Today is my first swim in almost 3 weeks. I got super sick. It was just the flu, but I don’t remember being that sick since I was a kid living with my parents. I am 58 years old now. I usually “poo poo” the flu shot warnings but no more! Whatever that was, I never ever want to have it again. I still have a lingering cough and sniffles but I feel mostly human. I worked out for the first time Tuesday and today, Friday, the surf is super small and I feel ready to get in the water.
I am a little worried about the logistics of entry and exit. There is basically NO beach. I took a walk at low tide yesterday and the entire shore was all cobble. There was some sand but it was super low and only visible thanks to the negative low tide. I figure with smaller surf, it should be fine but possibly a little precarious. Whatever. I am ready to do this.
As I walk down the stairs, the sun feels so good on my back. It has been so long since I have walked down these stairs in just swim trunks. I am so happy to be doing this. How long before I’d lose my tan?! I think I still have it. Once I have a view of the beach I am immediately delighted. I swear I was just here yesterday and the tide is much higher now than it was then but I see sand. It’s a beautiful thing. This beach changes every day. I was reading an article earlier that described a beach as a “river” of sand. The sand comes and it goes. Sometimes it goes for a little longer than usual. This is definitely an exceptional year when it comes to sand loss. I don’t like it but it’s just another passing season.
Despite the increased sand, we are far from normal and I do have to scramble through a fair amount of cobble to get to what one would consider a beach. I wish I had some sandals but that would mean I would have to stash them somewhere and then retrieve them when I am done. As I write this, it occurs to me how ridiculously simple that is, but no, I want to be able to swim directly to the ramp at the end of the swim since the tide will be even lower and I don’t want to go back and grab sandals. Maybe I should just stop thinking about all of this and just enjoy the fact that I am in a place where I can feel the water hit my feet. This water! It is November 6 and the water is 73 degrees. That is so crazy. I guess that is what our sand is funding. It is buying us warm water.
I get to where I can comfortably walk on sand and soon reach my usual starting point. The waves are small in front of me. There are some larger waves breaking just in front of the ramp I came down a few minutes ago. I let a couple of these small waves break on the shore and then I head west into the water. It feels great. I am past the surf after just a few steps and I start to swim. This feels odd but wonderful. It has been so long since I have been encased in water and it feels so great.
I am swimming south. I watch the larger (but not “big”) waves break just ahead as I angle my way west of their breaking point. The water visibility seems to come and go. I pass through an area where I can see the ocean floor below me and then into a cloudier expanse where I can’t really see anything.
Things look different here. The light is ever so slightly changed as we pass through Fall. I love it. It’s hard to pinpoint how this makes me feel but it definitely does make me feel. What is it about light that seems to steer and influence our emotions? This light seems almost peculiar and it colors how I see everything in front of me. There are emotions that are familiar, very familiar, coming from that light but I just can’t seem to remember their names. Maybe they don’t have names. They are just feelings. It is interesting how humans have been able to label emotions and feelings and it seems like every few years we come up with new words and labels that we did not use previously. Somehow these words shine an intellectual light on our experience and we can suddenly talk about these experiences with this new narrative that seems to help us carve a road that was not there before and plot a new path forward. What do you think it was like to be human before language? Or at least when language was much more primitive? What do you think it would be like to be a dog or a cat and feel our emotions without labels? Would that be a more “pure” experience? Do our words and labels sometimes add something extra that was never there in the first place? I honestly don’t know. I know that we seem to like labels. They help us make sense of who we are. Sometimes I wonder how authentic this sense is or does it just help us to make up a story that we think adds contour lines to our 2 dimensional maps that do not always match up with the territory around us.
Well here I am in this water and in this light and I try to just let the light into my heart and feel the water wash over my skin. Maybe I will live this next hour like a Seal - without words, just a few guttural intonations. I try to let myself feel the feelings I am feeling without giving them a label. Keep my eyes on that light bouncing off the surface of the water as it creates this electric shimmer that is so beautiful and unique. I am one of very few people in this ocean right now. We see things with a perspective completely foreign to what we will soon experience on land where we live out the vast majority of our days.
I wonder what the water is trying to say to me. It is trying to say something. It’s not English. It is a sort of telepathic knowing. Something clicks in my brain and all suddenly feels right. I look beneath me and see schools of fish. These fish have no political party affiliation. They simply live their lives here in this natural surrounding. No one is arguing about policy here, we are just trying to get from one end of the beach to the other. For this moment, I just want to feel the water on my skin and let the light hit my heart and watch my thoughts extend before me like light that scatters as it refracts against all the things we see around us.
