Saving the starfish

---

You’ve probably heard part of this story already.

Here’s how it goes. In the aftermath of a terrible storm, a beach becomes overrun with starfish. People stare at the dying starfish strewn among the flotsam.

Vultures circle overhead.

A boy comes along. He is as distressed as everyone else, but he walks among the starfish, looking at them closely. When he sees a live one – one for which there is still hope of survival – he throws it back into the receding tide. He repeats this, starfish after starfish, over and over.

The others watch in condescending amusement.

Finally a woman approaches him. “Little boy,” she says. “Why are you doing this? Look at all these starfish. You can’t save them all. You can’t begin to make a difference.”

The boy pauses, then bends down to pick up another starfish. This one is beautiful, speckled, with spots that look almost like lights in the setting sun.

He throws it in the ocean, then looks at the woman and shrugs.

“I made a difference to that one.”

---

It’s a nice story, isn’t it? Let me tell you the rest of it.

---

The boy did not grow up dreaming of saving starfish.

He actually wanted to be a builder, a designer, an engineer. He started by making sandcastles, and graduated to constructing intricate machines made of wood and shell and stone and metal and circuits and light. He loved how his mind felt when he made things. He was never more alive than when using his wits to create something useful out of discarded scraps.

But his world was beset by storms, and the storms grew fiercer every year.

The boy was a typical kid. He had friends, he had crushes. He played games and sometimes got in trouble but tried to be good most of the time. He whispered his hopes and fears to himself in the middle of the night, ideas about what his life was and what he wanted it to become.

But he could not find it within himself to ignore the starfish after the storms, as so many people did. So he started a habit every evening for a few hours, going out to the beach in front of his house to throw some of the surviving starfish back to the ocean. It wasn’t enough – it was never enough – but he could not face doing nothing at all, and it was something.

---

The years passed, and the storms grew worse and more frequent.

It came time for the boy to go away to school, to become the engineer he had always dreamed of being. But the ongoing destruction from the storms had made everyone in his village poorer, including his parents. He knew that without him there to help, his parents would lose their house – the only home he had ever known, on the beach that he loved.

Besides, the starfish needed him.

So he stayed. I’ll go to school when the storms stop, he promised himself.

---

The boy – now a man – got a job. It wasn’t his dream, but he did alright at it. It kept his family in a home, which in an increasingly battered world was becoming increasingly rare.

The stretch of beach in front of his home was not beautiful, not the way it had been when he was very young. There were too many starfish to save, so it always smelled faintly of decaying bodies, and when the air was still the flies swarmed. There were no piers, no shelters, no fire pits, not even any beautiful rocks; anything lovely or useful was torn to pieces quickly.

But after years of daily care, his beach was far nicer than most. On the others, the stench of death was overwhelming. The clouds of flies were so thick you could sometimes not even see the piles of rotting starfish through them. The shores were ugly and full of disease, and most people avoided them.

When new starfish washed up on those beaches, the man felt heartsick at their suffering. The starfish were fated to a long and painful death, dessicated by the sun or eaten slowly by vultures while laying among the carcasses of the ones who came before.

But the man could only do so much, so he concentrated on saving what he could – the starfish that lay abandoned on his own beach.

It wasn’t so bad. He enjoyed the sand and water, and grew to love the starfish. Throwing them repeatedly into the ocean was very boring, but he managed by designing and building things in his mind. When he got back to the house, he made prototypes and models according to those designs.

He tried not to dwell on how far his models were from the reality of what they could have been in the life he was supposed to have. When the storms cease, I’ll pursue that dream, he promised himself.

---

Some people still mocked him: older people who thought that cynicism was wisdom, children who were baffled or frightened by his actions, his former friends who spent their evenings drinking with each other to block out the sadness of what their world was becoming. They derided him for the arrogance of believing he could make a difference and told themselves that their hopelessness made them superior.

Some people felt guilty when they saw him, ashamed that they weren’t doing more themselves. Usually those people walked away and drowned the guilt in distractions or addictions. But for some the guilt was too much to bear, so they transformed it into anger, and the anger was often directed at him.

(This might not make sense, but anger rarely makes sense. All the people knew was that they looked at the man and felt angry, so they invented reasons for the anger after the fact.)

Some decided that he deserved anger because he thought he was better than them (even though he didn’t). Those without homes on the beach were jealous, and this turned into anger at his privilege. Those who had homes on the beach were angry at him for not cleaning theirs too, or for making theirs look bad by comparison.

He did not know what to do with their anger or their guilt or their mockery, so he withdrew.

---

Occasionally someone would join him on the beach.

Some came from far away and had beaches of their own. They were trying to save their starfish too, and came looking for advice or commiseration or a friendly ear. The man loved these visits, and eagerly shared everything he had learned – for had learned quite a lot over the years: how there were actually multiple species of starfish, and some could survive the sun for longer, and some would move and shelter each other, and some grew into flowers when they died, and a rare few had those beautiful spots that looked like lights in the sun.

