On my lunch breaks at the New York Aquarium, I went to the isolation tank. The sharks, rays, and turtles were fed at around noon every day, in a big gray box of a building that was closed to the public. I’d slurp down whatever I’d brought from home and run to the upper deck to sit on the outer edge of the pool, arriving with the other interns and the trainers, who toted metal buckets smelling of fish blood.
The shark trainer lowered a pole speared with capelin into the water, and the sand tiger sharks started to circle, pulling off fish with big jerks of their heads. To the side, the nurse sharks ate squid and capelin from metal tongs that they long before bent with the rounded portals of their mouths. The loggerhead sea turtles — their names were Red, Yellow, and Blue — and the hawksbill sea turtle, Lucy, snapped their beaks at squid held above their heads. The main event came when several trainers lowered a stretcher, with its metal frame and black, billowing net, to the bottom of the tank. Ray Charles, the southern roughtail ray, nosed up to it before sliding in her whole body, which was several feet in diameter. The keepers pulled her to the surface, and from gloved hands fed her fish, clams, and squid as she splashed in the last few feet of water.
Then the feed was over — my lunch and their lunch. The humans left ISO, as we called it, and returned to their regular jobs. For the trainers, this meant prepping food and teaching the animals new behaviors; for interns like me, it meant scrubbing algae or hosing down the feed room. The animals sunk back into the depths of the tank, like coins to the bottom of a wishing well.
There was another, less trafficked door to the isolation tank on the lower level of the building. On a new assignment, I pushed the door open and it released with juddering squishes into a dark room with no stairs and no windows to the outside. The room felt like a submarine. Most of it was filled by one half-moon of the ISO tank, set in concrete. This huge cylinder of water cooled and moistened the air in the room around it, a balm after hours on the scorching asphalt of New York City summers. A hose was attached to the wall for easy cleanup jobs, next to various knobs and handles painted bright red. There was a drain cut into the floor at a slight dip to avoid standing water. Water heaters and coolers and distillers lined the room, filling the air with mechanical sounds. In the center of the space was a single white plastic lawn chair.
Once the door shut behind me, the only source of light in the room was the giant window cut into the tank, which turned everything blue. The glass was several inches thick and distorted at the sides, but when I pulled the lawn chair right up to the curve of the glass and sat down, I could see straight inside. There were the turtles blowing bubbles at the surface. Ray Charles and the nurse sharks were sleeping in piles, their tails twitching and blowing up puffs of sand. The sand tiger sharks dominated the middle of the tank, sweeping the water in circle after circle. When I looked at the sharks, a sense of deep, deep silence swallowed up every sound.
I stared at them for a while, then took out a field notebook and a pen. A shark keeper named Nicole had instructed me to create an ethogram — a behavioral log — for the inhabitants of the tank. In the trailers that filled the back of the aquarium parking lot— what the employees called “the cottages” — I had spent many hours of my internship on an old Dell laptop with sticky keys, looking up scientific articles that detailed the behavior of these animals: a 1974 article that diagnosed the activities of a colony of ten bonnet-head sharks; a 2014 study of the foraging behavior of hawksbill turtles; the pre-copulatory behavior of sand tiger sharks recorded by a group of researchers at Oceanworld Manly, Sydney in 1993. I needed to know what to expect from the creatures in front of me.
Looking out at the rectangle of water framed in concrete, I tried to take notes on everything the animals did: the sea turtles’ intimidation tactics, the stingray’s Spiderman-like wall crawls, the nurse sharks’ pulses of breath as they lay on the sand. All these I recorded, but my attention always snapped to the sand tiger sharks that circled the middle of the tank. Their bodies were long, with characteristic fins: one, two, three on each side of the body, two straight up like sails on their spines, and the long triangles of their tails. Their backs sloped upward at an extreme angle. They would be hunchbacks if they walked on land with those spines, but the water supported them, lifted them.
They knew I was there. As soon as I sat down, the sharks — at first striated through the depths of the tank — came together at the level of the window. They took their time getting there, but at some point they all converged in front of me.
