Swimming to the Top of the Tide Page 4

  COLD

  Around here (latitude: 42; longitude: -70), water temperatures drop to the mid-to-low sixties by the end of summer. Take a brisk walk in sixty-five-degree air and you’ll work up a sweat. But in sixty-five-degree water, you don’t warm up no matter how energetically you swim. That’s because of heat transfer—the exchange of heat from a warm object to a cooler one—which happens about thirty times faster in the water than in the air. We felt this heat extraction first in our hands and feet, the parts of our bodies farthest from our hearts.

  One evening we swam up Ebben Creek farther than we’d been before, where the channel narrows to the point where you can almost touch one side with your toes and the other with your fingertips. Enticed by the snort of horses in a field upriver, I wanted to keep going, ignoring the fact that we’d already come close to a mile upriver, that the tide wouldn’t turn for another hour, and that we’d have to swim a long way back against the current.

  About halfway back, Robert had one of his excruciating knife-in-the-thigh leg cramps, caused by many things, but in this case it was swimming against a strong current in cool water bordering on cold. Though he’s not heavy and was doing everything he could to cooperate, it took me long minutes to shove him out of the water and up onto the bank. He flopped onto high ground, twitching like a fish.

  After the leg cramp subsided somewhat, he was able to stand, then walk shakily. I steered him away from the ditches and holes, which seemed to have multiplied in the semidarkness.

  We made a third trip to the dive store. We had thought the several thin layers we had—Farmer Johns, plus sleeveless hooded vests, plus long-sleeve wetsuit shirts—would cumulatively fend off the cold. But though these layers helped with the initial shock of entering cold water, they weren’t enough to keep our core temperatures up. Robert had already gone online and researched water-temperature charts and the recommended types of suits for different gradations of cold. I’d found some instructions (italic passages below) regarding how a wetsuit should fit.

  Fit is a very important aspect to consider when buying a wetsuit. If your wetsuit does not fit properly it will not be able to keep you warm or allow you the mobility you need for your sport.

  Robert went first into the single dressing room, carrying several full-length “4/3” suits (four millimeters of insulation at the torso, three at the arms and legs; meant for water temperatures between sixty-three and fifty-eight degrees). I browsed the suits, wondering if we would ever need the 6/5 versions (for water approximately forty-two degrees and below). At the end of the rack were the drysuits, which looked like colorful Gore-Tex spacesuits.

  A few minutes later, Robert emerged, graying chest hair sprouting from the neck of the suit, which had a nifty chartreuse thunderbolt running diagonally across the torso. He did some deep knee bends.

  After you have your wetsuit on there should be no excess room, including the torso, crotch, shoulders and knees. It should fit tight in order to keep only a thin layer of water between your body and your suit.

  “Hard to tell where the line is between tight and constricting,” he said, reaching both arms up over his head, then touching his toes. “But I think this is about right.”

  My turn in the changing room.

  Gently pull the fabric up and over your hips until the wetsuit is at your crotch. Make sure that the fabric around your legs is not twisted. Now pull the suit up over your torso, making sure it fits very tightly against the skin and that there is no extra fabric left along your torso before you put the arms on.

  I cracked the door open, motioning for Robert. He tugged my zipper up. The neckband pressed uncomfortably against my throat.

  Make sure that the neck of the wetsuit is directly against your skin. This will create a seal so just the right amount of water enters the suit. If your suit is loose, an abundance of water will flush through.

  While I’d been struggling with the suit, he’d been finding boots in both our sizes, and heavier fins meant for boots instead of bare feet. The fins were split, rather than the paddle style we’d been using since the summer.

  The split creates a vortex that assists in propulsion and speed. Split fins are good for casual divers, inexperienced divers who may not have good kicking technique yet, and divers who have ankle or knee problems and cramp easily.

  Gloves were last. Getting the first one on was not so difficult, but putting on the second one—with no fingers free—took a while. The dressing room was too warm; our faces were flushed.

