IMAGE: Three-Toed Sloth. From the exhibition Amazonia, featuring photography from National Geographic photographer Sam Abell, at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the University of Oregon campus at Eugene in 2010.

The Night the Cruise Ship Caught Fire, I Found Two Three-toed Sloths on the Beach

When  I got there, the waterfront was burning. Ambulances wedged between fire trucks,  and people silhouettes were running with litters in both directions on the long pier. Streams of water shot out over the cruise ship backlit  by the flames and the midnight neon of the city in the distance.

I came up along the shore where bodies rolled like logs in the surf. The surf broke at its crest and hissed up the black sand. A human sized figure struggled to crawl up the beach, but each wave hammered at it, loosening its clawing grip in the sand and sucking it back to sea.

I ran down to see if I could help, and it was then I saw the baby with its almost human face crying just out of the struggling parent’s weak grasp. I grabbed the baby creature just under his armpits and dragged him up above the surfline. Mother would be dangerous, I knew, so I found a 10 foot length of bull kelp and threw one end to her. I stood on the other end, heavy enough to steady it. She used her three long toes to drag herself up above the breaking waves.

The baby clung to his mother’s chest, human and yet not human. I stood back as the two of them disappeared into the heavy grass and sheltering complexity of the dunes.

I should call the zoo, I thought, but in a dream, you let the creatures that emerge from the sea escape into the dark outside the over bright circle of noise and lights cast by the fire, the ambulance, the big water trucks, and the burning ship.