Beach Life 2: Sea Urchins

When I was 12 years old, a woman I didn’t know gave me her shell collection.  

I was a budding young scientist, who had set up my parents' study as my laboratory, with my microscope and collections of rocks, leaves, seed pods, twigs, and anything else I could find. 

One day, my dad walked into my haven while I was in the middle of a reverie of exploration and told me to stop what I was doing and greet our company.  I looked up to see a strange woman I'd never seen before.  She was wearing a big hat and had red hair and fancy jewelry, and she didn't look like any woman I'd ever seen before.  She was clearly not from around here.  My dad announced that she wanted to give me something.  I couldn't imagine what she would give me, and she scared me.  I stood back afraid to even look at her, but she told me she had  heard I collected shells and rocks, and now she saw for herself that I did, and she had a shell collection and she was moving away and wanted me to have it, that she had collected these shells personally from all over the world and was entrusting them to me and to please take care of them. 

I could barely speak I was so thrilled and nodded “yes” vigorously and thanked her at my dad’s urging and started going through the boxes of shells, gently fingering each one, taking in the colors and shapes of the candy-colored spirals, swirling pink spikes, tall peaked golden cones, snow-white angel wings, soft sunrise-painted ovals, buttercups, scallops, whelks—shells of all varieties perfectly preserved. 

Two were my particular favorites:  a long flat quill-pen shaped, translucent tan bivalve and a purple dome with tiny bumps all over it that reminded me of the Taj Mahal I’d seen in books.  I held the first like a pen in my hand and pretended to write with it.  She laughed and told me it was called a pen shell.  A perfect name. 

I held the other one in the palm of my hand and looked at its beautiful patterns of vertical lines pouring out of the star at the top center and down the sides, evenly spaced, and interspersed with bumps.  I turned it over and looked inside at the smooth, empty, concave, pale underside.  “I love the patterns!” I told her.  She said that if I saw it on the beach, I wouldn’t recognize it and I definitely couldn’t hold it like that because it would be covered with prickly purple quills and that the animal lived inside.  She said it was called a sea urchin.  That was infinitely more mysterious to me.  An urchin like David Copperfield?  A lost child?  But it looked so beautiful and rich.  I treasured it most of all my shells and carried it with me for many years.

But until today, I never saw a sea urchin in the wild.  And it was just like the one I had as a child, except that half of it was covered with purple spines.  It was lying with its belly and the flat bottom of the shell exposed.  The spines were down in the sand.  I didn’t know what to do.  What if it were still alive?  The ocean was much rougher than usual this morning—the water was much higher up on shore, the waves were unusually white and choppy, and the currents were the strongest I’ve felt--even in water barely covering my ankles, I felt a deep pull.  Maybe it was still alive and the water would bring it out to sea and it would live again.  Or maybe it’s time had come and gone, and I could take it home with me.  The underbelly was full of a grayish gelatinous mass, and a brownish stem-like material, protruded about a quarter of an inch from the center like a belly button.  It could be an opportunistic animal in there, not even a sea urchin, and they could all be dead.  I waited and watched.  I looked for something to move it to the water and picked up a fan-shaped, gelatinous piece of seaweed, scooped it up and moved it along until the water picked it up and swept it out a little, then receded leaving it still on shore.  No more interference, I thought; it was enough just to see it.