I have two good arms, and two good legs, and a pretty good head on my shoulders. I shouldn’t complain, but sometimes I still do.
Weaving Kelp
I was sitting in a pile of rotting seaweed when I realized that I wasn’t mad anymore. I was fascinated. The kelp was in a huge, swirling, tangled mass on a wet beach. Flurries of sand flies went up in nasty clouds whenever a dog or human came near. The dogs sniffed and sometimes lifted a leg, despite my shooing them away. Apparently the smell was more enticing than I was menacing.
The fury that had propelled me down the beach, away from my infuriatingly calm and reasoned husband, who had said that he would talk to me when I could be more reasonable – like that was ever going to happen – the fury had gone up out of me like a cloud of flies. It had been carried out over the waves, the great grey foaming currents that slammed the beach after the storm, carried out to sea, blown to bits by the charming winding mass of kelp under me.
Earlier that day we had been wandering in and out of shops along Main Street in Half Moon Bay, nosing around with the kids on one of our intermittent visits to old friends who lived just south of town in a little place called Loma Mar. Our marriage was always difficult, and traveling never made it easier to manage. We may have had similar views of the world, similar ideas of what was good and bad, but we seemed to arrive at them from very different points of view. As the years went by I realized that we really had very little in common after all, despite outward appearances. It was these conflicting views and divergent ways of being in the world that pushed us apart, although for the life of us we could neither see nor understand the problem at the time. We just kept pushing and pulling at each other until we were bruised and in need of separate corners.
Half Moon Bay is really a lovely little beach town with great shops and the best sushi I’ve ever had. A location like that, with its ever verdant rolling hills and pristine, chilly coastline draws artists and writers and antique dealers by the hundreds. The art galleries were clearly out of our price range, as my husband was a grad student and I a part-time stay-at-home mother and shoe saleswoman. Thrilling life it was. But I love art, am an artist by nature and training, and I cannot walk by a painting or a sculpture without whining like a dog. My husband whines and paws the same way when he sees golf courses, but I think that’s just ridiculous. Art is far more interesting.
In one of the shops we had seen gorgeous blown glass, huge beachscapes, pit-fired and salt glazed pots and overpriced jewelry made from sand-worn bits of glass. And a kelp basket. A little basket not more than 8” or 10” across, tucked away on a bottom shelf like the embarrassed relative of the more elegant and classically approachable objects of beauty. I was in love.
While being a part-time mom, part-time shoe saleswoman, I was also a part-time student of anthropology at University of Nevada-Reno. The class I was taking was called, “Native American Technologies”, and simply stated, it changed my life.
We learned of flint-knapping, grasshopper drives and basic weaving techniques, including basketry. In fact, it was basketry that gave rise to almost every other important technology meant to stabilize human cultures throughout the world.
At that point we were studying the various ways in which twine was made, and which plants were used by which tribes and in which way to make the baskets that defined and differentiated their unique tribes. Did the twining technique make and ‘s’ curve, or a ‘z’ curve? Was it a twined basket or coiled? Willow or Maidenhair Fern or Redbud?
For me, it didn’t matter. From the first amazing slide that our professor showed us I was deeply, inexplicably moved to tears. There was something about basketry that spoke to a very deep place in my heart, in my psyche, that was not to be denied. I found myself making twine from anything I could get my hands on. I began collecting baskets from thrift stores, looking for anything that wasn’t obviously Made In America, but that had an ancient or other-culture look to it. I even tried to split willow with absolutely no success and much to my dismay. But the fascination persisted.
So this little kelp basket, all withered looking, in shades of buff and tan and deep reddish-brown, this basket caught my attention in a way I could not explain. I plucked it from its shelf, turned it in my hands, smelled it, and almost licked it, in much the same way that a two-year old would examine a new toy. What was it, I finally asked the artist in charge of the shop for the day.
“Oh, that’s a kelp basket,” she answered, immediately recognizing a kindred spirit. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Oh my god,” I cried, “it’s the most amazing thing. It’s just beautiful!”
My husband had come over, worried, his grip tightening on his wallet, but he was completely stupefied by these two women crooning over a strange, twisted arrangement of what looked to be dead twigs.
