breaking waves.
I live close enough to the Venice Pier that surfers often park on the street near my apartment and walk barefoot to the water in their wetsuits. The neighborhood break is tough to surf generally, and usually best in the early morning. But for the past several days I had noticed an unusual proliferation of surfers carrying their boards to the beach at dusk. I figured it was something to do with quarantine, that maybe they were trying to socially distance the lineup -- or at least to avoid detection, since the beaches are technically closed right now. But it turns out these surfers were taking their boards to the water to dance with the ocean light.
“Wait. What?! Bioluminescence here? I’ll meet you in 10 minutes,” I texted back. “Life goals!”
Pulling on a pair of jeans, the t-shirt and hoodie I had laid out for the morning, a Covid-19 face covering and a pair of flip-flops, I made my way toward the ocean. My friend met me at her beachside home and we headed for the waves together. We weren’t alone on the beach but the sand is pretty much locals-only at this point, with parking lots closed and police patrolling the public spaces. People kept a respectful, neighborly distance.
As we approached the ocean, the moon was bright and the waves glittered with the usual pretty reflections of nighttime. I scanned the dark horizon, straining to see something. I was wondering if a faint glow I could make out in the distance might be the thing I had come to see, when a set of big waves came in and sudden strobes of vibrant blue scattered across the froth, chasing from wave to wave until the color bubbled and dimmed at the shoreline. And then it happened again, and again — each set of waves bathing the ocean in electric blue light.
Walking with my friend on the hard-pack at the edge of the water, I glanced down to secure my footing and found myself struck nearly dumb at the sight of lightning bolts under my heels. “Feet! Light! Feet!” I babbled, pointing.
The phytoplankton in the sand were just as active as they were in the water and, within moments, we had dropped to our knees and were scribbling glowing arcs through the damp sand with our hands. We both pulled out our phones to record the magic and found the cameras couldn’t capture it. When we got home an hour later, my friend sent me a screen capture of her photo roll: half a dozen identical black squares. I managed to catch 15 seconds of black picture accompanied by the sound of the pair of us 40-something women giggling like toddlers.
And I realized in that moment the reason there’s no better sound than the laughter of a child. The breathless joy we were both experiencing is what life feels like to a baby sensing the world for the first time. It’s the laughter of sweet birthday cake and the sudden pucker of a lemon; the warm kiss of a sunbeam between the shoulders and the infinite blue of a cloudless summer sky. When I saw that neon glow for the first time, I felt just like that. We both did. And we laughed together until our stomachs hurt.
The experts can’t say how long the red tide will last. It could be days or weeks. Regardless, it has given me something I am determined to hang on to long past this particular moment: a reminder of my own capacity for pure, naive joy, and a determination to find it as often as I can.