The Aral Sea

When I was a kid I would get interested in something to the point of obnoxiousness. Maybe that is why I had few friends, or maybe I was that way because I had few. Either way, I started collecting airplane photos, which came with chewing gum much as baseball cards did. I could tell you the names of every aircraft in the Royal Canadian Air Force or describe the wing markings of the Peruvian Air Force. I put together a model of a plane called the “Pogo,” a propeller driven plane designed to take off and land straight up and down. It had a short life.
Then it was birds. I read the print off my parents’ Audubon book, and bemoaned the fact that the birds I really wanted to see didn’t come as far north as the Maine tundra. I tried painting them, but with five and dime water colors, four inch brushes and no talent for art, I quickly became frustrated.
So I turned to the Civil War. My grandfather had already given me an excellent grounding in American military history for a fourth grader. He gave me, in the third grade, a biography of George Armstrong Custer, and promptly informed me, that had old yellow hair survived the Battle of Little Big Horn, he probably would have been court martialled. I cajoled Chip Koerber into making blue forage caps out of construction paper for all the kids on the street, so we could re-enact battles. Our hats turned out to be disasters, so I turned to geography.
I always finished my social studies assignments ahead of the allotted time, so I would quietly go over to the globe on the counter by the window, and one day, I noted that there were seas all over the world. I found the Ionian, the Banda, the Weddell and the Sea of Azov. I also found the Andaman Sea, the name of which fascinated me; I was sure no one else knew of its existence but me.
I then hatched a plan. I was going to cover the entire walls of my room with a huge, museum quality map of the world, on which I would place all the seas. I found not only was there a Red Sea, a Black Sea and a Yellow Sea, but a White one as well. And then there was the Aral Sea, totally landlocked, stuck to the east of the Caspian Sea in the middle of Asia. What would a sea way out there look like? I wanted to go there, and sail around it.
But I never did. I went away to college, bummed around Europe, went off to fight a war in a place I had never heard of as a child, swam in the Tasman and South China Seas, and returned to live a fairly predictable middle class life, working in jobs I never knew existed as a child and never would have aspired to if I had.
After a time I began to notice how things have begun to change. The good, gentle old folk, the ones who knew the secrets of handling a team of plow horses, spinning wool into yarn on the porch, shoveling coal into the bellies of steam engines or who had walked the wooden decks and reefed the sails, have all faded away. The parents, the aunts and uncles, who put together the family picnics, flipped the burgers and roasted the hot dogs for us kids, are one by one becoming absent. Those men and women, who came home from the wars those years ago, became our teachers, den mothers and parents of our friends, in increasingly greater numbers no longer answer the roll call.
Our hometowns as we knew them have disappeared. Where once the men from Brunswick crossed over the river to hunt deer in Topsham, there is nothing but pavement and big box stores. Maine Street, alive every Friday night with people buying their groceries at First National or A&P, going to the movies or the five and ten cent stores, is dying, lined now with galleries and coffee shops, which do not attract the number of people that made it so vibrant. The furniture store that converted its basement to toys and where Santa Claus listened to lines of runny nosed kids, no longer exists. Even the Christmas boughs which arched Maine Street with brightly colored, boisterous lights have been replaced with bland clear lights and timid, politically correct banners wishing a happy generic holiday.
And then there is the Aral Sea. Once the fourth largest saline body of water in the world during my younger days, it now consists of three, highly polluted lakes. Its once fertile bottom is a barren salt pan, a resting place for the hulks of the fishing boats that once plied its waters. The fishing villages that once lined its shores are now ghost-towns.
We can never go back to see the old folk and hear their stories, we can never go back to the homes we remembered, and we can never sail the Aral Sea again. Time hurries us along to wherever it is we’re bound.