Sophia de Koter
Tarpon Springs, FL
2024, Senior, Creative Writing

The teak floorboards creak as I steal down the narrow stairwell. Dad is asleep, and he won’t be happy if he finds out what I’m doing.

I creep silently as possible through the old screen door – needs oil – and out into the thrumming night. The hums of cicadas and the chittering of mockingbirds and yellow-breasted chats sing in symbiotic symphony to the sway of the sea and the beating of my feet against the deck. Torch and spade in hand, I make my way down the seashell-spotted path to the sea.

It’s a fifteen-minute walk down to the shore, and the night air is thick and humid and buzzing. Beachgrass tickles my thighs and mosquitoes nip at my ears as I pass by the old oak tree uprooted during a storm last June. I still remember the shock on my little brother’s face at the sight of the great wide-as-a-church-door trunk lying on its side like a beached whale. We grew up playing on that tree. Dad did, too, but he didn’t seem quite as shocked. Sad, maybe, but not surprised. Storms have been growing stronger lately. I suppose they’ve been growing stronger for a long time, really.

When I finally make it to the waterside, I’m nearly shin-deep in all the plastic bottles and rotting take-out containers that litter the receding shoreline, and I’m grateful for the knee-high muck boots Dad bought us after the last hurricane flooded the cabin. Gripping the splintering handle of the garden shovel, I trudge towards the water’s edge, where the debris is least dense, and begin to dig.

There’s only so much time before they come, so I work fast. Flies pelt my cheeks in frenzied swarms as I shovel paths through the sliming trash, but I keep going. I’m so small amidst mountains of rubble, but I keep going.

This was a proper beach, once. One with seagulls and crabs and laughter and little jellyfish tops poking from the sand, like the ones in my books. How can a change like that happen? From ecosystem to landfill? Why didn’t people try to stop it when they saw what was happening? Even if it wasn’t their fault, even if the broken glass was washed in from the sea and the grocery bags blown down by the scorched winds, shouldn’t they have wanted to help? Why didn’t they do something?

If “all that we touch we change,” then surely people must have understood that their touch was going to harm something, someone (Butler). And yet they stand and watch. They throw stones at the glass and turn their heads in shock when it shatters. And now “Babylon is fallen, is fallen,” at the hands of its own people (Butler).

I’ve been at it for an hour now, and I can hardly see the outline of the new moon, but the stars are just bright enough this far from the city to light my way. There’s a reasonable dent in the mass of rubbish now, enough so that you can see the sand in a rectangle leading two feet up from the water. The sand on the surface is soft and sludgy, but the further back you go, the more it becomes fine, silky, clean.

Dad worries about us kids coming to the beach. It’s too filthy, too uninhabitable. We could cut ourselves on ragged edges, get punctured by exposed needles.

But as uninhabitable as the coastline is, some still inhabit it, and the rays and spoonbills and fiddlers still have to struggle on despite the mounds of waste suffocating their disappearing homes. They don’t have flashier cities with flashier politicians that they can just up and move to. Their only place is with the sea.

I remember asking Dad last year about why people don’t try to clean up the beach, or the reservoirs, or the marshes. He said it was because it’s too dangerous for people to be going to those places nowadays, that we have more important problems that need solving first. But the people in charge don’t seem to be solving problems any more than they create them, and if it’s not too dangerous to start wars and send men off to be bombed and massacred for a fight they didn’t start, and if it isn’t too dangerous to monetize the methane that spews, bloated and gushing, into the sky, not just from giant factories but even from rotting little beaches like this one, and if it’s not too dangerous to let people starve and wither and die on streets slick with ice and viscous with melted asphalt, then I really can’t see why it’s too dangerous to send out a few people with stakes and garbage bags (Vasarhelyi).

It’s been three hours now, and the waves are lapping against the shore and dragging back out to sea the waste they carried in. It’s funny how things work like that. You put something into the world, and it just keeps circling back and forth and back and forth, ebbing and flowing until someone gets either tired or riled up enough to get their hands dirty in the cleaning.

Although tired doesn’t really do much these days.

Extending from the first area I shoveled are several winding and stretching paths, sleek ribbons of quartz carved from a mass of manufactured sediment. I tiptoe back to the opened block of shoreline and search for the last bare patch of sand, spot it up at the edge of the beach, and begin to dig once more.

Not much longer now, and it needs to be ready for when they come.

The paths I created are sprawling across the shore now, and as I uncover this last winding stretch, they sprawl forth from their base like a willow, hewn from hardship and flowing with the changing tide.

Twenty minutes later and I’ve reached the last of the open patches of sand. Just in time.

The first heads begin to emerge from the earth off to the eastern end of the beach, back where I had first begun to spot the uncovered parcels of shore all those weeks ago, when I had snuck out to look at the sea after my fight with Dad. We never could agree on when was the best time to sow new seeds in the garden. Dad says that he’s always planted new seeds in March, I say that it’s warm enough these days to start in January, one thing leads to another, and we always manage to blow up at each other.

But no one’s screaming in the kitchen now.

Poking up from their little holes in the ground, all across the beach now are hundreds and hundreds of tiny sea turtles, ranging from the eastern to the western edge of the shore where I started uncovering trails two months ago when the earliest nests appeared. Miniature and untouched and perfect, they make their way along their curving paths towards the lapping embrace of their mother, the sea.

I listen to the pitter-patter of their flippers against the soft sand and against each other as they shuffle along, undisturbed by the walls of humanity’s indifference surrounding them. Nature is like that sometimes. It keeps going, even when everything around it and within it changes and is on the brink of collapse; it just keeps going. And even if it seems to have fallen asleep, it always seems to wake up again, like a bale of newly hatched sea turtles turning their heads to the ocean for the first time.

For the millionth time.

Twenty minutes pass before the fastest and most eager of the turtles reach the water, and it’s time for me to go home. As much as I want to, there’s no more protecting them now. It’s up to fate how many of them will return to this shore to lay their own eggs. Up to fate how much of this shore will be left for them.

Isn’t it?

Clambering up the slippery edge of the coastline, I take one last look at the turtles and at the vast expanse of Neptune ahead of them. It’s a long way to go, and the journey is treacherous, but not impossible.

Before I head back, I slip my hand into my back pocket and pull gently out a small wrap of linen tied with twine, no larger than a leaf of linden. From within I take a small, bean-like seed about the length of a pencil that’s only been sharpened once or twice. Using my hands to create a small cup in the muddy soil, I bury the seed so that the newly propagated sprout peeks hopefully from the ground.

Having completed my work, I look down, sweaty and aching, at the rows of mangrove saplings I’ve planted here since Mom passed five years ago. She always thought we had a responsibility to care for the Earth, just as the Earth cares for us. So, I watch over my little coastal world in hopes that one day it will make a difference.

Works Cited

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower: Parable Series, Book 1. Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy, 2012.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer. Milkweed Editions, 2014.

US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “What Is a Sponge?” NOAA’s National Ocean Service, 14 Mar. 2019, oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sponge.html#:~:text=Regardless%20of%20these%20differences%2C%20sponges,carbon%2C%20nitrogen%2C%20and%20phosphorus.

Vasarhelyi, Kayla. “The Impact of Plastic on Climate Change.” Environmental Center, 26 Jan. 2024, www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2023/12/15/impact-plastic-climate- change#:~:text=The%20refinement%20of%20plastics%20emits,landfill%20size%20and%20these%20emissions.

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