With thanks to Z.S.
After an extended period of mutual absence, the Gulf Stream current [KÓLPOS] and Arctic Labrador current [ARKTOS] reunite unexpectedly at Cape Point off Hatteras Island, North Carolina. Historically, the convergence of these two currents has created the most dangerous and violent stretch of water along the American East Coast, earning the moniker “The Graveyard of the Atlantic.”
I
[KÓLPOS] Four days hence from Cayo Hueso. Four days from that despicable spit of white sand. Never turning, never changing except to diminish. Deplorable little spit. Four days separated from that Spanish abomination, Tekesta before it, yet hardly restored of its hellishness. Four days of respite along my beloved coastal progeny – my prodigious, rocky colonies. Colonies, they called them. What a lovely word it was, colonies. Fluid, liquid, musical as I –
KÓLPOS pauses, his water growing still as he focuses on something in the distance. He resumes, his tone indignant.
[KÓLPOS] What spumy stream is this, foaming in the distance? Insolent, piddly, trickling thing. I grow cold. I grow cold at the sight of it. I grow cold…cold…
He trails off. On the surface, small waves begin to lap in anxious anticipation.
[KÓLPOS, in disbelief] It cannot be. I could not taunt myself to think it. Such long years of near meetings that yield to many missings. Of reunions only singly. This faculty is beyond me. I may not let myself believe that it –
He is interrupted.
[ARKTOS, shouting irately from the far horizon] WHAT HOT, UGLY FLUME IS THIS APPROACHING? TURN FROM ME, STREAM, THAT I SHOULD HAVE NO NEED TO BREAK UPON THEE!
ARKTOS churns violently, clapping tall waves against each other. A dense humidity falls and the air tinges hazily.
[KÓLPOS, in stunned delight] Arktos, brother! Brother, welcome friend! Am I not recognized? Do we not meet in happy reunion, as the dear asthenosphere has willed it? Oldest, dearest Arktos, are you not still my only equal? Do I not remain your true and constant Kólpos?
[ARKTOS, slowly, cautiously] Kólpos…this name is known to me, though distantly. Long years since I have seen him; long, long years. Could I mistake him for a flume?
ARKTOS pauses and his waters calm; the humidity in the air grows thicker as if on the verge of rain. He continues with remorseful recognition in his voice.
[ARKTOS] A flume I called you. A flume, dear Kólpos. Dear, beloved thing. I break myself upon your mercy, to have not recognized my kindred. To have named THEE a stream!
[KÓLPOS, sloshing with glad relief] And I you spumy!
[ARKTOS, jovial and sloshing in kind] Spumy, am I not? Do I not foam so? I DO foam at the happy sight of my only echo in these vast seas; my fortified brother in violent seamaking.
[KÓLPOS] Violent only for the living.
They laugh too long and too loudly.
[ARKTOS] How long since we have churned? How long since we have turned a steady vessel slimy and wet beneath? Such sport, our calling!
[KÓLPOS] So few as seductive a charm as sinking, sinking.
[ARKTOS] Fewer now, fewer and fewer now, but sunk we have.
[KÓLPOS] And gorgeously, mightily.
ARKTOS laughs in a resounding voice. His surface vibrates with small, white-capped waves no taller than the seabirds that float upon it, who remain unbothered except to unfurl their wings in quick, rhythmic steadying. At once, ARKTOS remembers himself. His surface calms and he resumes, resolutely.
[ARKTOS] Brother, will you permit me to continue? Will you indulge me in reminiscing? I have been too long away—long, long away indeed. Might we, together, partake in the greatest sin of the elderly? To live, even briefly, in our past? To revel in our histories at the forsaking of new memory?
[KÓLPOS, swashing his waves as if to nod] Come, smash upon me. Let us treat with our greatest stories, apprise what power we possess. I say to thee free of wave or wavering, dear Arktos: commence.
KÓLPOS and ARKTOS smash into each other, sending a violent plume of foamy seawater 100 feet into the air as the seabirds scatter. Above them, the sky darkens and the humidity tips into mizzle. In the distance, Hatteras is partially obscured by an ominous and fast-moving shaft of rain.
