Staying Afloat
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1We were to dance with the ocean. We would contact the gestational waters of the Pacific Northwest and gesticulate in response to the ocean’s touch, her give, her heave. We would weave our moves into her liquid body. We would extend our tentacles and gently curlicue our way back into her, let her soak her way back into us, feel her coursing through our veins. We would merge with her, the perfect womb for our creative venture. We would float and disarticulate our bodies to limb a fluid poem made of blue gestures inked in a somatic language of watery words and ways. Together we would yield to the weightless pull and hold of water. She would bless us with her grace, dissolve us into bliss.
2But the water was cold, scorching cold, singeing cold. Ocean would not take us in, brought our dance to a momentary halt. We had come from the Channel, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean. We wanted blue and hot and salt. We were gifted glaucous and grey and cold and fresh. We lacked the blubber, the blue blood, the thick fur, the cetacean heart. Weren’t made to be mermaids. Mother Ocean humbled us into acceptance of our human form and land limitations, foamed patience into our yearning souls, wrapped us in shawls of fog as we hungered for more. Then quenched our August thirst with her atmospheric rivers.
3Mother Ocean held us at a distance, set the limits of our dance, yet offered up her littoral, her pooling water, the tug of her shore. We waddled and warmed up in cold shallow water, my friend in her wetsuit, myself in my wet skin, shirt, and skirt. We dipped and writhed and crittered and crawled, gently worming our way back into the watery world from before when we grew legs and lungs. We swirled and whirled, lolled and rolled. We caressed the air the water the fine sand and the algae with our feet our hands, reveled in the balmy water, marveling at its creamy, smooth feel: so much thinner than the more saline waters of the Belle Bleue, that beautiful blue body of water.
4We slowly danced our way in, striving to surrender to the cold cold water. The shrouds of fog enveloped us in a delicate embrace that felt like a first step into her airy arms. Dance-swimming kept us going and it felt wonderful to enter the Ocean—knee-deep at first, and finally to be taken in by this greater body of water. But we needed to stay alert and feel deep down at the core of ourselves for the moment when the searing, prickling numbing sensation should be heeded. We would come out in time, shivering and light-headed, blue lipped and blue veined, to avoid freezing into bloated blue bodies of stayed blood. They say water temperatures can be dangerous below 15 ° Celsius, that hypothermia can affect your breathing, your heart, your brain, your internal organs. They say that water is colder, denser than air at the exact same temperature. That immersion in such cold temperatures can kill you in less than a minute.
5So we danced some, and mostly, we watched and walked and sat and hiked. We combed the beaches looking for seaweed dancing with the water, rolling in and out, and for empty seashell, algae, and crab claw clumps forming spontaneous sculptures in the sand. We sifted tidepools for more dancing seaweed, live and dead bodies waving and bobbing and crittering into modest yet vibrant and colorful choreographies. We clambered onto half-immersed beach boulders covered in mussels and wondered at the sea constellations of marine rock creatures, minding our step not to squish any of the beautiful spiny urchins, mint anemones, nor any of the strawberry, orange, brown, or purple sea stars whose homes we were intruding upon. I became an object of curiosity for a sea otter who kept surfacing between waves of unknowability to check out the two-legged creature squatting on her rocks and equipped with a long black cylinder augmenting my eyes. Her moving in closer and closer made me jittery, conscious of her slick wildness, her amphibian agility, my being out of place on those slippery gritty rocks surrounded by nothing familiar, flat, or solid. Earlier we’d come upon bear tracks in the sand, and a bald eagle whose soaring was wildly weighed down by a dull tangle of bull kelp caught in his talons.
6We visited aquariums, art galleries, and museums, where sea life proliferated onto land. We collected books and stories and photos of ecopoetic octopuses and selkies and jellyfish and mermaids and cetaceans. They were made of clay, paint, words, metal, watercolor, recycled plastic, salvaged trash of all sorts. They had emerged from their oceanic invisibility, and they peopled the streets and parks and cafés and restaurants and galleries and shop windows, appearing everywhere on shelves and clothes and murals and posters and postcards and book covers. Made you see more blue even when looking away from the sea.
