I somehow didn’t post this essay that I wrote based on my time as artist in residence at the Isles of Shoals. Published by the wonderful nature-writing magazine Terrain.org, it centers on a necropsy of a seal pup that died from entanglement in ‘ghost gear,’ or a lost fishing net.
With the seal’s body as a window, it depicts the battle for the ocean among fishermen, marine animals, and scientists as once-decimated seal populations begin to boom – and contemplates how death mediates our connection to nature.
I’m very proud that this essay was also nominated by Terrain for a John Burroughs Nature Essay Award.
The Reaper of the Sea
The dead seal lies on the table. The bulk of it unignorable: the heavy torpedo-shaped body, gray as a sea in storm; the whiskered head, the flippers; a mound of muscled ocean.
A gaggle of undergraduates duly robed in reusable plastic aprons, wrist guards, and nitrile gloves stares at the gruesome yet strangely beautiful torpedo laid sleepy-eyed on the aluminum …