My hands were awash with  patriotic colors this morning. Blue blood of a lovely lady horseshoe crab, hooked by a lad whose enthusiasm, alas, could not compensate for his ignorance. Red blood of a dogfish, also hooked by the exuberant one. His first fish. Ever.

I landed and unhooked the fish. The child posed with it, two feet of shimmering muscle wrapped in sandpaper.

Can you eat it? 
Sure, if you bleed it first--

The father never acknowledged me; he refused to let the child take home and eat the fish.

"Nobody eats those things," he muttered. His eyes flashed fear when the dogfish had first broken through the surface.

The child looked at me. I had already shown him horseshoe crabs were harmless, letting the child brush his hands along the wriggly harmless claws. I had already shown him how to  handle a "shark," letting him run his fingers along the sandpaper skin. He trusted me.

You can eat it, I said once again, quietly--no reason to embarrass the child or his father. But it'll be fine if you let it go gently.

 He believed me.

***

Both the dogfish and the horseshoe crab had real reasons for fear. The milky blue blood oozing from the injured horseshoe crab may marks its doom. The bright red drops of blood on the handle of my net, now a dull burgundy, will cost the dogfish.

Neither knows of Memorial Day, when we splash red, white, and blue on our homes celebrating the brave young folks fighting over in lands we cannot be bothered to learn how to pronounce, battling ideologies in a futile attempt to defeat fear.

We fear, and we slaughter, those things we do not understand. The father has chosen ignorance, his child is still open to learning.

The child learned a little bit about fishing today, a little bit about the critters of our bay. He learned a much bigger lesson about ignorance, and he has a picture of himself holding a magnificent animal he feared moments before the photo was taken.

Our ignorance kills us. The local jetties are missing a few young men and women who are thousands of miles away. We barbecue and play in their names.

How many of us really know their stories? How many of us  want to know?

Yes, I am aware of the inconsistencies--fishing is complicated, and it's not.
 The horseshoe crab photo taken this past February.

READ MORE - Bleeding on Memorial Day

At the end of the day, the hallways are cluttered with abandoned papers. I picked one up.
Quadratic equations, lots of them, scrawled out with the tentativeness of an adolescent's hand.

I'll rake for clams this weekend, fish for striped bass, then bumble in the still chilly garden for a bit.

Which means reading tide charts, currents, and dirt.

I can't tell you how many times I got hit with quadratic equations, electromotive force charts, trig tables, and that freaking pickle jar in Ethan Frome way back in high school.

Then I'd go home and go fishing.

Not saying school wasn't useful--I may still have a decade or two to stumble upon a situation where I might need to decipher broken pickle dishes--but I learned a lot more useful stuff staring at the surf than I ever learned in school.

1:1 computers doesn't change this.

READ MORE - Clam rake vs. pickle dish

I tossed an Ava lure into a 20 knot wind this morning, hoping to land a striped bass.

I wasn't sure how I cut myself, but I had. A tiny trickle of flame bled into the ocean, millions of red blood cells, thousands of white cells, now feeding the innumerable creatures I'll never see. My hands were numb from the stiff November sea breeze. Time to go home.

***

We talk of bleeding on the inside, and some of us do. Bleeding ulcers, hemorrhagic strokes, and broken hearts are all very human traits.

I prefer bleeding outside. We are part of a wild world, a world that exceeds any Heaven any of us can imagine, any Hell used to manipulate us. Every time I spill blood on a beach I am giving back to the sea that feeds me.

Our blood bathes us like the sea water of our origins. We rinse our sins and our wounds with water, washing away invisible (but real) threats.

***

Any one of our white blood cells carries a whole genome, enough to make you you or me me (excepting for the mitochondria, intracellular aliens on whom we depend, another story for another day).

Our most common white cell, the neutrophil slithers through our vessels, and can slide in and out of a vein as needed, to attack foreign invaders.

The neutrophil can wrap itself around critters tinier than we can imagine, critters that consume us. The neutrophils do this every moment we are alive, sacrificing themselves, separate from us because they act as independent agents, part of us because they are us.

Incomprehensible, really.

***

If you swallowed a long enough piece of dental floss, maybe attaching a small indigestible weight at its head, you could, I imagine, end up with ends extruding from both your mouth and your anus. I suppose you could floss your gut, but a healthy dose of oatmeal will serve the same purpose.

We're really huge toroids, doughnuts with four limbs. We eat to grab energy from bonds formed by plants using the sun's energy. We eat to grab complex molecules we cannot form ourselves. Our gut is wide open to the world. It keeps the neutrophils busy.

***

It's late November. If we had any sense, we'd toss out the incandescent lamps, the fluorescent hum, the glow of plasma screens and sleep, as our ancestors did, when the sun goes down.

Because we don't, our neutrophils, ourselves, spend a lot of time and energy fighting demons we create. Coronary artery disease, peptic ulcers, even breast cancer are mostly modern inventions.

I spent a lovely day tossing a piece of metal at the gods, my feet bathed by their sweet saline, my face bathed by their sweet dying light.

How can I teach children about phospholipid bilayers and nucleic acids when I spend late November believing in little except the small grace gained by fishing in the dying light of a dying year?

How can I teach children what "year" means when we attempted to change it because the constant revisions disrupted our satellite communication. (The sun keeps shedding mass--turns out depending on our orbit in relation to the sun fluctuates.)

***

Children should not bleed on the inside nor the outside, but if my children had to do either, I'd pick the latter. We read of ancient rites, of blood poured, and we shudder, as we should.

What of the rites we put our children through, trading curiosity and creativity for a life groomed for bettering the economy, for protecting our "homeland"?




Last fall my own children saw the arc of a bluefish's blood stain my sweatshirt as I cut its gill arches. I had rendered the fish unconscious moments before with a club to its head. Its heart still beat, its neutrophils emanating from the blood vessels, seeking to fight an enemy they could not fathom.

The blood soaked the sand, feeding the critters underneath, and the flesh fed us hours later.

There are a lot of ways to die. If I exsanguinate, please let it be on the outside, God, please let it be on the outside.

Yes, I know, that's a bluefish, caught by my firstborn.
She does not like to kill. Neither do I. We both enjoyed eating the blue.

READ MORE - Bleeding on the outside