7One art gallery octopus was beautiful and painted on paper in Indigenous Salish Coast style, with an ethereal double popping out from the background, elusive and spirit-like, like a silvery shadow of the blue, brown and black octopus whose portrait this was. At the heart of its mantle-face, the octopus’s strong beak, stretching out in the four directions, and morphing into an orca—the power of myth, and transformation. As I bought a copy of it, the print came with a gruesome story of traditional octopus hunting that involved thrusting one’s hand at the heart of the cephalopod’s mantle and ripping the beak out of the live animal. It was part of a masculine initiation practice, the story said, meant to prove a young man’s bravery. Somehow, the story went on, when capturing a tiny octopus later in a different spot, the same man imagined it to be the offspring of the previous octopus, now envisioned as the mother of this minute creature. I wondered about valor and solidity, why lack of empathy with sensitive wet (m)others should be encouraged as a proof of courage. I saw the painting differently now—octopus haunting, surging from a nightmare culture that I recognized as partly mine too.
8We watched, photographed, and filmed dancing algae and bull kelp, crustaceans and mollusks, multicolored critters and beach birds, sea otters and a porpoise. We focused our anamorphic eyes and saluted the rock giant at Ruby Beach whose unwavering face is turned to the Pacific Ocean, sitting there amidst rising and receding tides like a water-land border guardian. We gazed at the driftwood cemetery—the wooden skeletons of thousands of impressive trees beached along the coast. Enjoyed the ballet of sandpiper and sanderling flocks scurrying and scuttling back and forth across the wet sand then suddenly lifting in a flutter, a cascade in reverse, a punctuated undulation skimming right above the mirror-like water gently rolling itself out onto the beach, and then back in again, the whole tableau like notes on a music score. We gawked at the myriad ways in which land, rivers, and ocean interlaced into labile soliquid waterlands, shifting and glittery water worlds where the shore knows no boundary, no set form or state.
9We wanted thrill and wonder. We wanted orcas and gray whales and wild salmon and shapeshifting, color-growing kaleidoscopic octopuses. We wanted totems and spiritual insight into Indigenous wisdom. We went to the Makah reservation, following dreams sprung forth from books half-way between fiction, poetry, and reality. We were inclined to invite Neah Bay to dance. But we hadn’t asked the Makah elders for permission and felt shy about asking. What would they think of these two French women, academics with a creative streak, travelling all the way to the most northwestern part of the United States of America with ideas of the place mostly anchored in Linda Hogan’s liminal writings and Merce Cunningham’s modern dancing? What right did we have to dance in Neah Bay as an ecopoetic gesture, an offering, in a place where people had their own ancient Indigenous dances, rituals, and ceremonies which they themselves were trying to keep alive?
10I had come the previous year with my daughter, visited the Makah Cultural Center. I still marvel at the rediscovery of Ozette, at the Makah’s gratitude toward Mother Ocean for delivering a powerful landslide and, centuries later, a tidal wave, which had first buried in mud, sheltered, and then revealed again this ancient fishing village on the Pacific shore, decades after Makah territory had been dramatically shrunk by European invaders. We walked the beaches and hiked the splendid trails that the tribe meant for tourists to tread. We figured we’d ask the Ocean for permission outside of the Makah reservation, on waterland that yet also used to belong to first peoples—as all of it once did across the Americas.
11On Vancouver Island, on the Canadian side of the San Juan de Fuca Straight, we visited Weeping Cedar Woman—a towering urban park sculpture over six meters tall, made of cedar and copper, whom I’d already met the previous year while in Tofino. Carved out for the most part of one single piece of wood, she stands there over you with rivers of tears streaming from her eyes. Her tears have halted deforestation on Meares Island, in Clayaquot Sound—writing history and standing in the way of destruction with the power of imagination and empathy. The cedar wood art piece seemed to be standing at a crossroads between Greek mythology and Indigenous stories, culture and tales from all over flowing into one another across time and place.
