Beeline
by Marina Hansen
“Aqua Life” by Katie Hughbanks
My vision for how to spend that winter was to crawl into a dark hole. A long period of hibernation might usher in a fresh world, one that I actually wanted to be a part of. I could feel wonder again. I could find words to say. I would digest the grim events and excrete them at the coming of spring into an alchemized and bearable form.
But there was one problem with my plan. I’d be living with my parents for a few months in Southern California. Even on the winter solstice, the darkest, deepest, most hole-like day of the year, people walked around smiling sickeningly and licking ice cream cones in flip-flops. At such a low latitude, the mid-winter sun beamed down blindingly upon us and up, baking from the sidewalks. Hot light and laughter filtered in through my bedroom window even through the closed blinds. It was all wrong. It was supposed to be winter– a frigid retreat into the underworld, a time to sit in the dark cold and think about how we will all die.
So I went into the sunless back room of my parents’ house, turned on a tiny lamp on the desk that flickered like a candle, and planned to spend the season there. My concerned parents knocked on the door and asked nervously if they could turn on more lights. No, I said. Let me rot in here. Why didn’t they understand that, mentally, I was a squirrel curled up in the subnivean zone, the pocket of air under the snow where the little animals read by their woodstoves? In that dark room my surroundings reflected how I felt inside, especially on those few occasions when thick, desert rainstorms pummeled the windows. But still, something was missing.
Before I left my home of five years, I took my grief and draped it into the icy water of various rivers, dropping leaves and watching them tumble and drift. I rested my cheeks against large rocks and sagged myself against them, buried my hands and feet in piles of granite dust, sang elegies to the centipedes. I wrapped my arms around trees, sunk my body down to the base where I could prostrate myself in total submission, laid my naked body across the roots and basked in the feeling of total loss: loss of my relationship, my community, my job, my home. I could not make sense of the horrors happening in the world, and had no idea where I was going to live or how to have faith in my vague plan for the future.
…
Around the time I graduated college, my parents moved to a place with strip malls and crowds of people. There was a reason people lived there, and it was the reason why they were walking around grinning in states of undress, following the sloping concrete down to where the happy people went: the beach.
I greatly respected the beach, but I did not connect with it. The ocean was a great well of mystery– a slimy place of terrifying creatures and destructive forces. But that winter, I knew that if I could feel close to nature at the beach, I would have a better chance of making it out of hiding as a semi-healed person.
I put on sun-protective clothing, my mother’s ridiculously wide-brimmed hat that exuded a sort of 50s glamor, and dark sunglasses with black sun-shields blocking any light from coming in the sides.
I was lingering by the door when my mom walked past.
“Watch out for the bees.”
I looked at her blankly.
“There are bees in the sand. You might want to wear shoes,” she said before walking away.
When I arrived at the beach, I carried my shoes in a backpack just in case, but I was determined to walk barefoot. I had an old mentor who I worked with sometimes. I was always trying to keep us on track, but he would tell me to relax already about my capitalist attachment to the agenda and go walk barefoot in the meadow (most of our meetings took place in meadows). Grounding, he called it. I missed him.
…
Giving the glaring sun a look of disgust and pulling down my pant legs to shield my ankles from the rays, I trudged through the dry sand up to the water’s edge where the harder, flatter sand made for easier walking and I could feel the waves over my feet.
I saw the problem immediately. There were dead bees in the sand right where I wanted to walk. They blended in, so it took effort to spot them. I could keep my eyes trained downward to avoid them, but that would mean I couldn't look up at my surroundings or let my thoughts wander. Dead bees still had stingers. That year I had been stung by a bee twice, and both times flailed awake in the middle of the night for two weeks, manically itching my bee stings that swelled to the size of kumquats. No way was I going to risk that happening on the bottom of my foot.
What to do?
Then, I had an idea. It wasn’t a very long beach. What if I just removed the bees? I could perform an act of service for the good people of the beach and, in turn, find purpose and meaning. So I picked up a mussel shell and began to scoop.
…
There were more bees than I thought. I quickly filled up the mussel shell with bees and bits of wet sand that surrounded them. I was walking to find a good place to dump the bodies where no one would step on the stingers, when a bit of movement caught my eye. I looked down, almost flinging away the mussel shell in shock.
A honeybee was waving its little foot at me.
By foot, I mean a conglomeration of barb-like talons. It was a slow, robotic movement, a last desperate plea. Had honeybees always been fluffy? In a balding sort of way? I held the bee up to my face and became lost in its impossibly fragile, papery wings and bulging, black eyes like orbs of polished obsidian.
The bee wiggled its foot again. Save me, it said. Or maybe I said that to the bee.
Were the other bees in the mussel shell alive too? I picked up the closest bit of debris, part of a zip tie, and pushed around the hill of wet sand inside the shell to uncover the other bees.
