NONFICTION | Anya Chambers Swimmers

NONFICTION

Swimmers

By Anya Chambers

The day after a storm has passed it is high tide and there is a stillness to the water. It has the consistency of a thin gel, the temperature ambient. If you close your eyes, it is not unlike being in a deprivation chamber, disconcertingly close to nothingness. We glide at a leisurely pace far beyond the red buoys of the swimming area, each extension of arms and legs not achieving any perceptible progress. We are slow moving points on the blue flatness which expands indefinitely to the semicircular horizon. I think this is how a snail might feel slipping along some incomprehensible vastness, forward its only possible trajectory. I wonder what it would be like if the shore never got closer, if this was it.

Isn’t it true that most bodies of saltwater on the planet are still all one, separated only by imagined divisions? This is the case, with the exception of the Black and Caspian Seas which are technically landlocked oceans, and a few salt lakes (these are good reminders we can’t be certain that the ground we stand on is in a fixed arrangement). Some 321 million cubic miles of salt and water are varied in degrees of temperature, concentration, or pollution, but for the most part, they are the same. So where is the line that designates where the waters of the Indian Ocean end and the Atlantic begins, where exactly do oceans become seas or bays? Are there floating welcome signs of the sort you’d

see entering a state or a country? “Welcome to the Arctic Sea, Home of the Beluga.” Without people putting up fences and squabbling over who has a right to call a territory home, the boundaries here are more plainly built of language and markings on a map devised to ease navigation. But then there’s that thing about mastering the seven seas, how having the power to navigate them was a tactical advantage, and so humanity got busy building its great flotillas in a race whose echoes could be heard in the arms and space races of the coming centuries. So then is there a boundary to be drawn between owner and master, or is it all salt on the same open wounds?

There is less ambiguity where land cedes the way to water: at these boundaries the stakes are high. Part of the dilemma is that as land dwellers we tend to consider things from the shore, particularly in our current climate predicament. The land gets defined and changed by the water as its level slowly rises. From this perspective things are looking bleak. As anyone who has tried to stop a leak or a flood knows, the dam doesn’t hold forever, eventually the water asserts its way. But what happens when we change the vantage point, look at things from the water’s perspective? What if we get in and swim.

There is a clear distinction between being at the edge of the water or inside it. Standing on the periphery you are subject to the standard laws of gravity. Your worries, while distant, are still biting at your heels. You know that once you are in everything will be different–once your feet leave solid ground the hierarchy of importance is immediately shifted and at the top there is one prerogative: not to sink. The key is not to fall into a moment of panic. The key, as it is in most situations, is to not become afraid. Objectively, as long as you know how to swim, there is no reason to be afraid. But there is something else

below the surface.

Once upon a time, out in one of the Emerald Lakes on the Karelian Isthmus, about an hour away from Leningrad, my grandmother and I began to swim to the other shore. I was heading out on an inflatable mattress at what seemed to be incredible speed for a child, smugly outpacing her steady breaststroke. With my gaze fixed on the bathing area in the distance, I imagined it belonged to a local pioneer camp. I would materialize out from the haze of distance, a strange girl, blonde hair waving in the wind. “Where has she come from?” the campers and the counselors would wonder, “Is this a returning apparition of a child lost many years ago?” Or maybe they would imagine me an athlete, an intrepid youth fearlessly traversing this great lake, not subject to the boundaries of shores, parents, or camp regulations.

The lake was expansive, larger than I had ever crossed, presumably deeper and darker somewhere toward the middle, which is where I began to think about under rather than ahead. This was a terrible mistake because underwater things are much closer to the things of the underworld and there, well, nothing very good happens there for the living. And from under I could feel it following me, the cold grasping hands or tentacles of some unknown wrapping tightly around my limbs, pulling me down to a coldness which was already beginning to grip my heart. Once it had my breath, the cold would settle in, permanently. In a panic I whirled my float around and sped back to the speck of my grandmother whom I had long left behind. When she asked me why I’d turned, I told her I’d just changed my mind about going all the way across. I imagine she was relieved to have me close again, to make our way back to the shore, where lunch and family were waiting. I didn’t tell her or anyone how close I had

felt to death that day out in the lake. From that point forward, every time I got a little too far out on my own, when the bottom would drop out of sight, I could always feel something stalking me from below.