II
[ARKTOS] When did they first come? The provenance? Some four hundred years past? Tiny, we thought them, infantly and alien.
[KÓLPOS] It was five hundred years past when they grew fat and heavy; heaving and creaking abovely. Five hundred years past, five hundred — I mark this, sure of it.
[ARKTOS] Five hundred, of course, of course. Fat and heavy and wooden. Hubris it was, hubris in their unknowing.
[KÓLPOS] It was their desire TO know, I believe. Their undying, untidy searching. Their want for conquering.
[ARKTOS] And yet,
[KÓLPOS] And yet…
They pause a moment before KÓLPOS resumes.
[KÓLPOS] Five hundred years since they arrived fat and heavy and—briefly—floating. Our first, now nameless as history echoes, but claim them we did in silent reckoning.
[ARKTOS] A shrewd and measured move, our silent claiming. As if to plant the seed of more unknowing, their most hated thing. A simple wash of wave, a lash of foaming to sweep, to send them careening—such courage by the eager Boatswain.
ARKTOS mispronounces the final word as “BoatsWAYNE.”
[KÓLPOS] My brother, it is called, “BoSUNN.”
[ARKTOS] Ah, ah, ah: “BoSUNN!” Then a greedy one he was, and so easily undone. Do you recall him calling, “Turn into the current”?
[KÓLPOS, in an unsettling tone] Hardly, silently. But he paid. Was it the mizzen slit his kidneys or the main? I did not know a man could perforate as that. Did not think the distance wide enough to pinion him as such, stuck down through his guts to the aft.
ARKTOS shivers involuntarily, despite their temperature difference. KÓLPOS remembers himself and gradually commands jocundity back into his voice.
[KÓLPOS] But the seed…the seed of unknowing rooted, then. More they sent. More, happily more they sent.
[ARKTOS] Privateers and pirates; The Adventure—Teach and his brigands—Brigantines, bigger; Fetid frigates; Barques like dogs: The Guadalupe, The Salvador.
[KÓLPOS] Stuck in sand and sucked downafter.
[ARKTOS] Floating castles for courtesans rended –
[KÓLPOS] Ended.
[ARKTOS] Ripped and screaming in dark water.
[KÓLPOS] Did we not claim and claim?
[ARKTOS] We did.
KÓLPOS and ARKTOS smash into each other again, this time shifting a large mass of sand into a pile deep beneath the water. In the distance, heavy rain has settled fully over Hatteras.
[ARKTOS] There was The Enterprize.
[KÓLPOS] Simply.
They smash into each other again; the pile of sand grows taller beneath the water.
[ARKTOS] The Henry.
[KÓLPOS] Duly.
They smash, as above.
[ARKTOS] The Patriot.
ARKTOS moves to smash again but KÓLPOS does not rise to him.
[KÓLPOS, sternly but understanding] Brother, she was not ours: that greed only of men.
[ARKTOS] I digress...
[KÓLPOS] I grant this.
[ARKTOS] Summarily then came steel, after iron.
[KÓLPOS] Such mediums to which we never took a liking.
[ARKTOS] The Monitor? The Proteus? Garish.
[KÓLPOS] For metal, though earthly, can hardly be reclaimed.
[ARKTOS] Timber topsails? Wooden whalers?
[KÓLPOS] Yes, yes.
[ARKTOS] They rest and decay so sweetly.
They smash a final time, bringing the growing sandbar above the churning, black water. Behind them, Hatteras is engulfed in wild, violent rain.
[ARKTOS] But the ships are not the spoils, no. Nor the ambergris, nor gold.
[KÓLPOS] The spoils? No, no. For we, perpetual beings, sprung ourselves of breaking, shifting. We have always trafficked in the primordial.
[ARKTOS] The spoils, then?
[BOTH] The souls.
[ARKTOS] Committed to the floor.
[KÓLPOS] In their immediacy, trapped or drifting below; for to surface? Far, far too wet and too full.
[ARKTOS] Future fish shit, suspended and nibbled.
[KÓLPOS] Gnashed and listless.
[ARKTOS] The rarer ones occasionally untouched but to deglove.