  Neoprene’s air-filled cells trap body heat, approximating the very dense fur of an otter and the thick blubber of a seal or whale. Fins—made of various combinations of plastic and rubber—mimic a fish’s flexible fins, a duck’s webbed feet. But it’s still just prosthetics, unavoidably more cumbersome than the real thing—and cussedly uncomfortable on land.

  It wasn’t until the next evening, as we slipped into the Tilt-A-Whirl current between Conomo Point and Cross Island, that all that new snugness felt just right. We were more buoyant with our thicker neoprene skins, and, once the water inside our suits matched our respective body temperatures, we’d be warmer, too. We’d also gained more power in our legs with the new fins.

  Emboldened, we swam farther than we’d been before, all the way around the western end of the island. Out of the tidal strait, the current was calm enough to pause and tread water. We’d been here many times before in boats and kayaks. But things look different when you’re peering at them from sea level. When your eyes are just half a foot above water, the horizon is less than a mile away. And Cross Island—just a ten-acre blip of an island—loomed like the edge of a continent.

  Many times we’d motored or paddled by the iconic summer cottage perched up on a grassy bluff. It had faded blue shingles and a wraparound front porch. This time, free of boats to anchor or stash, we decided to take a look.

  Carrying our fins like satchels, we scrambled up the bluff, our new gloves and boots insulated with tepid water. Stepping onto the porch, we cupped our hands over our eyes and peered in each window, piecing together the first floor: a front room facing the bay, sheets thrown over its couch and wicker chairs; a mini-kitchen with 1960s linoleum and knotty-pine paneling; a narrow staircase leading up to the sleeping loft, its treads worn.

  A grassy path led uphill from the house and disappeared into the wooded interior of the island. Our boots squished as we trod the grassy, tree-overhung path, passing an abandoned tennis court and a Shingle style house several times larger than the blue cottage.

  We emerged on the island’s east coast, approaching what had always been a familiar landmark out in the bay: a stone foundation that was rumored to have been the beginnings of a “spite” house. Someone in the extended family that owned the island had decided to block the view of another relative. That’s what we’d heard, anyway. The unfinished foundation stood at the edge of the island like a question mark.

  Somewhere during our trek across the island, the tide had turned. We’d swum against the current on the way and would be swimming against it on the way back if we retraced our path. Instead, we walked across the exposed mudflat that edges the east side of the island, reentering the channel upriver.

  Back at the dock, we’d come full circle. But we’d also traced a widening arc.

  Anywhere you are, things scale up and out. The whirlpool in the middle of a tidal strait is a baby version of deep-ocean maelstroms. The footpath across a ten-acre island is cousin to the transcontinental highway. Family feuds over sight lines scale up to global warfare.

  Things scale down and inward, too. Cross Island is actually not a monolithic island; it’s one of three oak islands perched on a slab of salt marsh out in the middle of Essex Bay. The other two, Corn and Dilly, are mere fractions of an acre. All around them are mini-islands too numerous to count, with names that exist only in the minds of birds.

  A few days later, I arrived home from work grumpy, a spat with a colleague nagging at me. I felt she had been in the wrong, but I also didn’t want to be wrong and not know it.

  “Why don’t we go swimming?” Robert asked.

  “It’s late,” I said.

  He stretched his arm toward the western sky, fingers parallel with the horizon, and squinted. “So? We still have two and a half hours of daylight left.” (Along with measuring the hours till sunset with his fingers, he also measures distances with his stride, or, in the case of a thunderclap, with his ear—each five-second lapse between the lightning flash and the cracking sound means one mile away.)

  And that was how we ended up on the Clammer’s Beach side of Conomo Point, at the juncture of the Essex River and Walker Creek, hoping to swim Walker Creek all the way down to the Concord Street bridge. The swimmable part of the creek was a hundred-some feet from shore, across a shimmering mudflat. Carrying our fins, we followed the path of generations of clammers, who had fortified this first bit of muddy shore with gravel and crushed clamshells, creating a ramp for the entry and exit of their motorboats.