I knew they were coming when a pointed, gray snout nosed into the frame, approaching from the curve of the concrete wall beyond where I could see. Then came the slits of nostrils, followed by the teeth. Teeth are usually the first thing people see when they look at sharks — especially sand tigers, whose snaggleteeth project every which way like they’ve had dental surgery gone wrong. The sand tiger shark’s mouth is usually open, too — that’s the other thing that makes fear bubble up in peoples’ stomachs like soda — as if they were poised to bite, jaw cocked and ready for the chomp. (The real explanation is less sinister: these sharks are “ram ventilators” — one of the ways they breathe is to swim with their mouths open, which pushes water through their gills.) Distracted by the mouth and the teeth, what people don’t notice are the sharks’ eyes.
The eyes are where the magic of the shark happens. The sand tiger shark’s eye, once it appeared in the window, was level with my own. She might have been suspended in water, I might have been sitting in a chair, and there might have been a barrier thick as a textbook between us, but at some point our eyes met. Hers were large as quarters and slightly more oval. The iris was gold and pierced through the middle by a pit of black. These eyes would not immediately call forth the word “beauty” from most people’s lips. They bulged slightly out of the shark’s gray skin. They shifted back and forth, the strong muscles beneath turning their focus ahead, then back to me. But something moved behind them. She was there, and I was here, and those eyes were looking into mine. Some message passed between us. It was indefinable, unreliable, static-y radio blur, but something happened.
And then she swam on, with a swish of her tail, and the moment was gone.
Sharks bring me peace when nothing else does. When a whirlwind of anxieties creeps up on me, thinking about sharks lulls me to sleep and helps banish my fears. Day to day, I carry them with me as emblems: carved on necklaces, embroidered on my socks, and stuck to the back of my laptop. Sharks are quiet and shy, fearsome and odd. They are something like me.
As a child, I ran up to dogs on the street and danced impatiently until their owners said I could pet them. In elementary school, my sister acquired a garden snake named Eliza who we kept in a tank in the laundry room of our New York City apartment. After arriving home from a half-day of preschool, I watched Eliza as she dozed on the rocks of her tank but flew from the room when my mother dumped live crickets into her cage and the massacre began. My sister took no pleasure in the crickets’ deaths, but she knew what had to be done. In the evenings, she took up space at the kitchen table with her schoolwork, and I with my toys, before they were cleared away and forkfuls of salmon were shoved in our mouths.
The death of animals was my introduction to the larger concept of mortality. My family spent every summer on an evergreen island surrounded by smooth rocks called North Haven, off the coast of Maine. I saw the chalky shadows of sea stars that had dried to death on our dock. I saw the broken pieces of crab shell where gulls had dropped them from a height, killing them and cracking them open in one motion, in order to slurp up the meat inside. A decapitated seal washed up on the beach, cut to pieces by the whirling blades of a propeller motor.
Lobster boats trundled by, billowing smoke and trailing a flock of seagulls while hauling traps to and from the cold harbor, always following the movement of their quarry. Sometimes the lobstermen, sunburnt and smiling, delivered their catch right to our dock. The rubber-banded, clicking masses ended up in a floating box tied to the dock to keep fresh until dinner. My friend Ellen and I would pull up the box and stare at the lobsters running over each other; I grabbed them by the shell while Ellen backed away. I took great pleasure in pointing out the “swimmerets” — feathery on females and hard and bony on males — that the local lobstermen had taught me to identify. Later we dunked them in boiling water, turning them bright red. When they stopped moving, we ate their meat with butter, as the people of North Haven Island had for generations.
But amid all of this purported affection for nature, I had a secret: I was afraid of sharks. Summer after summer I sat on the splintery dock, watching the waves with apprehension. The water was so deep and dark and full of life that the rays of sunlight barely penetrated. Ellen and I sat there on huge, colorful towels, eating chips and drinking soda as the sun stung our pale backs. When we could no longer stand the heat, we would challenge each other to jump into the water. I usually went first. After a leap of courage and a pulse of my legs, there was a brief moment in the air as the ocean rose up at me when I was afraid. Then the water hit me so hard and cold it made my lungs seize. (The ocean in Maine can reach temperatures as low as 50 degrees Fahrenheit in early summer.) I broke the surface, gasping. Then I looked down, and all I could see below me was green. I imagined huge, unknown sharks floating up from the depths to snatch at my legs, and swam hard for the slimy, seaweed-covered ladder at the side of the dock, where I hauled myself up as quickly as I could, shivering.