Those visits gave the man joy, but they always ended – each visitor had a beach of their own to take care of, after all. They kept in touch with letters, and the man accrued a collection of beloved pen-pals; but letters are a poor substitute for human touch. These missives often left him feeling lonelier than ever.

Sometimes people would come to take pictures of him or write an article about him, full of admiration and approval. Outwardly, he welcomed these visits; he thought publicity might encourage more people to save some starfish themselves. And a small part of him was flattered by the attention. But he mostly dreaded it. Being fawned over left him feeling gross and used. In his darkest times he suspected that putting him on a pedestal just allowed people to feel better while still failing to do anything at all themselves.

He knew this was an uncharitable thought; mostly people were just looking for hope, and he couldn’t begrudge them that. But he still loathed the role he had to play in that cycle.

One day a woman his own age joined him on the beach. She was very pretty, so he was shy and stumbled on his words when trying to talk to her. When she left he thought she wouldn’t come back; most people didn’t. But she did, again and again.

Before long they started conversing properly, sharing thoughts in between throwing starfish.

She was from inland, far from any beaches. She had dreamed of writing, but that had ended when her parents died in the last starfish-caused pandemic (as had his). Instead of turning her grief into hatred of the starfish, as many did, she had vowed to do what she could to help.

“Most people make that vow, but don’t last more than a few days. Saving starfish is tedious and sad and unrewarding,” the man observed. “Why do you keep coming back?”

“Partly because I like talking to you,” she admitted. “But…” she shrugged. “I don’t know. Once I saw the starfish and knew that there was something I could do to help, I couldn’t walk away, could I?”

---

They eventually got married, of course.

---

They agonised about having children, wondering if it was fair or right to bring new life into a world that was getting worse and worse.

But love doesn’t make any more sense than anger does, so they had a son, and then a daughter.

They loved their children more than they thought it possible to love anything, and vowed to do whatever they could to make the world, or at least their part of it, a place worth living in.

---

But adulthood is hard, and the storms and disease just kept getting worse. Even with both the man and woman tending the beach every evening, there were more dead starfish than ever.

They teetered constantly at the edge of exhaustion. The needs of children and jobs and starfish gnawed away at them until sometimes they wondered if there was anything of themselves left.

They told themselves it would be easier when the kids were old enough to help. But neither wanted to burden the kids with a childhood spent picking up starfish, so they kept putting that time off.

Sometimes, out of weariness, one of them skipped the evening starfish run. It didn’t happen often because that just made it worse the next day, and neither of them could bear to give up on the starfish or the home they were trying to create for their kids.

The man stopped corresponding regularly with his far-flung friends; when he did, his missives were short and guilt-ridden, too little and too late, full of apologies and sparse in detail. It was mostly okay because his friends, overwhelmed with their own lives, did the same. But still, connections need nurturing, and in the absence of that, those beloved links became frayed.

He lived in constant pain. Years of bending over to pick up starfish had made him old before his time. His arms and shoulders often felt on fire after an evening on the beach. It was hard to sleep well.

The man spent less time designing things in his head than he used to. He still felt pulses of his old love for building – creating sandcastles with the kids, tinkering in his small workshop late at night when he couldn’t sleep – but more and more that love was tinged with bitterness, because he no longer thought the storms would ever end. And even if they did, he was now too old and too weighed down with commitments to move somewhere else and start from scratch.

Once he designed a starfish-flinging machine in his mind, and even drew up some diagrams for how to put it together. He thought it would work to clear the beaches much faster than people could – if it could be built it might make a real difference, far more than anything he could do now. But for all his natural talent, the man had no actual education in design or engineering, so he second-guessed himself. Plus he had no time to build it, and no materials or tools even if he had time, and no connections to people who could market or test it even if everything else miraculously came together.

So he hid the sketches in the back of his desk and tried not to think about them too much.

---

One evening it all overwhelmed him, and instead of saving starfish the man found himself sitting in silence on the sand, staring at the sun set over the ocean, feeling a sadness deeper than tears.

Is this all there is? he wondered. Just working harder and harder while things get worse and worse?

He heard a step behind him, and his wife sat down next to him. He didn’t look over. Even that small effort felt like too much.

“I’ll be back up to the house in a second,” he said tiredly. “Did you need a hand with the kids?”

“No, they’re fine,” she said. “I just…” she trailed off. He heard a paper wrinkle. “I found this.”

He looked over. She was holding the diagram he’d drawn of the starfish-flinging machine.

He flushed. “Oh, that. It’s nothing.”

“…Is it?”

No, it’s not nothing, it’s everything, it’s my hopes and talents and everything that this terrible world has made me abandon, the man thought. I’m wasting my life throwing starfish into the sea. His voice caught in his throat, and the words didn’t come.

There was a pause, and then she said, “I have a little notebook of my own, you know.”

“You do?”

Her eyes were dark in the setting sun. “It’s embarrassing.”

