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Description
It was a Thursday when the ocean started in my front yard. The cat was walking through the yard and I was calling him. He had just been in a fight and I heard the yowling for ten minutes before I did anything. There were dark red paw prints running up the sidewalk and I kept calling Here kitty kitty, Here kitty kitty. And the cat, if he could cry, probably would. He was torn up pretty badly. He's walking to me and I'm thinking about if vinegar would remove cat blood stains and the cat sort of falls into this hole that's behind the mailbox. Years ago the house painters had spilled a gallon of deep blue paint onto the yard, and grass hasn't grown there since. In the summers, we situate the tiny kiddie pool above the spot, and as I lay in it reading TIME, I can feel every tiny pebble on the ground mold my back. When I get up, my wife tells me there's a constellation of indentions, but I never see them.

     The cat fell into this hole in my yard and emerged soaking wet and smelling of salt.

     The next day, my son took his toy sailboat and set it in the water, brown from the dirt with little leaves of grass floating in it, and he put his face on the ground and blew the boat across the two feet of space that had grown overnight. My wife watched him through the offwhite curtains of the living room and told me that a child could drown in two inches of water. Neither of us could swim. She was afraid of water, but would never admit it. I said that it was just a puddle and I'd measure it for her. I took out the free yardstick we got from the fire department which we had never used before and sunk it into the brackish water, expecting to hit bottom at an inch or so. The yardstick kept going and going, and, after getting all the neighbors' yardsticks and taping them together, we arrived at 37 feet.

     Weeks later, when the hole had consumed our entire yard and our house was just an island and we had borrowed plywood from the neighbors to built a bridge and we had measured the ocean as being 243 feet deep, the whale surfaced and died. My son told me it was a humpback, but the monstrosity, our biology major nephew told us, was a Sei whale. He walked up to it and kicked the blubber. He sniffed and put his hands on his hips. Let's open her up, he said. We looked at him, and the neighbors began coming out of their houses, offering their power tools and saws for the operation. Our nephew took a saw and put on rubber gloves and cut into the whale. Its heart was the size of a European car, my son told me, but the nephew said it was more the size of a moped. I imagined putting my arms into the whale's arteries and feeling the blood move.

     Inside the stomach was a partially digested newspaper from October 17, 2003, a Bible, a glass bookend, three hundred pounds of krill, a cactus, and a freezer, half corroded by stomach acid, from New Orleans, containing five packages of Eggo waffles and ten pounds of blueberries. We called the city about picking up all 40 tons of the whale but they wouldn't. Inch by inch, over the course of a week and a half, we rolled the whale back into the widening gulf that required more and more plywood.

     One and a half months after the cat had nearly drowned and his wounds were cured by the salt water, on the eve of my son's 8th birthday, our next door neighbor's house fell into the water. The only things left floating were eggs and a bottle of wine, Sauvignon Blanc, 2002. The water was 324 feet deep, an even number. Every day, my wife floated in the small rowboat we had bought from the general store, wearing her sunglasses and the bathing suit I didn't approve of, and she would desalt our ocean. She never looked at the water, and tried not to feel it. She said that she could feel the salt crystals form in her pores and that if she stayed in long enough, her skin would harden into rock salt, and he sweat would destroy her. She was always that melodramatic. The boat make crinkling noises as it chipped off the salt and it sunk to the bottom.

     When our other neighbor's house fell into the water, she was in the boat, and she could have sworn that the nice old couple would have been saved if the salt hadn't been dissolved by the previous night's rain. The only things left floating in their house were curtains and an ironing board.

     National Geographic visited over the course of three weeks, setting their research vessel into the water carefully. The water now encompassed half a block, and three more houses had fallen in, their occupants moving out weeks before. The giant ship floated around at night, making an odd crunching sound as it politely bumped the shore, snapping branches and packing down the earth. The submersible found the remains of five houses, most of them having fallen upside down, except the house of the nice old couple, which remained right-side up. This, the explorer said, gave a haunting feel to it, and they felt bad taking the mementos away with the robotic hand. At least, that's what they said in the article. On the 22nd night of the voyage, a 18-wheeler came by and plucked the ship out of the water.

     In month 6, the power lines three streets over snapped, and when the transformer hit the water it exploded, embedding shards of metal on the port side of our house. Our house, it is interesting to note, came to rest on a pile of kelp that had grown foot by foot from the bottom. The earth beneath our house had slowly dissolved,a nd my son would hang his head over the edge, watching the showers of brown disappear into the deep. The kelp grew around the foundations of the house to the extent that it fully supported it when the earth finally gave way.

