A manatee looks like every animal I have ever tried to make with play-dough: roll a big piece into a sausage, flatten a bit on either side with your forefingers and a bit at the end with your thumb. Hey presto. A manatee also happens to be the grey of all play-dough colours mixed together.
Imagine eating lettuce underwater: the crunch, the squelch. Reading about manatees, I finally give in and look up what the word “prehensile” actually means, as in a giraffe’s prehensile tongue, a monkey’s prehensile tail, a manatee’s prehensile lips. What could these things have in common, you wonder, for 25 years. Then it is time to find out.
It means they can hold, manipulate or grasp things.
My prehensile mind struggles to fold itself around the shape of a manatee: I have only ever seen them in videos, where they seem to be forever filmed in pieces, revealing themselves frame by frame this way, squashing their noses against glass that way. And eating lettuce, forever eating lettuce.
Their skin seems to scar like play-dough too: propeller cuts that look like indentations made by giant fingernails.
Manatees don’t have incisors or canines, only “cheek teeth”. No hair, only whiskers. Algae growing on their backs. Everything is gentle. They can’t turn their heads sideways: they have too few vertebrae. Everything moves as one.
In A Father’s Work is Never Done, a poem by Nathan Hoks, his father “devised this plan, we’ll stand on our heads and let the ocean wash over us. / The ocean will be a tub of mint tea. / The ocean will make the sound of a tuba and be filled with manatees”. Herman Melville, in Moby-Dick, describes so-called “pig-fish” as “a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay”.
What do they sound like? Tubas? No, they squeak and squeal. It makes no sense, and maybe that is part of the peace they seem to offer. Everything is a mess but manatees are a simple, if weird, shape. They seem to occur in videos surrounded by only two other things: green things that they eat and slightly cloudy blue water. Sometimes sunlight dapples on their backs.
In A Marriage Poem by Ellen Bryant Voigt, “She wants something crisp and permanent, / like coral – a crown, a trellis, / an iron shawl across the bed”. But their marriage is at the age where she and her husband are caught between caring for their ageing parents and their children. They are more like manatees:
Dearest, the beast of Loch Ness, that shy,
broad-backed, two-headed creature,
may be a pair of whales or manatee,
male and female,
driven from their deep mud nest,
who cling to each other,
circling the surface of the lake.
Don’t try to find out whether manatees actually make mud nests. The Google results are for manatees who died in Mud River, Hernando County, Florida; and for wasps, who do make their nests with mud. The wasps really mess with the benevolence, the serenity, of thinking about nothing but a 500kg animal moving slowly through cloudy water and something green to eat. Imagine, just imagine, swimming in lettuce.
Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia
