Life between the tides.

Sometimes "time out" means sitting at the edge of a tidal pond watching starfish cling to the undersides of rocks during the low tide, or looking into pools of water left by the tide, observing the teeming life, the shrimp dancing in between waving bits of rockweed and sea lettuce and the occasional movements of a rock or wharf crab. The intertidal zone may be one of the best places to stop when the soul needs refreshment and reattachment to the universe. In this world where life is always threatened by the rising and lowering waters, the harsh waves, and the cruel drying light of the sun, you see compressed before you the cycles of life.

The starfish will live to see another high tide if they stay moist in anticipation of the waves that will wash over them, waves that will send them crashing into the very rocks that moments before harbored them from their enemies. The rockweed and sea lettuce will again wave in the surging waters if they keep from drying during the time when the nurturing waters have abandoned them as part of the ritual of the tidal dance.

Life seems cruel in the intertidal zone, the place along the shore covered by the high tide but left uncovered as the ebb leads to the low tide. The dead crabs, the skeletons of starfish, and the mussel and crab shells provide mute testimony to the likelihood that for some the next low tide will be their last. There is no confusion about stability, no illusion about a steady state. Where the waters come and go, life is one long series of changes, changes that are remarkably dramatic but no less likely than those any of us face outside the intertidal zone.

All of the creatures of the intertidal zone have their own special modifications. The rough underside of the starfish grabs ever so forcefully as the swirling white water of the rising tide tries to pry it loose and send it flipping onto the beach where no water will ever again wash life through it. And yet the starfish often seem less fragile in their environment than we do in ours.

We watched as society fell in love with the technology of health care in the late '70s only to see that admiration recede as cost and accessibility became the dominant issues. We saw our salaries rise like waters under a full moon when the laws of supply and demand took hold and shaped us as powerfully as any tide. The cycles of our being are less regular than for those who live in the intertidal zone, but we are not genetically programmed to survive the forces that act upon us. Instead, we must rely on our ability to anticipate, think, and act. As individuals, as a society, and as a profession, we exist only to the extent that we can survive the many cycles working on our bodies (and souls).

During my recent sojourn to Maine, I not only reacquainted myself with the life between the tides, I also visited new friends in novels never read and old friends in books long forgotten. Through the mind's eye of Ernest Hemingway, I rowed out to the Gulf Stream and accompanied an old man as he reflected on his life while he struggled to land a giant marlin. The old man with his cramping hand and indomitable spirit fought the fish and then the sharks that devoured his great fish. The old man, to pass the time and to draw strength, looked back on the cycles of his life, reflecting on the stages of his existence. His triumph was his perseverance, his ability to live through the cycles despite having no special biological predilection for survival.

Thinking about the intertidal zone, the old man, the great fish, and my own life led me to ponder the irony of the old man's creator. As the book note to The Old Man and the Sea states, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. The great American writer left us when he could no longer survive within the cycle, when he was alienated by where life had taken him. Apparently the message of perseverance he shared with readers earlier in his life could no longer sustain him.

In the intertidal zone life usually triumphs; death may come to some residents, but survival is the general rule. The intertidal zone may appear a cruel place, but it is predictable, and everything that exists there has some special survival equipment. The same is not true for us all. Perhaps it is we who live in the harshest zone, a place where life often appears easy and predictable, but where destructive forces come not with regularity but rather at the whim of some unexplainable forces. In return for uncertainty, however, we are blessed with an awareness denied the simple creatures of the intertidal zone, an uncertainty that bred panic in an author no longer able to persevere, but that can also encourage the kind of awareness that allows the triumph of an old man over a giant fish--or the triumph of us all over tomorrow.