Skinny Dipping with a Mermaid
It took me awhile growing up in the turbulent 1960’s and 70’s to claim my feminist inheritance. In fact, the sexual revolution might have passed me up all together had it not been for fate. Beyond any conscious choice, fate shifted some of my inherited puritan ethos to a more playful appreciation of my body. It was my friend Lara, the one who is part-woman, part-mermaid, who played the critical role of ushering in this small but momentous shift.
Lara moved comfortably through the heat of the Northeast that summer when we lived together - a small knife and a lobster claw tucked into her waist band. She drove her red mustang along the Atlantic coast, stopping periodically at cafes that advertised crab cakes and lobster bisque, on our way to Maine and the island of Vinalhaven. We were two women escaping the Midwest to a place Lara loved and returned to again and again over the years like some migratory creature.
The sea turned out to be her kingdom. We crossed those deep blue waters landing that afternoon at an old cabin on a tiny inlet. This would be our home for the week. Early the next morning, the tide receded leaving a pool in its wake filled with life. Not since the fairy tales of childhood did I find myself besotted with the treasures that lie below the sea - earth’s greatest storehouse of species. Like a visitor to an alien but magnificently beautiful planet, I cried out with delight while tip-toeing among starfish, sea urchins, anemones, mussels and clams - all pressed against the rocks or clinging to seaweed, once gracefully swaying in its ocean bath now collapsed in heaps upon the sandy bottom. Lara looked like a queen surveying her subjects as she leaned down to gently retrieve a gold starfish or point out the decorative shell of a sea urchin.
“Aren’t they just wonderful,” she declared. While Lara and I were different, we complemented each other in personality and interests.
We both sought out adventure and didn’t mind if it occasionally caused us a bit of discomfort, like bedding down for the night in a broken-down cabin. Once we were in bed with the lights out, the mice came to life racing each other along the rafters. Lying there I was transported back in time to a frontier home - the little house on the prairie without the prairie. A crazy quilt that had lost most of its batting lay limply across my single bed under the window. The kitchen consisted only of a tin sink and a two burner stove. Someone had left a mason jar with daisies and a few roses on a small wooden table which I generously referred to as the dining room.
Around town Lara and I wore our embroidered Mexican blouses or tie-dyed shirts and rolled up jeans with socks and sandals - a dress code that set us apart from the townsfolk. We joked about being called city slickers. Vinalhaven had been spared gentrification and was truly another universe that time had overlooked as it marched on everywhere else across the country.
As self-proclaimed, self-sufficient women, the next morning we again awoke early this time with the goal of reaching the wharf in time to collect the fresh catch of the day. The fisherman were just lowering nets from the sides of their rugged boats filled with crabs and lobsters. The men were rugged themselves and spoke with a heavy Maine dialect.
We stopped in town to admire the flower gardens filled with old-fashioned flowers - delphiniums, hollyhock, daisies and climbing roses. They neatly framed the 19th Century wood buildings and the more up-scale bed and breakfast. In the the front window of the town’s small art gallery were displays of surreal paintings. In them men, women, furniture, cats and dogs floated out over the horizon like a star nebulae. These weren’t your average tourist watercolors.
“We need to blend in,” Lara declared one afternoon as we sat on the front porch. “It’s time to visit the nude quarry.”
Nude Quarry! I wasn’t ready for this towny experience.
“Don’t worry,” Lara reassured me. “Everyone shows up and no one will even notice us.”
It took some time before I began to weaken.
“Oh, alright, I’ll go as long as I can keep my bathing suit on.”
Our mustang rose to the occasion as we navigated rocky back roads into the quarry. It was nearly noon when we arrived but already a sizable gathering of people had claimed their spots and set up lunch on the smooth rocks, which over-looked the deep blue of this sunken water hole. The sun glinted off thermos bottles and an assortment of floats and rafts. Country music greeted us along with baskets of ham sandwiches and macaroni salad. Everyone showed up. Every shape, size and age of human was represented. And all these humans joked, ate, shimmied and ran past us wearing nothing but their birthday suits.
Lara stripped quickly and ran down the path leading to the quarry. Ten minutes passed when I finally decided to undress down to my sedate blue skirted bathing suit. Lara soon reappeared grabbing a towel.
“The water is perfect. You have to come in.” She looked up at me on my lone rock and smiled. “How is it up there?”
“Everyone is staring at me,” I shot back defensively.
“You do stick out a bit,” she let go with a hearty laugh.
Thirty minutes passed. I was finally worn down by the smiles that the locals cast in my direction. It only took me ten seconds to leave my suit behind and race for the quarry. Did I hear some chuckling in my wake? Once inside the cool enveloping waters, I wouldn’t leave until Lara gave me the high sign. It was time to head back to our cabin home.
“Congratulations,” she sang out in the car, “you passed the initiation.”
As we packed up a few days later, I was already looking back at our water hole experience with nostalgia. We had been quietly accepted into the order of the naked quarry and I felt a camaraderie with the other skinny-dippers. Lara and I took the scenic route though Vermont on the way back to Michigan. Passing a mountain stream on a hot day, she pulled the car off onto the side of the road. We looked at each and could tell we both had the same thought. Racing toward the river we pealed off our clothes letting them fall in a long trail behind us. Lara took a photo of me semi-submerged in the cool water that gently flowed over the surrounding stones. At home I placed that photo like a personal trophy in my album. Like me, however, to this day it hides modestly behind another trip image.
Only I know its secret location.
-Marijo Gorgan
Marijo Grogan is a psychotherapist and writer living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her poetry and essays have been published in Drought Times, Crazy Wisdom, Braided Way, Sojourner and Tiferet. Star Wish, a play focusing on female initiation, was produced at the Heartlande Festival. An essay on adolescent angst was broadcast on National Public Radio. Marijo is a contributing writer to the book EmbodyKind which will be published by Amazon in September, 2022. She was nominated for a Women of Achievement and Courage Award from the Michigan Women's Foundation.