My family recently made the short drive up to New Jersey to visit relatives. I don’t normally associate Jersey with aquatic leisure, but the air was hot and the state, contrary to its unfortunate image in pop culture, is filled with natural beauty, so off we went to the shore for some swimming and sun.
I had expected the ocean to be frigid, especially in contrast to the northeast African beaches to which I’ve lately been accustomed, but the Jersey water in summer was warmer than the Red Sea during winter. Nor was its brownish-green hue a deterrent. It’s not wise to judge water by how it looks, but by how it feels. The body never lies.
The water felt delicious.
My son and nephew found a gap between sunbathers and barreled into the surf. I joined them and was promptly knocked backward. Trying to ignore the granular pain scratched across my shoulders and midsection, I staggered to my feet and made it past the break. There I bobbed around the murky water, thrilled that for at least one more day I could enjoy the gifts of vim and mobility.
I jumped and ducked waves with the boys for a while. I can’t say for how long; time was lost to mist and brine and humidity. It’s a beautiful kind of captivity, I thought, facing east to the undeveloped expanse in front of me. That’s the catch, I suppose: a sense of belonging in this world often requires isolation. The paradox is brutal but somehow calming.
A minor commotion on shore disrupted the revelry. A fisherman had snagged something that was putting up a vicious struggle. The man had attracted a small audience as he ran along the shore, pulled by his catch. It was either big or strong. The line was taut, stretched to a forty-five-degree angle, and the tip arced steeply toward the water.
He was coming right toward me. “Move!” he yelled, trying to wave me out of the way, but he could barely let go of the grip before returning his hand. I panicked. The thought of getting clotheslined was scary enough, but I had no idea what type of creature was on the end of that string. A few months earlier, on the Egyptian coast near Hurghada, I had floated about fifty feet above a medium-sized shark while snorkeling off the edge of a coral plateau, but that encounter felt safe, peaceful. This animal, whatever it was, presented a sense of menace. It was injured and angry. The fact that it could only be imagined made it even more ominous. I ducked into the water and came up clear of danger.
The boys and I went ashore to follow the fisherman. The audience grew each time he passed a new group of sunbathers.
“What is it?”
“Gotta be a shark.”
“No way.”
“Maybe a little one.”
“But look how it’s tugging the line.”
“Could be a cod or something.”
“Too strong.”
“It’s a shark, I’m telling you.”
“He couldn’t have gotten a dolphin, could he?”
“I think there are marlin around here.”
“Prolly a tuna.”
The fisherman refused to give his opinion. Deep in concentration, he took advantage of the opportunity to be rude. Protagonists, after all, are expected to undermine social convention.
A carnival surrounded him: sprightly children, bemused parents, jealous peers, a clique of young men speaking Hebrew, a disapproving old lady. I stayed in earshot of the young men, who surreptitiously peered as if they knew something damning about me.
I figured it was a shark on the line, mainly because I knew nothing of marine life in the mid-Atlantic. I was also familiar with the origin story of Jaws.
My guess became more viable when part of the catch finally revealed itself. At that moment I switched loyalties away from the angler and began rooting for the mysterious fish whose grayish fins had just breached the surface.
Why did I need to see it? Why should it suffer for a tourist’s entertainment?
And why had it taken me so long to notice that the fisherman and his entourage weren’t innocents, but aggressors, interlopers, ecological deviants?
No, I didn’t need to see what was on the line. It was best left to the imagination, where at least it wouldn’t emerge as a colossal disappointment.
But the fisherman was relentless and the catch kept showing itself in the receding surf, chubby and preternatural and misshapen. It looked sort of like a shark, but it was clearly something else.
An internet search would later inform me that it was a cownose ray, so named because of a bovine facial structure. Often mistaken for a shark because its sides look like dorsal fins, it is unthreatening to humans. The long thin tail can whip around quickly, but its sting is mildly toxic and only used in self-defense. This specimen boasted the shape of a bloated kite with a great white’s coloration.
It wasn’t ready to be captured.
The cownose flapped furiously at the edge of the break while the fisherman, more rudely than before, ordered the crowd to give him space. My son and nephew considered moving up for a closer view, but the animal’s ferocity kept them anchored in sand. I looked on sadly. The battle was all but over. The fisherman told one of the young men to hold the rod—“don’t yank!”—while he approached the catch. As he leaned over the cownose, the water frothed into a thousand little bubbles. The fisherman pulled up the line. It was empty.
The crowd was disappointed. We expected some kind of display from the fisherman, maybe a spirited lecture about our incompetence, but he grabbed his rod and walked away.
“Let’s get back in,” said my nephew.
“I’m not going back in there,” said my son.
“Come on, Amo Steve. You’ll go back in, right?”
I looked at the boys and grinned, then dashed toward the water. The boys followed. We’d wasted enough time on individual theatrics. By then we had recognized an unmistakable frontier, opaque and fluid, across which some creatures persecute while others fight, and only one side offered any opportunity for pleasure.