I find myself thinking about the ocean more often these days, especially when the sirens wail outside my apartment here in the city, or when I see the cost of living index tick up another point on the news, another coffee shop closing, another landlord raising rents to an absurd level for a studio that’s barely bigger than my first fishing boat. It’s a strange kind of displacement, this urban anxiety, so different from the one I grew up with, the slow creeping dread of the tide. I was back home last summer, for my sister’s 80th birthday, and I walked down to the docks like I always do, a pilgrimage really, and the water was HIGHER. Not just a little bit, but noticeably, the barnacled line on the pilings almost completely submerged compared to what I remember from my youth, from even five years ago. It’s like a chronic condition, a progressive erosion, a terminal diagnosis we all just quietly accept. Old Man Hemlock was still alive then, barely, sitting on his porch, staring out at the bay with that same stoic resignation. He always said, “The ocean always wins, son. Just a matter of when it decides to collect.” He’d seen so many storms, so many close calls, but this isn’t a storm, not a singular event you can batten down the hatches for. This is a slow, relentless subversion of what you know, what you depend on, what defines you. And I saw it in his eyes, that profound melancholia, that feeling of impending loss that’s so total it’s almost beyond grief. It’s an almost anthropological despair, watching a culture disappear, not with a bang, but with the steady lapping of waves. My nephew, he’s got kids now, and he’s talking about moving inland, selling the old house, the one our grandfather built. He says it’s for the ‘future,’ for ‘security,’ and I don’t blame him, not really. It’s rational, pragmatic, a textbook example of adaptive behavior in the face of environmental stressors. But it feels like a surrender, a capitulation. I remember the smell of salt and diesel and drying nets, the low rumble of the trawlers heading out before dawn. That’s not a memory, it’s an imprint, a part of my proprioception. And to think of it all just… gone. Houses abandoned, docks crumbling, the sea claiming back what was always hers. It’s a different kind of existential dread than what I encounter here, the kind where you worry about retirement funds or healthcare costs or whether the subway will be delayed again. That’s a transactional anxiety. What I feel for my old village is a deeper, more profound sense of anomie, a disconnection from the very ground of being. I used to think I escaped it, coming to the city, finding a new life, new purpose. But it follows you, that sense of impending dissolution. And I just sit here, 2 am, the city humming below me, and I picture those waves, just a little bit higher each year, patiently, inexorably, claiming what’s theirs. And I wonder, what will be left of us?