I wanted it. No, I didn’t want it, I NEEDED it. I longed for it. I had to have it.
“How much is it,” I needed to know.
“I think it’s… let’s see… oh, it’s $30.”
I looked up at my husband, trying not to whine and paw at the floor. “Honey…”
With one withering look he let me know that I was not going home with the basket. But I also knew I was not going home without the basket without a fight. After all, I earned part of our monthly bills with my ridiculous shoe saleswoman wages. After all, it was only $30. After all, it was the most strangely beautiful thing I had ever wanted, had ever needed, so badly, I could just taste it.
“Now, honey, it’s only $30. We can pay that…”
“For what? For that little thing? What do you want with it? What are you going to do with it? It won’t hold anything… why do you want it?”
How do you answer a question like that? ‘Why do you want it?’
I had a hard time not biting off the tip of my tongue trying not to answer, “Why do you want sushi? Why do you want sex? Why do you want ME?”
It was always this way. He could never understand why I was the way I was. There was always something strange, but not mysterious about me. I was that weird little basket to him. Oddly worn, oddly sensuous, oddly useful and useless at the same time. Years later I would make a basket that was filled by itself – hard to explain, and I’m getting ahead of myself, but - I called it “No Purpose”.
The fight over the basket was done. He had won. After all, the wallet was in his pocket not mine.
The kids wanted to go to the beach. It had been raining, but the clouds were moving off and no one really cared about getting a tan anyway. Everyone wanted to be somewhere other than stuck in the car together. We held the argument in the air between us all the way to the beach’s parking lot, but once the kids gratefully took off to play in the soggy dunes, the fight resumed.
I don’t remember any of what was actually said, but I do remember yelling. A lot. And waving arms. Mine. And of pure frustration and fury. Probably some crying thrown in. Me, not him.
Finally he gave that ultimatum: I’ll talk to you when you can be more reasonable.
I can think of nothing that would have made me more angry than that.
“Reasonable”? Think the fuck again.
“I’ll show you ‘reasonable’.” And I stormed off, down the beach, away from that man and everything he represented to me. Functionality. Rationality. Practicality. Superficiality. All the ‘ality’ words I can think of, but never once ‘creativity’.
I stomped in the sand sending flurries of flies, clouds of annoying little creatures whose lives are spent in piles of rotting seaweed up into the air only to descend once the threat of annihilation has passed. I was that threat, over and over, past every rack of kelp in an endless series of racks of kelp.
I never noticed the stench as I blindly raged my way down the sea strand. All the recriminations, threats, unanswered and futile questions, the accusations, the defenses, the years of frustration endlessly carouselled around my mind until I was finally overcome with a sense of futility that brought me to a halt, tearfully staring at nothing and everything.
I had stopped in front of one of the huge racks. That’s what a congregation of seaweed, of kelp, is called, whether it is floating in the ocean or cast up on the beach – a ‘rack’. And seaweed is a poor name for the multitude of algae that include sea kelp. These racks I had been stomping through and around were all of Bull Whip kelp, or Nereocystis. It has a long narrow body that ends in an air-filled bulb with long blades that stretch out away for 10 or more feet. Kids will play with it just like a whip, which it does resemble.
I was staring, just staring at it when I realized I recognized it as the material the little kelp basket was made from. I could see some of the strands were dried out and looked just like the weavers in the basket, the strands that coiled out and around the central core of the basket. Without thinking I sat down and started pulling a dried length from the mass. I began to weave. I had never actually made a basket, just studied them, and had no idea how exactly to proceed, especially with this strange material never once mentioned in my anthropology class. At times I had to break a length or tear it with my teeth. I didn’t even think twice about it. It had to be done to make the basket, so it was done. I think people walked by, I’m sure there were a few stares, but all I could see was the basket forming in my lap.
After a timeless time in which there was no time, the basket was done. It was almost exactly like the one in the shop.
I stood up and headed back toward our car and my husband. When I spotted him, sulking where I had left him, I ran up calling, “Look! Look! Look what I’ve made!”
He just stared. First at the basket and them at me. I didn’t understand his look, the slow smile, the softening of his eyes. I held the basket out toward him and said over and over, “Look!”
He said, finally, to me, “I am.”
