Washing of the Water

My first experience of the ocean was one of terror.  I can't remember it, but I can remember remembering it.  I was about three.  I know I toddled into the shallowest parts of the water, just off the shore, and a wave knocked me hard into the briny sand.  Of course, a parent was right there to scoop me up and carry me back to the safety of my beach towel.  But I'd had enough.  I didn't want to have anything more to do with the ocean, ever again.  I believe it took them several hours to coax me back into another try, and this time I wouldn't do it alone.  It was my aunt who lifted me up in her arms and walked into the ocean, holding me securely in the midst of all that thrashing immensity.  And that, my second experience, is my first memory of the ocean: the moment I learned to love it.

That was a quarter of a century ago, and today I am going back to the ocean for the first time in a decade, the first time since that day trip up Cape Cod back when I was going to school in Massachusetts.  How have I let so much of my life slip by without really living?  I have been sorely in need, and today, under this sweltering sun, I am to be reunited with the thing for which I have been longing.  I haven't been this excited in - well, in nearly two months, which makes it sound like a less impressive thing than it is, but truly this has been a year of discovery and rediscovery.

My mothers are dropping off my brother and me at the Bolsa Chica State Beach, where we will join up with my brother's Boy Scout troop, but as we pull into the parking lot, all their comments are directed at me: The Scouts are setting up their base by lifeguard station 22.  Remember that, Truth!  Twenty-two!  If I lose track of the time and get lost, they'll meet me by the snack stand, but they won't be happy.

I am tempted to ask them when they have ever known me to forget a two-digit number in the space of a few hours.  I am tempted to ask them when they have known me to let myself become hopelessly disoriented in space or time, particularly when to do so would inconvenience another.  Instead I keep my tone light as I indicate my brother and ask, "And what's he supposed to do if he gets lost?"

"He's not going to get lost," my mother says.  "He's with the group.  They've got responsible adults there."  I don't let it show, but I feel as though I've been slapped.  Does she have to make me feel like such a liability?  She was never an overprotective parent.  One of my brothers camps alone in the desert on a regular basis, and she never questions his ability to take care of himself.  Yet here I am, her firstborn, and she talks to me as if it's a damn shame she can't legally keep me in one of those leashed harnesses that they make for toddlers.

I just bite my tongue and focus on the thought of being in the ocean soon.  As the car slides into a parking place, I lean forward and look through the windshield and catch my first glimpse of that beautiful blue expanse.  "Oooooh," I squeal, "I can see the ocean!"

"Truth," says my mother, "remember, these people don't know you.  Please try to act normal."

"I am," I say lightly.  Does she really think that a little demonstration of enthusiasm in the presence of my family is typical of the way I conduct myself at length around strangers?  Besides, I know what she's really worried about, and I'm quite sure they wouldn't think any less of her if they knew she'd spawned something like me.  Every family has to have its black sheep, after all.

"We don't mean normal for you," my other mother says.  "We mean normal for other people."

"Hey," my mother says.  "That's mean," and I think the miracle has happened: she's actually going to stand up for me.  Then she adds, "She can't manage that," and I wonder when I'm ever going to learn.

We get out of the car and I help one of the Boy Scout mothers carry supplies out onto the beach, then I apply waterproof sunscreen and talk to another one of the mothers about onomastics.  One possible meaning of her first name is the same as the most common (somewhat fallacious) interpretation of my middle name.  A genealogy enthusiast, she informs me that one of her ancestors, the wife of a Revolutionary War soldier, had a variant of my uncommon first name.

Then, I go down to the ocean.

The water that laps out over my feet as I step into the wet sand is chilly, but not so cold as I might have feared.  In the ocean, though, I don't worry too much about getting used to the temperature.  I might find it uncomfortable a bit further in, and linger awhile in the shallows, but the ocean has no patience for my timidity, and sooner or later there will come a wave to knock me off my unsteady feet.  For a moment I will feel nothing but the rush of cold over me, and I will rise up gagging on the searing saltiness, and then there will be nothing at all that can hold me back.

A little farther down the sand changes.  No longer the softly abrasive sand I am used to at the beach, what I feel under my feet is the scraping of harsh little pebbles.  Rough as the texture may be, this new sand is remarkably yielding under my weight; my happy scramble down to the water is halted, and I find myself sinking into the sand almost up to my knees.  Just then a wave rushes up and knocks me down hard, and I am sitting now with my legs buried in the wet grit, feeling the water rush back powerfully over me.  So, I am to be made accustomed to the water already!  I pull my legs free, as well as I can, to continue on down into the ocean, but I find myself starting to sink again, then forced down by another wave.  As the water rushes back around me, I cling to the rough sand on my hands and knees, feeling my handholds eroding away beneath my fingers and laughing with utter delight.

I'm not sure how long it is - five minutes or ten, or less? - that I stay like that, kneeling in the grit, clutching tenaciously to ephemeral things.  It is a beautiful thing, to be so close to the earth as the ocean rushes mightily around me, yet I long to go further out, to crash against the waves in all their fullness.  There is an astonishing power, though, even here at the edge of water, and I find myself knocked back to my knees whenever I try to move until it occurs to me that I've been going about this all wrong.  I've been trying to push farther into the ocean while the waves are rushing in, then sinking myself in deep as the broken wave rushes back around me.  I've been doing nothing but fight.  This time, when the tide washes out, I let it carry me.  From my crouched position I am quickly able to rise to my feet, and soon I am surprised to find the texture of the sand changing beneath my feet, back to the soft fine grains I was expecting in the first place.  (I will realize later that the place I happened to enter the water was particularly thick with that soggy grit, and I would have had much less difficulty getting all the way into the ocean even a few feet away on either side.)

