Unicorn Blood

August 23, 2004

If I were a homesteader or explorer dad I could have navigated us to the shoreline by starlight, smell and celestial navigation. Instead I am in full holiday thaw and we are using flashlights. Without them this would be possible but the age of my charges does not allow for the patience required to wait for the receptors in the eyes to sensitize to the blue light of the stars. Streetlights are city things and they seem worlds away tonight. Waves are crashing and they want to be in them …now. We should know the way so well. This has been our summer and Easter getaway for more than a dozen years and everybody is amazed tonight that we haven’t seen all this tiny island has to offer. When I say starlight I mean stronger than citified moonlight by a wide margin. Here you can see all of them. Satellites, planets, airplanes, constellations, spacejunk, comets, intercontinental flights and further galaxies all are there in a million layers. This is the sea life of an ocean where the water is replaced by transparent buoyant oxygen. You look up into it like you peer over a boat into a world you can’t live in. A vast alien space is unveiled and the farther up or down you go the harder it would be for you to survive and the more amazing it would be to visit. On top are the known yet naturally exotic fish and on the bottom, in the darkest depths, guarding all the treasure and pain ever to be lost on the surface, are glowing translucent alien creatures yet to be discovered.
Tonight we are going to swim with them. It’s a different kind of darkness here. It’s full of adventure rather than streetwise apprehension. Our big black dog bounds somewhere ahead of us. Her low woof and growl signals the flashlight beams to train themselves together in her direction. Through the yellowish circular flashes bounds a large deer. Left to right across our path. The kids track her with their dollar store beams. All anyone can see is the deer’s spotlight dance as she leaps four-foot chunks of tall dry grass and vanishes into the even darker woods. Like klieg lights scanning the skies for enemy bombers the doe has been deprived of her strategic veil of darkness by a random sweep across a probable sector. The ovals of light swirl in front of us once again as we move onto the steep trail down to the driftwood logs and the pebble and sandstone moonscape of a beach.
Familiar voices of summer friends are the only way any of us can tell who is there. Unless you shine a light straight into someone’s eyes there is no way to take instant inventory of who is down here on this dark beach with you. The first swimmers are into the waves and are coming up gasping and screaming in elation. I’ve forgotten to wear swimming gear of any kind so I quickly pare down to nature’s bathing suit and commit to a shallow dive. I open my eyes to the underwater stars. At this time of year and at some unique confluence of temperature conditions and salination the bioluminescent explosion occurs. Tiny microbial creatures store the sun’s light through the day and release it when agitated. Thousands of tiny rock concert "glo-sticks" flare up and around you in those wind tunnel curves. As you come up and break the surface they fly away from your laminar flow in small firework flowers. Straggler glitter runs down the strings of your wet hair in a disco wet dream. It seems staged by nature to distract you from some other more valuable prize. The delicious fruit sacrifices itself for the purposes of vital seed inside. Peacock feathers. A lizard drops its tail to a raptor then grows a new one. I get the feeling we are being bedazzled for a reason. I can’t stop enjoying this. It is completely distracting me from anything that might weigh me down. I am the sand irritating the oyster to conjure a pearl. I am sticking my tongue in the Venus fly trap. The punch has been spiked and it tastes fantastic. I stand shoulder deep and scull my arms in figure eights to watch the acid tracers. The waves that pass over me carry rolling rhinestones on their crests. As I look across to where the bigger waves are breaking on the sandstone spit it seems like they are lit silver blue from underneath as if in some LA hotel pool. This is unicorn blood. Tonight we are all wizards in a Led Zeppelin album cover world. Children are still chirping and laughing in amazement as some of us towel off and stutter out strings of impossible adjectives. Just as I don’t feel I want to hear the scientific explanation of the northern lights I want to use this moment to help maintain my innocent world of inexplicable beauty. I’ve lived by the ocean my entire life. Why have I never done this? I will do this every chance I get.