Muscongus Metamorphoses

On the east side of the island, the girls are circled on the schist, playing a game they call Silent Football. All but one. A curly-haired camper in a giant sweatshirt lingers out of sight. With her long stick-legs poking from the hem and a mop of honey-colored hair, she looks less like a child than a cria, a young alpaca. At dinner, while we spooned out sticky skeins of over-boiled spaghetti, she whispered something to a counselor and then vanished back to her tent.

The tide drops, and I recall another gathering of girls on this same stone, a little older than this group. Their silhouettes bent in a half-circle against the dark, voices carrying the ritual debrief helmed by the Leader of the Day. To soften the agenda, she decreed each girl claim a “spirit animal.”

“Lemur.” “Gazelle.” “Penguin.”

My co-guide, soft-spoken and bearded, was christened Panda. Sensing his unease, they quickly revised him into Owl. When they reached me, they chose Arctic fox. Perhaps they recognized some intuition of winter in me.

Now, a few weeks later, Muscongus Bay’s horizon again glows pastel. The sky is awash in the candy-colored gradients of Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers, which were still in vogue when I was their age: tie-dyed seas, hot-pink leopards, dolphins leaping from galaxies of glitter. Those binders were Ovidian portals reimagined for the late ’80s—open one and you tumbled into another cosmos. So too here, on an island briefly inhabited only by women and girls, the veil of ordinary time lifts. Without phones, female adolescence reverts to its ancient rites: hair braided into ropes, songs composed, dances rehearsed for the end-of-camp recital. Watching them, I feel as though I am leafing through an illuminated manuscript of my own eighth-grade summer, each page preserving a transformation caught mid-gesture.

The Game Master appoints N., the group’s 22-year-old trip leader, to start the fwap—a pat on the thigh that sends the invisible football spinning left or right. N. is Australian, hair freshly shorn, grin wide, eyes softened with a koala’s solemn playfulness. They tell me how their parents were more concerned with them coming to the U.S. for the summer than going to Africa. They describe a cautionary metamorphosis as temporary as an ESTA visa: “I grew out my hair before coming here,” they recount. “Wore hot-pink Juicy Couture on the plane. Customs didn’t blink. The first thing I did when I got to the camp was cut it all off again.”

The Koala does not know the rules. Neither do I, but I join anyway, alongside my counterpart, M.—a kayak guide-in-training on the edge of her first semester as a high school teacher. She has already memorized all ten girls’ names while I still fumble. She radiates an effortless empathy, connecting with the ease of mythic figures who could charm beasts and gods alike. In my Lisa Frank menagerie, she is the Unicorn—surefooted, luminous, prancing through neon stars. She knows all the rules.

The Game Master intones: “Above all, players must be silent. No student may speak, smile, or show teeth. Permission to speak must be granted by the Game Master. To ask a question, you must raise one hand, cover your mouth with the other, and say, ‘Mr. Game Master, Sir?’”

The fwapping begins. The Unicorn flows effortlessly. The Koala giggles and breaks the spell.

“Mr. Game Master, Sir?” cries one girl through lip-lidded teeth. “The Koala laughed.”

The circle convulses in pantomimed glee. Votes condemn the Koala to further laughter. Democracy and its parody entwine. We play until the sky deepens into purples and electric blues, a neon-coral afterglow burning behind silhouettes of pine. The air shimmers not with rainbow dolphins but with mosquitoes rising in clouds, as if the night itself were sloughing one skin for another.

At last, the Game Master calls it. Teeth flash, sighs escape. The night is promised now to whispered confidences between nylon walls that do not muffle sound. An hour later, around nine-thirty, the three counselors patrol with beams of light and a comforting crunch of dry leaves. I circumnavigate the site, then return to my tent pitched on a northwest outcropping of grey schist marbled white—the sort of surreal geology Lisa Frank herself might have dreamed.

I crawl into my sleeping bag with my book about rivers. While I read of the Valley of the Eagles bifurcating the Mutehekau Shipu in northeastern Quebec, outside, the bay hums with islands. Macfarlane writes, “Spring becomes stream becomes river, and all three seek the sea.” The sea just outside my tent keeps seeking itself. It’s fallen almost ten feet, exposing inshore lobsters scuttling ever closer to the surface. Soft-bodied from a recent molt, they creep from their cast-off shells, tender and luminous until the armor hardens again.

Ovid would know this hour as Macfarlane knows his rivers: when forms seem to slip, and the mind is stirred to speak of new shapes. Myth seeps into real moments, and the ordinary is already in the act of becoming otherwise. I tell myself all is well. The Cria is safe. And yet, as sleep pulls me under, I wonder if hidden in that tent is no longer a shy girl in a sweatshirt, but some liminal creature of the night, eyes startled and luminous in the dark.

To be a sea kayaker is to apprentice yourself to catastrophe. A cosplayer of shipwrecks. We rehearse rescues with the precision of battle reenactors, parsing choreography as if survival depended on it—which, of course, it might. We debate endlessly: should the swimmer seize the toggle or the deckline? Should the towline be clipped gate-up or gate-down? Should a capsized boat be emptied before it is righted, or heaved dripping across the rescuer’s skirt? Even our vocabulary is contested. Is the person in the water a swimmer (neutral), a victim (tinged with pity), a casualty (too severe)? The older the paddler, the harsher the term.

