Essay
Reading About Reefs When the Sea Is Rough
海况不好的日子，我去读珊瑚礁
September is the month I hardly dive. The weather comes in from the east, the boats stay tied up, and the shop gets quiet enough that I start cleaning things that were already clean. Three years ago I started walking to the library instead. It is cool in there, it costs nothing, and nobody asks me what the water was like.
The reef books are on the second floor, past the newspapers, in a case that gets the afternoon sun. The fans turn slowly and the pages stick to your hands. I sit in the same chair by the window and read about carbonate, polyp, symbiosis — words I know from the water and had never once seen written down.
The shelf I keep coming back to
There is a survey of the barrier reef from the seventies, typed and bound and full of numbers, and I open it more than any of the new books. Half its sites I could point to on a chart. Some of them are not coral anymore. I read the old count, then remember what is there now, and close the book for a while.
I learned the reef twice, once in the water and once on paper, and the paper is always a little wrong about the small things.
The librarian is a woman in her sixties who keeps the diving books behind her desk for me, because I once told her they get misfiled. She does not dive. Every time, she asks whether the sea has been kind, and I say yes or no, and she nods the way people do when they have decided to like you.
What the books cannot do is prepare you for the noise of it. I read a paper on bleaching and understood every sentence, then swam out to the same reef in June and saw white where white should not be, and the paper had nothing to say to me. Data is a map of a place you still have to go and stand in.
A quiet that is not the sea
The quiet in the library is nothing like the quiet underwater. Down there it has pressure in it, and your own breathing, and a horizon you can cross. Here it is paper and cold air and somebody's chair scraping the floor. I like it because it is the only quiet in my life that does not ask anything of me.
At four I walk out into the heat and the glare coming off the street, and the flannel I brought against the air conditioning goes back in the bag. I have read maybe twenty pages. By the time the weather clears I will not remember most of it. It does not matter. I know where the books are now, and one of them is mine to argue with.
中文译文
九月是我几乎不下水的月份。天气从东边压过来，船都系着不动，店里安静到我会去擦那些本来就干净的东西。三年前开始，我改成走去图书馆。那里凉快，不要钱，也没有人问我今天水怎么样。
珊瑚礁的书在二楼，过了报纸区，放在一个下午能晒到太阳的柜子里。吊扇转得很慢，书页会粘手。我坐在窗边同一把椅子上，读碳酸盐、水螅体、共生——这些词我从水里认识，却从没见它们被写下来过。
我总是回到的那一排书架
有一份七十年代的堡礁调查报告，打字机打的，装订过，全是数字，我翻它比翻任何新书都多。里面一半的样点我能在海图上指出来，其中有些已经不是珊瑚了。我先读当年的计数，再想起那里现在是什么样，然后把书合上一会儿。
珊瑚礁我学过两遍：一遍在水里，一遍在纸上；而纸上的东西，细节上总是差一点。
管理员是个六十来岁的女人。因为我说过那几本潜水的书总被放错架，她就一直替我收在柜台后面。她不潜水。每次她都问，海最近好不好，我说好，或者不好，她就点头——那种已经决定喜欢你的人才有的点头。
书做不到的，是让你准备好面对它的声音。我读过一篇讲珊瑚白化的论文，每个句子都看懂了；六月我游到同一片礁上，看到不该白的地方白了，论文对我什么也说不出来。数据是一张地图，而那个地方你还是得亲自站进去。
一种不是海的安静
图书馆的安静和水下的安静完全不是一回事。水下的安静里有压力，有你自己的呼吸，有一道你可以越过去的地平线。这里的安静是纸、是冷气、是谁的椅子在地板上蹭了一下。我喜欢它，因为这是我生活里唯一不向我要东西的安静。
四点我走出来，热气和街面的反光扑上来，早上为空调带的那件法兰绒又塞回包里。我大概只读了二十页，等天气转好，也记不住多少。不要紧。我现在知道那些书在哪儿了，其中有一本，是可以跟它争一争的。
