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People say it was a seal that saved Kevin that night under the wispy San Francisco clouds just below the bridge. Other insist it was a dolphin, its grey tail lapping in excitement at its rescue. There was even a brief rumor about Superman. But I can tell you it was a sealion because I was there, and this sealion, Kali, was my friend.

Kevin didn’t believe me when I first told him about Kali, but then who would? A girl and a sealion forming an unlikely, unconditional friendship…it was something out of a children’s book, a bedtime story, nothing more. 

That’s why it never made the news, not properly anyway. Sure, the local news brought in experts from Stanford and Berkeley to review the cell phone footage bystanders had taken from the Golden Gate. I wondered in the moment, and in the days that followed, why people had just stood there, gripping their $500 iPhone, pointing, gasping, but not doing anything remotely useful. Perhaps my running back and forth between the emergency telephones that lined the bridge was enough for them. The frantic, fractured voice that trembled across the phone line; yeah, that’s what a real 911 call is. She’s got it under control.

But I didn’t have it under control. All I could think about was the ice cream. Twenty minutes before we were licking ice cream off a popsicle stick and debating how many popsicle sticks enter the ocean every year and clog up some sealion’s throat. Kevin would maintain it wasn’t as bad as plastic–he wouldn’t even touch toothpaste if the picture on the front had the little blue dots that resembled microplastic beads–but I pointed out that all waste was exactly that, waste.

No matter the argument, I was go-big-or-go-home kinda girl. I didn’t do anything half-assed. Kevin liked that, said it made me different from the girls he usually met–you know, those imported Silicon Valley tech types, used to following orders as long as it guaranteed a paycheck.

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There were probably some on the bridge that day along with the tourists. Mostly, there were tourists. At least I think there were mostly tourists; it’s a blur for me. Except for Kali. I can see her round black eyes peeking out above the water very clearly. Even though it’s a long way down, I know she saw me. It was her way of calming me down.

It was like that since we first met. The reasons most people come to San Francisco–tech, the arts, the universities–were not the reasons I came to San Francisco. I came for the bay, specifically the mudflats and their sediments. I was a post-doctoral fellow and the unique mix of fresh and saltwater in the bay created not only a rich biodiversity in the region, but a curious soil composition that easily could have spurred twenty white papers. That’s how eager a geographer I was then, but when Kevin jumped things changed and I found myself much more interested wildlife, those living breathings things, that soil and water that bred life. After all, earth was just a petri dish, just the beginning.

That’s how it was with us: the jumper who faced demons none of us dare, the unsung aquatic hero who summoned the purest friendship, and me, a geographer who, for the purposes of this narrative, has become an unlikely storyteller.

It was as a geographer that I first found Kali, lying out on wetlands with a plastic ring around her neck, squashing the flesh just like belts on the dresses my sister wore. She was struggling to make ends meet as an editorial assistant at a New York publisher while I was out here amongst the wetlands. At first, I mistook the sealion for a rock. Embarrassing, I know. But that dusty grey skin when battered by sunlight had a rough texture, almost jagged from the way she sat. It was only when I crept closer that her head turned towards me and our eyes connected. Those black eyes, glassy with fear.

“Shhh,” I whispered as I crept up close, “It’s okay.”

The sealion seemed to whimper, letting out a soft, high-pitched noise. I’d heard that sound before, when tightening the strings on my guitar really, really slowly. Kevin used to make fun of me for it, saying I was pushing the instrument too far in the pursuit of perfection, like the way I have to have exactly the right ratio of chocolate in mint chocolate chip ice cream.

I crept up to her close. The sealion seemed to know while she could move–her front feet were free–she wouldn’t get very far with the ring around her neck. Once I was in about ten paces, I reached into my pockets and around my belt, where I had magnifying glass hanging off one of the loops, but nothing useful to set her free. Turning my head around, I looked to see which of my colleagues were still mildly within my frame of sight. Not many it turned out. But just beyond the horizon I could see the blue of Kevin’s baseball cap.

Frantically, I waved him over, but he didn’t see me. My arms flailed in the air. “Kevin!” I called, being careful not to disturb or frighten the sealion. Three times it took before he took a step towards me. Men were so lazy. But once he could see I wasn’t moving like the rest of our cohort, he picked up pace and it wasn’t long before I could hear the wind whistle through the grass where his footsteps had been.

