From early June to mid-September, rain or shine, I go for a swim at each day’s end. At some point, my late afternoon swims became more ritual than routine, without ceremony or rites but laden with meaning nonetheless: You are alive. Life is transitory — don’t squander it. Know what brings you joy.
If the tide is low, I opt for the churning waters of the Atlantic at Nauset Light Beach. When the waves are tall and strong as they break over the submerged second bar, the bodysurfing there is glorious. My first steps into the cold water are always a shock to flesh and ankle bones, but I have swum here for over 70 years, and experience taught me long ago that my body will acclimate as long as I keep moving.
I wade and stroke through the broken waves, knocked about but purposeful, heading to the bar to wait there for a big cresting swell. The trick is to time my plunging leap forward just before it breaks and then quickly kick right foot, then left, and pull my arms through one strong stroke to merge and keep pace with the wave’s energy.
If my timing is good, I skim the surface of the ocean as the wave catapults me forward; I am a passenger, unfettered, eyes closed, a rider without intention or purpose other than to be. In these waves, mindfulness is given over to play. Then, tired but drained of care, I make my way up Nauset’s sloping shoreline, smiling like a carefree schoolboy.
When the afternoon tide is high, I favor the more tranquil waters of Cape Cod Bay at Thumpertown Beach. My dive into that warm water always delivers its pleasantly anticipated promise as I, an air-breathing mammal, voluntarily abandon atmosphere, immerse myself, and am newly baptized.
Don’t read this as sentimental or hyperbolic excess. I say it is biology. For I am a creature with a deeply embedded physiological memory of salt water breathed in my mother’s briny womb and in millions of ancestral years in the long-ago oceanic origins of our species.
Floating, my body, tired from a day’s work bound by gravity, is buoyed. My brain with its commonplace concerns is quieted. And what seems now like the inconsequential purposefulness that has monopolized my time is dissolved. I luxuriate in the view of the sky, then pull on my swim goggles and freestyle out, peering at the sandy bottom. Stroke after stroke with turned head and open mouth inhaling air, I ease into a long-haul rhythm.
When I emerge from the water with the sun setting behind me, I am an ambulatory sack of salty water until I feel the boundary between flesh and sea that had been temporarily suspended now reestablished. Near the shore, I recognize an instinctive feeling of relief. The bay, so alive, also carries the tang of death in it, amply visible in the detritus of broken shells and hollow crab carcasses that litter the edge.
I am old enough to know that death lurks around some corner unseen, but will it surprise you to hear that that thought does not fill me with anxiety or dread? Life in the raw is an intense and bittersweet mingling of joy and an ever-present awareness of the fleeting nature of existence.
I turn my thoughts to dinner and a peaceful late spring night and to tomorrow where I take it on faith — what else should a sensible man do? — that another glorious day awaits.
Andrew Hay lives in Eastham.