     The only casualty of the gentle rocking that heralded the demise of our last connection with terra firma was my great grandmother's prized Chinese teapot, which slid off of the dining table. We were held in place by the electricity and water pipes for a while, but soon the wires snapped and the pipes rusted. When the main water pipe burst, my son jumped into the ocean and felt the cold water that had been contained in the house seep out in a stream, diving beneath the house into the darkness below. He said he could drink the fresh water but there was that taint of salt water still. He floated up slowly, his stomach mimicking the eggs of our long-gone next-door neighbor.

     Thus, we were on a boat of kelp leaves, the only renewable resource we had. The house drifted, and whenever we bumped the shoreline my wife would jump out and run to the store, and every able-bodied man would lash our house to the shoreline just long enough that my wife could run back down the street with a full shopping cart, the town's children running after her, picking up the bread and chips and oranges she dropped.

     At noon on day 273, we lost sight of land. Our nephew came up with a Coast Guard boat loaded with supplies; a satellite phone, simple radar equipment, a home desalinator, a generator. He told us that soon, our ocean, the Goodbar Sea, named after us, of course, would soon merge with the Atlantic Ocean and, in the coming weeks, the Great Lakes, presumably we could drift forever and not know it. He told us to keep in touch and smiled, his feet crunching on the kelp as he hugged my wife. Weeks later, we drifted past the Coast Guard ship. It had run aground on the smokestack of the coal plant. Our nephew and the Coast Guard were nowhere to be seen. I dove into the smokestack and tried to imagine what the steam and smoke coming out of there felt like, but I couldn't.

     On day 319, my son dove in the water and his lips turned blue. I think this is Lake Superior, he said, and he drank the water. As he held onto a piece of kelp and floated in the fresh water, a pike came up below him and the blue of its dorsal fin matched his lips. We wrapped him in blankets for weeks. Once the cold water of the Lakes had passed, my son began to swim again. He reported to us about schools of fish that swam underneath the kelp bed. The next time we saw land, my son and the cat, now 15 and 12 years old, respectively, jumped ship. We were just outside of Zamboanga, in the Philippines, and had supposedly done two and a half circuits of the world. Our son came rushing back clutching a world map, saying that the cat had run off and that the ocean kept growing. I didn't hear this, but my wife did.

     On the eleventh anniversary of our ocean, the waters receded. Like Noah, we became stranded on our own mountain, in what used to be Colorado. Like Noah, we meekly exited our house, trying to ignore the smell of the fermenting kelp. It took a while to get used to walking on land.

Description
It was a Thursday when the ocean started in my front yard. The cat was walking through the yard and I was calling him. He had just been in a fight and I heard the yowling for ten minutes before I did anything. There were dark red paw prints running up the sidewalk and I kept calling Here kitty kitty, Here kitty kitty. And the cat, if he could cry, probably would. He was torn up pretty badly. He's walking to me and I'm thinking about if vinegar would remove cat blood stains and the cat sort of falls into this hole that's behind the mailbox. Years ago the house painters had spilled a gallon of deep blue paint onto the yard, and grass hasn't grown there since. In the summers, we situate the tiny kiddie pool above the spot, and as I lay in it reading TIME, I can feel every tiny pebble on the ground mold my back. When I get up, my wife tells me there's a constellation of indentions, but I never see them.

     The cat fell into this hole in my yard and emerged soaking wet and smelling of salt.

     The next day, my son took his toy sailboat and set it in the water, brown from the dirt with little leaves of grass floating in it, and he put his face on the ground and blew the boat across the two feet of space that had grown overnight. My wife watched him through the offwhite curtains of the living room and told me that a child could drown in two inches of water. Neither of us could swim. She was afraid of water, but would never admit it. I said that it was just a puddle and I'd measure it for her. I took out the free yardstick we got from the fire department which we had never used before and sunk it into the brackish water, expecting to hit bottom at an inch or so. The yardstick kept going and going, and, after getting all the neighbors' yardsticks and taping them together, we arrived at 37 feet.

     Weeks later, when the hole had consumed our entire yard and our house was just an island and we had borrowed plywood from the neighbors to built a bridge and we had measured the ocean as being 243 feet deep, the whale surfaced and died. My son told me it was a humpback, but the monstrosity, our biology major nephew told us, was a Sei whale. He walked up to it and kicked the blubber. He sniffed and put his hands on his hips. Let's open her up, he said. We looked at him, and the neighbors began coming out of their houses, offering their power tools and saws for the operation. Our nephew took a saw and put on rubber gloves and cut into the whale. Its heart was the size of a European car, my son told me, but the nephew said it was more the size of a moped. I imagined putting my arms into the whale's arteries and feeling the blood move.