The rage was gone.
And that is how I became a Kelp Weaver.
Weaving Kelp
I was sitting in a pile of rotting seaweed when I realized that I wasn’t mad anymore. I was fascinated. The kelp was in a huge, swirling, tangled mass on a wet beach. Flurries of sand flies went up in nasty clouds whenever a dog or human came near. The dogs sniffed and sometimes lifted a leg, despite my shooing them away. Apparently the smell was more enticing than I was menacing.
The fury that had propelled me down the beach, away from my infuriatingly calm and reasoned husband, who had said that he would talk to me when I could be more reasonable – like that was ever going to happen – the fury had gone up out of me like a cloud of flies. It had been carried out over the waves, the great grey foaming currents that slammed the beach after the storm, carried out to sea, blown to bits by the charming winding mass of kelp under me.
Earlier that day we had been wandering in and out of shops along Main Street in Half Moon Bay, nosing around with the kids on one of our intermittent visits to old friends who lived just south of town in a little place called Loma Mar. Our marriage was always difficult, and traveling never made it easier to manage. We may have had similar views of the world, similar ideas of what was good and bad, but we seemed to arrive at them from very different points of view. As the years went by I realized that we really had very little in common after all, despite outward appearances. It was these conflicting views and divergent ways of being in the world that pushed us apart, although for the life of us we could neither see nor understand the problem at the time. We just kept pushing and pulling at each other until we were bruised and in need of separate corners.
Half Moon Bay is really a lovely little beach town with great shops and the best sushi I’ve ever had. A location like that, with its ever verdant rolling hills and pristine, chilly coastline draws artists and writers and antique dealers by the hundreds. The art galleries were clearly out of our price range, as my husband was a grad student and I a part-time stay-at-home mother and shoe saleswoman. Thrilling life it was. But I love art, am an artist by nature and training, and I cannot walk by a painting or a sculpture without whining like a dog. My husband whines and paws the same way when he sees golf courses, but I think that’s just ridiculous. Art is far more interesting.
In one of the shops we had seen gorgeous blown glass, huge beachscapes, pit-fired and salt glazed pots and overpriced jewelry made from sand-worn bits of glass. And a kelp basket. A little basket not more than 8” or 10” across, tucked away on a bottom shelf like the embarrassed relative of the more elegant and classically approachable objects of beauty. I was in love.
While being a part-time mom, part-time shoe saleswoman, I was also a part-time student of anthropology at University of Nevada-Reno. The class I was taking was called, “Native American Technologies”, and simply stated, it changed my life.
We learned of flint-knapping, grasshopper drives and basic weaving techniques, including basketry. In fact, it was basketry that gave rise to almost every other important technology meant to stabilize human cultures throughout the world.
At that point we were studying the various ways in which twine was made, and which plants were used by which tribes and in which way to make the baskets that defined and differentiated their unique tribes. Did the twining technique make and ‘s’ curve, or a ‘z’ curve? Was it a twined basket or coiled? Willow or Maidenhair Fern or Redbud?
For me, it didn’t matter. From the first amazing slide that our professor showed us I was deeply, inexplicably moved to tears. There was something about basketry that spoke to a very deep place in my heart, in my psyche, that was not to be denied. I found myself making twine from anything I could get my hands on. I began collecting baskets from thrift stores, looking for anything that wasn’t obviously Made In America, but that had an ancient or other-culture look to it. I even tried to split willow with absolutely no success and much to my dismay. But the fascination persisted.
So this little kelp basket, all withered looking, in shades of buff and tan and deep reddish-brown, this basket caught my attention in a way I could not explain. I plucked it from its shelf, turned it in my hands, smelled it, and almost licked it, in much the same way that a two-year old would examine a new toy. What was it, I finally asked the artist in charge of the shop for the day.
“Oh, that’s a kelp basket,” she answered, immediately recognizing a kindred spirit. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Oh my god,” I cried, “it’s the most amazing thing. It’s just beautiful!”
My husband had come over, worried, his grip tightening on his wallet, but he was completely stupefied by these two women crooning over a strange, twisted arrangement of what looked to be dead twigs.
I wanted it. No, I didn’t want it, I NEEDED it. I longed for it. I had to have it.