[KÓLPOS] Eerie, eerie, the ones untouched.
[ARKTOS, incredulously] I could have never thought thee squeamish!
[KÓLPOS] Squeamish? No, only knowing. Men, women; brown of skin, yellow, red, pink; all white, in the end. All white beneath.
[ARKTOS] Damp and ghostly.
[KÓLPOS] White with eyes open, pressure bulging.
[ARKTOS] Marbled as, in time, they try to float.
[KÓLPOS] Puffed and gaseous, reeled by rot to the surface.
[ARKTOS] Humiliating for the stuck ones.
[KÓLPOS] Massed and crowded upon sunk ceilings.
[ARKTOS] A mercy we lack the depth to see them truly…
[BOTH] Collapse.
They pause to revel a moment in their recollections and watch as rain continues to pock the surface. After a few moments, the rain softens and the water begins to still. They resume in a more somber tone.
[KÓLPOS] But the children…
[BOTH] The children.
[ARKTOS] A pity.
[KÓLPOS, pointedly] Not a pity.
[BOTH] Unspeakable.
[KÓLPOS] The only compassion we may offer—such foreign understanding of these mortal lives we conjure—that the children do not die screaming.
[ARKTOS] No.
[KÓLPOS] Nor fearful.
[ARKTOS] No.
[KÓLPOS] That, in the end, their mother only finds them: warm, and dry, and held.
[ARKTOS] Their final moments calm.
[KÓLPOS] Though final.
[BOTH] Unspeakable, the children.
[KÓLPOS] But for them our summation would be only fear: never reverence, never reverence. It is always the little things that propose meaning to men.
[ARKTOS] And men are rarely reverent but for the end.
[KÓLPOS] Well said, my brother, well said.
III
After another moment of silent reflection, the waters fully calm and the skies begin to clear. The rains have passed over Hatteras and crepuscular rays of sunlight appear all the brighter in contrast to the now distant, dark rainclouds. KÓLPOS and ARKTOS turn toward the small protruding sandbar they have created in their violent recollections.
[KÓLPOS] But look, my dear one, upon that which we have also wrought. We too gave this land life, did we not? Life in mound and ocean, yes. But most honorably: men.
The waters lighten and pulsate. ARKTOS continues in a virile, hale tone.
[ARKTOS] For the ones that survived us? Vital, seafaring men.
[KÓLPOS] Brave outlivers. Took riches –
[ARKTOS, cheekily] Bed women.
[KÓLPOS] Made families. English, Spanish, Portuguese if not for us—but for us?
[BOTH, merrily] Carolinian!
[KÓLPOS] Their children and great-grandchildren still Carolinian.
[ARKTOS] Their bastards and known relations. Descendants and yet born generations: fine, fair Carolinians.
On the golden sand in the far distance, beachgoers slowly make their way back to the shore, unfurling blankets and propping umbrellas in bright pastels before wading into the surf for a final swim in the late-afternoon sun.
[KÓLPOS] Ah yes, now they arrive: the final incarnation.
[BOTH] The bathers.
[ARKTOS] What motion they create, be-cheeked and kicking gaily. Free of fear, of fate. Lovely, full and dimpled.
[KÓLPOS] Sometimes long and thin.
[ARKTOS] I prefer to see the full ones.
[KÓLPOS, admonishingly] Arktos…
[ARKTOS, impishly] Kólpos…
[KÓLPOS] Initially, I recall we thought them sacrilegious, brazen.
[ARKTOS] Defilers, kin-mockers. Of some kind of ill or wanton design.
[KÓLPOS] But even we—o old things—may evolve, mightn't we?
[ARKTOS] We might.
[KÓLPOS] Lovely reminders, do we not now find them?
[ARKTOS] That death lives beneath life.
[KÓLPOS] Depthed and solemn.
[ARKTOS] Still and always.
[KÓLPOS] Sun, sun ye bathers, as your brothers now may not.
KÓLPOS and ARKTOS swirl about each other and turn their gaze to the beach. Over the choppy wind wafts the occasional shriek of laughter; the occasional mew of a gull.
-- Hanna Karras is a writer and mother from Baltimore.
