There Be Mermaids Here
This piece is best enjoyed listening to a new a capella group of women called Lyyra, perform the haunting Here There Be Mermaids. The piece pulsates like the surf as it builds to a thrilling climax, and then becalms just as suddenly.
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I’m driving along the coast highway when just as my eyelids are drooping I espy a sliver of an Oregon state park with a couple parking spaces, nestled between the surf and Hwy 101, too small to all but the most curious.
The beach is almost totally rock, with a couple of sand patches like the bald crown on Friar Tuck’s head. I take a seat on a rock and let the waves consume my senses. I relax and synchronize with the surf, attuning to the ebb and flow, neap and flood, systole and diastole that underwrite life on earth.
I peer into the alternate universe of a tranquil tidepool, with its miniature polity of Miss Anemone pageants and wily sea urchins selling hermit-crabs real estate of dubious title, an underwater Whoville whose denizens have no clue of the disruption that the next wave will bring. I consider intervention for a moment, but remember that Horton would be an invasive specie to Oregonians .
I am interrupted by insistent splashing as the tide crept up the slab. As I resettled to a higher spot the wind began to rustle in the trees across 101 in answer to a markedly rougher offshore surf. I thought about saddling up and leaving, but I found the increasing tumult invigorating.
Meanwhile, the rustle in the trees became a soughing, and the soughing became a lowing, and the lowing became a keening high in the trees, and the keening became a polished soprano chorale that lured kittenish cougars and puppyish wolves to the water’s edge to innocently cavort with unicorns.
As the chorale began driving to a crescendo I took a delirious look at the water’s edge and saw a comely humanoid creature with a demurely-situated seaweed coif about her shoulders, beckoning me into the surf with a scaly flash and a powerful thrust.
Finally alarmed, I turned quickly to my side, but the wax earplugs I always bring with me to the seashore were nowhere to be found.
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