Back in the house, I snuck downstairs to covertly read up on shark attacks in the Maine area. I tapped my leg against the desk and waited for our ancient desktop computer to load. A quick search later, I found the International Shark Attack File, with statistics dating back a hundred years, and discovered that only one shark attack had occurred in Maine’s history up until that point, and it had not been fatal (many years later, in 2020, a great white shark killed a woman swimming near Portland, breaking both records). I read that great whites were uncommon in the prohibitively cold Maine waters. I tried to comfort myself with this fact. Every time I braced myself to jump off the dock, I was convinced that this time, I would not be afraid. But then I’d hit the water, and images of sharks would flood my brain. I’d clenched my legs closer to my body. Remembering the story my sister told me so nonchalantly about capsizing her sailboat in the thoroughfare between the islands, and spotting a gray fin only feet from her, I’d make for the ladder with gasps and flailing limbs, counting myself lucky when I emerged.
Then, when I was about six, Ellen and I found the DVD of Jaws in my parents’ dusty collection. Over the next two hours, and between bites of chocolate peanut butter cookies, we watched the great white shark rolling over in the water as he attacked a boy on a yellow raft. We screamed as a dismembered, bloody leg fell to the ocean floor and watched with admiration as Roy Scheider’s cigarette quivered on his lip: “You’re going to need a bigger boat.”
I was scared. The dark of the basement seemed overly cold and menacing, and I nearly ran for cover when, onscreen, an eyeless corpse popped through a hole in the bottom of the boat. But over the course of the movie, the killer morphed from a nameless fear into something much more solid, physical, visible: a shark. The more the shark appeared, the less afraid I felt. It wasn’t some uncontrollable, untraceable thing, but a being that could be studied, that could be understood. The more I came to put a face to the fear, the more fascinated I became, and the less afraid I was. I still got jitters, but I found myself turning towards the face in the depths, rather than away from it.
My mother told me that many people who watched Jaws were too afraid to go into the water for months or even years afterward. I wanted to prove that I was braver than they were — like Quint or Brody or Hooper. The next day, I padded down to the beach in my flip-flops, our dogs panting at my side. I don’t know if my mom was there to watch me swim; in my memory, I was alone, but perhaps I remember it that way because in that moment I felt so much myself. As I neared the tide, I threw off my shoes and stepped into the water. It was as cold as always, but I forced my feet further in, my toes slipping over mussel shells and shale, until my hips were immersed. I closed my eyes for a second, steeling myself for the unknown, and dived. The water caved over my head, but I came up laughing. I still jumped when the seaweed tickled my back, but here I was, in the water. It was as though I had beaten Jaws.
I wanted to know more about this “rogue shark.” I wanted to know more about the great white.
Two years later, the year I turned eight, was when death became real to me. It was the year that my sister, feeling depressed and isolated, swallowed an entire bottle of pills. For that day, and perhaps a few days afterward, my brain stopped making memories. There are fragments that float to the surface. The doctor telling us she might have ruined her kidneys forever. The image of a scene I hadn’t actually witnessed: the plastic pill bottle falling from my sister’s limp hands and clattering to the tile floor. The blur of an ambulance ride. The clearest memory I have is from a few weeks later: I am doing homework by my sister’s hospital bed, she in her hospital gown, my uniform still on from the school day.
That year, we celebrated her fourteenth birthday in the hospital. We bought balloons from the gift shop and tied them around the crooks of the beeping machines attached to her, and nurses joined us as we sang “Happy Birthday.” I don’t remember if my sister smiled, if she enjoyed her party. I mostly remember eating a hospital hot dog. At some point, she was moved to the long-term ward, where she wrote pages and pages of sad poetry from her plastic-smelling bed.
When my sister finally came home, we had to take all the knives out of the kitchen. For a while, we used only forks and spoons. And then she left again, in and out of boarding schools and a “wellness center,” and I was alone with my parents.
I abandoned my thoughts of ponies, mermaids, and Barbies. Real life had cut all my dolls to pieces. Without my sister, the house was eerily quiet. Late at night, I would listen to my parents’ concerned murmurs through their bedroom door and tell myself I would not add to the stress of our household. I tried not to make noise. I became quieter and quieter, wrapped inside myself.