“Oh, god,” I heard him as he knelt down beside me. Immediately, I put out an open palm towards him, but it started to shake as it remained empty. “Quickly!” I shouted, “Haven’t you got anything sharp? A knife? Anything?” Unlike me, Kevin knew exactly where to look. In his back pocket, where most men keep a wallet, he pulled out a swiss army knife, a relic from his boy scout days in and around Sacramento.

Tapping me on the shoulder, he offered it to me, and I shuttered in response. I didn’t expect him to just offer me one, stepping aside like that. But Kali kept staring at me and it was like Kevin knew she trusted me. Taking the swiss army knife, I pulled out some of the different functions. Any would do really; they were all sharp.

Knife out and open, I moved it close to Kali’s neck and she squirmed in fear like she knew what the piercing metal could do to her marine flesh. Funny, how she too would know how the damage her ocean’s rocks could do to human flesh. Wiggling, I inserted my index finger between the ring and her fur while with the knife in my other hand, I began to cut. The plastic was hard and firm, the kind that Nalgene liked to use for their bottles. Several cuts in, the plastic was beginning to break apart at either side of the knife. A flipper moved up on the rock. Kali must have felt it loosening. I was nearly there, when the sealion jerked her neck and the plastic snapped. She was free.

Kevin and I smiled at each other. It might just have been the happiest I have ever seen him. Kali straightened her neck, allowing us to see her magnificence in profile as the sun eclipsed the sky. Naively, I half-expected her to stick around, but like any wild creature, she was gone in a heartbeat.

It’d be weeks and 20,000 words worth of paperwork before I saw Kali again. Kevin was keen to tell the rest of our cohort about the episode–always the glory seeker–but I was quiet. I’d had an intimate moment with a mammal, that was all. So I really didn’t talk about it once she started reappearing. At first, I attributed it to simply returning a habit like salmon returning to the stream where they’d been born or a human child coming home after months away at college. But she seemed to follow me. If Kevin was around, she would stay, but she’d never appear if anyone of the other fellows was nearby. She appeared for us, and us alone.

One foggy Tuesday I remember vividly as the day she truly let me into her world. I was in the marshes again, taking water samples. You hear scientists talking about ocean acidification all the time, but the levels I had pulled from the bay for the last week were really alarming–way too high for this time of year. I had all my kit out when I noticed larger ripples in the water. They were too large for an amphibian. My steps I took slowly in stride, holding my measuring instruments close. But no sooner than I had looked up and she was right in front me, face smiling as the sun stroked her back.

Timidly, I extended an arm out to touch her and her head back away a few inches. “It’s okay,” I affirmed. The sealion, after a second, swam towards me and met my reach. We stayed there, animal and human, for several minutes. I asked her questions about her experience in the water, if she thought it was too acidic, if there were enough fish for her to eat and feed her family, if she knew where Kevin was right now. She didn’t answer, but that was okay.

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When my hand lifted off her skin towards my clipboard, she retreated, diving back into the ocean. I wondered how I had offended her as I put pen to paper. But just then, I felt her fur nuzzle my wrist. Looking up, her face stood directly in front of me, her black eyes staring straight at my own. With a knowing glance, she turned, leaving her side to me. She stayed there, calm and peaceful, only looking back at me every few seconds like she was waiting, waiting for me. Carefully, I took a slow approach like before. But when I reached her head, she flapped her flippers. It wasn’t angry, more like annoyed that I wasn’t a very intelligent human. When I put a hand on her upper back, she relaxed as if to tell me I was doing the right thing. In my head, I ran through the possibilities of what she might want–food, shelter, others of her own kind. Except she wasn’t with her own kind. She’d deliberately sought own someone very, very different from herself. My inner six year-old clamored at the thought of swimming with a sea lion like I had once dreamt of swimming with mermaids. Intrepidly, I placed one foot on the other side of Kali’s wet, furry body. She didn’t move. Lowering myself onto her back, I had barely sat down when she took off into the open water. A dive down to start and my fingers, laced around the sea lion’s neck, were what kept my recklessness in check. If I had broken off, I could have flung aimlessly into the sea. Strangely, holding onto a sea lion was my path to salvation.

In a breath, we broke through the surface. My grip loosened and my hair eased on the back of my neck. Around me was the blue I was accustomed to studying from the land–save a scuba trip every few months. Dark silhouettes swam beneath us. A bright sun rifted across the waves, leaving a glimmering trail of light in its wake. The dew on Kali’s fur glittered in the sunlight. I search for algae blooms or signs of a red tide that could explain the Ph level readings I had been pulling recently. But before I knew it, we were off again, gliding along the waves. My shorts and t-shirt were drenched–as I am sure the clipboard and papers I had left on the edge of the shoreline–but I didn’t care. Arms out wide, I closed my eyes as the wind whipped by the sides and I let out a giddy scream.

