The Spray of the Whale by Shanda Connolly

As my husband drove us along the coast in western Maui, I happened to look out and see a whale breach and spray into the air. It looked like a huge geyser bursting up in the middle of the ocean. Unexpected and amazing. It lasted a second; I would have missed it had I been looking somewhere else.

Then, days after coming home, we awoke to news that Lahaina had been struck by fires. Within several hours, we learned that most of Front Street had burned to the ground. I felt nauseated as I thought of the unfathomable losses of all the shopkeepers, waiters, and waitresses, gallery owners, and Uber and shuttle drivers we’d met there the week before. I remembered our morning at Baby Beach—my daughter’s favorite memory of our trip there—snorkeling in the warm, shallow waters and looking at colorful fish and coral. Days after we’d been there, many Lahaina residents took shelter in the same waters to escape the fires. As the days went by, the death toll rose, with many still missing, many more hospitalized, and thousands housed in shelters. The historic banyan tree at the south end of Front Street, planted 150 years ago, now scorched and possibly too scarred to survive, seemed to symbolize the tragedy suffered by this lovely beach community. I choked as I looked back at a picture of me and my daughter in front of the tree the week before.

Earlier in the summer, we were staying overnight in a little town in the mountains near where my daughter had been at camp for a week in northern San Diego County. With nothing to watch on television, we sat on the deck that warm summer evening to look at the evening sky. In the course of fifteen minutes, we’d seen several Perseid meteors —orbs shooting across the sky like Roman candles. Like the whale’s spray, lasting but a second.

The summer had been hot, in fact, the hottest in our planet’s history. I started to read statistics: Ocean temperatures up to 100 degrees in some places, and temperatures over 150 degrees in the Persian Gulf. After reading that, I shut the computer off.

Today, I ate a golden peach, so ripe it probably would be rotten if I left it another day, standing at the kitchen sink—the only place to eat it and not make a complete mess. Delicious and perfect. No human has ever made anything that tasted so wonderful, and never will.

It’s memories of these ephemeral moments that help sustain me through dark times. But will my daughter and her generation be able to turn to nature to find serenity and joy? Or will they only see more tragedy and destruction? Maybe it begins with paying more attention to these tiny miracles, these gifts given to us by our natural world. Maybe, by recognizing the fragility of these moments, we can recognize the fragility of nature itself.