These Seas That Swell

from The Underbelly of the Feast
Originally published in Ligeia Magazine

When you follow the lungomare—the road that hugs the sea—from Circeo to Gaeta, you will pass ancient ruins, hilltop temples, and waterfront restaurants. In Sperlonga, there is one of these restaurants, made entirely of mud and grass. And the people inside, they built it with their bare hands years ago, when estuaries emptied out into the sea, before eroding topsoil dried them up.

These people—a family of four—left Sabaudia by boat. When they reached the Cave of Gaia, where the waves crashed onto the rocks of Mount Circeo, they filled up their nets and buckets with shellfish and anchovies, packed down their vessel with tools and supplies, and readied their boat to sail down the coast.

In the early afternoon, the family arrived at an estuary, where water broth both brackish and sweet mixed between high banks of pluff mud and salt grass. The family, they took one look at this mud and this grass and knew just what to do with it. From their boat, they pulled out shovels and buckets, and began to dig. They drove their shovels deep down into the mud, heaving out hefty heaps until each of their buckets was full. Then, the family took out their shears and baskets, and began cutting down the grass until each basket was full, too. With this mud and this grass, the family built their home.

It didn’t take long for the supplies to run out. After all, there were few to begin with. But once they had, the family collected more mud and grass from the estuary and used it to build tables, chairs, and a sign that read: RISTORANTE. They knew their food would say the rest.

~~~

Despite its location, the restaurant never quite made a name for itself. The locals and tourists alike preferred fine dining—large plates of seafood pasta presented elegantly on silver platters atop white tablecloths—but the family was committed to preparing simple, down-home dishes from all over the world: fried grouper and shrimp, blackened flounder and sea bass, low country boils and jambalayas, paellas and curries, phos and gumbos, served up with ice-cold beer or chilled wine made in-house from local ingredients by the family’s own hands.

Regardless, those with an appetite driving along the lungomare on their way to Pozzuoli, Ischia, or Amalfi, would see the open-air beachfront establishment and stop for its charm. Regulars would usually take a seat at the bar, on one of the stools. Teenagers would nearly always nestle into a nook on the patio, overlooking the estuary. Tourists—especially with children—would take whatever was given to them, usually settling for a table in the corner, out of everyone’s way.

The adults would be the first to see them: a cluster of mangrove roots hanging from the ceiling, a bouquet of salt-wort sprouting from the center of the table, a patch of seagrass rooted in the mud floors.

“What are those?” the adults would ask, pouring themselves another glass of wine.

“What are what?” the children would respond, their mouths full of fried fish.

“Those,” the parents would say, raising their glasses to their mouths.

“Those,” the children would explain, sipping their sodas, “are plants.”

“Plants,” the adults would echo, nodding their heads up and down slowly, repeating the words that came from their children’s mouths. “Those are plants.”

~~~

When the tide was rising in the early afternoon, the mother of the family who had built the restaurant from mud and grass liked to sit on the banks of the estuary and watch it fill with seawater. After finishing her lunch, she would enjoy a hand-rolled cigarette and amaro in her rocking chair on the restaurant’s patio, and then grab her coat and stroll down the beach.

On her way to the estuary, the mother would pass the tidal pools, filled with starfish, shellfish, and minnows, which the rising tides would carry back out to sea. She would also pass the magnificent sand dunes, crawling with saltwort and sand reed, where crabs were scurrying in and out of their burrows in the sun.

While the tides and the dunes interested the mother, what had drawn her away from the restaurant down the beach wasn’t the estuary itself, but the mud that lined its banks. This mud—a pungent, viscous miasma—was crawling with life. The salt grass grew up out of it along the banks, and the oysters rooted to it in the shallows; the fiddler crabs burrowed into it on the shore, and the flounder buried themselves in it on the estuary bottom. And it was with this mud that the mother made her sculptures.

With a small trowel that she carried in her apron, she would scoop out heaps of this mud onto the banks as the seawater spilled into the estuary, carrying with it larger fish, crustaceans, and debris, and she would mold this mud into shapes.

What shapes the mother molded the heaps into depended on what she saw in the estuary that day. Some days, her sculptures took on the shapes of driftwood, adorned in barnacles and kelp. Other days, her sculptures took on the shapes of flounder, that strange flat fish with both eyes on the same side of its head.

But regardless of what the mother saw in the estuary on any given day, she would always sculpt a starling from that mud, reminding her of Rome.

~~~

Late in the evening, when the tide was out, the daughter liked to forage on the beach in the tide-pools. After she had finished dinner and poured himself a final glass of wine, she would grab her satchel from her desk and head out into the night. 

The daughter always thought that the beach, at night, when the tide was fully out, looked like the surface of the moon—sand that had been smoothed by receding waves, tide pools carved out by the shifting currents, the entire scene a vast monochromatic landscape illuminated by celestial bodies, passing boats, and the occasional bioluminescent plankton bloom in the swash zone—and it was upon this strange, mysterious landscape that the daughter foraged for shells.

On her nightly passeggiata, the daughter would find shells from conchs, clams, and snails; shells from scallops, mussels, and oysters; shells from crabs, lobsters, and, every now and then, the shell of a nautilus. And when she found these shells, she would stoop down and scoop them up in her hands—or sometimes, her arms, if they were too large to pick up with her hands alone—and place them into her satchel.

The daughter would scavenge the beach for shells until she reached the estuary, where she would sit down on a flat rock and take these shells out—one by one—and skip them across the surface of the water. The daughter would do this, skipping the shells and counting the number of times they graced the surface, until her satchel was empty.

