Platts Bank

Platts Bank read aloud:

Platts Bank

Somehow, we ride our lost loves out to sea. Or they ride us. It doesn’t matter.

- Diane Seuss

I thought I was going to Platts Bank to fish, but it turned out to be a dharma gate. I won’t say that fishing is the same as Zazen, but I am saying that if you are on the water long enough, you become unlocatable, and if you stay a little longer, you see that you always have been and always will be. It takes two and a half hours to get to Platts Bank in The Rita B from Portland Harbor. When we could no longer see land, we were not even halfway there. This is plenty long enough to lose sight of my identity. Halfway Rock sank into the sea behind us. We passed between the pursed lips of Cape Split and Ram’s Head, and the captain opened her up, and we were flung. This is when you surrender, put your earplugs in, and face yourself. If you’re smart, you might start chanting beyond beyond beyond to get real comfortable with it.

I began to seriously question my chances of escaping the myth of duality in this life when everything but love looks to be cut in two: air/water, right/wrong, life/death, me/you, and so on. From the boat, all I could see was a world divided - sea and sky cut cleanly by the horizon, our original line - the great level - the source of insatiable seeking that we’ve co-evolved with. I suspect it’ll take some time to unsee, likely longer than I have. I briefly considered plunging myself into the water as a potential fast-track to boundary dissolution, like eating five dried grams of psilocybin in silent darkness, but then I remembered that my friends had made Italian sandwiches for lunch, so instead, I sat and stared at the straightest line on earth for two hours.

It was unclear what to do with my eyes or my devotion when things looked to lie so flat. We have made a verticality of worth and worship - steeples, mounts, pillars, or else being cast down from them - the fall, the descent, pits of despair, ditches. We, as the universe, seek novelty over everything. Our eyes reach at topography and our minds grasp for ordeal, or else we become restless and create it for ourselves in surprising, often troubling ways. This is to say that I am a toddler when faced with anything approaching monotony, but after an hour or so of letting my eyes skim over the seascape as featureless, an architecture revealed itself - made of clouds and waveforms - and so, limitless in newness and now. Imagine the perpetual orgeastic shapeshifting that clouds and waves display, and dare to be bored. Fanny Howe said, “The sky is a fish packed in ice,” and I see it, and immediately it is something else. Then I see, in riding the waves, I am undergoing the complete ascent and descent with each swell, easy and unnoticed as a breath. Nothing is missing. It’s all here. My expectations of time and scale began to calibrate, and a great peace and excitement came in seeing that I could do this forever, I have done this forever, we have done this forever.

Some say that awakening is the last disappointment, but I was tired and in my new felt cosmic comfort, I fell asleep, sitting up against the wall of the cabin, leaving my awareness in just my right hand to loosely grip a metal post to keep me from tipping over in my shallow, rocking sleep, like on a subway, but with more dimensional movement and the ocassional sea spray in the face. But I am not disappointed when I wake. When you sleep somewhere, something is reorganized by your dreams, and you wake up at home. We are nearing Platts Bank when I open my eyes. Gannets dive like brand-new angels being made. Petrels walk on water. Purple jellyfish loll around the boat in amorphous unhurriedness. I am thrilled by the nonchalance of strangeness and encouraged to be thrilled, too, by my own.

The sea is rough but not unkind. We grip the gunwales with our thighs to brace and ride the ride and clamp the rods so hard under our arms as we reel that we wake up the next day bruised in odd and specific places, much like the morning after the first night with a new lover. The fish takes the bait and ascends, as a believer might pray all their life to, but our values do not apply to anyone but ourselves, and to a fish who lives on the seafloor, they are nearly inverse. I haul her from her low home up on my hook, into a hell that we call fresh air and sunshine, a beautiful day so hellish to her form that her guts are pushed from her mouth in a pink sac by the pressure of rising so fast, and I can only hope there is unseen mercy in this design, even rapture. Higher still, I hold her up by her gills toward the sky, smiling, like I’m handing up an offering to something I believe might save me, and then we bleed her, cut away her flesh, toss her guts to the gulls, and salt her rack to attract lobsters to the same fate.

To the family beach house, I bring a few fillets. We have lived beside the sea so long and still know nothing of what it holds. Just like any other life, even family and our own, we can only see what they choose to show or what chance and weather bring to shore. Chance has no memory, and weather has no care in the world but expressing itself, so we must abandon rationale and forecasts, take whatever comes, and hope we can make a stew from it.

We ate cioppino on the porch, the white fish simmered gently in a bold, briny tomato broth with clams, shrimp, scallops, mussels, squid, and lobster. We raised our glasses to the chef, to the stew, to being together in our family’s truest home, the sea right there over our shoulder, shining, but we barely glance at it. It’s just too big to look at sometimes, and we look deeply instead into our bowls, into the pot to fish out another good ladle, like children peering under rocks in a tidepool, shells clacking, only curious about what we might touch and put in our mouths rather than think about the unknowable, winking at us behind our backs. I have come to trust that we are not here to know this world but to appreciate, and in either case, what better way to try than by its fruit.

***For anyone looking to fish on or off the coast of Maine, my dear friend Captain Ed Snell of The Rita B is the man you want to take you. We had five people on the boat and I came home with nearly 20lbs of haddock, pollock, cusk for the freezer, and a pile of collars and mackerel for the grill. And no, you do not have to pass through the dharma gate and go offshore (though, I obviously recommend it), he can take you around the harbor where there are plenty fish to catch and lots of land in sight.