Survival in the Sea

Stealth is the best I can do to describe my long, sleek, elegant, and meandering body moving through the heavy pressure-laden ocean water. Gliding seamlessly with almost no friction, my big torpedo-shaped mass with triangle fins and tail part the water with ease. I don’t speak. I make no noise. I have no organs that make noises. I have no bones. Mechanical perfection: I move, and I swim. I look around with my dead, brooding, dark eyes. My rows of teeth seem to grin or smile as you call it? I am the perfect creation of Mother Nature. I am a live machine of purpose. I am perfection of life.

My kind is old. Older than anything on land (or the place without salt water you call land). I have thus far survived perpetual planet mass extinctions, several times over. I do not use silly human words or descriptors to accentuate my purpose. My purpose is survival. My kind has no language, written or oral history, or use for adjectives or adverbs in this world. I have no politics. I have no religion. I have no style. I have no wealth. I have no home unless you differentiate the land and salt water. I have no need for these things. I am. I am alive. I have survived.

My kind has survived for 420 million years without greed, sadness, envy or fear, or any other silly human character flaws or emotion. My kind does not fight for land or power, postulate on education, or dwell on excessive thought; I am alive and I have purpose. My kind is older than humanity and older than Mount Everest.

Four mass extinction events over 420 million years according to your human history, is what you say my kind has survived. Over 70% of the world’s animals, including land and water species, were extinguished. But that is based on your time, minimal knowledge, and perception of time and space and dimensions. You think you are wise, based on your narcissism and your one-dimensional theories of the universe and time.

I am alive and my kind will survive your one-dimensional life. If I had emotion, I would laugh at your memories, your brief self-absorbed history and your self-created importance based on education, wealth, and your societies. Your hierarchies, bureaucracies, and philosophy are all but boring to my kind. You continue to dig up the dirt and create mountains for your kind to stand on and then dig holes in the dirt to bury your dead. You do not focus on the supreme purpose. The survival of your species.

You always come back to the oceans. Humans cannot help themselves. I stealthily swim around you as you fish, swim, explore, and travel. I have circled your vessels and heard your nonsense words in many languages throughout your flat line of time. Loud noises, quiet drifters or screaming men swimming and soaking in the salt water, screaming my name in the murky water, and paddling and splashing to stay alive. You pray for life and hope for death.

Your unjustified self -importance is of no importance to me. You hope for a quick death as the red fluid runs out of your body and I stealth around you. You look at me and hope for life, but when you see my fin rise out of the water and peer into my dark, old, deep eyes, you see your death. You see a reflection of your dark, old, deep soul you cannot escape. Then I can smell the red fluid and your fear. I smell it and I stealth and grin at you with my rows of teeth. My kind is old, and we have been harvesting from the oceans for longer than your history allows or can believe.

We are born. We grow. We travel. We eat. We mate. And, we survive. My kind has been through this all before. I grin at your ignorance with my rows of teeth. You are born, you grow, and you think you learn, you think you accomplish, you think you travel, you eat, you mate, yet you will not survive.

Four times I have seen and felt the Earth explode with life, vibrate from the land with human vessels moving through the water. Inevitably they burn out and get quiet after fire, climate change, volcano lava and ash, or a fiery ball from another place that bursts into the ocean explodes with such a magnitude it pushes the water out and up and over all the places you call land.

You are wasteful and pollute. The human trash and your waste floats through my water. Stealth around you I am still and grin because I know your time is short. Your thought accomplishments are small, and you have no concept of survival of your species. You have no concept of your species surviving.

As time passes, I swim shallow and I see more humans. I swim deep and see more vessels. You are due another war. We have no language or history, and no word or noise for war, but I have the history from the one that gave birth to me from a generation ago.

A big war ship you called Indianapolis in the Pacific Ocean in 1945 by your time. The memory, if you want to call it that, will fade soon as it has no real relevance on my kind’s survival. The ship had a lot of humans in matching uniforms with a purpose to deliver an extinction device to other humans across the salt water. My kind heard the ship and heard the sailors yelling and exclaiming as we swam around the vessel. Boasting with cheers, proud talk and loud voices, their celebration carried over the top of the water. The humans were ignorant of their own impending demise.