~~~

At high tide in the late afternoon, the son liked to go fishing. Long before preparing dinner, when the sun was only just beginning to drop in the sky, he would grab his casting net and buckets, and walk down to the estuary to see what the tides had brought it that day.

The son would walk up and down the banks, surveying the surface for signs of bait-fish swimming in schools. When he saw them, he would ready the casting net in both of his hands, feeling the weights between his fingers, and then he would toss it in. The son would throw that casting net out across that water in such a way so that it would open up, as wide as the mouth of the estuary itself, and swallow up whatever was inside. Standing on the bank with the rope in hand, the son would then slowly tug until he could empty it out onto the sand around his feet.

When he opened up that net, out would fall minnows, mackerel, flounder, bass, crabs, and shrimp—dancing and flopping around on the sand like they had fallen right into the son’s frying pan in the restaurant’s kitchen. This is when he would scoop up his catch, one by one, and throw them into his bucket, which he had filled with water from the sea.

Once his bucket was full, he would walk further down the banks of the estuary until he came to the outdoor kitchen that he had built with his sister years before. At this kitchen, the son would clean the fish—scraping the scales from their bodies, emptying the guts from their bellies, separating the meat from the bone as he portioned them out into filets. Later, he would carry his catch back to the restaurant, where he would keep them on ice until that night’s dinner, when he would steam the shellfish, and batter down and fry up those filets, toss them in sauce, season them heavily, and throw them on platters for himself, his family, and whoever else had stopped by the restaurant that day.

But before he went back to the restaurant, the son would take those guts and scales, and plant them shallow in the pluff mud, where the family had harvested the salt grass. He would take his hand, and hollow out a little hole in the mud, drop in some of the innards from the fish and a single fish-scale, and then cover the hole up again. He did this until each of the scales that had been scraped from the bodies of the fish had been planted. When he was done, he would rinse off his hands in the brackish water, grab his bucket, and head home.

~~~

Early in the morning, when the tide was going out, the father of the family liked to go for a swim. After drinking a cup of tea in the restaurant’s kitchen, he would descend down the steps from the dining room to the beach and walk along the shoreline until he came to an estuary. Here, he would wade out into the sea until he could no longer walk. It was then that he would swim.

Beginning with a dive into a wave, he would swim underwater for as long as he could hold his breath. Then, he would surface past the breakers and begin to move parallel to the shoreline, leisurely at first, starting with a breaststroke, then switching to a backstroke and ending finally in a butterfly.

After he had worn himself out, he would flip over onto his back, take a deep breath in and hold it. With this breath in his lungs, the father would float. He would lay there on his back on the rolling waves—his head and torso on the surface, his legs and feet dangling in the water beneath him—and he would look into the sky above.

Sometimes, the sky above would be bright blue as far as the father could see, without a single cloud in it. Other times, the sky above would be filled with a dense layer of shelf clouds, bringing in the rain from far off the coast. But every now and then, when the weather was just right, the sky above would be both blue and filled with clouds. On these days, the father would lay on his back with his lungs filled with air, his body suspended in the seawater, and watch the shapes that these clouds took on.

Some days, these clouds took on the shapes of animals: an opossum, hanging upside down by its tail in a tree; a raccoon, fishing for crawdads in a shallow creek. Other days, these clouds would take on the shapes of plants: sprawling live oaks draped in Spanish moss; towering umbrella pines on rolling hills. But no matter the day, after the father had been floating on his back in the sea for a long time—breathing in through his nose, holding it, and slowly letting the air out of his mouth, again and again—these clouds took on the shapes of their own. When they did, the father would open up his mouth, and begin to sing.

~~~

The father discovered the statue at low tide at the beginning of fall, after a week of tempestuous storms. He was walking up the beach towards the estuary for his morning swim, when he saw a trident jutting out of the sand. When returning with his family later, they took one look at this statue and knew just what to do with it.

With their shovels, the family dug the statue out and dragged it over to the estuary, where they mounted it upright on the highest bank. Then, they covered its surfaces with mud and grass, until what had once been a statue became an amorphous lump of clay. As the sun climbed high above them, the family worked that mud into their hands until they had sculpted a live oak tree draped in moss. 

The family stood back from their creation and stared at it in the autumn sun—its roots climbing down the estuary’s banks into the water below, its trunk standing sturdily in the mud and the muck that surrounded its base, its limbs reaching up to the sky above—and then, the family went along their way: the father waded out into the sea for a swim; the mother sat down along the banks to sculpt; the son and daughter, together, walked up and down the estuary, searching for oysters.

When the son and daughter had found them, they took out their knives from their pockets and shucked these oysters open. In each of these oysters, there was a pearl, which they planted at the base of the oak tree made of mud at the mouth of the estuary overlooking the sea.

Of course, the son and daughter ate the meat in the oysters—letting them slide down the back of their throat and into their bellies. After they had done so, the son passed his shells to the daughter, who slipped them into her pocket with hers.

That night, when the daughter went foraging under the light of the moon, she noticed the first leaves sprouting out of the limbs of the live oak. To this, she took the oyster shells from her pocket, and skipped them across the water—but to the daughter’s surprise, they did not sink. After they had skimmed the surface four times, they made their final splash, and then floated. They must have floated for over an hour, as the daughter sat there, watching—until eventually, when the tides changed, the saltwater spilling back into the estuary, slowly rising up the banks—these oyster shells suddenly sank down to the muddy bottom below.