Stern College for Women - Kochaviah Yearbook (New York, NY)

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the sea serpent ' s own story BY PEARL KIDANSKV From the Sea Serpent ' s eye a tear ran down his foreleg and he brushed it away gently with his right dorsal fin. So you do believe me? he asked. Certainly, said the newspaper man. Why shouldn ' t I? The monster shook his head. The incorrigible skepticism of the Human Race, he said. Think of what Christopher Columbus endured before he met Ferdinand and Isabella. Think of what they did to Robert Fulton until he succeeded in sailing his steamboat up the Hudson. Think of Galileo. When I first bobbed up the Scottish lake, it was the same old harsh, unbelieving world that I had met so many times before. The more conservative London newspapers referred to me editorially as extravagant nonsense. Try to think of even nonsense being extravagant in Scotland. You do believe in me, honestly? The reporter took out a cigarette and lit it in the blue flame issuing from his companion ' s nostrils. My dear Lusus Naturae, nowdays everything is credible. I have written millions of words about new scientific discoveries that would make the hair stand on end. I have written about infinite space curling up into a strictly finite rubber ball. I have described a universe a billion years old, composed of rocks five billion years old. I know all about time which moves backward. After all this, do you imagine it puzzles me to have you show up simultaneously in Scotland, Yucatan, the Shannon River and Bering Strait? Almost any day I expect you to be reported from the Volga River. To what do we owe your latest reappearance on so many fronts at once? The Sea Serpent stared straight ahead of him, her, or it. Do you know, he declared, I almost didn ' t show up at all. I had, to put it quite plainly, grown sick of the same weary round. To what purpose this recurrent parade in the public eye — in 1817, and in 1839, and in 1859, and in 1897, and so on? Like a tireless Business Cycle. Why sure, the reporter interrupted. There was a picture of you in the New York Times the other day as seen by a navigating officer in the Caribbean, all dips and curves. You looked exactly like the roller coaster at Coney Island. But pardon me, you were saying. I was saying that I grew tired of it all. People were fast ceasing to believe in me and I was beginning to lose credence in myself. After all, my time was spent. I belonged in the ooze of the Eocene, not in the full blaze of the Twentieth century civilization. And then all at once it came to me how foolish I was.

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stroyed from time to time by stones, tiny white mushrooms, or the dead branches of trees long since rotted through. I wondered as I spied brightness ahead and was pleased to see a small lake coming into view. It was wild, exotic looking with vines hanging across the clearing, here and there even dropping into the water. Spiders wove delicate blankets of lace, or devoured gnats that were caught in them. Water ougs skated across the dark, stagnant water or admired their reflections in its sur- face. Bees kissed the virgin water lillies or flirted with brilliant red buds on the bank. Leaves floated along, were slowly saturated, and sank. I watched this graceful play from my vantage point on the bank many times after that day, charmed by the exotic atmosphere, unconscious of the biting insects, usually alone and relishing my aloneness. The summer ended, and I said good-bye to my quiet cove. Summers came and summers went until one year my parents felt that my brothers and I were ready to attend a summer camp. There I met a counselor who had a car that he would let me borrow from time to time; I took advantage of the opportunity. One wet, foggy day I was riding up to the top of Big Mount Pocono on a seldom used road when I saw a sight unforgettable. I stopped and left the car, for the dark, moist air blocked my vision. As I stood there, the waves of fog engulfing me, I felt an eerie sensation overcome me. Before me stretched a lake whose limits were shrouded. The water looked like a sheet of steel whose edges had been cut in an irregular, odd pattern and from out of it lazily drifted a mysterious mist. I gazed at the mist dissolving into the heavy air around it and the full beauty of the scene struck me. There was about it the air of sullen fantasie which engulfs Dozmary Pool, in which dwells the Lady of the Lake and her lake maidens. I felt the scene creep into my veins and I knew in my heart that I would return to see it again. My second visit to the lake revealed a vision of unalloyed magnificence. The day had in it a golden warmth which seemed to enter into everything it touched. The surface of the water was smooth, as if nature had frozen it that it might better serve to mirror the vernal calm which engulfed it. Only the jumping of a frog or the paddling of several ducks disturbed the surface. Surrounding the lake was a swath of lush, velvet green. Much of the lake ' s warmth and friendliness exuded from that verdant border and without it the lake would have resembled many others in the region. Beyond the grass was a low stone wall intended to keep the waters in their bed when spring floods came. Past the wall was a rustic forest path surrounded, on one side heavily, and on the other side sparsely, by the wild vegetation of our northern country. An atmosphere of inviting friendliness pervaded. How different the same body of water seemed these two times. Oh, how I wanted to return and learn of its other moods. But all too soon the summer was over and I returned home again. 1 have grown older — mentally, physically, emotionally. The time arrived for me to leave home to obtain greater maturity and knowledge. I departed and now 1 am here once again in my beloved North. Even now, when 1 think of home, one of my firsts thoughts is of the ocean, turbulent or peaceful in turns, and 1 try to compensate by going to the Hudson River to watch the sky. the water, the boats on it. The river is wide and a great expanse surrounds it. Whether gray, blue, or green, it is a com- mercial river and makes no effort to hide the fact. No puny delicacy for it. Everything is big, powerful. The big sightseeing boats carrying gaping tourists: the bigger cargo boars carrying cotton to far off countries; the grand yachts Willi their rowdy, card- playing, horse-betting owners and their dignified stifi captains; the gigantic ocean liners, their rails lined with travelers waving adieu to relatives on the piers; the great bridges that span it, all doing homage to the George Washington Bridge. And the sky, like a roof of blue, SO very far and high. I feel small and insignificant next to the grandeur that surrounds me; u is a good feeling. 1 watch the water running, swirling in eddies, but going — going, and I realize thai here before me is a symbol ..I lit. 1 1- i lift develops quickly m there it runs in circles, confused, dizzy. Over there, see. ii rights itself again and continues along us normal paths. And so on through etemitj

