at the surface of the deeps
'Waterworld' - Super Mario Bros. 1, NES
Better than Ativan has been cold water swimming. I like the ocean this time of year. It’s cold but not freezing. There’s no crowds.
I love the salt water, the expansiveness of the oceanbody that has been through it all and is linked somehow to every humble drop of moisture in our atmosphere. I float around, happily treading water, an inconsequential foreign object in a comfortingly indifferent ecosystem. Cool water swimming lends a pleasant clarity to thought, there is a perfect cessation to worry and petty care.
I discovered the pleasures of all-season swimming when I worked in a restaurant on one of the touristy coastal islands. The shifts often extended late into the night, and were full of the inherent bullshit running around and insane multitasking of trying to create a holiday environment without conventional power, water, or cooking facilities, and when the bulk of the staff were drifters or hobos themselves. By one or two AM wen the restaurant closed I was usually in that sickening state of being both keyed-up and exhausted.
I’d pedal down-island, a flashlight duct-taped to the rusty handlebars of my old 3-speed Stella, found under the porch at the resturant and practically pure iron at least 40 years old. I was usually half-tipsy from weariness the gratis post-shift rum and the island was pitch dark. I’d finally arrive home. “Home” was a splintery half-timbered cabin on the shore. There were mice inside, and their furtive nibbling noises freaked me out. It was often preferable to flop on a lounge chair on the deck or hang my legs over the edge of the half-sinking fishing dock. The water lapping blackly against the dock seemed very inviting. At first it was enough to take a few minutes, sitting on the dock and half-dozing, half day-dreaming, trying not to get slivers in my ass. Then I was compelled to stick my feet in, swish em around, enjoying the cold. Eventually I was climbing right in and paddling out a-ways so I had a bit of free ocean around me to slosh around in.
As ambitious as I ever got was floating. Floating, facing upward, and letting the water de-ache my overwrought head, hot eyes and sore bones. It was soothing yet also barely tolerable, viewing the overturned bowl of outer space above me, blurry with stars, while my ears were submerged and deaf to everything but the thrum of water. It was a sensory combination that made me dizzy at first, before I adjusted. Then it was only cold relief, that perfect cessation of land-bound concerns.
“This sounds really creepy,” my coworker Fiona told me when I told her about my newfound hobby . “It sounds all wrong. Like flying a kite at night, or something.”
"hello, mother dear."
I didn’t have anything to say to that. Fiona was intimidatingly pretty, with a chill patrician manner and apple-pink cheeks despite the fact that her own nightly hobby was doing lines of coke with the rest of the kitchen staff after hours.
I still like the ocean although it is not as handy, these days. I have to talk myself into going, clear off a block of time for it, and after a swim I have to ride back across town with inevitably missed grains of sand grinding between my toes. Damp hair, damp everything. Not as refreshing. Plus, the Vancouver waters are sort of dreadful and sticky with whorls of oil. But the swim itself is worth it, the experience of chill alien vastness, like outer space here on Earth!