12We later visited the enchanted Hoh Rain Forest, quietly treading in the steps of Merce Cunningham, through a pungent moss cathedral outside of the most popular trails which we’d skirted to avoid hours of sitting in a rental car barely crawling ahead in the long line leading to the official park entrance. My friend had told me about the tourist craze in the Forks area, made popular by the Twilight series staging a Quileute werewolf. This wet forest place hummed with humidity and humus and hanging moss, smelled of fungi and Western Hemlock, Red Cedar and Sitka Spruce, Big Leaf Maple and Douglas Fir, Black Cottonwood and Red Alder. As we hiked into the lush golden forest, I remembered the story I’d heard from my outdoorsy sister-in-law, who lives in Portland, as we’d camped together in the Olympic Peninsula the previous year. She’d told me about her friend’s friend, who’d been fatally attacked by a Mountain Lion after she’d tried running away from it. As always in those semi-wild places, we were aware this was Bobcat and Black Bear and Mountain Lion territory. Humbled by the thought, we reveled at the sight of more modest lifeforms on the forest floor, which we had to tread softly, mindful of the shiny banana slugs—bright yellow ones, brownish ones, mustard ones, and olive-green ones, some uniform in color, some with black splotches and dots on their mantles. We went on a photographing spree.
13The undergrowth was thick with moss and ferns and mushrooms everywhere. What caught our eyes and set us tracking the invisible underground networks through the forest floor was a delicate clump of fleshy white flowershrooms shooting up from the ground like ghost bell pipes that looked unreal, like they might glow in the dark. We couldn’t figure out what these queer and translucent beings might be—white succulent plants, or fungi? Could there be such a marvelous thing as a plant without chlorophyll? How could a plant grow without the capacity to photosynthesize sunlight into nutrients? We quickly noticed how the impossible flowers invariably sprung up in the vicinity of viscous, vomit-like slime molds on the ground or on fallen trees. The whole thing was so strange and beautiful. Those sticky, bubbly, bright yellow and white sprawls we’d find out later are poetically called scrambled egg slime, or dog vomit slime mold. We had guessed the bubbly yellow mush and the fleshy white clumps must be forest partners of some sort. It turned out the eerie white wraiths were plants indeed—Indian Pipes, they’re called. Plant-fungus partnerships are legion in the forest, grounded in mycorrhizal exchanges of sugars and minerals between the two. Since Indian Pipes are indeed deprived of the green molecules they’d need to make sugars and to thus have something to offer as a symbiotic partner in the underground trade, they simply tap into the exchanges already going on between a photosynthesizing tree and a mineral-giving mushroom. They are parasites. But as they thrive on little and don’t proliferate much, they keep their presence a discrete one.
14As for the lush Hoh Rain Forest, its vaporous wetness speaks worlds about the endless hydrological cycles tying Mount Olympus to the Pacific Ocean, land to water, via the glacial electric blue Hoh River. Before the Hoh River reaches the Pacific, it is home to wild salmon. Swimming back upstream at the end of their own life cycle, salmon become ocean-rich food for forest animals, their left-behind carcasses then fertilizing the forest floor.
15I went whale-watching that time with my friend off Vancouver Island, as I’d done the previous year with my daughter, out of Port Angeles. The first time, in San Juan de Fuca Straight, I kept worrying about the noise pollution and the foul gases spilling out into the water and the air in the wake of our loud and nasty engine. How sound ripples across water four times faster than through air. How it can travel unabated across thousands of meters underwater. How cetaceans echolocate and fish pick up sound waves through their inner ears and lateral lines. How monstrous we must seem to them in their sound pictures of us. And what I was teaching my teenage daughter. We spotted humpbacks, tracking their spouting with wide open ears and eyes, and loving it whenever we could glimpse the curve and roll of a dorsal fin gently slicing through the surface. There was one who seemed to be curious about us, if not friendly. We learned to identify the signature print on his fluke, which the tour guides had an entire photo book of, where each matched a first name every individual had been given. Once hunted down to the brink of extinction, humpbacks were rebounding, and people rejoiced at seeing them around again. One specimen breached, turning the magic ocean into a geyser for a loud, suspended moment. An offering.
