The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils
Burnt green, and blue, and white."
-- From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Any marine biologist will tell you that the haunting, blue-green light illuminating the breakers from inside is just the response of certain microscopic organisms to the agitation of being tossed into the air and dumped on a beach. They even have a fifty-dollar word for it, "bioluminescence."
As far as I'm concerned, though, it is magic.
The fireworks have been especially brilliant lately, particularly last Friday night.
As each wave would roll in toward the beach, the glow would flicker from one end of the foamy crest to the other, looking much like lightning in a cloud.
Its color was an ethereal sort of blue-green-aquamarine, almost too faint to see in the city lights.
It was, in fact, easy to mistake for the reflection of the mercury-vapor street lights on the foam, until you got away from the lights.
Along the dark stretches of the Gulf, the glow was unmistakable and beautiful. A pair of wide-field binoculars trained over the water revealed that the peak of each wave and swell as far as the horizon was smoldering greenly.
This could not be the mindless reaction to a stimulus .by a batch of microbes, no matter how numberless. It has to be sorcery, spun by the spirits that every seaman, from Coleridge's ancient mariner to today's tankerman, has known to inhabit the depths.
They: are the same gods of the sea responsible for stoking St. Elmo's fire, sailing the Flying Dutchman, and singing the mermaid's song.
They have many names -- Poseidon, Neptune, the Sirens, Davey Jones --and they light up the waves on certain dark nights of the year just to let us of the land know they are out there.
Who can observe the unearthly green fire and not be transfixed by it? Can you easily dismiss it as a swarm of sea bugs?
Is it any wonder the sea is the source of so much romance and folklore?