My mother noticed. When she first sent me to Dr. Lila, I refused to talk, so she laid out stacks of paper and colored pencils on a glass table in front of me. For session upon session, I drew. And the main thing I drew, over and over again, was an underwater glass house. There was a tube containing a ladder that connected me to the surface, but the rest of my house was far below. From my bedroom in this house I could look through the glass at dolphins and turtles and feel peaceful.
Three years later, my parents split up. In the fallout, my sister went to live with my father. I stayed with my mother, who was heartbroken. I tried to comfort her, but by now all I knew was how to be quiet.
The more I learned about the world of humans — the pain they can cause each other, the fighting and the guilt — the more I turned to sharks. I caught a Shark Week special depicting the rash of shark attacks in the summer of 1916 that had inspired Jaws. I watched eyewitness videos and documentaries about marine biologists. I grew on a diet of encyclopedias and books filled with Latin names and anatomically correct illustrations of sharks.
Sound travels differently through water than it does through air, and sharks make very little noise. They can hear, but they also rely on their sense of smell to guide them, and on how they feel the water change around them. Great whites travel thousands of miles through unchanging sea before they ever see another of their kind. From the human perspective, they are lonely, but it is these sharks’ modus operandi to be alone. That suited me.
Sharks, I saw, were unfairly maligned. They were misunderstood, called “man-eaters,” when humans were really the consumers, the butchers who cut off their fins and watched them drown. Most shark attacks result from people provoking the sharks, pulling their tails or disturbing them in their repose. I learned the statistics and started quoting them at people wherever I went: On average, there are sixteen shark attacks in the United States per year, with only one fatality for every two of those years.
I brought up sharks in everyday conversation. Over dinner, a friend of my mother’s might ask me what my favorite animal was, just trying to make small talk with a kid.
“Sharks,” I would say.
“Really? Why?” came the usual response, the concerned adult craning down to look at me.
“Did you know that more people are crushed by vending machines than are killed in shark attacks?”
Sharks are quiet, almost polite, just minding their own business when violence thrusts them out of the water. I wanted justice for them. So in high school I read Fast Food Nation and abstained from lobster. I researched the circumstances around shark attacks for a high school paper. I looked for any opportunity to be around them and to tell the unsuspecting humans what I had learned. It was far easier than trying to get some kind of justice for myself while my family was splashing around, trying not to drown in their own lives.
I learned that sharks’ sense of touch is dual: they detect pressure changes in the water, as well as spurts of electrical charge. A shark’s nose is where the ampullae of Lorenzini are — pores filled with gel that help the shark detect changes in electrical currents in the water, like the thrashing of a fish at the surface. (In the unlikely event that a shark attacks you, this is why some people say you should punch it in the nose.) Sharks, like other fish, also have lateral lines, a system of tubes and sensory cells just beneath the skin that detect changes in the water pressure around them. If you move the water anywhere near a shark, they’ll know.
The shark that allows you to touch it is rare. Typically they shy away, protecting their vulnerable eyes, defending the sensitive pores on their noses. It’s possible to force it: you can restrain a shark, hold it thrashing against you, and try to dominate its thick gray body. If you manage to flip a shark onto its back, you might be able to bring it to a state of “tonic,” a hypnosis where its whole body goes still, and its muscles relax under your hands like they have been injected with a paralytic.
Occasionally, a shark comes to the touch willingly. In the shark exhibit at the New York Aquarium, there is a huge glass tunnel, the first thing guests pass through on their way into the building. One of the tunnel tank’s biggest residents is a white tip reef shark named Vanna White. She’s part of a group of sharks known as “requiem sharks,” which includes many of the big name sharks with gray skin and big teeth, the ones people think about when they hear the word “shark”: tiger sharks, bull sharks, blue sharks. Vanna has a long, slender body, smaller than you might expect, and white tips on her dorsal fins as though they have just been daubed with chalky paint. Every day, the keepers lure her and the other sharks onto a stretcher for feedings, so they’ll have positive associations, like food, with the white canvas bag when the time comes for blood draws or annual physicals. Andrea, a shark keeper with a bouncy, chestnut ponytail, told me that, one day, she noticed Vanna looking up at her, pausing before she left the stretcher. Andrea tentatively reached down to stroke Vanna’s back, fully prepared for a bite in retaliation. But Vanna didn’t bite. She only waited until Andrea’s hand left her back, then swam on. Months later, Vanna regularly swims up underneath Andrea’s hands during feeds, and Andrea can coax her out of corners when no one else can. Vanna will allow no one but Andrea to touch her.