     Inside the stomach was a partially digested newspaper from October 17, 2003, a Bible, a glass bookend, three hundred pounds of krill, a cactus, and a freezer, half corroded by stomach acid, from New Orleans, containing five packages of Eggo waffles and ten pounds of blueberries. We called the city about picking up all 40 tons of the whale but they wouldn't. Inch by inch, over the course of a week and a half, we rolled the whale back into the widening gulf that required more and more plywood.

     One and a half months after the cat had nearly drowned and his wounds were cured by the salt water, on the eve of my son's 8th birthday, our next door neighbor's house fell into the water. The only things left floating were eggs and a bottle of wine, Sauvignon Blanc, 2002. The water was 324 feet deep, an even number. Every day, my wife floated in the small rowboat we had bought from the general store, wearing her sunglasses and the bathing suit I didn't approve of, and she would desalt our ocean. She never looked at the water, and tried not to feel it. She said that she could feel the salt crystals form in her pores and that if she stayed in long enough, her skin would harden into rock salt, and he sweat would destroy her. She was always that melodramatic. The boat make crinkling noises as it chipped off the salt and it sunk to the bottom.

     When our other neighbor's house fell into the water, she was in the boat, and she could have sworn that the nice old couple would have been saved if the salt hadn't been dissolved by the previous night's rain. The only things left floating in their house were curtains and an ironing board.

     National Geographic visited over the course of three weeks, setting their research vessel into the water carefully. The water now encompassed half a block, and three more houses had fallen in, their occupants moving out weeks before. The giant ship floated around at night, making an odd crunching sound as it politely bumped the shore, snapping branches and packing down the earth. The submersible found the remains of five houses, most of them having fallen upside down, except the house of the nice old couple, which remained right-side up. This, the explorer said, gave a haunting feel to it, and they felt bad taking the mementos away with the robotic hand. At least, that's what they said in the article. On the 22nd night of the voyage, a 18-wheeler came by and plucked the ship out of the water.

     In month 6, the power lines three streets over snapped, and when the transformer hit the water it exploded, embedding shards of metal on the port side of our house. Our house, it is interesting to note, came to rest on a pile of kelp that had grown foot by foot from the bottom. The earth beneath our house had slowly dissolved,a nd my son would hang his head over the edge, watching the showers of brown disappear into the deep. The kelp grew around the foundations of the house to the extent that it fully supported it when the earth finally gave way.

     The only casualty of the gentle rocking that heralded the demise of our last connection with terra firma was my great grandmother's prized Chinese teapot, which slid off of the dining table. We were held in place by the electricity and water pipes for a while, but soon the wires snapped and the pipes rusted. When the main water pipe burst, my son jumped into the ocean and felt the cold water that had been contained in the house seep out in a stream, diving beneath the house into the darkness below. He said he could drink the fresh water but there was that taint of salt water still. He floated up slowly, his stomach mimicking the eggs of our long-gone next-door neighbor.

     Thus, we were on a boat of kelp leaves, the only renewable resource we had. The house drifted, and whenever we bumped the shoreline my wife would jump out and run to the store, and every able-bodied man would lash our house to the shoreline just long enough that my wife could run back down the street with a full shopping cart, the town's children running after her, picking up the bread and chips and oranges she dropped.

     At noon on day 273, we lost sight of land. Our nephew came up with a Coast Guard boat loaded with supplies; a satellite phone, simple radar equipment, a home desalinator, a generator. He told us that soon, our ocean, the Goodbar Sea, named after us, of course, would soon merge with the Atlantic Ocean and, in the coming weeks, the Great Lakes, presumably we could drift forever and not know it. He told us to keep in touch and smiled, his feet crunching on the kelp as he hugged my wife. Weeks later, we drifted past the Coast Guard ship. It had run aground on the smokestack of the coal plant. Our nephew and the Coast Guard were nowhere to be seen. I dove into the smokestack and tried to imagine what the steam and smoke coming out of there felt like, but I couldn't.

     On day 319, my son dove in the water and his lips turned blue. I think this is Lake Superior, he said, and he drank the water. As he held onto a piece of kelp and floated in the fresh water, a pike came up below him and the blue of its dorsal fin matched his lips. We wrapped him in blankets for weeks. Once the cold water of the Lakes had passed, my son began to swim again. He reported to us about schools of fish that swam underneath the kelp bed. The next time we saw land, my son and the cat, now 15 and 12 years old, respectively, jumped ship. We were just outside of Zamboanga, in the Philippines, and had supposedly done two and a half circuits of the world. Our son came rushing back clutching a world map, saying that the cat had run off and that the ocean kept growing. I didn't hear this, but my wife did.

     On the eleventh anniversary of our ocean, the waters receded. Like Noah, we became stranded on our own mountain, in what used to be Colorado. Like Noah, we meekly exited our house, trying to ignore the smell of the fermenting kelp. It took a while to get used to walking on land.