Saleh El Montaser
Suez, Egypt
2025, Senior, Creative Writing

The alarm woke Naia from sleep at 4:30 AM, but she had been already awakened by and listening to the distant rumble of waves crashing over the breakwater. Six months previously, it would have been covered by the din of construction workers building another tall-budget building where their former fishing village once stood. Now, in the dark before dawn of her little apartment, the voice of the sea was the one that kept her anchored to what she was.

She pulled on her brother Koa’s hand-me-down wetsuit, which he had moved to the mainland when most of the coastal fishing families had been purchased by the big developers. The patchwork and frayed neoprene held a memory of a thousand mornings spent in the water when the reef had been healthy and fish had filled the oceans.

The elevator had broken down in her building once more, and Naia carried her surfboard under her arm down twelve flights. The city lay out before her outwards, concrete and metal extending out to mountains, glass spires pierced by sunlight. But beyond out towards the fringes, where sea and shore merged, there lay vestiges of the past. Areas where her grandmother’s stories existed in tide pools and her grandfather’s fishing nets were draped off sun-faded garages.

The beach had changed now. There was a white sand slope lined by ironwood trees and now there stood a concrete fortress-like seawall there guarding the new condominiums from the sea’s more turbulent moods. Naia had to climb down from a rusty ladder to get to the water, her board scratching against the barnacle-covered wall.

The water greeted her like an old familiar, cold, and welcoming. Paddling out beyond the reef, what was left of her Naia endured the familiar ritual that happened every morning. The pain of existing in a city that had forgotten her, of watching bulldozers destroy the house where her mother had been born, of watching coral turn bone-white, all dissolved into the beat of her stroke, into the pull of the current, into the taste of salt upon her lips.

Here, as well, there was no doubt about the alterations. The water was warmer than it should have been in December. Plastic trash drifted like party confetti to which she had not been invited. And silent God, that silence where the reef would have been full of singing fish.

“The sea is killing us,” she spoke to the dawn, her voice carried away by waves crashing over lifeless coral.

Grandmother responded from memory: “The sea doesn’t die, child. She becomes, she grieves, she combats. She does not die. But whether we help her cure or whether her anger brings us all down.”

Tutu Rose had been born back in 1935, when the island was not much more than plantation fields and fishing communities. She had endured World War II, statehood, and the tourist explosion and tech invasion that had driven all the native families out of heaven. Ninety years old and one of the very few remaining people who could remember when all her beaches had been filled by monk seals and green sea turtles had nested by hundreds of thousands.

“She’s not the same sea I’ve grown up besides,” Tutu Rose had told Naia last week, her knotted fingers from her arthritis etching waves into her quilt, an heirloom passed down through five generations of women from her islands. “But she’s our sea anyway. Still our responsibility.”

Naia surfed back to shore when the first commuters began their daily commute from beach communities to urban centers. She watched them from outside of the water, strangers, who moved here to be here but who were disconnected from the earth that sustained them. They rushed by the homeless encampment which had sprung up around public toilets, earbuds blocking out both the music of the sea and Pidgin English talk which typified native families who had not forgotten their native place.

Naia returned to the beach, dug into her pocket, and unlocked her group chat with her cousins spread out across the mainland. They had departed for university, for jobs, for cheaper rent, but all of them had retained contact through photographs and stories, their sense of place not severed by thousands of kilometers of water.

“Sunrise session at Pipeline,” she captioned, attaching a photo of the vacant waves. “Limu is back by Shark’s Cove, according to Tutu. Maybe that reef recovery project is working.”

Cousin Leilani from Portland responded: “Miss home every day. What is the water like?”

“Getting better this week,” replied Naia. “New wastewater plant filtration system is up and running. Pressure from residents paid off.”

The responses poured in. Koa from Denver: “Proud of you for staying and fighting.” Malia from San Francisco: “Donating money to the legal fund.” Even their cousin Ikaika, who is overseas in the Pacific serving in the military: “The ocean brings us together no matter where we are.”

It was their generation’s version of the ancient wisdom Tutu Rose had instilled in them all along: connecting across space, trading knowledge, and looking out for each other. The methods had evolved, but not the principle: the health of the sea meant everyone’s health, and everyone’s power lay in their connections.

Naia’s phone buzzed with a reminder notice from her calendar: 7 PM, community meeting, Waianae Community Center. The evening’s agenda would be standard fare: fighting the new development plan, organizing beach cleanups, and pushing for greater water quality monitoring. Tonight’s main event will be discussion about the deep-sea mining project sixty miles out.

Naia returned from downtown via the market when it was getting underway for the day and could sense the old familiar mixture of hope and desperation that had characterized her generation’s relationship to the planet. There were farmers who were Mexican and Filipino immigrants now spreading out their produce, which they had cultivated themselves, out of ground that could still nurture. Their market space lease would be up, and rumors circulated about another expensive shopping mall going up on the property.

There were not any blood relations working at Sonny’s stall, but the family, when it counted, was sorting out his day’s catch from his daily trip out. There had been fewer varieties and smaller fish, but he kept going out day by day on his father’s vessel and upheld traditions dating back centuries.

“How was fishing?” Naia asked, already knowing from his face.

“The sea gives,” he said, and that meant it had been hard. “She’s suffering, you know. The water’s too warm, too acidic. The fish are moving deeper, further out.”