He felt a rush of love. “You don’t have to feel embarrassed.”

She shrugged. “It’s just, you know… my stupid stories. I only wrote them down so I could get them out of my head. Not to show anybody. Who would want to read them anyway?”

“I would.”

She smiled. “I know.” A sigh. “But there’s no audience besides you. I can’t publish them. Nobody publishes anything fun anymore, it’s all emergencies and plagues and unrest and storms and starfish. And even if I tried, who would read anything I wrote? I’m nobody,” she repeated.

You’re somebody to me, he thought, but he knew that wasn’t the reassurance she was seeking. She was stuck in the same hell he was, and he knew how comfortless that place could be.

“Then I feel bad for feeling bad,” she said, echoing other thoughts he’d had. “We’re so lucky to have this. A house of our own. Two healthy kids. A beach that isn’t great but is a lot better than other places.”

“We’ve worked really hard for all of that.”

“Yeah, we have. But we’re also trapped by it, aren’t we?”

“Yeah.”

The silence this time was longer, and the man felt his despair rising again.

“You know… we could quit.” The words were so quiet they were hardly audible, but they felt like a shout.

We could quit.

We could sell the house, and walk away, and go somewhere inland where the starfish don’t exist and we could pretend that they never did.

For one wild moment, the man thought yes! YES! I want to give up! and he turned to ask his wife what she’d honestly think of that, but then he paused, his eye caught by a sparkle in the sun.

“Oh! It’s a spotted one!” he exclaimed involuntarily. “I haven’t seen one of those in months!”

“The starfish that glimmer in the light?” his wife asked. “Where?”

He pointed with one hand, and with the other clasped hers, so he felt her pulse race once she saw it. Her voice caught. “I had worried that those might have died out,” she whispered. “They’re my favourite.”

“Mine too.” He hugged her.

Another silence. They gazed toward the shifting waves. For some reason, his mind had quieted. The man found himself looking around and noticing things.

“Did you see that group of flowers on the right?” he asked. “They grow from the bodies of the red starfish, I think, as long as there is enough empty beach. And they seem to withstand the storms okay.”

“The kids were playing there the other day,” she said. “They made a giant zoo that contained each of the different species as stand-ins for other animals.”

He squinted. “A zoo? Is that what that lump of sand is?”

He felt her giggle against his side. “Well, in child imagination land it is.”

“Child imagination land is a good place to be, I think.”

She sighed. “I love our kids.”

“I do too. So much.” He paused. “I have to admit, I love those flowers too.”

“Well then we have to also love the red starfish, for making them.”

“Fair enough… And I admit to a soft spot for the big frilly starfish. Every time I see one I think of one of those weird old-fashioned hats and want to put it on my head.”

“Do you? Ha. Well, I have to admit that I love the little starfish with the suckers all over.”

“Those suckers are so irritating!”

“But the fish are incredibly cute.”

“Yes.” He had to smile, then. “Goddammit, I love all of these fucking awful smelly starfish.”

She hugged him. “And I love that about you.”

“Even though it means I’ve trapped you here with me?”

“Did you, though?” she asked. “I chose to be here.”

“You did.” He felt a lightening in his chest, then. “And I guess I chose this too.”

“Even if it’s not what you really wanted?”

The despair nibbled at him again. “It isn’t what I wanted,” he admitted. The words hung in the air, and suddenly he wanted to take them back.

“Actually. I don’t know. Maybe it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well. I didn’t want to spend my life throwing starfish,” he said. “But I did want to be the kind of person who would do that if it was necessary. Actually, I’m not even sure ‘want’ is the right word. I had to be that kind of person in order to be true to myself.”

“Yeah.”

“And – I also wanted respect and love from people who I admire. People like you, people who care, people who do the right thing even when it’s not rewarded.”

“You have that.”

The man nodded, words coming more quickly now. “I didn’t want to numb myself to the world, or spend my days in anger or blame. I didn’t want to have to silence my inner voice, or bear the knowledge that I had turned away from my values.” His voice broke. “I wanted to live meaningfully.”

“I think we’ve done that too.”

“Yeah.”

He rushed on. “I wanted to be a designer, a builder.” The next words felt scraped out of him. “. . . and I’m not, not in the way I dreamed. But – in a way I am maybe? I’m still the kind of person who invents starfish-flinging machines, and refines the design on scraps of paper even if nobody will see it.”

“That’s one of the things I love about you.”

“And I love that you’re the kind of person who has so many stories in her head that she writes them down in a secret notebook that she doesn’t think anybody will ever read.”

She sighed. “Sometimes I ask myself, what’s the point?”

“I think the point is to be that kind of person. To be you. It doesn’t matter what the world does, it doesn’t matter if anybody reads them, it matters that you had them in your head so you wrote them down.”

A long silence fell, broken only by the ceaseless motion of the waves.

“… I guess we’re not quitting then, are we?”

“I don’t think we could bear it.”

They stood together.

“Then let’s go save some starfish.”