Early summer evenings we sometimes take chairs to one of Wellfleet’s ocean beaches and perch there above the surf sipping a drink and staring out. The last of the daytime beachgoers get in their final plunges. A local comes for a ritual early evening immersion, a fisherman casts a line. Vacationers prepare fires for an evening party.
It’s a fine scene, the sun still warm on our backs, the ocean rolling all the way from Portugal or wherever right to our feet. “This is the Atlantic Ocean,” we say, always amazed at the simple fact of that.
Increasingly the last few years we see seals cruising up and d own, sticking their heads up, seeming to check us out. We share the beach, the seals and we, this interface between land and sea. Human swimmers venture a few feet out into what feels like their territory. I’ve never seen a seal come on shore here. There seems to be curiosity on both sides. But it feels like two very different worlds.
The swimmers may not swim out as far as before Great White sharks were reported in the area. A Great White was spotted at dawn a few days ago a few feet off this very beach. The beach where a guy was bitten on his feet by one is just up in Truro from us.
“How do the seals like it living fulltime in that water,” we wonder. “What about winter?”
“That’s their medium. They must like it as well as we like our lives.”
“But what is their life like? What do they think about?”
“Yeah, like what do they think about the sharks?” The Great Whites have been drawn to our waters, we read in the p aper, by the burgeoning number of seals. “Aren’t they freaked out knowing they’re shark bait?”
Actually, they seem pretty stress free as they cruise and play in the surf. (But would we recognize signs of stress in a seal?)
“Freaking out is what we do. Maybe the individual seal is more tuned into the group and figures: No problem, we’ll survive. No way the sharks can get more than a few of us.”
“I wonder what they feel about us? They seem curious. Looks like curiosity.”
Down the beach a ways a woman in a blue bathing suit stands at the edge of the water looking at a seal maybe 20 feet away.
“Look at that. They seem to be communing. Is that big guy attracted to her?
We remember the stories about silkies, mermen and merwomen who sometimes mate with humans. In a movie we saw, “The Secret of Roan Inish,” a fisherman steals a silkie’s skin so she’ll have to stay on land and marry him and have kids, but she is lonely and eventually finds her silkie skin and escapes back to her sea home.
Male silkies are supposed to be big seducers of human women, especially those dissatisfied with their marriages. A woman wanting to make contact with a silkie male has but to go to a beach and shed seven tears into the sea.
Is that what’s going on down the beach with the woman in the blue bathing suit?
As dusk settles such stories seem almost believable.
It’s interesting living here where some of the population are seals, even if they never turn up in town meeting. Or run for selectman.
But what are they really like, we wonder. We sit there feeling marginal to the vast underwater world that terminates right here at our feet, the seals and the sharks and whatever else goes on out there. Unable to see beneath the surface, we resign ourselves to cluelessness.
Evening revellers have turned away from the darkening seas to focus on their fires. We fold our chairs and head up to the parking lot.
One beach, two completely different worlds It’s part of the magic of summer in a seaside town.
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