Putting On My Own Air Mask

I woke up at 4:30 this morning, grabbed my phone and looked at the Strands web cam. Fog. Honestly, I’m relieved. This gives me free license to roll over and go back to sleep. I have church at 10:00, but I don’t have to work or watch my 4 year old today. So I sleep until 7:00 and it is the first morning I have slept in in weeks.

I take another peek at the web cam out of curiosity. Still fog. Can’t see a thing. I partake of my usual morning meditation. Alarm goes off after 30 minutes and I give myself another 10 minutes because it sure does feel like I could use it. Nothing has changed at the beach in the last 40 minutes. I’m hoping to get a swim in after church but who knows. Sometimes this doesn’t clear until well into the afternoon. Also, it’s supposed to rain today.

Just before I leave for church I take one last look at the web cam (I definitely get my money’s worth from my annual Surfline subscription) and hey look! A beach! According to the weather report, the rain should start about noon. Well that should be fine. The problem with swimming and rain is the grime and bacteria from runoff, but how much runoff could there be if it starts raining half way into my swim? This could be perfect. I’ve always wanted to swim in the midst of a good rain. This might just be my chance.

After church it’s a little before 11:00 and the beach looks good from the web cam. It looks real good. Still not too breezy. I’m excited. It’s supposed to get to 75 degrees but I’m not feeling it right now. It’s been the coolest morning in a while today but still not anywhere close to what I would call cold.

I get to the beach parking lot about 10 minutes after 11:00. Everything looks great. It’s completely overcast but definitely not foggy. It’s a little cool out. No sunshine to warm my skin. However I’m confident all will be well out in the water. Things have been very slowly coming down in temperature over the last week. Still, the coldest local buoy is at 67 and that is a wonderful number in the water.

Seems like the beach traffic is down for a Sunday afternoon. This weather doesn’t exactly scream “beach!” But I don’t know. It sure does look like a pretty great place to be to me. Waves are definitely down a couple notches today except there is a wave just about to break right on shore as this little boy is obliviously playing in the sand. He looks up and sees it and lets out a yelp and runs up the beach and laughs. I laugh too. I just love that moment when the water strikes fear that immediately turns to joy in kids. Not just kids. I am certainly not immune. The water here at the shore has it’s own personality. It can be as charming as hell but sometimes it can be downright mean.

I walk into the water and can feel the coolness on my skin rise up my body as I get deeper. There are no waves to help expedite the “getting wet” stage. I just steadily get deeper and deeper and then I push off separating my feet from the ground and suddenly I am horizontal and moving on top of the water. I feel the cold but it really has no bite. I just wait for it to subside and it does. It’s comfortable all throughout the swim and there are a few patches here and there that are luxuriously nice.

I find myself swimming closer to shore than normal. I really don’t think I am making any kind of an effort to do so but it just kind of happens as it often does when the surf is particularly small like it is today. I feel like there is this other person deep inside of me who is the one that is really in charge of the swim. I, the one writing this post, am just along for the ride. The Internal Family Systems theorists would likely have something to say about this. I wonder how this is true not only of swimming but other areas or particular times in my life.

I often think of that week last December when I moved out of my house and into my own studio apartment. It all felt like it was prearranged and I just had to walk from where I was to to the new place where I was going. If someone told me the week prior that I would be doing that I would not have believed them. Furthermore, if someone would have told me that I needed to figure out how to make such a thing happen, I would have been completely overwhelmed and would not have known where to even begin. Well one day I am hit like a ton of bricks with the fact that if something doesn’t happen immediately, I’m going to either hurt myself or others and everything just kind of lined themselves up perfectly. I’m sitting on the couch and it just dawns on me that I have some money that would let me do this. I look on Zillow and see a rental 5 minutes away. I visit it a couple days later and a few more days it is my home. I felt an expansiveness in that little wonderful studio I hadn’t known in decades. I think I wept every other day for the first month with a sense of ineffable gratitude and freedom. The most difficult part of the whole moving process was finding a personal referral because I had no friends. I was reminded that I did indeed have a friend and she gave me a great reference.

I’m pretty close to the lifeguard tower as I cross in front of it. I look beneath me and there are large round boulders sitting here that I usually don’t see. It’s pretty dark beneath the surface today. There is not a whole lot of light here. I am particularly close to the small crowd of surfers here. I don’t know what it is that they are surfing.

As I continue north, the sky that began sort of drab and dull seems to open up and become alive with light. I start to see little pockets of pink in the south western distance. The water gets a little more bumpy. At one point I see a small wake pass me by and I swear it looked like the back of some kind of sea monster. So much so that I stopped to look around. Well the sea monster either was never there or is long gone now - most likely the former. Up ahead I see a light formed from hazy blue sky peeking through the clouds just at the tip of the point at the end of Monarch Bay. It’s like the sun has decided to kiss that tiny patch of rock just below the pines. And why wouldn’t it? It’s absolutely gorgeous.

I swim by large underwater trees of kelp and watch schools of Corbina swim alongside them and me. I find myself thinking a lot about my divorce and my whole family situation lately - not that this is a novel subject over the last several months. I’ve had a lot of weird abstract dreams this last week that leave tiny breadcrumbs for me to chew on. None of this is simple. Everyone is at fault. Am I engaging in selfish and reckless behavior or am I just putting on my own air mask so that I can have the internal fortitude to eventually better assist others? It is all very confusing to me. I want to do the right thing. How do I reconcile what I thought was the right thing for so so long was not right at all? Am I just making one mistake after the other? Seriously if I had to write an explanation of why I left my wife and kids, I’m not sure I could do it. All I know is how I felt before and after that day in December. It’s interesting haw thoughts and ideas can only take us so far but in the end it is our feelings that call us to action. Where do these feelings come from? It’s like a swell that breaks on the beach that has traveled from miles and miles away driven by winds in a distant land. The energy can remain in the water for weeks until it finally releases itself in a matter of seconds on rock and sand.

I’m getting closer to monarch and that light at its tip is expanding. These clouds and light remind me of Hawaii and I’m not exactly sure why. I can see and feel the rain now. I look behind me towards Dana Point and see a liquid explosion of light and cloud above the bluff. Finally here I am at my turnaround point in front of the Monarch Bay Beach Club. I stop and look around and just as I do a Pelican swoops in and lands to sit on the water just about 40 feet away from me. It’s all by itself. It sits there for a minute in this rain and then flies off. So great. I start to swim south.

All the way south I keep looking ahead and becoming transfixed by the view opening up above Dana Point. It’s amazing. The light and the dark and the clouds of all varying degrees of density. The rain drops fall on the water’s surface and create quiet music. This all feels so oddly delightful. People, myself included, complain and complain about clouds and rain and then they come and create a world of wonder and joy. At the beach and in the ocean during the rain? Who would want to do that? Well come on out here and you will soon discover why everyone should.

I get close to the surfers again as I revisit the point. The rain certainly doesn’t drive them away. I’m still amazed by the light show in all directions. I’m sure I am shouting distance from the surfers and I want to yell, “hey are you all seeing this?” Is this when it becomes appropriate for us all to hold hands? Hmm…no…I don’t think so.

As I get closer to my finishing point, the rain seems to gain in strength but everything else grows more subdued. The surface of the water seems to calm and the light in the clouds closes in on itself to form a more solid grey canopy. The beach has nearly emptied. This all feels very special. I climb up the stairs on the wet concrete and rinse off in what feels like an unnaturally warm shower up by the restrooms.

One last look over the fence and past the bluff to the many rocks that stick up at the end of the Dana Point headlands. That swim feels more fiction than non-fiction but you just can’t make this stuff up.