By Kendalyn Murdock
For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.
—Job 14
My fingers and palm sit, floating, just below the surface of the clear water. They look different in their new environment, their lines and outlines are less clear; the skin’s hue has changed. It’s as if the water has subsumed my hand, given it a place in this small tide pool in the North of Ireland. My hand is an organism amongst other organisms. It can be counted among the red vibrancy of the wiggling beadlet anemones, the strong limpets clinging to the basalt, and the winkles tucked into the verdancy of the softly swaying sea lettuce. In this moment, I am part and particle of this microcosm of the sea. It hurts to remove myself from it. When I take my hand out, my fingers drip small salty beads and I, regretfully, wipe them dry on my sweatshirt.
. . .
After my high school gym class, I head immediately to the stall to change. I lock myself in there, and I listen to everyone out by their lockers. There is laughter and the careless zipping of jeans and the ruffling sound of shirts being removed and replaced. I lean my head against the cold metal of the stall door, taking my things off slowly, ashamed of what I reveal, grateful that no one can see me. Over the sound of their laughter is the sound of someone in the shower adjacent to the bathroom stalls. The water falls loudly and warmly, beginning to steam up the locker room. A voice slips into my head: How easily I could slip into the unoccupied shower. How easily I could turn the heat all the way up and let the burning take my flesh. How easy it would be to watch as it all runs down the drain.
Every time I got in the shower at home, I thought I’d emerge different, but instead I’d stare at myself in the mirror, hair dripping, ashamed. Why do I want for my own fragmentation? The thought has crossed my mind so many times, having spent much of my life in a body that I’ve hated more than I’ve loved. My high school was situated right next to renowned hot pools and watering holes that, being in a rural area, took the place of a mall as the place where teenagers hung out together. I was always getting invited; I was always turning it down. I was worried about how I’d look to my skinnier friends and the boys when wet and in a bathing suit. My internal dialogue has always been so flooded with hateful thoughts about the way I look from that voice, the voice I know like the back of my hand. It’s never quiet in my cranium, I can never just sit in my body without hearing the voice urging me to position myself in a more flattering way, to not go somewhere or I might be seen, to not wear something that fits in a certain way because then everyone would know that I was overweight.
I emerge from the stall and walk past everyone, constantly readjusting my shirt, pulling at the fabric around my stomach.
. . .
I read a novella years ago by Vercors called The Silence of the Sea. In French, Le Silence de la Mer. The title alone wrought some inexplicable twisting in my gut, and for more than just the prosody of it—the quick movement of the tongue as it peeks out of the front teeth. I had been working at Wendy’s for a year, almost exclusively at the fryers, trying to make myself small as I stood up against the pits of fatty oil. The salt box that became my new limb had the French sel de mer under the English sea salt. As I looked at that French sodium and that mer in black font throughout my shift, that delicate phrase came back to me as I dumped, salted, and tossed the fries. I combatted the monotony of the task with the monotony of language, running the words through my head again and again: Le Silence de la Mer (dump), Le Silence de la Mer (salt), Le Silence de la Mer (toss). The repetition . . . the in-breaking image. An ache arose in me as the salt stuck to my upper lip when I wiped an itch and the oil steamed up and gathered in the dip on my chin.
. . .
On my breaks at Wendy’s, after running the title of a book through my head, I read books. I sat in my car in the heat, breaking a sweat but needing the silence in there that I couldn’t get inside the restaurant. I read mostly P. G. Wodehouse because he made me laugh, and I needed a fancy butler and his rich employer to make me feel a little better about the job I hated. One day I picked up Nan Shepherd and her book of nature writings, The Living Mountain. I was shocked by the spirit in her writing. It was as if God Himself were composing it. Surely that was how He saw His creation, in its entirety, in its minutiae and largesse, wedding them together as if they stood on equal footing. Before I could prepare myself, Shepherd was writing about how the body, that base, human thing, experiences the mountain. She fought back against the belittlement of the body in three of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read. She related how being “transparent” or “light as air” isn’t adequate in describing one’s spiritual transcendence in the natural world. Instead—and I have these words memorized now and the page they fall on is worn—“The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.” I stopped reading. A car honked in the drive-through and my coworker’s voice over the speaker drifted to me through the cracked car door. I knew there was something there in what Shepherd was saying, but I wasn’t ready to lay my pain aside; I wasn’t ready to part with my youthful egocentrism. So, sweating in the heat of the waning summer, I laid the book aside for some time.
