Swimming to the Top of the Tide Page 5

  The downside of petroleum distillates’ shape-shifting ingenuity is the long list of things that can happen—to you or your surroundings—if you handle them carelessly. Rags saturated with oil and crumpled up in a trash bag can self-ignite (we knew someone whose house had burned to the ground this way). Spray paints and lacquers contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like acetone, xylene, toluene, and benzene, which can irritate your skin and eyes, mess with your central nervous system, or—worst-case-scenario—trigger a chain reaction of disruptions in the red blood cell–forming capacity of your bone marrow. There is, in short, usually a direct connection between the complexity of a product and its potential for collateral damage.

  NOVEMBER

  On the last day of daylight saving time, we swam Conomo Point as the tide neared high. The wooden floats attached to the stone dock had been removed and stored for the season, so by then we were entering the water from the flat rocks projecting into the channel.

  We swam toward the year’s last 5:30 sunset. Salmon and magenta clouds clustered at the horizon as the sun, a gold lozenge, slid down, disappearing below the tree line of a distant shore in Ipswich. A few minutes later, the sky exploded into at least six distinct colors. Floating on our backs, we counted and named them: pale gray, gunmetal gray, jet-trail white, sheep’s wool white, baby blue, turquoise. Then the finale: gold flung out everywhere, the unseen sun gilding the undersides of every cloud.

  Over the next quarter hour, the color drained from the clouds. We treaded water awhile near the tip of Cross Island before heading back.

  “It’s just turned,” Robert said, meaning the tide.

  “How can you tell?”

  He pointed to a Boston Whaler, one of the few boats still moored in the channel. Sure enough, it had done a 180 while I wasn’t watching, and was now pointed east. I often looked for the turning of the tide but seldom saw it, the exact moment as elusive as the moment of falling asleep.

  Later that evening, we were up in Robert’s painting studio, an attic dense with stuff and with possibilities.

  “That felt like the end,” I said. “Not the end of swimming, but the end of swimming at night.”

  “Why?” Robert asked. He was feeding the fire in the woodstove, adding a log and blowing on the coals to get it to catch. I was sprawled on the couch, a comfortable castoff from a friend’s house, its blue upholstery sun-bleached. The Köln Concert played softly on an ancient stereo.

  “Because it’ll be dark tomorrow.”

  “There’s nothing in the water after dark that isn’t there before dark,” Robert said, reasonably enough.

  “This is true,” I replied, meaning, Yes, that is factually correct, but it doesn’t change how I feel about it.

  “It’s been getting dark while we’re swimming for a while now,” he said.

  “That’s true, too.” But getting into the water while it was still at least marginally light was a kind of on-ramp for me, sliding me past resistance. Tomorrow, that on-ramp would be gone.

  The next evening, we drove to the Point at our usual time, but now 5:30 was an hour past sunset. The moon was in its first quarter, with Mars and Venus up in the west. There was still a slight glow above the horizon. The water was navy blue ink, spangled with moonlight.

  Crouched on a flat rock jutting out into the channel, fins tucked under my right arm, I wavered. But seconds after Robert shot into the current, I leaped into the water, rolling over briefly to pull on my fins, then angling my body toward Robert’s so we could cross the channel more or less together. All I could see of him was the flash of moonlight on his head. I swam toward that flash, grasped the hump of neoprene that was his left shoulder.

  No boats coming in either direction for as far as we could see. We swam hard through the choppy middle of the chute between the Point and Cross Island, then reached the calmer current on the other side. We floated toward the western tip of the island in longitudinal stripes of moonlight.

  I had thought of dark as a kind of monolith, but it was an environment rich in sensory cues. Above the surface, these cues took the form of light, giving you detailed information about the shape of the water: its ropes of current, its bucklings and disruptions. I could still see the water, but I was viewing it through a different filter.

