Ula

The old woman holds her granddaughter’s small hand, as they walk along the dry bed of what was once the great sea. It’s the little girl’s first time to the coast, and she looks up to her grandma with a giant smile, awestruck at the expanse of dried up soil, with intricate wave patterns petrified into once what had been hidden. It’s to be found down far below the official edge of the island, but there’s nicely built a curvy ramp to walk down, and that feeling as though you’ve stepped into a new land is half the fun of visiting the place. This strange terrain goes on as far as the eye can see, creating a striking, striped horizon, the beige sand graduating into a darker mix of rocks and clay by the shore, into the deep and mysterious tones of tarry ooze which bump up in a strict line into the bright and cloudless blue sky. It’s not safe to walk out there, but it gives a sense of endless freedom even so. It smells of minerals, salt, and something else hard to identify, a pungent but fresh odor the body aches to breathe in deeply but would become quite overwhelming if you didn’t have your clean air with you, of which this duo of prepared explorers have packed plenty.

After about half a mile at their slow pace, laughing and enjoying each other’s company, often stopping to see what is stuck in the hard clay, they happen across a white object resting half in and half out of the sand. The grandmother recognizes it as something remarkable and exclaims out loud, gently pulling her excited companion away from the crumbling remnants of a fish skeleton that were occupying her attention. Indeed, it’s a conch shell, a rare find much sought after, and they carefully excavate it together from the hardened sand, and against all odds this relic is fully intact. The grandmother plops down right where she is, in a conveniently bench shaped trench left by the water behaviors of millennia, and rests her weary back against its sloped side. She holds the precious shell in her hand, and touches its smooth and pearlescent curves gently with her finger tips, lost in a nostalgic day-dream. Her granddaughter wants to share in her beautiful and wise grandmother’s wonder at the shell, and falls to her knees at her side.

“What is it, Mamó?”

“Oh, Ula. I’m brought back to when I was just a wee girl, about a hundred years ago, and what my dear Mum told me about these shells, what to do if I ever was lucky enough to find one.” She places the heavy shell carefully into Ula’s hands, the two together barely large enough to hold it.

“Lift it to yer ear, carefully now,” she continues, “It is said that if you hold a conch shell to the ear and listen very carefully, there’s magic inside, a whole world from long ago we can hardly dare imagine. Listen- do y’hear anything?”

The little girl does as she’s told, and her eyes widen as she focus on the sound inside the shell. “Why yes! Mamó, it’s a kind of sweeping sound, but gentler and louder. What is that?”

What joy that this tale told from generation to generation is true, and that she gets to share this with her aculsha offspring. She takes the shell back and listens for herself, equally astounded to hear the promised tones.

“Why,” she starts to teach, “tis said to be the sound of automobiles whizzing by along a highway!”

The little girl settles in for a story, as her Mamó has the age-old gift of the story-teller, and they’re always fascinating.

“Do ya remember hearing about these, automobiles, things people would ride in to get about instead of walk, back in the ancient days when the world was protected by the atmosphere? They’d travel so fast, across continents and the like in these cars that people could get from one end of our island to the next in but 5 hours. Can you imagine? And they’d travel so very quickly, pushing against that thick atmosphere that coated everything back before, that they’d create this very sound as they pushed it behind them. And you can hear all of that history and wonder in these conch shells, because they were about back then as well.”

“Ohh! And how did it get in the shells?”

As the old woman starts in on the same tale that she was told by her mother, who was told by her mother before, and hers even before, and so on, of a world of great innovation and convenience, marvelous scope and possibility, of a time when you could walk outside without packing breathing oxygen, and drive, and fly, the little girl leans into the crook between her arm and chest bumping the plastic of her nose and mouth mask around the hose of her grandmother’s, and they hold the shell together, tracing its wavy intricacies and marveling at the beautiful world they live in, where such things can exist, and the little girl feels so lucky to be there, with her dear Mamó, and to live the lovely life she does.