Tadpoles and Pandemic Hope

I sit on the rocks next to the young artist. Waves from open water slap the rock and lick at our feet, and a northwest wind tears at my hair, little wisps of blonde catching in my eyelashes. 

On our way out, we passed an older woman with expensive looking paints and pencils, sketching the waves on black breakwater basalt. “I guess that’s why they call it Artist’s Point,” the teacher said. 

I’ve come down to the water with the 5th grade class I’ve been helping with math as an Americorps tutor during the COVID school year. I’d moved up here both on a whim and out of desperation—I couldn’t find another job quickly in a pandemic. In March when it all happened, I’d been sent home from living abroad unexpectedly. I’d been able to find seasonal work as an outdoors guide, but no other leads. The school during a pandemic was a lonely and frustrating place, for the students and teachers both. 

In a perfect world, I would’ve worked with more than 15 different students. Instead, I worked with nine, dropping steadily from 15 throughout the school year, as parents pulled their kids out early, or kids stopped showing up entirely. I felt useless. The winters here are long. I almost quit once or twice a week. But I stayed.

It’s a hot day in late May with a wicked northwest wind blowing down over the ridge, and I am out with the 5th grade class looking for tadpoles in tidepools. We find them, and crowd around the edges of still water and algae. Hundreds of tiny tadpoles spring to life, out from under the rocks, tiny slick bodies scattered and little ripples across the surface of the pool shatter the reflections of faces of the maskless fifth graders. 

“Miss Maddy—can I just call you Maddy?”

“Sure,” I say. It’s the end of the school year, I won’t be back as a teacher next year. I worked hard to establish a working friendship with these girls, teaching math but also letting them know I was a person they could talk to about the pandemic. They spent a whole year being told by everyone how badly they were falling behind. I decided early on, during my second session with one of them, that I was not going to be another one of those people.

“Doesn’t the water look like blood here?”

“Yeah, it is kind of red. Do you know why?”

She smirked. She has long blonde hair she straightens every day, and frequent eye rolls. It took a long time for her to want to work with me at all, but now that the year was ending and she didn’t know when she’d see me next, she warmed up quickly. 

“Did you wash your sweater in it?”

I smile. “No. I think it’s from the plant roots. It’s called tannins. Like tea leaves staining the water.”

“Hm,” she says, uninterested, and walks away. I can never tell if 5th graders were always like that, wrapped up in their own worlds, or if we’re all like that now. Living behind cloth masks and plexiglass must have entrenched everyone further into their own little realities. 

I’m left alone with the tadpoles and tannins and walk instead to a rocky ledge where I see the young Artist sitting alone, drawing quietly in her notebook.

“What are you drawing?” I ask as I walk over.

“The sea,” she gestures to the expanse in front of her. 

Once, frustrated, I told her not to draw while we were doing math. “You can draw after we finish this problem.” 

She’d rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. By the time I’d circled back from the other student to check on her, her eyes were red and puffy. I felt horrible. What did it really matter if she drew during her thirty-minute math session? 

“It’s beautiful,” I say now. “You’re really talented.”

“Thanks,” she says. “Did you know my birthday is tomorrow?”

“I did know that. Can I sit with you?”

“You can,” she says. I dangle my feet over the ledge. A wave crashes on the breakwater rock, a tiny rainbow in the sea spray. 

“Have you ever seen a whale out here?” I ask. 

She crinkles her nose. “There are no whales on Lake Superior.”

I grin, straining just a little to hear her over the crash of the waves on rock. “You’re right.”

“I’ve seen a whale though.”

“Oh yeah?”

“In California. Have you ever seen dolphins?”

“I have, once or twice. In North Carolina.”

“I like dolphins.”

“Me too.”

“I don’t like boats though.”

“Your sister told me the same thing yesterday. Why’s that?”

“They make me sick. And nervous.”

“I guess that makes sense. I like boats. I just don’t like being under the water. Like snorkeling. I don’t like snorkeling.”

“I’ve never been snorkeling. What’s the coolest sea creature you’ve ever seen?” The Artist asks me, still sketching. 

“Hmm… I think a sea turtle.”

“I like turtles. I like tortoises. They’re so old.”

“Well, what about the young ones? They have to be babies at some time, right?” 

She sets down her pencil and looks at me and grins. “Those must be extra cute.”

I smile, squinting to see her against the bright noon light. “How old will you be tomorrow?” I ask. 

“Eleven,” she answers. 

I nod. “That’s a good age. I think you’re going to like it.”

We sit in the sun, down by the water and talk about sea creatures, and the places we’ve both been from before pandemic times, and the places we will go one day again, when we can. The wind bends the tops of the boreal trees, and pulls at our hair, and waves crash.

“I’m jealous. I’ve never seen a whale before,” I said. 

 She thumbs through her sketchbook. “You will.”

“Oh yeah?” I grin.

“Yeah,” She says. “You just will. And my tortoise?” 

“What about it?” I ask. 

“Say I’ll see it.”

“You’ll see your tortoise,” I say. 

The Artist returns to her drawing, and we sit side by side in silence until it’s time to leave. The next day she turns eleven, and I leave the school for the last time, and we all return to our separate realities.

One day she’ll see her tortoise, and travel the world, and swim with sea creatures, and draw them all, but she doesn’t need me to wish that for her. 

Madeline Marquardt is a writer, photographer, and paddler currently based in Grand Marais, Minnesota. She has worked as a sea kayaking guide in the Apostle Islands, English teacher in Armenia, and paddled and hiked extensively throughout the Lake Superior Region and state of Michigan. You can find her at madelinemarquardt.com, where she writes about the outdoors and adventure travel.