There is a saying in Russian, в тихом омуте черти водятся, which in loose translation means devils live in quiet waters. This serves as a reminder that trouble is often stirring behind a stillness. And let’s not forget that the most diabolically evil characters often have unperturbable surfaces. If the most damning function of evil may be its capacity to deceive, I don’t know what is more disconcerting: the literal lake full of invisible perils silently claiming lives, or that the devils tempting us to fear are always traveling with us on the inside, sowing terror and suspicion towards that which may just be fish and water. *

Our beach sits along the north shore of Long Island facing out over the sound and on clear days the Connecticut shore is visible beyond 20 or so miles of water. Unlike some beaches along this coast which line the island’s many bays and harbors, it is less likely to be plagued by the reek of stagnant water along with gnats and horseflies. That is, unless the air is still, and the tide has moved out. You can tell that this is the case when you first arrive at the beach, towel in hand, and see the waterline licking the exposed backs of the larger stones which spend most of their lives under water. These stones are swamp green, covered in seaweed, sea snails and sediment, all factors that fall into the category of slimy. This, along with the sulphury breath of salt marsh, I, like many, find repellent.

As much as I am dismayed by low tide conditions, my mother and our companions are elated—low tide means you should swim to the rock. It lies 200 meters or so from the shore,

well beyond the lifeguarded area. While usually impossible to spot from land, its location can be divined by a mirage of ripples or a lone whitecap on a low wave as the water level ebbs, but the rock never breaches the surface.

Once you’ve transformed from hesitant scout to swimmer, the visual cues are gone. Positions are hard to judge when you’re in open water because there are few reference points. Here there are only the red buoys near the shore and the green buoys way out in the distance marking the location of lobster traps; we know that our destination is somewhere to the left and in between these markers. Our route is a long diagonal, avoiding the designated swimming area entirely lest the lifeguards presume that we fall under their jurisdiction of rules or protections. After ten or fifteen minutes of steady swimming someone always says, “We have to be near it now,” and we begin to circle. At this point it’s a matter of luck and time in the sameness of the water all around us. Eventually someone first feels, then sees, the red seaweed swaying beneath their belly. They always yell “I’ve found it!” as they establish their footing and come to standing. “Really? I can’t believe it was over there!” someone else always says, as if there was any difference between a there or a there in a uniform field, until of course, the rock materializes. Maybe that is part of its magic— once someone finds it, we know where we are.

I don’t like the rock. I don’t like it for its undulating seaweed covered surface, its slimy feel beneath my feet. I don’t like its tendency to appear, sneaking under you, even when you know it’s close. What if you didn’t know and, as you came upon it, you’d smash your knee? Or, worse yet, sense its furtive stroke along your naked flesh and you’re unmoored and vulnerable, the shore so far away? And if there is one rock, how many others

are there? How many ships have met their demise on such a rock? How many adventurous spirits have bashed themselves to death on a mass concealed like this one, as they leapt from a cliff into dark waters? Or, how about that everyone assumes their relationship with this rock is special, like they’ve discovered it, and no one else is in the know? Meanwhile, every day, there are packs of swimmers making their way to Mecca, squealing in delight, and turning the sacred into a tourist destination.

But then my mother is standing in the middle of the sea, as if by miracle rising out of the water like a consort of Poseidon. The golden rays of the evening sun alight on her triumphant form, hair waving in the breeze. And I see it. She is Botticelli’s Venus and I am but a lowly mortal swimming at her feet. So, forsaking my aversion, I embrace the rock, I climb to standing to join her and the others. For a moment, we are demigods, gazing back at the little masters of the seas on their shrinking shore.