About sea urchins

Several summers ago, my children and I spent the better part of one week of our sailing vacation in Penobscot Bay searching offshore islands for sea urchin shells. The sea urchin, for those of you who have not had the pleasure of chancing upon one, is a round, purple spiny sea creature that lives abundantly in Maine's subtidal zone. It loves our rocky bottoms and is harvested by scuba divers in depths of 20 to 80 feet. Divers pick the urchins off the bottom and place them in mesh bags, which the boat operators waiting above haul up and empty into a bin. The largest market for sea urchins is to be found in Japan, where diners love the delicacy of the roe.

Our harvest, however, was more esthetically driven. When a sea urchin dies, it empties from the inside out, and its spiny exterior is stripped bare by the motion of the sea, leaving behind a stunningly beautiful, pale green shell. The shell is marked by groups of raised beads, separated into sections by lines that radiate out from a tiny hole in the center. Sea urchins are extremely fragile and must be handled very gingerly or they will crumble into pieces.

That summer, we dutifully picked these shells up from our island stops: Pond, Hog, Green, Long, McCafferty, Hell's Half Acre, Butter, Pickering, Eagle, Barred, and Great Spruce Head, to name a few. We strolled the beaches, picking up these treasures, placing them ever so carefully in buckets in the hold of our boat. By week's end, we had upwards of 20 or so, and I took them home, soaked them in a mixture of Chlorox and water to remove any remaining smell from the decomposing process, and stored them carefully in a glass jar for all to see.

They represent, for me, the incandescent joy of those peaceful days on the coast of Maine. My oldest child, a daughter, was just 18 months when we first started sailing. We tucked her into a portable crib in the forward V-berth, where she would fall asleep to the gentle rocking of the waves. She took some of her first steps on island beaches, and she and her two younger brothers, who joined our crew from birth, grew up among lobster pots and bell buoys. They cheered at the sight of island promontories covered with harbor seals and dolphin pairs arcing past our boat. Their night sky was ablaze with stars and their breakfast companions the ever-patient sea gull floating close by, hoping for left overs. They learned to identify the sharp keening of an osprey and the white head of an eagle. Their first experience behind a motor was in our dinghy with its 5 hp engine that gave them just enough speed, as they spun in circles around boats in the harbor, to feel exciting, especially at five years of age.

The sea urchin in this poem represents all of that joy, but it is a joy juxtaposed with an ever-present realization that if not carefully tended, any joy is fragile. The five radiating sections of the sea urchin coincide with the size of my family at the time. Each section was equally vulnerable to harm, equally beautiful in its simple existence. The poem attempts to capture both the beauty and the vulnerabilty of this family group.