I Never Meant To Raise an Ocean Swimmer

So it turns out I was right: Earlier this summer, I predicted that Charlie would swim the farthest out into the ocean, beyond and over Jim’s head and swimming where Jim is comfortable, with me posted by the lifeguard stand—-and this is precisely what has happened. The ocean is no swimming pool, but a living creature, changeable, wild, and mightier than us all. And I rather suspect that, while Charlie loves best to swim in rough and foaming waves that swirl him around and buzz over his head, he has little sense of the danger involved. Charlie loves to be amid the ocean’s power, but he does not realize what that power can do—earlier this summer, a boy about Charlie’s age drowned in a rip current at another beach in New Jersey.

That boy was swimming at 7pm, after the lifeguards had left. After four straight days of rain, the lifeguards were back and Charlie—who had gotten in his swims during and in despite of the rainy days—gloried in the curling waves. The orange flags that mark where one can swim were set quite close together and Jim had to pull on Charlie’s arm more times than he cared so that Charlie would go “flag to flag”—the current was so strong, it only took a few minutes for Charlie to be swept southward, and once he and Jim got caught in a wave that troughed the sand far deeper than where Jim could stand and they spun around in the water, towards the jetty.

The only other swimmers out that far were teenage and college-age young men and one older man: These were not waves for ye average 10-year-old boy; these were waves that reminded me of why the ancient Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, was also the god of horses and of earthquakes. The thunderous power of one of those waves pulling on us was like being run over by horses’ hooves, and being bandied about in the tremors of an earthquakes whose Richter scale measurement was not small. Charlie appears to be embarking on his future career as some sort of ocean and beach denizen—we walked by some fishing boats in the afternoon, and Jim and I agreed that it was too easy to imagine Charlie in another age as a stalwart sailor, unmindful of storms and gales and loving the intense smell of the salt spray and the sand on his skin and every wave that comes, ever new, and terrifyingly beautiful: Three of those young men on the beach had to be rescued by lifeguards when the waves took them out too fast.

And so, for an hour this morning and two this afternoon, Jim swam and ran with Charlie in and out of the wave, and I did my smaller part at gesturing wildly “north! north! swim by the lifeguard!” to get Charlie out of the water away from the jetty and back between the flags. At one point the three of us were racing up the beach, Charlie holding our hands and running between us, eyes haunted until we let go and he ran back to his ocean.

I never meant to raise Charlie to be an ocean swimmer, a boy who might better have been a dolphin or (who knows?) a whale, whose grace is visible to any eye when he is out and in and under the waves, and who has to be all but dragged in to warm himself and take a rest. (“Relax, let’s practice relaxing,” I said and Charlie grudgingly sat in the sand, burying his hands and feet.) I knelt to turn the pockets of his swimsuit inside-out: They contained clods of sand, dripping with ocean water. I am a sorry swimmer, too ready to complain that there is salt water in my contact lenses and that I can’t feel the ground beneath my fear. I am not even like the 10-year-old girls who stood at the water’s edge with their boards attached to their wrists and stared and stared and stared at Charlie’s exploits, at his literally headlong rushes into waves twice his height. I don’t know where Charlie will go with this ocean swimming skill—ability—love. I know that if you want to know Charlie, you have to see him swim or—even better–swim with him.

Surfing lesson scheduled for 9.45am on Saturday, our last day down here at the beach, in Charlie’s true home.