When I saw other signs of motion I started to run. The bees had already been drowning and I had unknowingly pushed them further towards their demise by adding the element of suffocation. I looked around wildly for a place to put them as I ran. When I reached the warm, bright sand far from the water’s edge, I crouched down. The sand grains seemed so large compared to the bees. It would be like a person trying to swim through a sea of hot, sticky volleyballs. The bees would get lost in the immensity of it. They could be trampled by the stomping feet of the ice cream lickers.
I trotted all the way to the bottom of the cliff at the edge of the beach, and the answer came to me in a beam of light so bright I had to squint through my sunglasses: a boulder the size of a refrigerator. It was gray, textured, and gleaming in the sun. The face of the rock had a thousand bee-sized ledges and the top was smooth with a thin layer of sand and a forest of succulents. I was suddenly reminded of the line, “Look at what the light did now,” a song I liked to cry to by Ya Tseen.
I used the zip-tie to set the bees down, each with their own little living room space on the rock. I carefully turned everyone who was on their back right-side up. The sea had claimed a few lives, but many of the bees started to make slow, swimming motions with their feet. They appeared to be exerting a herculean effort, like each limb weighed a thousand pounds and they were trying to move them through thick honey. Watching them I was reminded me of how I felt after college when my Lyme disease prevented me from getting out of bed for a year, when movement was so difficult.
“You can do this, little bees. Stay with me now. Life gets better, I promise,” I said.
There was a pile of mussel shells at the foot of the boulder. I grabbed one in each hand and tore my eyes from the bees. I had to let the hot rock do its work. A thrill gripped my body, the same kind that gave me chills when I thought about worms digesting rotten vegetables into compost– a natural process unfolding before my eyes, transforming into something unknown.
I ran to the water’s edge, but I was suddenly distracted watching the flat ocean rise monstrously into a colossal wave, like a demon breaking through the surface of the earth. The wave grew into an emerald wall and I was frozen beholding its enormity. It was like I was staring into an aquarium, straight into the belly of the sea. And then, as the wave reached its zenith, ready to smash downward, a dark shape appeared. It was bigger than me, curved in a way no human body ever could be. It moved through the wave with grace and ease, like a dancer.
The wave collapsed and the dolphin’s dorsal fin circled out of the water briefly before disappearing. I stood still with my mouth hanging open. There were so many things I feared about the ocean: sharks, jellyfish, tsunamis, sharp coral, boats, riptides, being cold, etc., but dolphins and whales have always enchanted me. Did dolphins always come so close to the beach? I knew that dolphins were smart and deeply emotional. It was hard not to feel like I had been visited by some fairy-like presence or gentle intelligence that I did not quite understand. I returned to the bees, but seeing the dolphin changed the situation. I felt a surge of energy.
…
It turned out that about two-thirds of the bees struggling in the liminal space between land and water were still alive, getting dragged through the sand by the tips of the waves. Curious looks from passersby followed me as I scooped up as many bees as I could, apologizing to the long-beaked seabirds who were clearly annoyed that I was invading their territory and interrupting their search for clams, and then speed-walked back to the rock, trying not to drop my cargo. To scoop as many as I could, I had to bury some of them in the pile. If I was quick enough, they might make it.
“Don’t die on me, little bees! We are almost there!”
While I spread out the second group of bees on the rock, I was delighted that the first round was looking lively. They had finally found footholds with their kicking and swimming motions and were now crawling all over, climbing the ledges and wading through the succulents. They didn’t seem tired anymore. They walked around determinedly, not, it appeared, to get anywhere in particular, but as if they knew the act of moving warmed up their bodies and readied them for their second chance at life.
I watched two bees approach each other and immediately begin pawing each other’s faces and touching their antennas together. These bees were having some sort of conversation. Did they know each other? What were they saying? Perhaps it was something like, “I’m so happy this amazing woman rescued us. See, she isn’t such a mess after all. In fact, she seems to have her life together.” Were they from the same hive? I knew bats had names for each other, so I wondered if bees did, too. What was the vibe of the interaction? Was it friendly, and isn’t-it-nice-to-be-alive? Or were they like cats, hissing at and hazing strangers?
Was delirium one of the stages of grief?
…
I departed to go collect the next round of bees. It vexed me how long it was taking to find them. Every extra minute it took for me to spot them in the sea of beige, bees were drowning. And then I made a pivotal discovery.
While I scanned the beach, I was noticing subtle, spiraling etchings in the wet sand. They looked like the mark a snake leaves as it slithers through the desert dirt, but noodle-thick and flanked by little dots. The way the patterns curved and intermingled with each other reminded me of medieval Celtic stone carvings. The pattern was surprisingly visible from far away in the high contrast of the winter sun. I was curious about what caused it, so I followed it, and there, at its end, was a drowning bee. The bees created the snake track with their dragging bodies and the dots were the marks of their little feet struggling through the sand. Their long, beautiful death journeys sent me into a train of thoughts about all the other breathtaking processes of dying in nature: autumn leaves, supernovas, forest fires.
