Playground

by Richard Powers

Ojo de Liebre Lagoon off Baja,

But down where the light was powerless, even the world’s largest eyes could not make out the stunning, jagged mountain ranges, vast waterfalls with a thousand times the flow of Niagara, trenches and crenellations and pits and crevasses like nothing known on land, panoramas never to be seen by any living thing.

Sharks that used two-thirds of the weight of their brain to sniff out one drop of blood in several million drops of water.

She wrote of the thousand-mile-long meandering rivers of scent in the atmosphere that seabirds smelled, tracking the plankton to find the krill that fed on it.

creatures with four-, five-, six-, and eightfold symmetry,

She lavished attention on one of the loudest noisemakers, a pistol shrimp.

The noise of these tiny shrimp rivals anything in the deep, even the booming of the great whales. When a whole colony of pistol shrimp start snapping together, the chorus can jam the Navy’s most sophisticated sonar.

The snap of a single pistol shrimp is louder than the roar of a jet engine from half a block away. And the explosion made by its snapping claw creates a wave of bubbles strong enough to stun a large fish or break a glass jar. These bubbles contain so much energy, they emit flashes of light almost as hot as the surface of the sun.

goby, a small ray-finned fish who relied on his shrimp partner to dig out and maintain their den.

The goby stands watch outside their shared burrow, catching food for them both. The shrimp constantly feels for the fish with long antennae. The goby tells the shrimp what is happening outside, using a language of special fin flicks. At the first sign of danger, the goby whisks them both back into the fortress that the shrimp has built.

the field he had loved back in graduate school.

they held still and said nothing, each grateful for the silence that the other permitted.

Great bursts of color were coursing through her, a symphony of inexplicable, contradictory messages about nothing and everything. Your sea is so great and our craft so small, O Lord. The cuttlefish’s song.

All that night, instead of sleeping, I wrote and rewrote my reply:

I went back and forth on every sentence, imagining how he might read or misread each one. Every time I changed a word or shifted a phrase, the tone of the hundred things I was trying to convey to him swirled around like an AM radio station in a snowstorm.

I hadn’t spoken with him for almost half of my life adult life. I had no idea where or who he was now, and we were shooting messages back and forth, in near-real time. That’s how truly insane digital life had become.

“The real question is how you want to proceed. What do you want from this? How are you feeling?” “Feeling? Wronged. I was so close to this man. I never meant . . .” “You want an apology? Are you out of your mind?” I had somehow regressed to the worst kind of novice player.

It’s quite another to understand what passes for the feeling of injustice between two people who once loved each other.

He was no great student of cleromancy, and his father, the miner, had mocked it as a superstition that united peasants and elites.

Nine-tenths of large life missing, and the rest filled with heavy metals. The largest part of the planet exhausted, before it was ever explored.

I lost my own sense of self, along with all idea of what kind of life I could possibly be living in so alien a place.

in that state, terror is just another painting hanging on the wall of a museum so huge, dark, and shot through with jumbled rooms that no single painting can hold my gaze or have much power over me for long.

my brain going over its sole mantra of the last few months: “Fluctuating cognition, fluctuating cognition . . .” It was a way of reminding myself that I’d be back, eventually.

Afraid that I might not be able to sleep. Afraid of the crippling fatigue that comes when I can’t. Afraid of what nightmares I might have when sleep stops and I’m awake again.

I was grateful for the apathy that pinned me, lost, at the bottom of a bottomless minute.

Nicholas Hoare’s doctoral thesis, Re-Mining Makatea: People, Politics, and Phosphate Rock, provided invaluable background and insights into that singular island.

Guy Stevens and Thomas P. Peschak’s Manta: Secret Life of Devil Rays astonished me.

Evelyne Beaulieu’s biography draws on the life of Dr. Sylvia Earle, especially as recounted in Sea Ch...

Helen Czerski’s The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works got ...

the symphonic cuttlefish comes from Peter Godfrey-Smith’s extraordinary Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and t...