For my last day, I wanted to do something I had never done before: swim directly into the sea. When I swim in open water, I swim parallel to the shore. This would be different. No markers. No line of sight. Just the horizon. The currents. The waves. On top of this, we would be swimming from Bolinas, a quaint fishing town that is famous for its hostility to visitors and taking down signs to keep them away. This is where Bolinas Lagoon opens to the open sea. Seals gather here and sharks supposedly come here to feast on the seals. I didn't know if this was just a rumor to keep out-of-town surfers away, but the Farallon Islands, just 20 miles south of Point Reyes, are the winter playground of some of the world's largest great white sharks. For this effort I enlisted the help of my friend Greg, a local.
We wore wetsuits. He gave me a comfortable neoprene hat to wear over my cap and glasses to keep my head warm. He also gave me a special anti-shark charm that I wore on my wrist like a watch. Developed in Australia, these wrist magnets repel sharks, he said, and “feel like a punch in the nose” to sharks if they get too close. It sounded good to me!
Swimming with the birds made me feel as if I, too, were a wild creature, another element in the web of life rather than the superpredator separate from the natural world that I tend to be in my everyday urban existence.
The day dawned foggy, but the low blanket of fog that covered the land the day before had dissipated. I was afraid to swim straight in and lose sight of land. Greg assured me that even in dense fog you can tell where the land is by feeling the direction of the waves. That may be true, but I was not yet ready to swim by the feel of the currents. Greg also wore small fins that looked like duck legs and a neon bubble tied to his waist to carry our valuables and make us visible from the boats. We agreed to swim for 15 minutes.
The waves were big. The surfers were already at a local spot known as the “patch.” We dive into the waves, swimming hard among them. The visibility of the water was zero: just a yellow, brown and finally black spot. We wouldn't be able to see a seal or a shark if it swam right below us. I didn't like the feeling.
But my friend was by my side. Finally, my shallow, panicked breathing slowed, my stroke steadied, and I settled. Beyond the wave line, we stopped. The early morning sea was crystal clear and calm. It felt slimy, velvety and otherworldly. Pelicans and terns swooped and darted around us. Surprisingly, once we swam, I could see that the land surrounded us with long arms. Stinson Beach stretched to the right, Bolinas to the left. We wouldn't lose our way. We swim further. Every few strokes we stopped to take in the view. We were just dots in the ocean, as small as a velella or an anchovy, part of a large, aquatic world.
Here my perspective changed. I realized we could swim forever and still see the shore. We lie on our backs and let the waves gently lift us up and then fall. The words my father, a second-generation submariner, often recited when I was a child, ran through my head: “Cradled in the cradle of the deep, I lie down peacefully to sleep.” We swam to where the glass ended and the wind rippled the surface, 14 minutes out.
The magic of the open water experience was better shared. No GoPro or camera can capture the vastness of the ocean for someone standing on the coast. Or what it feels like to navigate the slow movement of the ocean, pulsing like the heartbeat of the world. We reached shore in a group, swimming frantically and then turning to face the waves so as not to be wiped out. We swam until our feet touched the sandy bottom and crawled out happy but exhausted.
My body endured the rocking of the ocean for the rest of the day. I could close my eyes and be back there, rising and falling gently under the low gray sky. I held on to that feeling as long as I could.
My friend promised me that by next year I would have more bodies of water and more secret swimming spots. He had already come up with new watering holes that he didn't even know existed. But for me the search had been a success. Being in the water every day helped me regain my balance. Surfers say the ions in salt water make you happy. I don't know if it's true, but I'm 60% water and I felt like it had moisturized my dry skin, lightened the pull of gravity on my aging body, and stripped away some of the heaviness of the first six months of the year.
When I first went to my therapist many years ago, she told me the story of selkies. At the time I was feeling overwhelmed by work, marriage, and motherhood. Much of our work has been my journey back to myself. After my vacation, I told him about my adventure. She said, “You were able to put the skin back on. You're going to spend more time in your seal suit.” Yes. On land and in water. Am. Sometimes the metaphor is the medicine.