Months later, I was dropping out of my classes and trying to feel something again, trying to feel some spark of the divine. I came back to Shepherd then, still wishing to flee my flesh, all the while dodging life in my flight. There it was again—the paramount body, the fulfilled body, the essential body. Nan Shepherd dragging her body up Ben Nevis, Nan Shepherd laying her body down in the terrain and awaking to the world, unfamiliar to it and herself as she opened her eyes, and most alluring and terrifying, Nan Shepherd bathing her body in the summer streams under the open sky. Of water, she said, “I only know that man can’t live without it. He must see it and hear it, touch it and taste it . . . if he is to be in health.” The memory of liquid movement lived in my every cell. I recalled years ago the diving into that alpine lake in the Sawtooth Mountains, the resurfacing and the sharp breathing to assuage my lungs shocked by the cold, the adjusting, and then the numbing. Numbing followed by feeling, feeling that had no correlation with my skin or muscles and everything to do with floating and the water’s subtle movement. My body still spoke to me, though I’d shunned it, and it was begging for feeling.
. . .
Further down the coast in the Ring of Kerry, we pull off to a beach with cliffs stretching above it and begin the descent down the path to access the sand. Some man is selling his portraits; one has a yawning cat and another an old stone wall in the countryside. Above the cliff, a small mountain touches the sky with small white houses at its base. Looking out from the beach you can see Skellig Michael’s sharp outline. Most of the people on the beach appear to be Irish. Two siblings walk out into the crashing waves in their wet suits, an older man pulls his pants off, and my sister and I laugh together and look up at the cliffs while he puts on a speedo. I always assumed the Irish were more conservative. I watch as he enters the water. I understand the good the cold plunge does to his old body. I want to be in there, too. I want the feeling of the ocean on more than just my hand dipping into its shallow tide pools.
We didn’t plan on swimming, but I look down at my jeans and begin to shrug them off. I can’t believe I’m doing it.
“I’m getting in, who wants to join me?” I ask my grandma, mom, and little sister, but they don’t care to strip down to their underwear like I do. I smile at them. “Come on. Look how blue it is!”
They still say no, insisting they wish they had brought their swimsuits, but encourage me and hold my shirt when I yank it off. I walk into the teal-gray waters, the waves lapping at my feet. It’s frigid and from many past experiences swimming in alpine lakes, I know it’s best if I just get it over with to sooner kickstart the adjustment process. So I dive in and iciness floods my veins. When I come up, I hear cheering from my family on the shore as I try to breathe. The sudden cold shock feels like it has stopped my lungs, and I laugh to relieve some of that fear. Then I begin paddling on my back out farther into the ocean. Wave after wave rocks my body, caressing the back of my head as they push me back towards shore and I push against them. Then I float, blessedly and rarely weightless, and my back arches as I turn my head to the gulls swooping above, coming from the mountain, and echoing their harsh kree-ar. The cold is drugging my spine and numbing my toes. I want to utter, I want to cry, Thank you Lord, thank you Lord, finally I have annihilated my body. But I realize immediately after that I haven’t annihilated my body, like Nan Shepherd said, I’ve only annihilated an outside vision of it. This inner vision, this spiritual reception of the flesh, is a gift from the sea. I hang there in suspension and bring my head below the surface and listen and there is nothing. Only hollowness and muted noises from dry land. I come back up. I smile and the salty water slips into my mouth.
This is le silence. I am de la mer.
That voice in my head is washed out to sea and the consciousness of my limbs and my layers has dissipated and, like the Little Mermaid, it is foaming and floating away.
. . .
My sophomore English teacher made the sound of the sea with his mouth. Or the way he fit his mouth around John Masefield’s poem.
“See how it sounds like a wave breaking: ‘I must go down to the seas again.’”
It felt forced but I saw it breaking, I saw it recede and come back for the second part: “to the lonely sea and the sky.”
All that rising and all that falling. All that movement. It was the first poem I ever loved. It was something about the urgency for the sea. As if salt water could satiate and the liminal space between sea and shore could heal.
. . .
In the place where I lost my body, or what I mistook for it—that is, my consciousness of it—there was a large white statue of the crucifixion up on the hill. It stood in front of a landslide of violently broken rocks. Christ’s body is twisted and His palms are torn by the nails. I know how the story ends. I knew about resurrection and new bodies before I knew that the earth revolved around the sun. Oblivion leaves the smallest of seeds. I look at my body, my clothes with new eyes. I see the hands that I stuck in the tide pool, the legs and arms that kicked in the ocean, the stomach that delighted in fresh fish from the sea. Looking at the Savior on His white crucifix, I catch in the wind faintly for a moment, coming down the mountain or rolling up from the sea, the Scent of Water, and I breathe it deeply and let it become the climate in my lungs.
Kendalyn Murdock is (will be graduated as of June 2024) an English major at BYU. She was born and raised in southeast Idaho and has had a love for the written word since she learned the alphabet. She loves time outdoors exploring and time in books, similarly, exploring.
