The taste of the sea

I grew up in a big house on an island far out in the Finnish archipelago. It had been built long before regulations that dictated how large the islands had to be to hold houses. My great-grandfather had built it some time after WW1 and there my mommo, grandmother, had grown up and later on settled with her husband. Mum and dad had met at university, and him having this romantic view of the archipelago had them sharing the big house with mommo and moffa.

Every school day dad would put me in the boat and we’d fly across the sea towards Korpo, where he was the science teacher. Mum was an illustrator and worked from home, with the occasional work trip to Helsinki.

The Baltic Sea is in my blood, I know the sound of every creature and I can tell when a storm is coming. I have heard the mermaid sing and I’ve seen the sea troll Iku-Turso cast his nets. Mommo would tell me of how the world was created: of how the sea god’s daughter let a duck nest on her knee, but how the heat from the roosting duck made her twitch and crack the eggs, which formed the sky and land. I can navigate after stars and row for miles without tiring.

Still I have always felt a need to get away, to leave the comfort of the little island and taste other waters. Have you ever tasted the difference of our oceans? The Baltic Sea is almost sweet, the Pacific burns your tongue and the Indian Ocean fills you with tears. Lakes and rivers are all so foreign to me, they are too fickle, too easy. They let us drink them, there’s no fight left in them.

Every time I come to new shores I sing a song to Ahto, the sea god, asking him to show himself to me, but all I ever get are salty wind kisses. Sometimes I think I see him rise far out at sea, a great big shadow of a wave, always facing the other way. Mommo would tell me to stop this foolish business, the gods have no time for mere mortals. But she had never listened to mermaids in the moonlight, or swam in the sea with the Nereids.

I chose to pursue a career in photography, freelance mostly, but I would take the occasional job at a small newspaper if I liked the place well enough. Mommo begged me to come back to the island, find a nice man who wouldn’t mind the isolation and start a family. I kept telling her I’d take just one more job, increase the nest egg just a little bit more. It was after one of these calls that I was asked to cross the Atlantic on a huge tanker, photograph the life of the crew for an article in a nautical magazine.

Food and board, and the ocean. A dream assignment.

The first few days were ordinary, I’ve been on ships before and know their routines. As we got farther out at sea I grew more restless, I had trouble focusing on my assignment. My dreams were full of drowning sailors and laughing mermaids, water the colour of green bottles and the familiar taste of the Baltic Sea. The storm had been brewing all morning, by midday the sky was cold steel and the water a churning and frothing mass of black and grey. I had never felt more alive.

The Kraken hit us from the starboard side, it’s massive tentacles wrapped around the tanker and it started squeezing the metal like it was soft clay. Containers fell overboard, followed by crew dressed in bright orange rain gear. I saw smaller tentacles snatch them up and drag them down towards its mouth. The storm roared loudly, drowning out any screams, making the groaning noises from the ship seem ridiculous. I was in awe of the beauty of this destruction.

The biggest wave I’ve ever seen flushed everyone from the ship. I kept my eyes open. I saw everything. His eyes are black, bottomless pits and he saw me. Ahto saw me. As the Kraken dragged what was left of the ship down into the depths most of the containers cracked open from the pressure, spilling their content into the ocean. Bananas, I remember being surrounded by bananas.

They say they found me floating on an upside down lifeboat and the only trace from the big tanker were all the bananas floating ashore on the beaches of Scotland, Belgium and the Netherlands.

I cried for days, he didn’t want me, he left me alive.