A Stranded Shark

The ocean moves independent of the will of the things inside it. It moves like a stomach trying to heave an illness out of it, vomiting it all over the golden sand. All sorts of things find themselves stuck in the wet sand, writhing to get back into the home that threw them out. Some of them – turtles, seals, and the like – can crawl their way back in themselves, but others can’t quite make it. They don’t have the same ability to wiggle and shift themselves through the sand and back into the unlovable embrace of the water. They burn in the sun until they can’t survive it anymore.

Time after time I’ve seen whales beached on the sand and people clambering to save them. They repurpose sand buckets as life saving devices that keep the animals wet. They dig at the sand with hands and plastic shovels. When the whale is finally free, everyone cheers and they get a little column in the local newspaper.

I worked alone at digging out the trapped great white shark. The sun beat down on my bare shoulders, reminding me to wet the thing before it dried out. I picked up my overshirt and threw it in the water, lifted it back out and wrung it out over the shark. It threw its body around, trying to get back toward the water, trying to breathe, trying to survive. I wasn’t sure if I was even helping it or just prolonging the inevitable. I couldn’t stop though.

I buried my knees back into the sand and started to dig again. Over the crash of the water, over my shoulder, I heard the beach goers muttering to themselves. They were talking about how ridiculous it was to try and save a shark. A whale they understood. A whale was a sweet thing that had never hurt any one. An orca they understood. An Orca was a dangerous, but beautiful thing. A shark they couldn’t comprehend. A shark was both dangerous and ugly. They hurt people, and they ended beach days early. A great white was a dangerous beast from the depths of the ocean. Saving it was a waste of time, it was just putting another dangerous thing back into the water. Better to let it die and clean it up later.

The sand was relentless in keeping the great white trapped on the beach. It wouldn’t let me make a stream from the shark to the place where the waves reached the shore to help keep it wet. It wouldn’t be dug out around the shark’s body to let it wiggle its way back to the water. It was determined to keep this shark here until its death.

A child was at my shoulder. A boy with tight curls and a yellow sand bucket. He was maybe eight or nine. He didn’t say anything, he poured water over the shark. His mother rushed over and told him to stay away because the shark was dangerous. I couldn’t blame them, and I knew the shark didn’t either. Sharks don’t hold grudges.

The shark started to wiggle. It didn’t have the energy to thrash its way back to the ocean, but it had finally figured out it was dying. I splashed water on it, but I knew it wouldn’t help at this point. We were both just struggling to keep a dead thing from dying. The sand still gripped it tightly, holding it away from the lifesaving waves. At this point, it wouldn’t matter. The damage was done. Even if it got back into the water, it would succumb to brain damage and die. It would be nice if it could at least die at home.

The shark stopped moving. It wasn’t able to keep up that sort of fight. Somehow, I couldn’t stop. I kept digging at the sand. Without realising, the sun had started to set. The water was coming in closer, closer.

I know sharks don’t know what funerals are. Still, when the water got close enough, I pushed the shark back into the water. I wasn’t worried about ripping its skin on the sand, it wouldn’t feel it. I pushed it through the waves, and when it floated in the water, I pushed it further. The ocean finally took the shark home. It picked up the corpse and took it back into the water. Fish of all sorts would probably find it and start picking away at it before long. I stood, waist-deep in the cold water, watching the ocean for a while.