Heidi Seaborn on “Of King Tides”

It was Christmas Eve day, and we were out of sync in so many ways. Our grown children were elsewhere for the holiday, off with their partners’ families. And we were elsewhere too, my husband, our dog and me. We’d driven down the coast from Seattle to San Diego to escape the winter storms bringing king tides that wash up and over the seawall on to the street in front of our house and lash at our windows, to evade the brutal north winds, the ice. We’d found a funky little cottage to rent in a rundown area, but near the beach.

After a couple weeks, we’d fallen into a routine of long morning and afternoon beach walks, stopping to watch the surfers pop up, ride then disappear in the wave’s curl. We knew to navigate the vicissitudes of the tides, the eager way the Pacific carved out the sand, leaving strands of kelp like hair across a pillow.

But this morning, even from a block away, we could see the rising sea. The pier had become a dock, its posts buried with each successive wave. And the waves heaved up into a vast wall of water before smashing onto the shore. I thought I knew king tides, but this was something else, a near-tsunami in the making. Massive, monstrous, yet beautiful. Standing on the beach, the waves seemed to consume the oxygen as if they hungered to obliterate the sky and everything beneath it.

Thinking of safety, we climbed up on a sand berm. From there, I felt the Pacific’s magnetism, its dangerous urge like the Sirens call. Time eclipsed as I stood transfixed while the ocean delivered wave after magnificent wave coming nearer and nearer to the berm. Finally, it turned and began its slow retreat. And we did too.

When I returned later in the day, the Pacific had yielded back the beaches, withdrawing well beyond the long pier, exposing the seabed teeming with the miniature life usually obscured by the ocean’s depths. I crouched amongst the tidal pools, watching sea urchin, crab and the flitting schools of sculpin swimming through seaweed. And sea stars that appeared to be sunning themselves like the people who now spread out on towels across the beach. Yet I felt the sea’s presence beckoning from beyond, as if this too was part of a power play—“see what life force I have within me.” Tempting us humans into complacency for the moment before it rose once again to bury everything in its path.

Throughout the day as the ocean rose and fell to extraordinary highs and lows, I could feel a poem beginning to write itself. First in my head as I watched entranced from the sand berm—words tingling out of the surf. The words quickly became lines as another king tide formed that late afternoon. By early evening, I was deep in drafting the poem.

A quick search informed that this was a semidiurnal king tide brought on by a supermoon. And this information came with the warning that these king tides are a harbinger of the future: "a glimpse of what our coast may look like as sea-level rises. The water level reached by an extreme high tide today will be the same water level of more frequent moderate tides in the future” according to scientists at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. I had the poem’s epigraph and more importantly, its ending.

On Christmas morning, I woke to the gift of a new rough poem and the sense of what shape it needed to take on the page. I made a quick cup of coffee and began to find the pacing, pauses, line breaks, punctuation to make the reader feel the sense of power in those tides, the loss of self in their presence and the imminent and future danger.

I usually struggle with titles. But in this case, the title “Of King Tides” presented itself immediately. To start with the preposition ‘of’ captured my feeling of being in the middle of something beyond my control, and hinted at the relationship the speaker establishes with the king tides. I hope that relationship extends to the reader—that the poem pulls the reader into the sweep of a powerful angry sea and awakens understanding and hopefully, an impulse to act. (consider a donation to Ocean Conservancy).