It was there, off the coast, in the rolling waves, that he realized how much he loved the ocean. Never before had he been able to swim, daily, for hours. The ocean he knew was the cold the northern Atlantic. Swimming laps around a schooner off the coast of Maine, numbing and miserable, a test of manhood only, clawing with unworking fingers at the rope ladder and the slimy barnacled hull, pulling a pale numb purple-blue body to the deck to huddle by the stove in abject misery. Or Huntington Beach in the offseason, when only the most diehard Californians in their wetsuits dared to venture out to surf. He had been in Nicaragua, too, but the waters of the Pacific were violent, driven by engines as big as all the lands of the Earth. Tossed and pounded by the waves, stung by jellyfish, battered and scraped in the surf, tumbling and thoughtless, desperate, ground along the coral to climb bloody and burned up the beach. The Med was a difference entirely.
The water was not the topaz blue of the Caribbean, nor the dark black of the Atlantic, nor the brown, silty mess off Central America. It was emerald green and glorious blues, stirred by the original trident, Poseidon's, around rocks and stony points. He swam to one outcrop and climbed, slicing his feet on the razorblade shells, until he could stand on the sun-warmed rock and survey the coastline for several miles in either direction. Endless green mountains, their fault lines tilted into the sea.
It was important to remember that this was once Roman water, and that while he may be seen as the God of all the Ocean, Poseidon's true dominion was and ever will be the Mediterranean. It is the men of these shores who gave him birth and name, and it is over these waters they prayed and storied. These waters buoyed Hannibal. These waters saw Xerxes armada smashed by the Greeks. These waters bore Aeneas from burning Troy to found Rome and a thousand years of empire.... These waters ran below Odysseus’ plagued route home. These are the waters of the Tempest, tossing the nobles from Milan upon a shore no different than this one... of Twelfth Night, that swallowed Olivia and Sebastian and coughed them up in some Italian city... Vernazza.... Sestri... These waters carried the martyrs from the burned stakes of Spain to their final tomb in St. Fruttosso.
This is the sea of all the classic history. Ovid. Shakespeare. The Illiad. The Aenid. The Count of Monte Cristo... on and on and on... These are the cliff-lined shores that inspired poets, playwrites, and epics.
This was no ordinary sea. And the salt that stung his eyes and caked his lips, the pale desert of sand on the bottom, the rocks rolled to pebbles on the shoreline, this was where history as it was known had begun. He lay on his back, a meter down, while the sun filtered through the azure cloud, watching bubbles trickle upwards and the fish, fearless, swim around his hands, darting between his fingers, and here he thought upon all things, while the jagged rocks that jutted down into the sea, bent and molded by volcanoes, by Vulcan, loomed their pale yellow faces, crowned by green trees and olive groves, glowing in the sun, over all the busy beach dwellers, nestled under their umbrellas, who had forgotten or gave no thought to the power of this sea and the legacy these waves had carried, and would carry, surging endlessly through all the ages of man.
The water was not the topaz blue of the Caribbean, nor the dark black of the Atlantic, nor the brown, silty mess off Central America. It was emerald green and glorious blues, stirred by the original trident, Poseidon's, around rocks and stony points. He swam to one outcrop and climbed, slicing his feet on the razorblade shells, until he could stand on the sun-warmed rock and survey the coastline for several miles in either direction. Endless green mountains, their fault lines tilted into the sea.
It was important to remember that this was once Roman water, and that while he may be seen as the God of all the Ocean, Poseidon's true dominion was and ever will be the Mediterranean. It is the men of these shores who gave him birth and name, and it is over these waters they prayed and storied. These waters buoyed Hannibal. These waters saw Xerxes armada smashed by the Greeks. These waters bore Aeneas from burning Troy to found Rome and a thousand years of empire.... These waters ran below Odysseus’ plagued route home. These are the waters of the Tempest, tossing the nobles from Milan upon a shore no different than this one... of Twelfth Night, that swallowed Olivia and Sebastian and coughed them up in some Italian city... Vernazza.... Sestri... These waters carried the martyrs from the burned stakes of Spain to their final tomb in St. Fruttosso.
This is the sea of all the classic history. Ovid. Shakespeare. The Illiad. The Aenid. The Count of Monte Cristo... on and on and on... These are the cliff-lined shores that inspired poets, playwrites, and epics.
This was no ordinary sea. And the salt that stung his eyes and caked his lips, the pale desert of sand on the bottom, the rocks rolled to pebbles on the shoreline, this was where history as it was known had begun. He lay on his back, a meter down, while the sun filtered through the azure cloud, watching bubbles trickle upwards and the fish, fearless, swim around his hands, darting between his fingers, and here he thought upon all things, while the jagged rocks that jutted down into the sea, bent and molded by volcanoes, by Vulcan, loomed their pale yellow faces, crowned by green trees and olive groves, glowing in the sun, over all the busy beach dwellers, nestled under their umbrellas, who had forgotten or gave no thought to the power of this sea and the legacy these waves had carried, and would carry, surging endlessly through all the ages of man.
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