  Reaching the end of that semisolid ground, we started off across the mud, alert to subtle differences in texture that marked varying degrees of firmness in the chocolate-colored mud of the creek bottom. “Pluff” mud can be as enveloping as quicksand. If you lose a sneaker, it may be gone for good.

  We slid into the chute of water hugging the far side of the creek and swam hard against the current. The ends of ditches and natural canals punctuated the mud walls, curving enticingly inward. All quiet except for the rhythmic plinking of our hands stroking and fins kicking, and the occasional caw of a gull overhead. Ahead of us, on the more solid, inhabited side of the creek, three docks jutted out, a cabin cruiser tied up at one of them.

  An invisible someone was talking, the voice indistinct at first, th
en louder. As we swam closer, a tiny figure appeared from behind the boat, hands up around his head.

  “There’s a house under construction,” Robert remarked. “Maybe it’s the contractor on his cell phone.” But as we swam closer, the shouting turned into oratory. The figure was a teenage boy in a hoodie, pacing restlessly out on a long dock—an actor on a stage he must have thought was utterly private. We swam by, keeping a low profile.

  Around the next bend in the creek, the swimmable chute got wider and shallower. Soon we were not so much swimming as mud-skating, in water that was just over a foot deep. The motion was something like cross-country skiing, but instead of kick and glide, it was extend an arm, plunge fingers into mud, pull, then repeat with opposite arm. Tiny fish nipped at my wetsuit.

  The water got shallower and shallower, and finally we had to stand up.

  “I guess we’ll swim to the bridge another time,” I said. The creek bottom in the middle of the channel was sandy, though, firm enough for us to walk a ways—fins off—before turning back.

  “That’s Jan Smith’s boathouse,” Robert said, pointing out a small shed tucked into the eastern side of the creek. On the western shore stood the large, solidly built dock that had belonged to the Cohens, a real estate magnate and his artist wife. Every year, at the beginning of August, they’d hosted “end of the green-head season” parties (greenheads are vicious biting flies that plague the area for a few weeks in July). Next to the Cohen’s I could just make out Helen Tory’s studio. Her métier is the monoprint. I’d visited her studio, had admired the images of goats and sheep and sumo wrestlers, but had never had this view of her world.

  Robert pointed out a canal leading to the shore near Helen’s studio. It had been dug years ago, probably to allow boat access to the marsh during low tide, probably by a particular reclusive fisherman who had lived nearby.

  “He really knew fish,” Robert said. “He knew exactly when and where they came to feed. He’d only fish at night because he didn’t want people following him.”

  As the creek narrowed, its shores grew denser and denser with the lives and stories of our neighbors.

  FALL EQUINOX

  Early to mid October in New England can range from freak snowstorms to days that feel like summer, and it was on one of these incongruously warm days—fall colors, summer temperatures—that we swam Ebben Creek on a Sunday afternoon. The Farnham’s parking lot was full as we slipped into the water.

  It was also the last of several days of new-moon tides; only the top half foot of the grass lining the channels was still showing. Our sense of scale shifted as we swam over the channels rather than down in them, over a marsh lawn that seemed laminated. We swam past cedar saplings and bushes that were not normally underwater, past small, temporary islands where birds stood in the rising tide like sentries.

  About a mile upriver, we sat on a bit of submerged bank before turning back, water up to our waists, our legs more floating than dangling, wanting to extend what was probably going to be our last summer-temperature swim for the year.

  It had become a game for me to try to pinpoint the turning of the tide, but millions of cubic feet of water in a tidal channel do not change direction neatly. There are many strata of water, many places where the water is slowed down by a bottleneck, and so the pivot happens in many places, in fits and starts.

  We watched the glassy plane of water begin, ever so slightly, to drop. As we floated back with the current, more of the grass emerged, the outlines of the channels gradually coming clear again.

