Orange Peel
Bits of orange peel are pulled in the form of a winding dotted line away from the
hull over which they'd been thrown. A Hansel and Gretel path, entirely visible. This is
our track across the water. Instead of broken branches or lingering smells to mark our
path, our only tracings is our garbage. This one organic, a mini life-vest chain, floating
now but soon to be swallowed, separated into the blue. But who would follow us? What
out there would know or care where we have passed? Providing a bit of detritus, extra
snowfall to the deep, is all we, passerbyers along the surface, do. We who let down a line
or trail a tow made of synthetic lines, yet know so little of the life around them.
The film of the surface next to our boat, heaved to and drifting, is so smooth it
reminds me of a motion i have caught in a bottle at home. An old physics demonstration
of oil and water, it is meant to recreate waves when it is tipped up and down. Like in that
plastic-enclosed space, the lines captured in this space before me are so minimal. These
are the least complicated waters I've seen thus far, and, looking to either side of the patch,
outside the protection of the leeward side of the boat, i am flabbergasted by the contrast
of it, the movement, the entwining, the swirling, the eddying. A bit of peel is caught in a
tiny spiral that i would never have noticed except for the white fleck of orange underbelly
has been tipped in and gently pulled down as though it is caught in a rope being
unwound, down, slowly, into the deep.
We try to imagine, to re-create the path of that piece of orange that my hand has
just touched, traveling down, out of the range of visible light to fields upon fields worth
of depth. We can not see most of the organisms it would pass, touch, bump into, or be
bitten apart by... from this view above, all we can imagine is the ocean is a place as clear
and vast as the sky and yet heavy, constantly balancing and rearranging itself. A place
where living creatures are suspended and need no other outside roost, nor necessarily a
means of locomotion home... it is the land and air reversed, it is the world through the
mirror of this one. We set a foot in water here or there, to test the temperature, depth, the
difference in density.... but our skin shrinks from the salt, our defenses dissolve, we send
machines to scope the way. Who knows how long the orange peel will take to break
down, what harm our traveling is causing. We affect the environment in ways we cannot
see. Had we the eyes, how could we take in such vastness?
-marin
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