Why we believe in kelp.

We rang in 2020 with two very dear friends, joking and dreaming around the brunch table about one day starting our own kelp farm. In those coldest, darkest days of the new year, I'd pack the kids' lunches and send them out the door to school. Then I’d settle in and start making one lonely dead-end phone call after the next. Sometimes, when I had the good fortune of reaching someone on the other end, we'd start talking. I’d explain that we lived in Brooklyn, our backgrounds in engineering and early childhood… but we were really passionate about kelp- hoping that the enthusiasm in my voice could somehow make up for the lacking in having precisely zero authority about aquaculture. The response was always of the same strain, patient and friendly: "Don't quit your day job." Helpful, pragmatic. The kids would come home and I’d rinse out their lunch boxes for another day.

I'd ask Justin- who do we think we are to be doing this?, incredulous of my own audacity to imagine myself as anyone who had a place in this kind of industry, despite wanting so badly to make change in this way. He was equally incredulous by my self-doubt: why wouldn't we be the ones to do this? So I kept calling.

I found myself on Friday, the 13th of March, unable to send the kids out the door to school. Lunch boxes waiting hopefully by the door, fully packed. It felt as though the universe had sent us all to our rooms, asking us to think about what we've done. We loaded up the car for Long Island later that week, sirens heard up and down the streets, thinking that maybe we'd be gone a week. We never went back.

The universe wasn't done with us. We had 200 pounds of sugar kelp hanging in our front yard 6 weeks later.

Rain came the second night of our first batch. We had tried throughout the day under the sun to separate all of the innermost blades of every bunch, still stubbornly, freshly wet. At one point, I stood between the rows of kelp, still cool from the depths, pressing my burned arms into the rows.

What had dried then started to regain its moisture by the end of the day as the weather rolled in. Sugar kelp used to be what fishermen would use to predict rain- they'd nail it to a wall as a forecaster. When it softened, they'd know rain was on the way.

We found ourselves shoving loads of kelp into our own clothes dryer late into the night. Like new parents trying to get our footing, we were eager to try anything that might work- logic and reason and protocol to the wind. There was no protocol, really. I thought back to our days of living in California, two-stepping around the living room to some old country music with our newborn son, wondering if or where I'd ever land on the other side of the unknown that I found myself in now.

I felt the universe watching curiously and amused over our shoulders as we cleaned thousands of tiny mussels and krill from the lint catch.

Emily, 6 weeks, and Justin. Amagansett, 2015

Kelp grows at a furious pace- some species up to 24 inches in one day. It swallows our decades of poor judgment as a human collective- absorbing nitrogen, phosphorous, carbon dioxide from our seas and atmosphere. it's part of the underwater ecosystem of algae- Earth's second lung- more powerful and efficient than forests on land. it welcomes in sea life among its blades that are seeking refuge from warming, acidification, dwindling diversity. It absorbs the shock of ever-worsening storms on our coastlines. Then, in what almost feels a dig to humanity, it gives us omega 3s as a parting gift wrapped around our forks so that our brains might begin to work a little better than they have at solving the problems we face.

The effectiveness and pure vastness of this underwater structure is a true marvel- and all but forgotten by most. And we don't even know what we don't know yet.

The next day, after the rain had cleared, I found myself trying to decipher the code stamped into some of the blades that we accidentally blistered by soaking it in a pot of fresh water. It had absorbed pockets of my mistake, forming a brilliant display that I couldn't make out- beautiful enough for me to question whether it was a mistake at all.

If 2020 has taught us anything, it's that we don't know anything about anything- that the empty eye of the unknown is the only place we can expect to find our peace- and that it's well past time to reckon with what the universe already knows is ahead.

Emily's discarded art scrap from a project she handed me in late March 2020- in the quiet eye of the unknown

Don't Quit Your Day Job