  A few days later, it was blustery and a full twenty degrees colder. The water temperature had dropped to fifty, after several weeks of hovering in the mid-fifties. We swam Conomo Point in a silver-and-blue chop that slapped our faces and kept them wet. I’d worn three-fingered gloves, and as my hands began to stiffen, I squeezed my entire hand into the middle pocket, instead of just my middle and ring fingers, hoping all five digits would keep one another warm, but no.

  Back at the car, I had to guide one hand with the other to get the key in the ignition. At home, we made a beeline for our outdoor hot tub, peeling off our suits, gloves, and boots, washing off as quickly as possible with the garden hose. We climbed in gingerly, our chilled skin stinging as it hit the water. A few minutes later came the reward: bathtub warmth, even as the wind picked up, sending a cottony, dark gray storm cloud from the west and, with it, little pinpricks of mist. Only Robert’s head was above water, the rest of him refracted at an impossible angle beneath the water.

  I slid down so the water was right at my chin, and watched droplets of mist dissolve in the steam. Then a teeny hailstone landed on my nose.

  By the third week of October, New England salt-marsh lawns have turned uniformly yellow. We swam Ebben Creek, and made our way through stuff that had been flushed out of the marsh’s nooks and corners: sticks, logs, a deflated, sun-bleached Mylar balloon, and broken-up bits of pumpkin. Most of all, though, we swam through flecks and clumps and barges of hay. Curious, I plowed into one of these barges rather than dodging it. It parted as I swam through. It felt like a soggy though buoyant sleeping bag.

  Swimming with hay is a little eccentric. But there’s nothing dirty here, if by “dirty” you mean foul or filthy or dangerous to human health. It’s just cellulose—nice, clean organic matter.

  For many of the years of our marriage, I had worked with another form of cellulose. Walker Creek Furniture, our family’s custom furniture business, was all about wood, and about tradition. “We use mortise-and-tenon joinery instead of dowels,” our website stated, “and smooth our boards with a hand plane rather than a belt sander. While most furniture is finished with a sprayed-on polyurethane or colored lacquer, we finish every piece by hand using linseed oil, shellac and milk paint.”

  I learned to “read” wood grains as I sanded and oiled and polished the surfaces of tables and cabinets and chairs. I was intimately acquainted with the types of wood most commonly used in furniture making: pine, hemlock, ash, cherry, maple, mahogany, oak, and walnut. Pine and other softwoods grow quickly; their grains are loose, with lots of space between growth rings. The hardwoods grow more slowly, resulting in denser, more luxurious-looking grains. Bird’s-eye maple and figured birch would shift with the light, flaming out as you walked around them.

  I also became close friends with the substances we put on wood. Milk paint, for example, was a mix of casein (milk solids), limestone, clay, and earth pigments. We used a commercially available version of the paint, which involved mixing the powder with hot water and stirring it with a wire whisk to eliminate lumps. After applying the paint and letting it dry, we sanded the surface with progressively finer grits of sandpaper, then polished it with extra-fine (“quadruple-aught”) steel wool. The result was a durable, nontoxic finish as smooth as marble. Sometimes I spent all day with a single color, contemplating it with my hands as well as with my eyes. These were the colors of the marshes and the woods: the umber of mud, the celadons of lichen, the red oxide of a rusting barrel stave, the whites of chalk or lime.

  When I used milk paint, or other simple substances, like linseed oil and shellac, I knew where they came from. Linseed oil comes from the dried, ripened seeds of the flax plant. When used on wood, it produces a shiny but not overly glossy surface that highlights the grain of the wood. Shellac is a resin secreted by the female lac bug. It functions as natural primer and high-gloss varnish.

  We also used contemporary paints, stains, and solvents. Nearly all of these were derived from another common earth material: petroleum—literally “rock oil”—that had been pressed and cooked underground for millions of years. But the connection between crude oil and these refined substances was harder to grasp. It involved a long line of inventive people who had, beginning in the late nineteenth century, engineered these substances into everything from paint thinners to paintbrushes. Much of this engineering took place at a molecular, invisible level.