The Quiet That Holds Us
29.09.2024 Elena Klonsky and photography Beatriz Ryder
Mom used to say her nightmares were of the ocean creeping in, unstoppable and ancient. In Oregon, where we built our lives, we were raised to see the ocean as doom. The lurking beast, biding its time. The looming threat of a tsunami was the ghost we all knew but never spoke about, a gatekeeper of the fault line that could snap open at any moment, spilling the earth’s fury. Just to the west lay the Columbia Bar, a watery graveyard where too many souls had gone to meet their end. “Don’t turn your back on it,” they’d say, voices laced with superstition, “or you might get swept away.”
Still, we found ourselves drawn to the coast. Cloaked in four millimetres of neoprene, we made a pilgrimage to surf the ancient green. On grey days, when sea and sky touch hands, our boards and bodies drew lines down a blank canvas, our breath mingling with salt spray in the air. Surfing was our religion, and the tides, wind, and weather were our mercurial gods. We were so overwhelmingly small. The ocean would wrap its steely fingers around us, pulling us away from our mothers and out to sea.
Come autumn, the land bathed in golden light, and the water melted into a deep, unknowable green. Whispers of summer still reached their fingers through the warm afternoon tides. Over the years, however, we learned to stop relying on the sun to arrive. Gathered on my roof, my flatmates and I perched as lightning grazed the Golden Gate, and the Diablo winds mingled with electricity, setting the foothills aflame. It was the end of single-finned dawn patrol when I witnessed smoke so thick that daylight never came. Still, afternoons were reserved for slipping back into a Pacific primordial stew, and I was devoted to the pursuit of surf. Seawater was always dripping from my nose. I’d be careful not to look down suddenly, lest it come pouring out days later.
I moved to New York to research the changing climate. The week I arrived, a significant portion of Brooklyn and Queens was underwater. Most of my faculty was absent, addressing an emerging crisis rather than a cohort of eager postgrads. The Atlantic had raged inward, overwhelming the city’s islands as Hurricane Ida pulsed above. Century-old walls did their best to shelter my Chinatown shoebox from tidal surges. Through foggy windows, we watched the planet warm.
It turns out we never woke up from our ocean dreams. Amongst all the outcomes we will witness at the hands of climate change, none is so feared, so urgent, or so ubiquitous as water rising all around us. Over time, sea-level rise has been adopted as a euphemism for the entire climate emergency. Flooding, drowning—both so easily adapted into references to apocalypse. A mass of water slouches blankly in our direction.
It was during this time, as I studied, that I yearned to be at the mercy of the ocean the most. I’m not ashamed to admit that it was mainly surfing that I missed. Partially, I’m sure, it was a reaction to returning to a rigorous and structured education after two years of lockdown-induced passivity. After all, surfing is a lifestyle popularly represented by its Spicolian domelessness, a burnout je ne sais quoi. I often wondered if I’d turn to the Californian coastline and let my mind go numb.
But it wasn’t just the surfing—it was the language of the ocean itself, the rhythms and forces that you couldn’t control but had to learn to understand. Surfers, for all their slack-jawed reputations, know the climate better than most scientists. In the lineup, there’s talk of atmospheric lows, of La Niña, of the trade winds—language as ancient as the waves themselves. Breaks are guarded secrets, like scripture passed down through generations. Ask any surfer and they’ll tell you, the ocean isn’t just water. It’s a teacher, a test, a mirror held up to the world.
One day in class, my professor gave us a thought experiment. Picture a monkey tapping away on a keyboard, endlessly and without direction. Given infinite time, that monkey would eventually type out every human text ever written. Every letter, every novel, every lost song—all laid out before us. People say you can never step into the same river twice, but I think the mathematicians and the monkeys might disagree.
Matter can’t be destroyed, just as it can’t be created. The ocean, like the monkey’s endless keystrokes, will cycle through itself again and again. The sea will rise, just like it always has, spilling its ancient molecules back into our cities, creeping into our homes. We’ll all witness it—the slow, inevitable symphony of water taking back what it once owned. Will we stand in the same water that grazed our ancestors' feet? Through an atomic embrace, will I hold my mother’s hand?
The ocean preceded us all, and it will persist far beyond our ability to measure it or write poetry about it. Waist deep, I wear it as a jacket, our ancestral record written in its fabric. I am a small discrete thing, temporarily displacing the infinite. I am baptized; fresh, new, clean, and bathed of all the things I have chosen to know, and those I didn’t. My cells change phase; become liquid matter; suddenly I’m fluid. My fin trims through waist-high peelers, humming sweet soft chords. Me on my delicate pew, the ocean at my feet.
For one infinitesimal second, we move in sync, travelling at the speed of sound.
become a contributorpartner with ushosting an event?
we only email just enough