Standing up with ease now, the water around my waist, I look out west onto the ocean, foamy and dappled with early-autumn sun.  There is really only one way I play in the ocean, though I take it so seriously it doesn't feel like play: I walk out into the sea, as far as I can go.  It's that simple, because it really isn't simple at all.

The beautiful thing about water, about the ocean in particular, is that you can move through it, but you have to work at it.  You meet resistance.  The sea will not concede easily to your intrusion.  You have to fight for every inch.  Even when you're in shallow enough waters that you're still fundamentally in control of your movements, you feel the ocean pushing and pulling and tugging at you as if it had every right (which, by the way, it does).

Every wave peaks more than once, and walking into the sea is like peeling back the layers of an onion or ascending through the levels of a game.  No, no - there's really nothing like it.  The further in you go, the easier it becomes in some ways.  It's not what you would have guessed, but it actually becomes easier to dig in your heels (your toes, actually) and stand your ground when a wave runs over you.  When you get a wave that's too much for you, though, it's really too much.  After you've been knocked down hard a few times and risen up sputtering with your eyes stinging and your throat brackish, you learn how much you can take, and you learn to read the ocean.  You learn which waves you can take head-on, and which will slap you hard in the face.  You learn when to turn sideways and brace yourself against the onslaught, and you learn to know when you've lost, when the force rolling toward you is greater than all your strength, and your only hope is to turn around and face the shore, extend your arms, take a deep breath, close your eyes, and surrender.  You can lose a lot of hard-earned ground then, find yourself five or ten or more feet closer to the beach than you were just seconds earlier, and you have to push your way back out to where you were.  But you don't mind, because those are the most exhilarating times, when the ocean overpowers you and sweeps you off your feet.

You aren't conscious of the things you are learning.  It all makes sense according to the laws of physics if you stop to think about it, to contemplate buoyancy and drag and surface area.  But you don't stop to think about it.  You're living by body and by instinct.  There's a terrible taste in your mouth, your eyes are as dry and sore as if you'd been crying all day and all night, your ankle aches a little when you land on it just so, and you are all wrapped up in the moment.  All you see is the froth of the waves, a thousand bubbles you could almost scoop up in your hands, and every glimmer of light between here and the horizon.

Living in the moment doesn't come easily or naturally to me.  I live in the past, or the future, or both at once - but I can't just be in the present.  My nature is to think things over, and then to overthink them some more.  In the ocean, however, it's necessary to be alert and aware, to be as immersed in the moment as in the seawater.  If I forget myself for even a few seconds, that's when I get knocked down hard.  No, that's not it - it's when I remember myself that I get in trouble, when my mind opens itself too much into consciousness of other things and I neglect to consider the tremendous force surging indifferently around me.  I must attend to it; unlike Death, it will not stop for me.  I throw myself forward, laughing with ecstatic abandon after each wave whether I stand or fall, and there is nothing any longer in this world but the ocean and Truth.  More the ocean than Truth, I would say.  There is nothing at all but the ocean, and Truth in relation to the ocean.  On the shore of the wide world I stand alone and feel, with apologies to Keats, till all my earthly concerns to nothingness do sink.

For three hours I lose myself in the waves, my only concession to practical concerns being to reorient myself periodically in relation to lifeguard station 22.  I'm out deep at the end, and there comes a wave so big that even throwing out my arms and letting it lift me up isn't enough to keep it from thrashing me down and tossing me like a toy for a few seconds before pushing me back up to the surface and letting me breathe again.  I'm not about to take my leave on such an inglorious note as that, so I push out as deep as I was before and stay there until the next big wave comes and I surrender to it, swept up and carried as far as it will take me back toward the shore, then struggling to get a footing in the sand as the water rushes back around me, several times nearly falling but managing to come up standing in the end.  And that's how I want to leave the ocean: battered but undefeated.  With one last look out over the shining tumultuous sea, I struggle back through the water toward the shore.

I don't seem to be getting any closer to the beach, although I know I am.  The ocean comes up to my waist, and then only up to my knees, and then I drop to a crawl to feel the ocean flow heavy around me the rest of the way to the shore.  I look down, not ahead, and I watch the soft sand flow up in little brown clouds as my hands push through it.  This is my last moment to be surrounded by the primal and raw, and I am drinking it in greedily, as greedily as I shall, when I get back to the group, gulp the warm water from the plastic jug I brought, washing the ocean's salt off my puckering taste buds.  It comes almost as a surprise to me when I reach the very edge of the water.  I try to rise to my feet, and then a wave washes up and knocks me sidewise.  I spend my last two or three minutes in the ocean the same way I started: on my knees, as if in prayer.  And then I rise carefully and make my way heavily over the hot sands back up the beach to rejoin the group.

They are having dinner now, and one of the mothers graciously offers me a plate of salad, a bag of chips, and a piece of fruit.  The food tastes simple and good, and after I finish I lie back on one of my towels and wrap myself in another - not really drowsy, but quiet and thoughtful.  I know my mothers will be back soon; I know I'll have to shake the sand from my things, brush the sand from my damp legs with damp sandy hands before I get in the car.  I know no matter how many times I shower, it'll be the better part of the week before I stop finding grit in my hair.  I know all these things, and none of this matters.  When it's time to leave, and I rise to walk the twenty or thirty yards to the car, every muscle in my body screams, and that doesn't matter either.  I just threw myself headlong into the single largest object on the surface of the earth and let it batter me around a little.  Of course it hurts.  Chilled and aching, my skin flavored with salt, I brush away the sand and fall stiffly into the backseat.  Most of the windows are down, because I'm the only one who isn't hot, so I cover myself with my towels as if they were blankets, rest my head in the shoulder strap of my seatbelt, and surrender again to the current, to the delta waves rising and falling and crashing and breaking against the backs of my eyes. . . .