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I remember the moment distinctly, continued the Monster. I was then swimming off Tasmania, Gibraltar, the south shore of Lake Erie and within sight of bathers on Wakiki Beach. The thought came to me suddenly that I was not obsolete even if I was old. I saw men reviving many customs, practices and beliefs from the past — all the way back from the centuries, from the jungle, from the primeval slime. Here was somebody trying to get back to Robespierre. Here was somebody else trying to get back to the Roman Empire. And on every hand were clubbings and shootings and hangings and decapitations. Children were being taught to laugh at notions like human brotherhood and human freedom, and instead were drilled in gas masks and hand grenades. So I looked around and said to myself, Why, I ' m not out of date, after all. I belong. I fit in With so many monstrous things about, why not a Sea Monster? ' And here I am. How about your plans for the Summer? asked the reporter. Oh, I suppose the usual thing, answered the Monster, turning to depart. Atlantic City, Cape of Good Hope, Copenhagen, Puget Sound, and Valparaiso. You newspapers ought to make the cable companies give you a flat rate on me. signs of spring by DVORA ABRAMSON Even along Fifth Avenue, I try to find the signs of spring. The calendar testifies that it is past the spring equinox, and the nights are shorter than the days, but spring manifests itself in odd ways in the city. The city knows that it is spring and it prepares itself accordingly. Everything is well ordered and according to rule. The department stores display their new stock of cottons and surround their dummies with green paper. The people also know that n is spring, and they dutifully wear cotton and remark, What fine weather we ' re having , or Spring is here at last! , and the last statement has much truth in it, for many days have passed since March 21. Spring lias chased the hot-chestnuts vendor from the corners of Fifth Avenue, and the people celebrate the changing of the seasons with a black raspberry ice cream cone. The ice cream vendor pro- claims spring with bells, and at almost ev iv other corner one may see- ice cream wrappings protruding from the tops ami sides of the trashcans, and the sound of the city is the voice of the ice cream bell. I passed a flower vendor on Fifth Avenue who offered daffodils, a dozen for sixty-five cents and forsythia, a bunch for fifty cents. I thought how beautiful they looked, and how odd it was that here they priced even beauty. This much beauty costs so much, and a different color costs more. But what is beauty? I know that one can find beauty in the arch of a bridge and in the various manifestations of man ' s brain, but oik loses sight of the true value ol things when he stares too long at tempered steel. It is easy to see G-d in daffodils, but only one who knows daffodils tan see G-d in the frame oi .1 skyscraper. I am glad that I know daffodils.