What would your father say?

Uncle Sonny sat quiet for a moment, icing aku. “He’d tell us that the ocean is trying to tell us something and that we weren’t listening hard enough.”

Naia returned from her evening stroll to welcome her grandmother, Tutu Rose, who sat outside beside the lanai, observing the morning traffic inch up the coastal highway. Her grandmother represented comfort and a sense of urgency, a reminder that stories and wisdom of the old ways would be no longer accessible if not actively conserved.

Remind me again about the coral,” Naia said, resting beside her grandmother and two steaming cups of coffee.

Rose Tutu’s eyes sparkled. This was their tradition, their daily exchange of stories that invoked the past. “When I was little, the reef would be an underwater city. All the colors of which you can think. Fish everywhere, and such numbers that water would be silvery when they schooled together. Humpback whales would be right offshore you could reach out and pat them.”

“And human beings?”

We understood our place within the system. Take what you need, give back more than you take. The ancient chiefs understood that their manaa resulted from taking care of the land and sea and not owning them. Tutu Rose took a sip of her coffee, her eyes elsewhere. But that knowledge does not disappear, Naia. The way the patterns of wind blow, the way tide’s function, how birds migrate. We just need to learn to read them.

The community center that evening was full of people. There were three generations of people there, kupuna like Tutu Rose, working parents who fought and struggled for their cause, and youths like Naia who viewed ecological preservation as an issue of survival for their people. The meeting occurred within a mixture of English, Pidgin, and Hawaiian, and an interpreter for newer members of the community.

Dr. Nakamura, a marine biologist who had spent her youth working within the community before going off to Stanford to complete her PhD, spoke of the new findings from the proposed excursion. The slides revealed deep-sea creatures that resembled aliens, evidence of how much humans had to learn about what lay below the sea.

“The firm brings employment and economic growth,” Dr. Nakamura said. “But that damage would be irreversible. We are discussing destruction of ecosystems that took millions of years to build for minerals that would be devoured within decades.”

A senior man from the back of the room stood up. “My boy has no job. The fishing is not sufficient now. What are we expected to do, be poor to save fish we do not observe?”

The question hung above their heads, bearing down on them from economic desperation that rested upon every household within their community. This was 21st-century math in the business of nature conservation. Those who contributed the smallest amount to climate warming would be most likely to have to choose between survival and stewardship.

Rose Tutu struggled to stand, her walker dragging against the linoleum floor. Her voice, full of ninety years of knowledge, spoke slowly when she said.

I know about needing a job, about needing money to provide for our families,” she said. “But I’ve been around long enough to know how it goes when we trade our future for a quick profit. The planters promised riches. The hotel developers promised employment. The military promised security. And each time we traded a piece of our house and each time, someone else prospered and we had to settle for what happened afterwards.”

She stood and looked out among the faces of the room full of people who symbolized the islands’ multicultural history: Native Hawaiian, Filipino, Portuguese, Japanese, Mexican, and all whose strands had been entwined together to become local.

The ocean does not belong to us, she continued. “We’re the ones who belong to the ocean, though. We’ll be held accountable by our children and our grandchildren for what we choose to leave behind, not what we choose to sell.”

The meeting lasted beyond midnight, and task groups were formed on various aspects of the campaign. Naia coordinated social media campaigning among young activists, and Dr. Nakamura coordinated the science advisory group. Uncle Sonny and the rest of the fishers wished to monitor and report fluctuations in the fishery. The Filipino community leaders volunteered to contact Philippine environmental groups that opposed the same mining operations.

Naia trudged through neighborhoods under stars obscured by city light, weighed down by that familiar mixture of exhaustion and determination born of fighting for the planet. The challenges towered above her and connected by strands to climate change, pollution, economic inequality, and decaying culture. So did the people’s response. Every successful campaign spawned a bond that stretched beyond the current battle, forging networks of resistance that reinforced each subsequent fight.

Her phone buzzed with texts from cousins who had witnessed the meeting live. Leilani had forwarded a recording to Oregon environmental groups. Koa organized a solidarity action in Denver. Malia had connected them with California legal experts. What had previously been an ocean separating island communities was now an internet freeway connecting Native-led environmental movements throughout the Pacific.

Tutu Rose lay wakefully at home, quilting beside the window. The patterns she stitched told of waves and coral designs, fish which moved perpetually in circles, and islands connected by tidal flows.

“Was the meeting a success?” she asked, not even looking up.

“We have a job to complete,” said Naia, sitting beside her grandmother. “But we have assistance to help us get it done.”

Rose Tutu smiled, her needle sparkling under the moonlight. “That’s how it’s always been. The sea reminds us of we are all connected to each other: surface and depth, waves and shore, fish, and fishers. If we fight for the sea, we fight for ourselves. If we restore the sea, we restore our communities.”

Outside, waves continued their timeless rhythm, carrying salt and stories, tying together all the shattered pieces of home. Naia closed her eyes and listened, and felt tides drawing out her blood, currents whispering through her sleep. There will be a dawn session again tomorrow, another day of fighting for tomorrow, another day to respect the salt in their blood.

The ocean never forgot a single story, or a single song, or a single oath ever made by humans who vowed to love her. Now it was the turn of Naia’s generation to show that there were vows worth keeping at any expense.

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The Salt in Our Veins