As Harris walked back to her desk, she thought about why she had been so eager to connect with this stranger. She had been the only Black woman in her department for so long, as she had often been the only Black girl in her classes growing up in Hamden, Conn. She found her first group of Black female friends in college and has often felt anxious with other Black people about “just not feeling Black enough.”
The beginnings of a story started to form in her mind.
Violent interactions between sharks and humans are exceedingly rare. In 2020, the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File recorded 96 reports of people bitten by sharks worldwide. Of those, 57 were classified as “unprovoked,” which is to say that the people involved were not actively hunting or fishing for the sharks, nor were they attempting to feed or otherwise harass the animals. Ten of last year’s unprovoked attacks proved fatal. Just three of those deaths occurred in the U.S.: one involved a shortboarder off the coast of Maui, while another surfer was killed about 100 yards offshore near Santa Cruz, California. Julie Holowach’s death was the third of these fatal attacks and the first confirmed shark-related death in Maine’s history.
As news of the attack began to spread, both Maine residents and regional scientists were dumbfounded — “blindsided” is how one researcher put it. The day after the attack, Maine Department of Marine Resources commissioner Patrick Keliher told a press conference, “It’s not something we ever would have considered in Maine waters.”
Imagine a sentence as a trampoline. You step onto it, gingerly at first, testing its strength and your own sense of balance. It accommodates your weight, stretching a bit but, with luck, not ripping apart and sending you flailing. You walk, shuffle, slip to the middle, pause, and then flex your knees and push. The trampoline sends you up into the air, but only so far as to match the invitation and risk offered by your knees. You come down and survive. The trampoline offers another launch, and you bend your knees again. Higher, this time. Soon you are happily, gleefully soaring through the air.