Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [12]
But I’d miscalculated, expecting that his usual scattered attention would hold sway. The seal was too thrilling—too vulnerable—for him to forget so easily. He ran back, and I ran after him, to find him yelping madly at the creature, who was barking back and looking at me with a kind of bottomless exasperation. I leashed the dog and hauled him away again, this time keeping him on the lead until we were far away, into the marsh, a half-mile of dunes in between us and his prey.
Which did not turn out to be enough to stop him; when I made the mistake of letting him loose, he took off straight across the tops of the dunes, abandoning the curvy edge of the marsh for the shortest distance to further torment. I ran right across the dune-tops after him, my older and calmer black retriever loping behind me. When I thought I couldn’t run anymore—dry-mouthed, heart pounding—I made it to the last crest of dune to find him yelping and leaping perilously close to the seal’s head, both of them flashing teeth at one another.
This time the seal’s face seemed to convey a kind of helplessness and desolation that cut me to the core. I wanted a way to apologize for bringing this yapping annoyance, this petty grief, into what was already clearly a deeper pain, a silent and solitary occupation. I felt as if the seal were doing some grave work and I not only couldn’t help, I couldn’t help but harm; I couldn’t even keep my brutalizing pet from making things worse.
We left. Beau stayed on the leash at least a mile, till we were well in the middle of the dike that keeps the tide from washing away the modest ambitions of this town’s airport runways. Even then, released, he thought of running back, and began to, but I was given from someplace the sudden wise impulse to run in the other direction, toward home; making a game of it convinced Beau to run after me, instead of after his own wildness. It was a moment of choosing between loyalties to different aspects of himself, and he chose domestic partnership.
The woman who answered the phone at the Center for Coastal Studies said they’d had several reports of exhausted seals beaching themselves, resting, then riding out on the next high tide when they recovered. Exhausted from what? I asked. The work of finding food, she said. I didn’t know why then, more than any other time, they’d be weary. I described the seal’s look of distress and exhaustion, I said I feared it was ill. She said she didn’t know if there was anyone who could get out that day and look, but perhaps there was. She took my phone number, but they didn’t call.
So my attempts at helping didn’t seem to. The fact of the exhausted, incapable body—the fact of illness?—was intractable. I walked or ran on the wide expanse of marsh and dune, under that huge sky, around the single immovable fact.
The wide elemental landscape seemed to heighten and emphasize the lesson. Do what you can, nothing avails; it even seemed, with my panting, excited companion, that I’d made things worse.
The dead seal is an emblem of perfect repose; it lies like a yogi who’s left the body for a time, gone completely into himself, the beached body left behind in a state of great quietude, utter silence. The head’s turned to the right, so that one cheek rests against the sand. The small flippers lie peacefully at either side, and the perfectly straight spine ends in the symmetrical flourish of the tail. But there is no sense of movement or fluidity in the body, despite the grace and economy