Ocean water is barely water at all. It’s sand, grit, salt, iron, shells, secretions. It’s tug and pull, surrender and release. Unable to speak its language, the ocean usually feels, to my landlubber body, like when a song switches for a few measures into 5/8 Time. I can’t quite catch on to the rhythm. My trunk slaps against the waves when they’re at their angriest. My hair, colorless when wet, never billows behind my shoulders like a cape but wraps around my neck like a choker. I try to walk and take steps where there is no sand. I try to swim and suddenly there is no water but just its absence, and I’m no longer dog-paddling but crawling. Why? Why am I tossed about like a pinball in a penny arcade? Does the moon have something to do with it? I think so, but I can’t remember and can’t be bothered to look it up because I, like the ocean, don’t care.
I’m not saying the ocean hates me. I’m saying the ocean has no feeling toward me at all.
Last weekend, I drove to the beach with a couple friends, seeking such indifference. This time, like last time and every time before, I was respectfully cowed by open water. But I swam anyway and found a sweet spot, beyond the initial rough greeting of waves that topple sandcastles and toddlers with equal irreverence. A spot where the waves are large enough that you must either (1) get wrecked or (2) plug your nose and dive below—slicing through the belly of a current which feels, you imagine, like diving through jello. When you ascend, you aren’t calm—you could never be calm in the ocean—but you are acutely aware of the brine on your tongue and acutely alive with the air in your lungs. And for a moment, this summer doesn’t feel different from last summer or other summers you’ve lived or any other summer that is to come. Another wave swells.
Well done!