A nature metaphor appears early in Yiyun Li’s story of a mother helping chaperon her fourth-grade son’s class on a field trip to California’s Northern Coast:

At this age, the children reminded Lillian of those long-legged water insects which gather together at dusk, each connected to another until a secure chain is formed for the night.

This metaphor is central to understanding the story’s ending. More importantly, it suggests that connection is crucial to survival.

The line proceeding the metaphor connects it to the story at hand:

In daylight, the water insects would scatter, but these children might still have a year or two before their orderly connections were threatened.

That ominous tone is established earlier in the story: “…the Bay area before the 2016 election had been as innocent as the children in her minivan, as well-intentioned, as ill-prepared. But are we not all like children in Euripides’ plays, about to be murdered or sacrificed?” Lillian recalls when her older son’s time of innocence ended: “By fifth grade, the interactions among the children had lost their seeming innocuousness: one girl had made a death threat in a note to a friend,” etc.

This sense of foreboding, a reminder that the present is just the calm before the storm, reflects Lillian’s attempts to find clues to help explain the personal tragedies to come. That older son, we’ll learn, will kill himself; his younger brother Jude, who appears in this story, will suffer the same fate six years later.

This is Li’s fourth autobiographically driven short story involving at some level her two sons, Vincent and James, who committed suicide in 2017 and 2024.

As the children in the story form groups to explore and play games, the adults similarly pair up as they schedule activities, prep meals, and monitor the young. Their ability to collaborate and cooperate reflects the development of their own social skills, which the children are learning to varying degrees of success.

Among the children are “outliers,” those outside the norm, who don’t fit in. This group includes Jude and his friend, Evan, and a snobbishly smart but insecure girl named Hazel. While the other children link hands and circle a giant sequoia, the two boys stand aside and study lichen through a magnifying glass. At a nature reserve, the children see elephant seals who they’re told come to the area in the spring to mate, and that some seal pups double in size to become “super weaners” by stealing milk from another mother. Hearing the facts, albeit scientifically, of a bull elephant’s responsibility to impregnate his harem, puts the kids into a state of agitated glee. The phrase becomes a running “super wiener” joke among the kids, gaining new momentum with the evening’s meal of hot dogs.

Although the phrase agitates them, they’re probably also affected by weaning’s literal meaning of a young animal’s gradual separation from – weaning off – the mother’s milk. These kids are on the cusp of puberty, beginning their own process of separation and individuation, preparing or failing to prepare for their own coupling and mating.

Eventually a girl named Ginny screams “super wiener!” at Jude and Evan. Her words reflect the group’s expectation of conformity, a rejection of the outliers. The two boys are able to ignore her, but in hearing the interaction, Hazel turns “pale with rage.” She knows that the insult also applies to her.

Background info on the story’s two central girls: Ginny has been expelled from her previous school and will last only a few months at this one. She has a dismissive attitude toward the other children, according to Lillian. She has boundary issues. She’s a foot taller than Jude and takes a liking to him, which she expresses in face cups and unwanted hugs. Eventually she puts him in a headlock.

Hazel prides herself on being a scholarship kid and annoyingly wants to know who else is and who isn’t. She feels superior, or needs to. Before her current school, she attended a public school where she says the other kids were mean to her, believing it was because they wanted her to be just like them. They were also stupid because, as she puts it, “they don’t even know why they have to be mean to me.” That “have to be” suggests she understands, at some level, that they’re acting out an age-old script, survival of the fittest, a weaning out. She earns the ire of the other children by mocking the skits they produce.

In comparing Ginny to the outliers, Lillian says, “There would never be a shortage of Ginny’s, so Ginny might not have to confront loneliness. But some children – Hazel, Evan, and, of course, Jude . . . Do outlier children meet outlier fates?” Sadly, Jude and Evan will lose touch before college.

Because of the group’s agitated state, a planned activity for their last evening is canceled in favor of one designed to be more calming. The forty students pair up two by two like Noah’s animals entering the ark, safe from the coming deluge, and walk a circular path through the woods, swinging a lantern between them. This combination of the kids’ connection and the light source repeats the early metaphor of leg-locked insects forming a protective chain until the safety of morning’s daylight.   

The story’s final scene is set up with a showdown between Ginny and Hazel. By chance, they are the only ones left to pair up, but Ginny angrily refuses to be Hazel’s partner. When last we saw Hazel, she too was livid with anger, and that anger probably is still bottled up. Her feeling of being rejected might be the last straw. Hazel is given the option to walk with an adult, but she refuses with a Hazel-like logic: all the other children had been allowed to walk without adult supervision; therefore, she should be granted the same option and walk alone.

Untethered to another human, Hazel inexplicably doesn’t it make it back from her circuit. The adults who eventually find her at the bottom of the slope surmise that her leaving the path might have been a suicide attempt. Hazel evidently isn’t too injured, but her vibe of stubborn pride conveys her refusal “to be coaxed back into the normal life of a normal child.” One of the counselors arranges for a pillow and blanket to be brought down, and he tells her that they will stay with her as long as she needs. They’ll get her through the darkness. They attach themselves to her, providing a vital connection, whether she acknowledges it or not.

The story’s title comes from both a Goethe poem, which can be translated as either “Calm Sea” or “Calm at Sea,” and from a play by Euripides (quoted by Lillian earlier,) “The Bakkhai” (aka “Bacchae”): “Farewell to you, unhappy child. Fare well, but you shall find your faring hard.” Though the hard faring suggests a storm, Goethe’s poem suggests a second, more chilling meaning that can be lost on modern readers.

Deathly silence, horrible!
In the vast expanse and surface
Not a ripple moves, nor a wave.

Without wind, the sailing ships of Goethe’s time would sit motionless in the middle of the ocean, nothing on the horizon, helpless at the mercy of fate. Life’s forward movement had stopped.