16The captain on one of the tours, trained as a marine biologist, later confided that the company he worked for forbade the crew from mentioning the ecological issues and nuisance for the whales induced by boating; the bosses feared climate change deniers would rate them poorly and sink their business. Another whale-watching guide who taught art and worked as an artist in Vancouver told me about the orcas, and about the seal that day that had leaped onboard their boat to seek shelter from the orca pod chasing after him—the tangle of emotions and ethics as to what to do about this vulnerable mammal the hungry pod saw as their dinner. How people were thrilled—frightened by the huge pinniped (also a carnivore), the gigantic orca fins circling around the boat, and yet how they rejoiced that the seal’s life had been spared by their human presence out on the water. This person was called Sunny, and they drew colorful, mostly abstract shapes made of strings of cone worms, which put me in mind of cool ways to design plankton and salp and bioluminescence and all sorts of mindboggling sea critters and plants. They agreed to an interview, told me about the blue art class they’d been teaching at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, and how they’d loved reading Undrowned, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and How Far the Light Reaches, by Sabrina Imbler. More offerings.
17That second time with my friend, as we showed up for the ride we’d booked on Vancouver Island out of Ucluelet, they told us the ocean had been quite rocky, that nearly every tourist on board had spent the entire morning ride puking their guts out over the boat railings into the sea, and that we would be staying safe in the sound, where whales were more unlikely to be seen. They said we could book a different tour some other time for the same price or still come along for a quieter tour. We opted for the quiet tour, and I loved it. The fog moving in and out, the majestic mountains rolling around like green dreams floating on dark water, the bald eagles perched along the way and eyeing us placidly, stellar sea lions and otters barking, frolicking and bobbing in and out of the water, tufted puffins, porpoises. We passed an island in Clayaquot sound where wolves can sometimes be seen, wolves who have turned into incredible swimmers, grown webbed paws they said, and who feed on marine life, taking their part in the life-death richness of these wild forest islands. I was mesmerized by the thick roll of foam bubbling up and parting the water in a long moving V carved along by our boat on the water’s surface, where porpoises might at any time come and gambol in the human-made surf. We passed a place where we were told some man was working on restoring bull kelp forests—they said the urchin-eating sea otters we’d seen in playful rafts kept the kelp forest ecosystem in balance and the density of such underwater forests confused the reverberation of sound for dazed echolocating orcas, whose sound vision was thus hindered. I liked the thought of blue-green-brown forests providing shelter to otters and seals from their own ravenous predators.
18We were enchanted by that exciting excursion on calm waters, made thrilling by the complex layers of history and life the tour guides had revealed all along via storytelling. Yet, our final surprise came when the crew offered us a free ride on a different day—a business policy designed to guarantee that people would spot what they had paid for. This rare opportunity came with a queasy feeling—should we make the most of what the tour company offered, in this place so far away from home, or should we stay away from the whales and let them be? Was the uplifting feeling of wonder brought on by whale watching worth the pollution of our presence on the water? Spending so many dollars and travelling so far can give you a sense of entitlement—as if money, technology, and human will could command the Ocean’s behavior, or the apparition of its giant creatures, as part of a business transaction. We pondered those murky waters where ecopoetic engagement and curiosity are tainted by ecological responsibility. In the end, we decided to go again, each taking up a last-minute free spot on different excursions, seeing it like a random part of our improvised dance with the ocean, moving back and forth between reaching out, seizing, and relinquishing. This time the weather was beautiful and the ocean abnormally quiet, and I felt immensely grateful that I did get to spot the whales in their magnificent ways. I was still praying for orcas, wanted to see them in the wild. I was hoping to glimpse a view of them that would be widely different from that of Seaworld Shamu who had been the main attraction when I’d visited San Diego with my family as a child, and whom my mother had wanted to pet in her tank. The orcas didn’t show up, only through the stories the crew told, and then again in my dreams that night, as they often did.
