To Live in Growing Orbits, Vol. II: Shark Medicine
A Journey through the stories in Piko: A Return to the Dreaming
This is not a memoir.
If this was a memoir, I would tell you why I don’t feel like I deserve to even be in my own body, to take up the space given to me by a boundary of skin and bones. I would strip naked in front of you, bare my soul as if you were my therapist, a priest, God with a capital “G."
But this is not a memoir.
What is this book then? Now and then I do share my story. Sometimes I will tell you about how I fell in love with Waipi’o Valley and a man who was raised by lo’i and river streams, of how he led me across his family’s land, lured me with a story and a waterfall, of how the entire valley seemed like it was waiting for rain to crack the treetops, and the leaves turned inward to funnel the water before it even fell, pulling the clouds toward the valley’s deep gulches.
Sometimes I will tell you of how he cleared a path before us with a cane knife, slashed java plums and banks of impatiens that didn’t grow wild where I came from. I will pick up a guava from the ground and he will tell me not to eat it. “Worms,” he’ll say, throwing a rock at an orange so high in a tree I think it’s a bird. I will leave my body only to have him hand it back to me, heavy with juice in his palm. When my teeth prick the white pith, flowers will lift their faces toward the clouds.
These are the things I would tell you if this was a memoir. I would tell you why I was reckless and bold, expose my innocence, my longing for love so desperate I was porous and anyone with snapping teeth and a fin on his back could see right through me. Water passed through my skin, and light. In those days I was beautiful and sometimes I glowed. Why did no one love me?
If this was a memoir I would make some educated guesses and tell you, but really I don’t know. Anything I say would be assumptions and conclusions, the end of a story, when I want this book to be about the beginning, a new here, right now.
But I will tell you about how we climbed up the moss-slick rocks to the second pool at Nanaue Falls, the place in the story he told me about the shark man who could still swim here from the ocean through an underground passage. And I will tell you how when we reached the waterfall he told me when he was a kid he and his brothers used to hide one pool up and watch the hippie girls slide down naked. I will tell you when he said this I took off my clothes without comment and slid into the opaque water, thick as milk, jade green and without reflection, and that I knew someday I would write about it.
I will tell you how I swam toward the other side without looking back when I heard the splash behind me. I am the poet: Orpheus, not Eurydice. This is my song. I will tell you, waiting for the sound of his breath to let me know he’d surfaced, I pretended calm for as long as I could.
No human could go without breath that long. Right until the last second, I pretended calm, but when a shadow pass beneath me in the dark water, something that should have been impossible in this place barely touched by sunlight, my limbs locked.
It was only a few seconds. And then it was over and he was laughing in my face when he saw the terror in my eyes, popping up on the other side of me. “The shark’s my aumakua,” was all he said. Without apology, he dove back under, slicing the water without a ripple and I followed him back to the moss-slick rock and—but this is not a memoir.
If I was a therapist I would tell you my trauma response was freeze, not flight and maybe you’d nod, but this is not a memoir. This is the poem I found and everything in it means something else. Maybe you will find yourself somewhere in one of these loops and this will be your story, too. It may seem like it matters to know why we think we don’t deserve to take up space, to have a body, to walk on Earth, but knowing will not liberate us from shame. Only surrender will do that. So let go of your need for the straight lines of a story now and allow yourself to be carried to a wider circle than the one you now inhabit.
But this morning some of my story came back and asked me to tell it, so here are these words. That will be my criteria for what I will share with you, not my own desire to be witnessed or absolved.”
—from Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, my recent book.
Follow this link to audio and written versions of Nanaue the Shark Man in my prior post if you haven’t yet read it before reading on:
Nanaue the Shark Man, audio and written link
Jaws
Like most Americans in the 1970s, I was aware of the film Jaws, an early masterpiece by director Steven Spielberg. My parents didn’t take me to the theater to see it in 1975, thank goodness—I was only eight, but I remember the grown ups talking about it, and that the shark’s name was Bruce, my Dad’s name, which everyone thought was funny because the shark was vicious and terrifying, which my Dad was decidedly not, though he did think it was funny to terrorize me by chasing me around the yard with bluefish guts when he came back from a high seas expedition, though it was the good kind of terror that you know isn’t really life-threatening. Truth is, I loved being chased around the yard by my Dad with his smelly fish guts even though I shrieked. Adrenaline made life exciting!
But even though I didn’t see it until the 80s, probably on HBO in the early days of Cable TV, I became scared of sharks just from hearing the grownups talk about the movie. When I finally saw it, I was already primed for terror. Bruce did not disappoint. I can still recall the feeling of watching Brody, Hooper, and Quint waiting for the shark to destroy their boat, the Orca. The dread. The doom. The infamous soundtrack.
Even scarier than that scene, was the first one in the movie where the pretty young woman throws off her clothes and runs into the surf to swim in the moonlight and gets killed by Bruce, who we never see, which makes it all the more frightful.
I had no idea when I watched it as a pre-teen that I would grow up to be a pretty young woman at a beach party who went skinny-dipping in the surf. When that fateful day arrived I wasn’t terrified because I was pretty buzzed, but I was nervous, though I never would have admitted because at that age I was too naive to think anything really bad would happen to me, as well as being proud for putting myself in dangerous situations so I could show everyone how tough I was. Not that skinny-dipping at night was the dumbest thing I ever did—that would be buying drugs in a really scary neighborhood in Washington, DC, because my shady guy I was dating wanted some and was too scared to do it himself. Anyway, Jaws cast its reign of terror on me, as it did on the rest of America and most of the world. Despite this, I kept on swimming, telling myself I wasn’t afraid, sticking to the surf, until one summer my domain expanded and I got hooked on spearfishing. It all started with a Hawaiian sling my brother lent me and a lucky shot.
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