When I was sixteen, I traveled halfway across the world to study sharks in Fiji. My parents and I had found the month-long program for students my age, which included a college-level course in shark biology and an accreditation in advanced open-water diving, while searching for something shark-related to occupy my summer. My parents probably found it strange, but they never discouraged me from my “shark thing.” I had become the shark girl, and it was time, finally, to get into the water with them.
Though I was eager to go, I hesitated: My aunt Katy had been diagnosed with cancer, and it was getting worse. Katy had always been my refuge within my dad’s family, someone I could count on, who truly saw me. She called me “baby cakes” until I was about six, and I told her I wasn’t a baby anymore. So she switched to “big girl cakes.” At holidays she beckoned me into her kitchen to mix crepes or chop up bread. We watched The Princess Bride and Roman Holiday while sipping diet cokes and dunking pita chips in hummus. She loved me at a time when I was desperate to be loved.
A few weeks before my flight, I helped my dad move Katy to a new hospital room with a garden view. She had lost the wiry, red hair that had kinked wildly in every direction. Lying in bed, she took my hand. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Someone has to study the sharks.” She smiled and told me to go. When I looked back, she was staring out the window, dappled light playing on her skin as she gazed at the cherry blossoms.
Two long plane rides later, I was floating above a coral reef, an air-filled vest buoying my body as I waited for the other divers to “giant-stride” into the water – native Fijian divers, eager teenagers from all over America, a diving instructor to help us achieve higher certification, and a shark biology graduate student to lead us through our studies. Somewhere just below me was a herd of the creatures I had read about for so long: bull sharks. They are third on the list of “man-eaters,” a fact I had neglected to tell my mother before leaving. It had been so long since my gasping dives into the Maine waters that I was surprised to find the fears of my six-year-old self with me again.
The shark team gave the signal to dive, and under we went. I fell through the depths, not quite drowning, not quite breathing, with the unearthly combination of weightiness and lightness of body as the water consumed me. Far below, sweeping up from an underworld I didn’t recognize, I saw them: gray sharks, bigger than any I had ever seen before, circling the sandy bottom along the crusts of a coral reef. They were bulky around the middle, the club bouncers of the shark world – hence the name “bull sharks.” Their mouths were closed, teeth retracted, and they practiced sharp turns as we came to rest in front of them. Sunlight rippled through the water and mottled their skin. The shark divers started throwing out fish heads from a huge bin floating far above us. More and more sharks came, whipping around faster in preparation for their feed. I smiled into my regulator.
For the rest of the dives that summer, a subdued fear sometimes rippled in my belly. But fear and awe are close cousins. At one point a decapitated fish head floated toward me, getting closer and closer, until a big gray body rose up and over me, just feet away from my head, to snatch it from its free fall. I was too amazed to be afraid. I had traveled all this way to confirm that I still loved the sharks when they were close enough to kill me.
A few weeks later, I was sitting on the patio of a house in the city of Suva, which I shared with eleven other high school students, when my dad called. After days of losing speech and consciousness, Katy had died.
I cried until the sun went down and my eyes felt too puffy to close. The next day, they still ached. But somehow I found my rubber boots on the metal floor of the dive boat and got underwater. The bull sharks loomed up at me; they were still there, still beautiful to me. They glided through the water, all their energies focused on survival. I watched them through my goggles, thinking of Katy. I felt suspended, in every way, in a realm other than my own. This is what Katy had wanted for me.
The summer before I went to college, I took a boat trip to the Bahamas with my father and my stepmother. On one of our scuba dives, a reef shark that looked something like Vanna White swam up below us. I stilled myself, letting my initial fear and surprise wash over me and ebb away. Agitation would either drive the shark away or bring it toward us. My stepmother was next to me; she was afraid of underwater creatures, always careful to take off her jewelry whenever we went into the water, in case a flash of light attracted them. She grasped my hands, turning her body away from the shark as I turned toward it. We stayed there suspended, staring at the shark. It made a tight turn a few feet from us and swam back across the reef in the other direction. My heart was beating fast, but I wasn’t looking for an escape; I just wanted to stay there and keep watching it.