19Back in Neah Bay the previous year, I’d met a young woman working at the Makah tourist office who’d told me her Indigenous name was Seal. She said seals were important animals in her tradition, and that young people at the cultural center were learning ceremonial dances from the elders, keeping those alive. She showed me the huge blue-gray whale fluke print made by local artists. Inspired from Gyotaku, the Japanese art of making inked prints from real fish, the artists had made the fluke tail print from a beached gray whale’s end, prolonging its life somehow. I bought the sticker version, and a few other octopus and whale stickers made by the same woman artist to bring back to France and tell their story, together with shell earrings for my teenager. The seal-woman told me about having gone off to college to study biology before Covid hit, and how she had ended up back home, where tourism and fishing were the main sources of income, but where the future seemed uncertain. We talked about the ways her knowledge in biology could potentially help boost tourism, with more and more people interested in understanding wildlife, and about how drought and water restrictions in the area could make tourism recede. I talked to a fisherman in the harbor who felt sorry the daily fish catch kept bringing up individuals smaller and smaller in size. He told me to watch out at the end of the day for the moment when one of the locals would bring the unfilletable parts of the salmon out on the beach as an offering to the bald eagles waiting out in the nearby trees. The whole thing made for quite an aerial dance indeed.
20I thought about the Makah Thunderbird and Whale myth telling a story of multispecies cooperation in times of hunger, about the birdfeeder, and about the salmon and steelhead fisheries in the region that are co-managed by the Native tribes and Washington State. I thought about life on our blue planet as multispecies interdependance. I thought about the Pacific Salmon treaty signed between Canada and the United States, the three million Chinook salmon, coho salmon, and winter steelhead released yearly in the area by the Makah National Fish Hatchery restoration program in Neah Bay. I thought about the humble catch-and-release aquarium in Ucluelet where you can’t clap your hands for any orca-riding prowess but where you’ll gently touch and be touched by some of the smooth and leathery sea stars.
21Later, as I needed help from the motel manager since my French credit card was momentarily out of order, I waited for a Makah fisherwoman who was out on her boat and whose phone reception kept getting scrambled. Her phone coverage was discombobulated as she bobbed her way in and out of USA and Canadian waters, crisscrossing the national frontiers the cell towers on either side were having trouble sorting out. It made me wonder about the satellites up there, tracking our movement, and of GPS tags which can geolocate even marine organisms, except those who don’t need to surface to breathe and therefore remain underwater. They have satellites floating in space that can track the color changes in bodies of water, changes that are manifestations of algal growth, or plankton bloom, thus making visible some of the smallest ocean life forms which the human eye alone cannot see individually. We couldn’t get hold of the fisherwoman, even though she seemed to be the only one who could fix the problem so my daughter and I could get on the road. One of the elders eventually decided to offer complete trust, and she sent me off with the promise that I would wire the money as soon as I’d get back to Portland, at the end of our camping trip through various National Parks and Forests. So much randomness and design through it all.
22The whole experience made me think of Ocean citizenship, for the Makah and for the resident whales and orcas and all the other sea creatures living in the San Juan de Fuca Straight, constantly slipping through the geopolitical divides of maritime territories. How Ocean citizenship would make sense even for all of us land-dwelling mammals around our shared blue world. How human worlds and Ocean, with all our sea creatures and stories and boats and towers and space satellites and debris, are but one. How the untamable, uncontainable Sea, like the rest of nature, is never simply around us. How Rachel Carson also envisioned Ocean as Mother Sea.
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23That first summer in the Pacific Northwest, I met a surfer-woman who told me about her wild watery dreams where she encountered marine creatures that would come to her in the depths of the sea. I also met a librarian who’d developed the habit of open-water swimming year-round, learning to trust the cold cold water, going in on a daily basis. She told me how she’d practiced letting go of her apprehension of the cold, how she’d gradually morphed on the inside too, through that practice of surrendering to water, giving up resistance.
