ESSAY: Reading Water

Just outside of the bus window is the Saronic Gulf, I think. I’m listening to the Eagle’s Greatest Hits and I can read the water.

My dad taught me how to read water, just as—I’m sure—his dad taught him. I can see channels and I can see sand bars. Without being in the water, I can tell where it is shallow, where it is deep.

I can hear my dad telling me to stay in the deep water, it’s safer there. I was incredulous of course, as any child would be, that the deeper water could possibly be safer than the shallows, the light green water, where my feet can touch the bottom. “You don’t want to be able to touch the bottom,” he said, “You’ll run aground. Stay in the deep water where you have room to move, where your wake can grow.”

*****

They were just across the wide walkway from me. And I didn’t place them at first. But, I walked a bit more and looked a bit more. I saw the backpacks. I don’t know why I knew that they were not just traveling. I, just days before, was walking through Athens with a backpack and a suitcase.

*****

My mom’s side of the family, the Fountaine side—I have a nice solid, white person name Margaret Louise Fountaine Scudder—so the Fountaine side is really the Fountain side. They’re poor dairy farmers from Wisconsin. My grandfather, Thomas Fountaine, added the ‘e’ to Fountain to distance himself from the Wisconsin Farmer Fountains when he moved to Indiana.

But way back, the Fountains were the Bradfords—as in the governor of the Mayflower. And who knew that those refugees would make it to Wisconsin all to become dairy farmers that Tom Fountaine was embarrassed enough by to add that ‘e’. But, my mom kept her last name.

*****

Just off the deck of the boat is the Aegean Sea, I think. I’m listening to Mindy Kailing’s audiobook and I can read the water. Just beyond the deep, deep blue water is the light, greenish water that I know so well. Beyond that is a small Island. Islands speckle the sea here, but it’s these, smaller islands that I can’t take my eyes off. I’m confused by them. And then I realize it’s because there are no boats docked near them, no harbors—the people that live there don’t come and go.

*****

But, these people weren’t just traveling. This family wouldn’t have been sitting on this bench with those backpacks and trying to coo a screaming, brand new, baby to sleep, had they been just passing through on their way to a hotel or on their way home. Yet, they didn’t seem homeless either. They were hovering in an awful place somehow in between all of that—they knew that they weren’t at home.

If they were home they would be drinking coffee or laughing, perhaps they would be waiting to hear the call to prayer. But, maybe this baby would cry through it, causing the small children to become distracted. Maybe they would play soccer through the prayer and later their mother would scold them…Maybe if they were at home.

*****

Just beyond the hiking path on the highest mountain on Poros, there’s a channel to a small island of Pine trees, I think. I’m listening to the silence and I can read the horizon. Everything about Greece seems like a country that’s proud of something that happened long ago. The trees, the buildings, the mountains even look as if they bowed to Ancient Gods and forgot to stand up.

*****

I can read the water. My dad taught me and his taught him. My dad is from Ft. Wayne, Indiana. My grandfather and my father love the sea. After my grandfather died, my dad only wanted to keep the model ships my grandpa built in his workshop. There are no harbors, no boats in Ft. Wayne. But way back the Scudders were in New Jersey. specifically, Nathanial Scudder was the signer of the articles of the confederation from New Jersey. Nathanial Scudder was a shipbuilder.

*****

I’ve thought about the politics and the theory, the academics, and the unflinching racism and orientalism that has put them here, in front of me.

But what I so often ignore is the whopping pile of privilege I’ve inherited that has allowed me to be here, allowed me to be tough and wear baggy jeans and that is pulsing through my veins. I feel it in my seldom-blistered feet. I feel it with her soft hands in mine. And so, I, the descendent of Nathaniel Scudder and William Bradford stood in front of a family with no home left—whose country and history and lineage and family have been stolen, defiled. And I took a step forward. And I aimed my camera. And I—

The photo was not artful. I had no intention of using it in any way that was somehow brave or empowering. I did not ask them if I could take their picture—and I could have. Hell, I could’ve asked to sit and talk with them. I speak Arabic. Even now, I wear that language like some sort of badge of courage, “Look! Look at me! I lived in Jordan! I took “Gender in Islam.” I get it. Insha-Allah. But, I didn’t use it. My soft-spoken, Hijabi, professor would have been disappointed in me. I can picture her small huff and my excuses. She would’ve told me that the gesture was enough.

Instead, I crossed the street and took more pictures through traffic, behind a bush, safe from facing my privilege, guarded, untouchable. And I felt sick, dirty. I felt not only my own privilege, but privileges I don’t own—can’t own. Yet somehow, here I was, standing erect as everything I claim to hate, everything I claim not to be. I was borrowing male privilege. I was empowering the white male gaze.

*****

While in Greece, my mom sent me a video about how our notion of color has evolved over time, I watched it on a bus ride down the Saronic Gulf. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is standing on the edge of the ship and Homer described the water as “wine-dark.” In class, I read something similar before going to the beach.

I’m standing near the water’s edge, there are ruins not far behind me, open water to the front. I can read the water. It’s wine-dark. So I reach down and scoop a glass full, but it isn’t wine at all. It’s red, deep red.

Just beyond the bushes, is a wide walkway. I’m listening to the click of my camera and I can read their language…I can speak their language…I can listen to them.

Later, I uploaded the photos, high off my disgust and my pride, having just ripped from a family what little privacy they had in those moments.

And I did not delete the photos.

And I did not post the photos.

And I have looked at them since.