“How much is it,” I needed to know.
“I think it’s… let’s see… oh, it’s $30.”
I looked up at my husband, trying not to whine and paw at the floor. “Honey…”
With one withering look he let me know that I was not going home with the basket. But I also knew I was not going home without the basket without a fight. After all, I earned part of our monthly bills with my ridiculous shoe saleswoman wages. After all, it was only $30. After all, it was the most strangely beautiful thing I had ever wanted, had ever needed, so badly, I could just taste it.
“Now, honey, it’s only $30. We can pay that…”
“For what? For that little thing? What do you want with it? What are you going to do with it? It won’t hold anything… why do you want it?”
How do you answer a question like that? ‘Why do you want it?’
I had a hard time not biting off the tip of my tongue trying not to answer, “Why do you want sushi? Why do you want sex? Why do you want ME?”
It was always this way. He could never understand why I was the way I was. There was always something strange, but not mysterious about me. I was that weird little basket to him. Oddly worn, oddly sensuous, oddly useful and useless at the same time. Years later I would make a basket that was filled by itself – hard to explain, and I’m getting ahead of myself, but - I called it “No Purpose”.
The fight over the basket was done. He had won. After all, the wallet was in his pocket not mine.
The kids wanted to go to the beach. It had been raining, but the clouds were moving off and no one really cared about getting a tan anyway. Everyone wanted to be somewhere other than stuck in the car together. We held the argument in the air between us all the way to the beach’s parking lot, but once the kids gratefully took off to play in the soggy dunes, the fight resumed.
I don’t remember any of what was actually said, but I do remember yelling. A lot. And waving arms. Mine. And of pure frustration and fury. Probably some crying thrown in. Me, not him.
Finally he gave that ultimatum: I’ll talk to you when you can be more reasonable.
I can think of nothing that would have made me more angry than that.
“Reasonable”? Think the fuck again.
“I’ll show you ‘reasonable’.” And I stormed off, down the beach, away from that man and everything he represented to me. Functionality. Rationality. Practicality. Superficiality. All the ‘ality’ words I can think of, but never once ‘creativity’.
I stomped in the sand sending flurries of flies, clouds of annoying little creatures whose lives are spent in piles of rotting seaweed up into the air only to descend once the threat of annihilation has passed. I was that threat, over and over, past every rack of kelp in an endless series of racks of kelp.
I never noticed the stench as I blindly raged my way down the sea strand. All the recriminations, threats, unanswered and futile questions, the accusations, the defenses, the years of frustration endlessly carouselled around my mind until I was finally overcome with a sense of futility that brought me to a halt, tearfully staring at nothing and everything.
I had stopped in front of one of the huge racks. That’s what a congregation of seaweed, of kelp, is called, whether it is floating in the ocean or cast up on the beach – a ‘rack’. And seaweed is a poor name for the multitude of algae that include sea kelp. These racks I had been stomping through and around were all of Bull Whip kelp, or Nereocystis. It has a long narrow body that ends in an air-filled bulb with long blades that stretch out away for 10 or more feet. Kids will play with it just like a whip, which it does resemble.
I was staring, just staring at it when I realized I recognized it as the material the little kelp basket was made from. I could see some of the strands were dried out and looked just like the weavers in the basket, the strands that coiled out and around the central core of the basket. Without thinking I sat down and started pulling a dried length from the mass. I began to weave. I had never actually made a basket, just studied them, and had no idea how exactly to proceed, especially with this strange material never once mentioned in my anthropology class. At times I had to break a length or tear it with my teeth. I didn’t even think twice about it. It had to be done to make the basket, so it was done. I think people walked by, I’m sure there were a few stares, but all I could see was the basket forming in my lap.
After a timeless time in which there was no time, the basket was done. It was almost exactly like the one in the shop.
I stood up and headed back toward our car and my husband. When I spotted him, sulking where I had left him, I ran up calling, “Look! Look! Look what I’ve made!”
He just stared. First at the basket and them at me. I didn’t understand his look, the slow smile, the softening of his eyes. I held the basket out toward him and said over and over, “Look!”
He said, finally, to me, “I am.”
The rage was gone.
And that is how I became a Kelp Weaver.
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