When I opened my eyes, we were under the Golden Gate, it’s strong red arms extending into the water where we swam. The engineering was more imposing than I’d ever experienced. The bridge seemed to go on for miles as ships passed underneath. The suspension ropes reached towards the heavens, climbing on and on until they hid in-between layers of fog. Little did I know that one day soon I would be running back and forth along that platform in a frenetic trance. But there with Kali, the bridge was exactly that: a magnificent, wonderous bridge.

A dive again and we’d come up to the surface. A roller coaster on speed, it was the best natural high I had ever experienced and when we returned to the shoreline, I hesitated to roll off Kali’s back. I wished for a second round, a forever round. But then, I wasn’t a sea lion. I was a human, and humans walked on land with clipboard in hand. Stepping off, I scooped my clipboard, now illegible and waterlogged, from the sandy marsh. The team would be really impressed with these detailed notes. Really impressed. But I couldn’t focus on the future, only the present. Leaning down, I patted her on the head. She didn’t pull back this time, just turned and swam away just as easily as she came.

I sat there, on the edge of the march, for ages thinking she might come back, but she never did. By the time the face on my phone shown 8pm, I picked up and headed home. I had barely slammed the door when I called Kevin to relay the encounter. At first, he didn’t quite believe me–asked me what I had been eating–but eventually he came around, repeating “And you just swam with her under the bridge?” at least five times. What he didn’t understand was that I didn’t just swim with Kali. I communicated with her, this blessed moment of human-to-sea-creature interaction. Sometimes I wonder if Kevin had chosen the wrong vocation.

The weeks following would create a tense unease between us. Kevin was the only I’d told about Kali. While I respected the other would-be scientists I worked with in the bay, I didn’t trust them, not with this. You trust scientists with data, proposals, figures, graphs, and even speculation, but not dreams. It was in the job description: science isn’t about what could be, but what is.

Still, time in the labs was terse and water-focused rather than animal-focused. I’d catch Kevin shake his head at me every once in a while, as he passed me. Time outside the lab could be just as awkward. We’d already accomplished the touristy things–the bridge, the Disney museum, Chinatown. San Francisco native Kevin still liked to stop by the Purple Cow and buy me an ice cream on a fog-filled afternoon. Licking our ice cream, we’d talk about everything except Kali. How it took him in an hour to get to city center this morning. How I should really catch a San Francisco sunrise. How Carole King was supposed to be coming to town.

My nerve would creep up here and again. I’d try to sneak her into sentences whenever we’d talk about the lab. But being subtle didn’t go very well with recounting my time with a sealion–a sealion, a wonderful, wonderful sealion.

“Just shut up, won’t you?” he yelled at me as we strolled along the path, “Just shut up.”

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The tourists on the end of the Wave Organ looked up for a moment, observing our argument. One held up a phone to take a picture of the sea, but I could swear she tilted it just enough to get us into the frame. Oh, god, we were being filmed. I could see the YouTube headline: “WAVE ORGAN SONG INTERRUPTED BY COUPLE’S SPAT.” If we were even a couple–a couple of idiots, that is. I should have rented a single bedroom in Sausalito and resigned to my eventual fate as a crazy cat lady. “BAY SCIENTIST DEVOURED BY CATS.” Making headlines in my head was a dangerous game, one that could blur reality. But Kali was real and my experience with her, in her waters, that was very, very real.

“Let’s go,” I said quietly.

He stood still. “I thought you wanted to listen to the Wave Organ. Again.”

“Not anymore,” I dismissed and we walked the path back with the crackling of the waves to our right, against the shore.

By the time Kevin dropped me back at my apartment, something had changed. His hair was thinner, greyer. Well, it could have been if the stress bubbling inside his brain had started to show. But all I got were vacant signs, the little things, if they could be little at all. It was more like, well, like nothing at all. Maybe his mother–she must hate me, watching him jump–would know. Not me. I’m just a wannabe scientist who takes him on walks, eats his Saltines, and believes in sealions.

Kevin grew distant following the Wave Organ fight. He’d still talk to me. We’d get ice cream and coffee (in that order). I’d tell him about the coral polyps I wanted to study in Fiji and he’d tell me that had absolutely nothing to do with the soil and terrain I was studying here, in the bay (it didn’t). We’d meander the food truck festival and discuss how nearly everything on sale had been taken, in some form or another, from the ocean (it had).  From the outside it was normal. But his answers were terse and ordinary. He didn’t question. He lacked ideas. I thought he just hated me. It wouldn’t be the first time a man would turn on me because I’d gone a little too haywire, a little too intense or weird.

