Dark waters
Last weekend, John and I stayed at the Soundview Greenport, a little 1950’s roadside motel in North Fork that received a retro-modern glow-up in 2017. One afternoon I took my book and pool towel out to the strip of pebbled beach behind our room. The summer sun affected me only five pages in, my chest and shoulders hot to the touch, my brow beading with sweat. I walked over to the shore, its cold water a shock in comparison to the air’s heat.
A father with three young children were next to me in the water. He was perched on a boulder while the two young boys and one girl splashed around him like pigeons in a puddle. I heard him wearily attempting to explain the nature of tides to three distracted toddlers.
“Hey, kids. So the tide? Kids. The tide? The tide is going to come in and the water will be higher than this rock. Kids? The tide? Do you hear me. The tide is going to…”
This went on long enough that it became background noise along with the waves lapping the shore, the odd cry of an upset seagull. I was up to my thighs now, the cold water almost numbing my legs, but pleasantly. Farther out, a woman older than me was swimming freestyle. I guess you wouldn’t call those laps, really. Just endless freestyle. She kept swimming. Behind her, a hazy blue line that faded in and out of view was the only indication of Connecticut.
I felt a twinge of envy for this swimmer’s bravery, one that pushed me further into the cool waters, my toes feeling over the slippery stones. When I was up to my waist, the shore line dipped, the dark water at the bottom almost cloaking my feet. When I was growing up in Florida, I remember those bodies of water were the ones I feared most.
My family would rent a boat to ski or tube in the summer, and I dreaded the moments where I would inevitably fall off the tube and have to tread water alone while the boat, running at 25 miles per hour, already seemed impossibly far away after one minute, made a U-turn to come get me. The bay water in Florida can turn a tawny brown like steeped tea—warm at the surface, but cool and black at your feet, the change of temperature and color an uncomfortable reminder of the hidden depths lurking below.
I hated not being able to see my legs or what was underneath them, imagining a depth taller than city skyscrapers under me. In this dark fantasy, sharks swayed their muscled tails around the spires, sharp barnacles clung to gargoyles, dark creatures lurked in inky kelp forests. I would imagine the black depth was endless and would freak myself out with thoughts of an infinite abyss of time and space waiting for the right moment of luck or misfortune, to swallow me.
I remember lifting up my feet and holding them in my hands, praying the boat would get me soon. I would watch for it to notice that I was gone after that first breath breaking through the surface, brackish water in my nose, wet hair clinging to my forehead. When I was back safe on the boat, I’d exclaim with the other children, “Again! Again, let’s go again!” But during that frightful moment alone in the water, I’d wait, heart thumping, to see the bow turn its nose and, like a white horse, gallop toward me, a frothy wake in its path. Come find me come find me come find me.
I watched the woman swimming freestyle ahead of me and realized that she was closer to my age than I first thought. A rush of waves wrinkled against the shore and the toddlers flapped their arms frantically and ran around the boulder. “Daddy the tide!” they shrieked, “The tide! The tide!”
I took a few more steps forward, sucked in a breath and dove in head first. The cold dark water muffled the world for a moment and I let it hang there, my body suspended in time and space. When I broke through the surface, I looked up at the clouds. Above the blue line of the horizon, they appeared as thin lines of white spray, like wakes off the bow of a boat. ∎
