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By Root 260 0

finger gently broke the surface of the pool and I moved my hand slowly toward it. I wanted to touch the smooth side of this scaleless fish. Members of a large family of small, darting fish, their cousins carried names that conjured stories: saddleback sculpin, buffalo sculpin, fluffy sculpin, staghorn sculpin, and red Irish lord, which had particularly bugged out eyes. I’d been entranced by this small fish when I’d first encountered it on the Oregon coast, amazed first by its ability to blend in perfectly with the colors of its pool. You could move from pool to pool, seeing the same kind of fish, but each would be dressed up in its own uniform. Regardless of whether its backdrop was dominated by pink sponge, green algae, browns, blues, or gray, the sculpin seemed to wear the speckled wallpaper of its home, dissolved into the pool, and disappeared. And this fish returned to its home tidepool, even after high tide washed in and erased the boundaries of its small world. You could take one of these sculpin in a paper cup, I’d heard, and walk them far down the beach. Still, they would find their way home. I remained otherwise motionless as my hand got closer and closer to the fish. At the last moment, it darted under a rock.

I brought my face closer to the pool—the water was thick with minute clear organisms swimming around rapidly. Between them, clear shrimp with red dots surged about. Delicate crimson flowers opened in one corner of the pool: the fancy tops of otherwise plain worms that lived in protective tubes. I could see barnacles waving thready fronds in the water to filter prey. And then something so easily overlooked: a nudibranch, a yellowish sluglike lump no bigger than the end of my thumb with purple spots. This was an unusual find and I was dying to share it, to show everyone—but we’d all wandered off so far from each other it did no good to yell.

As I waded through the tidepools, I wanted to see everything—every anemone, urchin, nudibranch, sculpin, shrimp, amphipod, worm, sea cucumber, crab, sponge, tunicate, periwinkle, and triton. I approached the area like a naturalist, wanting to identify, categorize. I tallied the kinds of starfish I’d seen: true, six-rayed, blood, sunflower, leather, brittle. I tallied the kinds of seaweed: winged kelp, popweed, sugar wrack, black seaweed, and sea lettuce, and their melodic scientific names: alaria, fucus, laminaria, porphyra, ulva.

But names were inadequate to describe these otherworldly creatures. And none of the colors I knew fit either. Nothing was simply red, blue, yellow, or green. There were colors I’d never seen before, colors I’d never even imagined. And everything kept changing: one color when wet, another when dry. There were stripes and spots, fringes and threads, borders and plates. The sea’s varied cast formed a complicated play of interlocked life, each organism adapted perfectly to its role. There were the cleaners, the eaters, the prey, those that converted the sun’s light to food, those that kept the dead stuff from cluttering the seafloor.

For a few moments at slack tide, the morning stood still. The nearly perpetual wind along the bay rested; the sea didn’t move in or out; the blue sky stared; and I kept my head down, eyes to the pools. But the rest of the world did go on. Pigeon guillemots let out their high-pitched, wheezy cries, and a belted kingfisher flew from one spruce bough to another, calling out in its sharp rattle. And if I were to come back the next morning, I’d see that starfish that had been caught far out of the water on this series of low tides would have migrated down the beach toward the bay’s retreated edge. Their motionlessness was fiction. As we waded through this ancient terrain, this naked patch of the sea, the world beat on and on.

I moved up the beach and stopped at the face of a huge boulder—its seaward size was covered in bright orange anemones that drooped like hundreds of pairs of breasts. And over to one side, a rusty-red gumboot chiton had wedged into a gap in the rock. It was the largest of the chitons, and looked like