And that was okay. I had a sealion (when she bothered to flip over to the shoreline where I stood with samples and clipboard). Why did I need anything more from my west coast man with his long, straggly hair and a knowing glimmer in his eye?

Ah.

Over the next weeks, I had made some good progress on my sediments. Those early morning walks and late evening collections had allowed me to build up something resembling an almost substantial data set. The other fellows might have had stronger, more ambitious propositions, but I had grit. The data would tell me where to go from here. All I had to do was listen. I spent weeks listening, examining the sediment under the microscope and checking it for Ph level, iron and just about anything else I could think of. On a good day, I noticed a new level, a spike in zinc. On a bad day, I wished I was working on one of those middle school experiments where you already knew the answers. On a fruitless day, I sat out by the bay and waited for Kali to come. But she never came.

It ended up being about once a week that I would walk the shores looking out for her, once at high tide and once at low tide. I ended up calling them “Chasing Kali Thursdays.” It was some kind of permutation of a “Soul-Seeking Tuesday.” All I needed was a violin.

I didn’t dare tell Kevin about these long Thursday walks. He still didn’t believe in my first encounter with the sealion and he remained in his stage of distanced contentment. I didn’t want to screw that up by ranting about the ocean creature he didn’t believe in. Instead, I kept my loneliness inside me. Who was there to talk to? Even if Kali had visited another one of fellows–or even just a regular San Franciscan on the street–it is not like they would talk about it. We don’t talk about the natural magic in the world.

So we kept not talking about it. That’s how we got to the bridge that Friday night. We’d agreed on an early dinner at Spruce, just beyond the Presidio. Eight weeks of a grueling scientific fellowship were to be celebrated. We didn’t have a lot of money on the fellowship stipend so early meant we could catch the tail end of the lunch service and count it as dinner in our heads. Kevin had chicken. We both had resigned to becoming vegetarians, but it was harder for Kevin and he slipped more than once. Letting it go, I looked out of the window. The dense fog that had clouded the streets was gone now and it was still just light enough that the buildings’ architecture sprung out against the sky.

It was just about sunset when we paid the bill. I would have fought Kevin more over the bill, but we’d been fighting too much recently. I didn’t want to add it to our inventory of arguments. The car, a blue Honda Civic, was parked under a tree undisturbed by passers-by. How many arguments that vehicle had placed hosted to recently, I didn’t want to count them. The car hummed as we drove through the Presidio, the green heart of San Francisco. We passed few other cars along way. I thought there would be more on a Friday, but I suppose that’s the Uber effect–only going places when you need to go somewhere. Driving for driving’s sake was an ancient philosophy, washed up on the shore along with white picket fences and an affordable mortgage.

Looking up at the imported palm trees as we passed, I recalled how curious a place San Francisco really is. In a city of transplants, could anything really be natural? Was I not studying soil that had been inherently changed and cultivated by cross-pollination of life and experience? The pet cemetery on our right seemed to prove my thesis. From the window I could see the signs: Fluffy, 10 years old, a beagle mix and Hugo, a 5 year old lop eared rabbit. My sister had taken our labradoodle when she’d moved to New York. She didn’t talk about him much so I expected he hadn’t adjusted very well to the big city. Neither had my sister.

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The key clicked in the ignition as we parked next to Chrissy Field. Normally overrun with baseball enthusiasts, the park was only inhabited by a handful of nightwalkers and fireflies. That little yellow buzzing light, intermittent and fleeting, was how I passed the time, watching them. Chasing fireflies was somehow akin to chasing dreams. Kevin let me follow after one, clasping my hands together in vein every few seconds. He wasn’t used to following after bugs like that; he only trusted the ocean and only the parts he could see and experience directly. 

When I finally caught a lighting bug, I stood silently, watching it flutter in the palms of my hands. One eye open, I watched the left wing rise and fall and then the right. So invested I was in my new companion, I didn’t notice Kevin creep up behind me until he laid one hand on my shoulder. “The Bridge?” he suggested. I really didn’t think anything of it. We went to the Bridge often, especially at twilight. There was something calming about it, the wind picking up from the bay as the ships returned home for the evening. It was almost romantic, the way the city looked with the artificial light shining out of the windows from the skyscrapers on the San Francisco side and the homes on the Sausalito side. I wondered how many of those people, still reading or working by their lights, had walked across the Bridge at night.