To paddle the ocean is to be drawn into the mythology of disaster. On rivers, dangers are obvious—holes that gulp and gargle, strainers lying in wait, rocks greedy for a snag. But at sea, danger is diffuse, infinite, invisible: storms that consume whole fleets, creatures terrifyingly antithetical to Lisa Frank fantasy—white sharks, tidal bores, flesh-eating bacteria. Sea paddlers scull the threshold of myth itself.

And so, like actors in Greek tragedy, we rehearse our dramas in the amphitheaters of bays and coves before a bemused audience of gulls. We cast our friends as victims and point them toward the foaming rocks: “Capsize there, please!” We rescue, tow, re-rescue. We debrief over whisky, parsing seconds saved, gestures corrected, the chorus of our mistakes echoing back. We tell ourselves we hope these skills are never needed. But deep down, in the ego’s secret Trapper Keeper, we long for the test—that the wild will rise, and we will answer it. With flying Lisa Frank colors.

Later that night: a whisper at my tent.

“It’s me,” says the Unicorn. “The Cria’s sick.”

I follow her into the dark. The moon is a mere crescent, offering no help. Stars blaze above the white pines, their branches pointing skyward like fingers toward the Milky Way. Four tents glow faintly. Three are sealed tight; one yawns open. Around it huddle the counselors like anxious sentries: the Koala, the Game Master, and another, tall and shifting on one leg, a Heron in her blue-grey fleece.

The Cria shivers at the center. Gone is her oversized sweatshirt; she wears only swimsuit bottoms and a thin ribbed tank. Her skin burns, fluorescent with fever. Words rise unbidden—appendicitis, hospital—as fear tie-dyes the counselors’ faces. For all their competence, they are barely older than the campers themselves. The Unicorn is not yet thirty. I, deep into my thirties, am suddenly the elder here.

As we scramble for contact with the mainland, I already know what the oracles have decided.

We launch close to midnight. Dead low tide. The Cria hunches in the bow of a tandem, the Heron at the stern. The Koala fidgets in their single. I raft everyone together and clip on my towline, belted tight at my waist. Above, the Pleiades cluster faintly—or perhaps I only constellate the stars so, needing their sisterly symbolism to steady my forward stroke. On shore, the Unicorn and the Game Master stand hapless, their headlamps the last twin beacons of land. Then they are gone, swallowed by the island’s shadow.

Darkness closes in. I am floating in its midst, small and alone. Do the girls tethered to my boat feel my fear humming through the line like an umbilical cord? For a moment, we drift in tidal nothingness. I remind myself: you are trained. You know what to do.

I paddle. The darkness persists. My headlamp reveals only a few feet of water at a time. Another stroke, long and quiet. Then another. At last, an outline of earth returns. The weight of three laden boats drags me back, but I fold it into cadence. The sky explodes. Stars mirror on the black sea like disco lights on a roller rink. My yellow blades flash gold in the beam of my lamp: wings. In that instant, the Arctic fox dissolves. I become Pegasus. The girls I tow are my chariot.

We glide past tide-born rocks. Crowned like naiads in rockweed, they urge us on. As we near the marina, the talisman appears. We all see her at once, weaving deftly among the sunken traps.

“Oh! Look! A lobster!” cries the Heron.

She scuttles across the sand, separated from us by only a few watery inches of crystalline fulcrum. Her V-notched tail flicks and flashes her onward. Female, armored, ancient—immortal in theory, doomed only by the labor of endless molting. She embodies what Ovid could not see: that metamorphosis is not linear, one body fixed into another. Like girls’ adolescence, it is a continual process of becoming and unbecoming. Tidal, protean, infinite.

And just like that, we have come through the portal. The sea equalizes time, gathering all in its molting myth.

By dawn, the Cria’s appendix is declared safe. She rests on antibiotics and fluids, her fever breaking. I collapse for a few hours in the backseat of my car, then wake to lobstermen hauling traps—men already hours deep in their labor, backs bent, ropes and buoys slick with brine. When I paddle back to the island, the bay has reverted. The rocks that rose like naiads in the night have sunk beneath the tide. What remains is only the memory, filed in the Lisa Frank binder of the mind, its pages still shimmering with otherworldly glitter.

The Unicorn has shrugged off her rainbow mane to become my friend and coworker again. M. sits crosslegged on the rocks before the stove, rubbing her eyes while boiling water for oatmeal and coffee.

“Hey,” she greets me.

“Hey.”

The Argonauts once felled pines to cut their first ships, and with those hulls carved the Greeks’ first great sea story, the Argonautica. To paddle the ocean is to do the same: to hew experience from the deep and carry it back to land as story. The river, like the mountain, has its rhythm—an immediate, urgent narrative pulled by gravity. But the ocean, with its vastness and tides, resists such straight lines. It is the realm of crossings, of epics, of prehistoric species in which the females—protected by laws they did not write—can, in theory, live forever. Ever since humanity began inscribing stories, seafaring has repeated itself, molting like a lobster’s shell. Sailors relive them until, exhausted, they sink back into myth.

Perhaps to be a sea kayaker—and a woman—is not to cosplay these myths, nor to cancel them, nor even to write wholly new ones. What serves is to reread them through the salt-stung lens of lived experience: the lobster crawling free in starlight, the girls making decisions beyond their years, the midnight tow across Muscongus Bay.

Metamorphosis. Spirit animals. Molts. One thing becomes another, while remaining itself. The sea teaches this endlessly: ebb, slack, flood, slack, ebb, slack, flood. Ovid imagined transformations as endings. But intimacy with the ocean reveals them as beginnings without end—again and again, the water alters you, returning you to yourself.