I followed each pattern I encountered to its finish and quickly filled two more mussel shells with bees. Andre 3000’s album of ethereal flute music was blasting in my headphones and I yelled “Hi, I love you!” to the dolphin in the wave before sprinting back to the rock.
While the third round of bees started their slow leg lifts and the second round began to crawl and converse, something extraordinary was happening to the first group. They were jutting and pulsing their abdomens with an intensity that seemed to herald the coming of some imminent explosion. Suddenly one of them leaped into the air. My body convulsed in a reflection of the fear of bees embedded in me from childhood, but it quickly turned into a spasm of joy. It was flying away! It was free! I saved it, and it was free! I swayed where I stood. I wanted to run nine miles, sing at the top of my voice, hug my parents!
…
Every day I came to the beach. I saved hundreds of honeybees and even a few bumblebees. One bumblebee was the biggest bee I had ever seen, the size of a small plum, making the honeybees look like ants. When it finally vibrated its round, fluffy body like a rocket ready for take-off and shot into the air, I felt a lightness that was almost foreign; I’m sure I had experienced something like it before, but in that moment, it had been so long, I couldn’t remember when.
Most days the dolphins were swimming through the waves and I started to notice other interesting phenomena on the beach. Every day the ocean deposited new gifts upon the shore with a consistency that seemed deliberate, probably through some complicated calculation of tides and currents and animal life cycles and human activity. One day the shore was covered in a million tiny jellyfish. Another day I picked up seven different single shoes to throw away. The day after, the beach was covered in identical cone-shaped shells the size of my hand. Sometimes a squadron of pelicans eyed me beadily from their impossible perch right where the waves were cresting, birds so large they had me questioning the scale of everything around me. As I followed the patterns like a dog on a scent trail, the sun– the hot, bright, beaming sun– shined upon everything: the tops of beer bellies and bald heads, the glowing white nets of the volleyball courts, the surface of the rock, like a billion diamonds on the water. I had never before considered swimming but I started to entertain the idea. Could I actually swim with the dolphins? Could they perceive my earnest love for them so we could transcend the barrier of our different species?
…
After a particularly prolific day of drying out the bees, I was sitting at the dinner table with my father.
“Why do the dolphins come so close?” I asked.
“The orcas are in town. Something to do with climate change. The dolphins are hiding from them by swimming close to the beach because orcas like to eat them. But don’t swim with the dolphins. I heard it stresses them out.”
I stared at him. If before there were magic sparkles floating around my vision, there were now heavy drops of black oil. I saw in my mind the image of an orca snapping a dolphin in two with its jaws. The dolphins were trapped between the stresses of hungry predators and the human world. And orcas in Southern California? Weren’t they supposed to live in cold, northern waters?
The next day I stood in front of the waves to watch the dolphins. I saw something that I hadn’t before. There was a forlornness to them, a kind of aimless drifting. Seeing their bodies so big and clear in such a populated place suddenly felt unnatural.
I sat down on the hot sand, pulling my hat down so shade covered my body, and typed into the Google search box on my phone, “Why are there so many bees on the beach?” It was then that I learned the origin of the word ‘beeline.’ Bees have an innate ability to fly the straightest, most direct route back to their hive, no matter where they are foraging. They will almost always take the beeline back home. But sometimes, if there is a hive near the beach, on a sea cliff for example, the beeline takes the bees through the danger zone, a wall of thick moisture above where the waves break. The bees become so wet that they fall to the sand and drown.
I moved closer to the waves and sat there for a while, numbly. Finally, a small object fell hard and fast from the sky, making a surprisingly loud smacking sound when it hit the sand.
When I worked as an outdoor educator, we used to tell the kids that any question about nature can be answered through dedicated observation. Only in my recent adult life have I truly tested and proven this theory. But seeing has to be deliberate. There were some truths in my life I had chosen not to see.
I walked towards where I saw the bee drop. I knelt before it. The knees of my sweatpants were wet but I didn’t care. I put my hands on either side of the bee.
“I cannot save all of you.”
It lifted its arm at me feebly.
“I’m so sorry.”
And then I turned away from the bee, and left it there to drown.
The next day when I returned to the beach, I wore my shoes. I picked up eleven zip ties and did not rescue any bees. The patterns wove in and out of each other like the carvings of a medieval church. I hoped, that day, that I would see dolphins, and I wondered what the tides would bring.
Marina Hansen is a writer, farmer, and aspiring herbalist living in Bellingham, Washington. Her work has been published in The Climbing Zine and her forthcoming book will be released early next year. Visit 30press.com to be the first to get notified of its pending release.
Katie Hughbanks (she/her) is a writer, photographer, and teacher whose photography has been published nationally and internationally in more than 50 literary arts magazines. She is the author of two chapbooks, Blackbird Songs (Prolific Press, 2019) and It's Time (Finishing Line Press, 2024). She teaches English and Creative Writing in Louisville, Kentucky.