From Chrissy Field we walked up along the green until we hit the Golden Gate Welcome Center, which was closed. But that was okay. We knew where we were going–at least I thought we did as Kevin extended a hand out to me and helped me up over the step. Before crossing Strauss Plaza, we stopped into the Bridge Cafe, a small enclave where people glazed over the bags of chips and mints before departing with a single cup of coffee. I kept eyeing the freezer, which in addition to the ice cream sandwiches and firecrackers had been outfitted with some local artisan flavors. Kevin propped the door open, imploring me to get what I wanted. I picked up a strawberry lemon icicle. We paid and departed the shop just as a smug young couple came through. I used to want that, that look, the swaying, pretending to fight over who was paying. But that’s never really real, is it?

I watched the red railings that lined the outsides of the cafe fade into the fog as we continued up through the plaza. Eventually we came upon the statue of Mr. Strauss himself, the blue jeans man. Etched in bronze, his face was thoughtful, pensive even. Capitalism seemed the farthest from his mind, just his dream. The fog began to condense onto his skin like tears of sweat, born anew. My hand reached up to clean the bronze, but all that did was stretch out the water droplets, connecting them into a makeshift river. How malleable water is.

Kevin waved from a nearby bench and pointed at a middle-aged Chinese woman who’d been keeping an eye on the statue, waiting for a good moment to snag a photo. A hand on Mr. Strauss’ arm, I step aside and followed Kevin up the hill until we meet the road. And then, right then, the Bridge stood, towering in front of us with its arms stretching up to the heavens like our one connection between earth and another world.

We walked at a leisurely pace. The popsicle melted in my mouth with each lick I took. The strawberry lemon swirls would have held my attention if it hadn’t been for the view. With every step, the skyline morphed, showing off a new glimmer at every angle. A sixteen year old Instagramer would have had a field day. Me, I just walked with Kevin at my side–at least, I thought with Kevin at my side. I pointed out buildings and stars, like punctures, in the sky. He’d respond, “Yes, I can see that,” or “How great!” as we walked along and I held my denim jacket close to my body against the wind. I saw the telephones in the railings, but I wasn’t looking at them. I was searching for a constellation peeking out from the fog.

“Don’t you think you can see Orion?”

“It’s too foggy.”

“But something that big, that bright, it’d show, don’t you think? Well, of course you do. I mean, maybe, just there, that break–Kevin–”

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I turned around. “Kevin!? Kevinnn!!?” And in a flash, he was gone. I pushed past the few others that were on the bridge. I ran left. I ran right. I ran over a stone and tripped to the floor. That’s when I grabbed the rails and looked down while passersby held onto their phones to take footage of the fall for YouTube. It was a long way down. Just there, against the midnight blue sky I could make out the red of Kevin’s rugby shirt, the one he’d bought in Australia. I had to do something. These people were just watching. Watching, filming, watching. I scurried to the closest bridge phone, but it didn’t have a dial tone so ran to the other one and placed the 911 call. My voice, cracked and squeaky, relayed what was going on beneath me, but I all could remember was the popsicle. Strawberry lemon. Who the hell picks strawberry lemon? Kevin would never go for that.

God, Kevin. I snapped the phone back on the line and pushed my way through the small crowd that was forming. You read about this stuff in the newspaper, but who got to watch someone jump live, right in front of their eyes? Now that’s a good vacation story.

Pushing and shoving, eventually I found myself back clutching the rails when the body hit water. It was the largest splash I’ve ever heard. Rather than looking away, crying, I just watched. I watched and watched. And that’s how I know. Even with the distance, I could never have mistaken that spotting and coloring. Swimming under the water, she carried him just as she had carried me. Her black eyes looked up at me as she did.

I ran off the bridge to meet them on the shore, but when I got there, Kali was gone, replaced only by a set of EMTs and other vague human face. I wouldn’t see her again–and neither would Kevin–but that was okay. She’d given us what’s she need to: the confirmation that we, human and aquatic creatures, are, in some strange way, all here to help one another.

Sophia Latorre-Zengierski is a writer, editor and marketer from Princeton, NJ. With a background in the arts, she is a self-professed “ocean person” and led the first March for the Ocean in London this June. Having spent five years in academic publishing, she is currently studying at the University of Pennsylvania. She hopes to form a nonprofit committed to proving that anyone, no matter their background, can use their voice to protect the ocean. 

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