A few days later we were anchored, and my father and stepmother were practicing dive techniques on the sandy bottom of the harbor with their instructor. Certified two years before, I was on the deck of the boat’s swim ladder, waiting for them to return. The sun was low, and in my reflection on the water, I noticed a dark shape just below the surface. I grabbed my snorkel mask and dipped my face in. Two nurse sharks were circling the propellers of the boat.
Nurse sharks are gentle giants, fish up to ten feet long with skin that ranges from tan to purple and broad heads with fleshy projections like catfish. They will bite down hard when annoyed, but they spend most of the daylight hours lying in piles on the ocean floor, just breathing.
The nurse sharks below me then seemed particularly interested in the bottom of the boat. I grabbed my snorkel and fins and jumped in the water to watch their investigations. When I swam out above them, they didn’t shy away. They moved sinuously below me, circling each other, then floating away, their bodies moving in great curves.
I gathered my breath and dived down as far as I could. Again, the sharks did not swim away. They lifted their heads toward me, their yellow and brown bodies rising in the water. I couldn’t hold my breath for long, and soon I had to catapult back to the surface. The sharks, in turn, fell back through the water. I dived again and again, propelling myself deeper until my eardrums groaned under the pressure and then squeaked when I rose. On one dive, the yellower of the two nurse sharks, flanked by two striped cleaner fish called remoras, nosed up close to me so that her snout was only feet from my hands. She paused for a second, like a dog sniffing for food. I had to resurface for air before diving again. This time I stretched out a hand, tentatively. The gray one came up to me first, this time. I ran my hand over its body, the skin rough like sand paper. Then the yellow shark allowed my fingers to trace the curve of its head. I held my breath until my lungs were screaming. I had touched two living sharks, two embodied mysteries.
Years later, I still don’t know why they let me touch them. It’s a philosophical problem — the problem of other minds. I can never be sure what the sharks were thinking, or if they were thinking at all. Part of me suspects they had been fed by previous snorkelers, and were used to human divers in the water. They might have been searching for food in my hands. Another part of me thinks back to when I was a chubby child in a frilly bathing suit on the beach, imagining I could conduct the swelling of the waves, their crash on the sand the result of the flicking of my little fingers. When I touched those sharks, it was as though the ocean had risen up to meet me.
Late in the summer that I worked at the New York Aquarium, I hopped into a fisherman’s boat off the coast of Fire Island and puttered out to the ocean to help one of the shark trainers tag local sand tigers for research purposes. After hours of waiting for evidence of sharks, we found ourselves in the elbow of the island when finally, one of our lines jerked.
The boat captain thrust a fishing pole into my hands and pushed me into a chair in the middle of the deck. Just like Quint aboard the Orca in Jaws, I pulled and released the winch until the shark breached the surface: a small, gray sand tiger shark, thrashing, hooked in the side of the jaw. The others pulled her from the water and tied her to a cleat. She was a juvenile female-a wild shark, flesh and blood, below our hands, tied to our boat, real as the sharks in ISO but with no glass to separate us. The vet cut a slice in her abdomen to insert an identifying tag and tied up the wound with three quick knots of blue twine. I watched as they worked. Her round, yellow eyes stared up at me with the same vigilance as a cat’s, jerking side to side as we moved about her.
We were tagging her to help us understand her, to help her. But when I saw a bit of her blood wisp away into the water, I found that I was afraid — afraid that she was afraid, and that I had caused that fear. When it was time to let her go, the hook was lodged too deeply in her throat to pull out, so we cut the line instead. The shark raced off into the green depths, her wiggling tail the last thing we saw before she disappeared.
The next week, when I took my usual seat before the ISO window, my long-held feeling of wonder was paired with something else. Staring into the eyes of the sand tiger sharks before me, I saw the same eyes as the juvenile female we had released into the wild — eyes that held the same beauty, the same curiosity or fear that I had seen out on the bay.
I had spent so long defending sharks, fighting my own fear and trying to get close to them, that I had stopped seeing them for what they were: creatures that existed and lived and thrived beyond anything I could imagine, anything I could project or create in my head. It was impossible to reconcile, this idea that what they wanted most from me was what I sought in them: to escape.