Not being a coastal dweller, I've only come into the future death zones of jellyfish we know now as our sick and dilapidated oceans occasionally. Jellyfish, in their way, can sometimes be beautiful. They also die like old rotting meringue pies and wash up on beaches world wide. Plus they kill, indiscriminately, and regardless of the logic of the evolutionary food chain, everything they can 'bump' into. Now they are destroying our oceans, hastened by a range of human activities like pollution, over-fishing, indifference etc. These primitive death balloons are expanding their range and threaten to wipe out our marine biodiversity, and consequently, irreversibly and destructively change our planet beyond recognition.
When you are in Oslo, have a tent, and are cheap (which is everyone because Scandinavia is the European disneyland of insanely high prices) you can camp on any of the municipal islands for free. Some people live on them, in tents or little makeshift shelters. When I was there we didn't have any trouble finding a spot that overlooked the westerly horizon. Good for watching the sun go down. Public transit ferries motor around the fjord to take you into the city.
One day we thought we'd go swimming. It's not that warm in Oslo, or at least not while I was there, and the water is chilly even in summer. But there was a beach on the island, and a dock a bout fifty metres out you could swim to. I knew something was amiss when we had to pick our way through dead jellyfish the size of pizzas on the beach. Like a minefield. Jellyfish are such devious fuckers, truly the spawn of Satan, that they've probably evolved to kill even when they're dead and drying on the sand. So we were careful. I poked and stabbed a few with sticks.
We swam out into the bay toward the dock. It was cold. Fifty metres is not so far under ideal conditions but being a bad swimmer, wind picking up etc. can stretch that distance out quite a while. We climbed onto the dock for a little rest. The clouds rolled in and the wind picked up, not in any dramatic sense, just because the weather wasn't great for swimming. We decided to swim back. Luminescent circles appeared around the dock, in the deep water. Not many of them, just a few on either side. Jellyfish! I was paralyzed with fear. For a while we checked each side of the rectangular dock- a delicate circular form rising from the depth on each. Death afloat! When it started to become dark we swam back. In the water the horizon is short- the shore seems further away. You can't see anything under the dark glass of the water. I kicked frantically. If my friend had been stung I wouldn't have stopped. On shore, my companion went back to the tent. I lay on my back panting. This is not a vomiting story, but I threw up in the woods. Swimming wears me out; the cold and deathly afraid I felt of the cloud of jellyfish lingered. On the beach I watched the sun in its northern arc- never really leaving the horizon. A group of Norwegians drank wine and laughed on the shore. One of them, a girl with blond hair, through whom the light of God shone, pushed the jellyfish from my mind. There is a life beyond the primordial harbingers of water and death. Her legs lay against the grass, perfect in my mind. Eventually I got up, and my fear of dying without ever touching legs such as those supplanted my fear of washing up dead, bloated on a northern shore in a jellyfish bloom.