My mother heard these exclamations and felt the vibrations as she meandered through the big open vastness of deep water. She smiled at the ignorance of the humans flaunting her several rows of razor-sharp teeth. The humans traveled over the salt water and boasted of winning the war, killing just to kill and not knowing a thing about survival. The humans were part of a war machine too big for them to comprehend. The machine did not care about survival, only winning. They did not know that no one owns the land, and no one owns the sea.

When the first torpedo slammed into the side of the Indianapolis, the boasting and the celebration stopped. The ocean shook and the air quivered. The night sky lit up with fireworks. The ship groaned and shuddered. The men screamed as the ship bow blew out of the water and ignited.

Then, another torpedo hit. The ocean trembled again. The oxygen sucked out of the air in a loud gasp. The vessel exploded and split in two. The ship was swallowed and sunk into the ocean in twelve minutes, moaning and bellowing as it sunk to the ocean floor. The sailors cried out, yelling, begging, splashing, and bleeding. Nine hundred of them were thrashing and crying out in the cold water. My mother could hear their screams and felt the splashing while the smell of their fear and oozing red fluid spread through the water like an oil spill from the murky depths below, reaching every crack and crevice. Mixing with their red fluid, their fear spread over miles and miles of the ocean calling to our kind like a beacon.

Initially the air and water were full of the sound of boasting men celebrating another’s death, then exploding vessels, war, fire, torpedoes, cries and screams, followed by men splashing in the dark murky water in the middle of the night. Those were the alive humans. The dead ones bobbed up and down in the wet graveyard until our kind picked them off one by one. This gave way to daylight and a thick fog of fear, a few yells but overall an eerie silence.

Stealthily in the water, our kind, swam around the bobbing flesh the first day. No other humans came for them by ship or airplane. One by one the bobbers disappeared into the depths. The live humans watched the bobbers disappear and we swam in circles around the intertwined groups, watching them with our dark eyes, smiling at them with our grandeur rows of teeth and occasionally nudging them to scream or boast. They did neither as the live ones huddled together in groups, only exciting our kind more into a bit of a frenzy.

Never in history has there been so many humans and sharks in one area of the water together with the humans defenseless against our kind. Alone, but not alone. Scared and abandoned by their God, their country, and their families. It was just our kind and the humans. The humans, with their lankly legs hanging down in the water as easy pickings, tried hard not to move them for fear of attracting our kind.

For days we circled stealthily and watched the humans as they broke down, lost hope in their politics, faith, technology, education, training, families, and everything they held sacred for survival. They were stripped of their humanity. Our kind would swim by them close and stare with one dark, black eye, watching them until we had to turn around swim by them again. Sometimes we would stick our fin out of the water as we approached, only to dip down into the cold, dark depths as we approached, terrifying them to no end.

We watched them as they discarded the weak or bleeding or dying out of their huddled groups. Discarded them to die by our kind, sacrificing the injured and weak for the living. We watched as they learned to survive like our kind. For four days, a moment in time our kind and humans had the same purpose, the purpose of survival.

Four days later a ship approached to rescue the survivors. In four days the humans realized the color of their skin, their religion, their politics, and their faith were not their supreme purpose or the survival of mankind. Our purpose was intertwined for that moment in history. Our purpose was to survive. But still our kind showed no emotion, no despair, no fear, no regret, no grief, and no anger. The closest we got to emotion was excitement over the humans’ blood and fear.

I was not a part of this time, the mother that birthed me was and that memory or history as you might call it was passed down at birth. Along with the knowing our kind will be around a lot longer than humans, and most other animals on the Earth. Along with the knowing our kind has already been through at least four mass extinction events, our existence is our proof and our history. If humans would learn a lesson from our kind, it would be survival. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter because the humans will not be around to share the brief lesson, they learned that night. My kind will outlive you all.