I swim. Not as much as I used to and not as often as I’d like. But it’s a near-lifelong habit of which didn’t really start until I was a teenager. Before then, I mostly tread water because once the Pacific Ocean nearly swallowed me whole. I was a child when it happened, a child chasing small waves that crashed like long sandy cylinders on Point Dume beach. Suddenly a rip current summoned the water back to the sea so fast I lost my footing. Another wave broke over my head and rolled me over and over, weighing my bathing suit down with grit. As I struggled to move my limbs and breathe, suddenly, as if monumentally bored with me, the ocean flung me onto the shore just long enough that I was able to get up off my knees, gulp down some air into my starving lungs and drag myself back up the beach and my unsuspecting mother, newly afraid of water and its wildness.
In junior high summer school, we had swim lessons in the domesticated watery spaces of pools. Most kids swam easy as fish. Others—all arms and legs and jutting bones beneath tanned skins—raced on swim teams. The shallow end was my home, the place where I did some sloppy homemade version of a dog-paddle. Something that could keep my head above water. The deep end was like the ocean: something I didn’t trust. We learned to float, kick, and breathe. And then to twist our bodies and spin our arms like propellers or scoop them toward our chests while moving our faces in and out of the water. Those lessons never seemed to stick, though. I could never get the hang of twisting my neck to from side to side for air. So I thrash-swam with my head above the water, my eyelids closed against the sting of chlorine. Then went right back to treading water.
I wonder now if some part of me remembered that day when the ocean wrapped itself around me with such ferocity. The ocean covers 70% of the earth; water comprises up to 60% of our bodies. The blood that runs the human internal machine is almost all water, but also contains salt and ions in concentrations similar to those found in the sea; the same is true of amniotic fluid. I needed the earth under my feet to feel safe, not yet aware that the water was where I and every other human came from. And that if the earth was the mother of all living organisms, then, the ocean was her amnion. So however terrifying she seemed, the ocean not a mile from my house, the same one that covered nearly one-third of the earth, was simply embracing me, unaware of her strength. Recognizing as I did not, the ancient bond between us.
Not that I stopped going to the beach. There were other ways to enjoy the water, like boogie boards which floated me on my stomach and kept my head above water. I started riding shore breakers then gradually moved out to where the three to four foot swells began to curl. I didn’t always catch them, but when I did, I savored the movement that sometimes felt like flying and that the wet-suited surfers I knew called the most radical feeling in the world. Unaware that all the arm and leg work it took to catch a wave was also building my confidence as swimmer. Enough so that once, after a late summer Pacific hurricane had churned up swells twice the size of what I usually rode, I went for it. Wearing only a two-piece bathing suit and paddling into sea without a wrist leash for my boogie, I moved up the face of a foaming white-headed wave, only to be met by an even bigger one that crashed over my head. Ripping the boogie from my hands, the wave dragged me, prone and helpless, over a spiny reef before spitting me up on land, cuts all over my feet. This time the ocean had left her mark. You do not master me. I master you.
College took me to Bay Area where, living in the shadow of the Berkeley Hills, I could look north to San Francisco and see the Pacific every day. But where I never seemed to find time for the water. But swimming found me anyway through my freshman roommate, a free-spirited Master Class swimmer. She took me to a beach in Marin where she swam in 55-degree water I avoided then hounded me ever after to get out of the library and into a heated university pool. I did, sometimes, especially during summers. But swimming only became a habit when I discovered it could counter things I could not control on dry land. Like uncertainty: where would I go after so many years of being a student, what would I do, who would I become? Those questions ate at me, bore into my core without my knowing it. Then returned my senior year as shivering sensations that rattled along the San Andreas fault line of my spine and left me feeling breathless and disoriented and my muscles cold and rigid.
College was ending; and I was learning that graduation meant swimming in another kind of sea. A sea that a life of the mind had left me ill-prepared to face. It was then I remembered swimming, the way it softened and warmed my body from the inside. Water slowed and resisted; perhaps I needed something against which to safely crash the mad energy of my own terror. So I grabbed the one faded suit I’d had since freshman year and leapt into the blue. The first time in, I was barely able to move my arms and legs in rhythm. Even my breathing was wrong. In my land-walking nerviness, I had stopped breathing into my lungs and took shallow, half-apologetic breaths instead. It was faster that way, because I was moving faster, or my brain was. Flying off into the future, I stopped feeling the earth beneath me. I emerged an hour later exhausted; but for a short time, free of the inner tremors that shook me. The endorphin rush and parasympathetic relaxation response so much rhythmic breathing had triggered in my nervous system had calmed me. But I didn’t know that then. Only that I now, for a brief moment, I existed in the present tense, feet on the ground.
The water had mastered me again. But this time because I came to it somehow understanding that in mastering me, the water might also heal what years of worry and overthinking had thrown into chaos. Which makes me wonder now what lessons could be had for all of us, feeling the collective anxiety of this strange new world we live in. A world unmasked by disease and unmade by war on a planet we have damaged with our great, oversized mammalian brains. What if we could look into the water and see not just a reflection of ourselves and our desires, but kin? And what if we could understand that no one, not even multi multi-billionaires, will ever have even a fraction of the power nature has? So much now is out of anyone’s control. We are swamped and swimming, any way we can. But perhaps this is the lesson, the lesson of water. You do not master me. But learn my rhythms and become me and maybe you can master yourself and survive.