24I too have started becoming more viscous and watery. In my dreams, I grow tentacles and shrimpy curls that sprout from different parts of my body—my head, or my more intimate parts. About ten years ago, I once told Linda Hogan about my dream where I’d discovered an octopus had grown between my legs. Linda and I had been sipping wine by the Mediterranean in beautiful Collioure, at the end of a long international conference on dwellings of enchantment. My dream had set me thinking about the subtlety of tentacular femininity, the horror it seemed to trigger in some, the dreadful kinds of excision men had come up with to cut us off from our slippery power and pleasure, the hidden and wet parts of us that could never entirely be taken away, those parts of us which, even severed, would always grow back. As Linda Hogan wrote of shapeshifters and Indigenous men and women becoming animals and plants in various ways, I was curious to know how she would read into it. Hopefully, she would help stave off the silly Freudian interpretation that I knew couldn’t capture the numinous feel of that dream and its lingering power, despite its somewhat grotesque content when read in a dim European light. Linda called me granddaughter; she told me the octopus was a powerful spiritual creature—that it was wonderful to have it visit me in that way, that it had to do with a revelation about my innermost feminine power, and also with spirit, intelligence, and sensitivity, that I should keep the conversation going with the animal, see where it might lead me. The octopus has never stopped teaching me since then. The creature has stayed with me and I with it. I turn to cephalopods for many things, mainly for clues as to how to stave off the castration of our ecopoetic sensitive intelligences.
25Those dream and conversation are what got me started, years ago, trying to follow the enlightening ways of the octopuses, seeking them out, dancing with them, writing in bluer ink. I wonder what got my sister-in-law started with her mesmerizing water painting series she titled “Bodies of Water,” each a short story about our porous bodies of water enjoying other bodies of water. They are many shades of blue, but her all-encompassing water is textured purple and pink and orange and yellow. They are beautiful and queer, magical and eerie, vibrant and thick. My sister-in-law has insomnia, and I know painting keeps her afloat through the eddies of life—layering her buoyant inner colors out onto blank canvas awaiting her worlding touch. She’s an art teacher too, and she loves to swim. She lifts heavy weights, and she paints. She has painted swimming bodies, men and women and children’s bodies: a child skipping her way ahead on a drenched sidewalk under the rain, leaving rainbowlike concentric circles in her puddled wake; a bunch of women hanging out in orange and pink water under a vast twinkling night sky, in what looks like a pool the size and shape of the Earth, suspended in the immensity of forever darkness; women in a pool holding on to the lane line instead of swimming laps, two of them conversing, one by herself, caught up into the bubble of her own thoughts—or possibly pain?; a life guard watching over a pool with a huge rescue float held safely against his middle section; my mother-in-law taking in one of my daughter’s glee from the feel of water all around them; a man weirdly standing on the street in the pouring rain, dressed in a transparent rain poncho, looking soaked and so blue except for his yellow wool hat and the plastic pink flamingo floater around his waist, with the bird’s head strangely eyeing us sideways; a strong yet weightless long-haired swimmer in a blue swimsuit horizontally slicing through deep water, surrounded by squiggly smudgy sluicy ghostly limbs and presences dancing around in the thick blue water as she propels herself forward—is she aware of them?; a self-portrait, my sister-in-law’s own beautiful face grinning in strange underwater delight, her tentacular hair coiling away like dancing purple kelp—a water goddess, brushing colors into iridescent dots, shimmering streaks, dripping drops, dancing lines and wavy contours, quietly breathing blue life into alleviated bodies of water.
26To me, her paint people look like active and meditative embodiments of ourselves, staying afloat in uncannily wordless worlds of rising water. Whether through dance, painting, or writing, maybe we are all just trying to shape the formless, to write our part into the foaming of life in its ever-new forms, to surf the swell of our oceanic becoming and welcome what comes in tides and waves, which we can only ride with, or get submerged by.
Table des illustrations
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| Titre | “3 a.m,” painting by Julia Himmelstein from her 2024 Portland exhibit Bodies of Water. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/docannexe/image/4822/img-1.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 274k |
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Bénédicte Meillon, « Staying Afloat », Journal of the Short Story in English, 85 | 2025, 145-154.
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Bénédicte Meillon, « Staying Afloat », Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 85 | Automn 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 15 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4822
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