  Below the surface, proprioception took over. Each extension or contraction of any muscle in my body was noted by my muscle spindles, the specialized cells in each muscle bundle that tracked the shifting lengths of these bundles and conveyed the information to my central nervous system.

  The result was a richly detailed nonvisual map of where my body was in relation to an ever-shifting matrix of space and time.

  After the switch back to standard time, I began logging our swims. It was several weeks past the date we had thought it would all be over, and I wanted to keep track of the final leg of the journey. We’d already agreed that it was not going to be a stunt; we would keep swimming only as long as we were still enjoying it. I noted the basics: location, weather, time of day or night, what the sky and water looked like, other creatures we saw, and what they were up to.

  By this time we were swimming mostly in the evenings after work, with an occasional daytime swim. I sometimes jotted down what we thought and talked about as we swam, or on the way home, or over dinner afterward. Sometimes the entries turned into essays, in the older sense of an assay, an attempt.

  We had made yet another trip to the dive store, buying the “6/5” suits that had seemed so unlikely back in the summer, along with boots and gloves with ankle and wrist seals—basically a drysuit for the extremities.

  11/4—Ebben Creek, air 60°, water 47°. Quick swim after work, all the way dark by the end; the yellow Farnham’s sign welcomed us home.

  11/5—Ebben Creek, air 59°, water 50°. In at 4:15, out by 5:00. Still light for a while, but since it was cloudy, it was a very filtered light, with soft, saturated color fields: abalone water, yellow-orange grass. The colors drained as the sky darkened, everything turning to gray scale. Half-moon going in and out of clouds. The fog thickened as we swam.

  11/7—Ebben Creek, air 59°, water 54°. In at 5:00, out at 6:40. The moon was in its second quarter and it was about as dark as it ever gets—black water, charcoal sky, with a faint haze of ambient light to the south, in the general direction of Boston. One of the best swims we’ve ever had; we went a long way.

  11/10—Ebben Creek, air 58°, water 54°. Unseasonably mild, so we swam with the tide nearly all the way to Grove Street. In at 5:30, out at 7:00. We swam to the second bend in the creek, where the two Adirondack chairs were still strung between a willow and an ash; the hammock had long since been put away for the winter. I waited for the tide to pause, floating upright, the tips of my fins barely brushing the bouldered bottom of the creek. Robert floated on his back, arms and legs splayed like a starfish. Our typical stances in water were revelatory of who we are: his trusting nature, my need to be on top of things and know exactly where I am going at all times.

  11/11—Ebben Creek, air 49°, water 47°. We had the day off and swam the creek at noon. Maybe because we were hungry, the conversation turned to oysters—specifically the eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica. “There used to be so many oysters here that the bottoms of the creeks weren’t muddy,” Robert said, floating on his back, free-associating. “Or so I’ve heard. Bob Parlee—Bob over on Milk Street? His wife was one of Mary’s teachers?—tried to get an oyster farm going over near Songinese Creek. I don’t know how that turned out.” Pause. “Do you know why their shells are so bumpy?” Another pause. “They take on whatever shape they’re attached to, usually something bumpy or rocky.”

  We didn’t find any oysters, but we did see ribbed mussels (Geukensia demissa) tucked away in the creek walls, where they attach themselves to cordgrass roots (unlike their close cousin, the blue mussel, which attaches to pilings or rocks). Similar in shape and size to the blue mussel, they’re yellowish brown to brownish black, with corrugated ribs running the length of the shell. Years ago, kayaking one of the creeks, we’d noticed ribbed mussels for the first time, and brought some home and steamed them. The meat was disappointingly watery and loose, no competition for blue mussels or soft-shell clams.

  There’s a literary term for when something barely noticed or overly familiar emerges from the background and becomes wondrously strange and new: foregrounding. That day, bivalves came popping out of the background and were everywhere, like Waldo: sunk in the soft mud of the creek bottom, lodged in the tough roots of the cordgrass, clinging to the rocky shores farther out in the Essex River Basin. And rightly so: Bivalves and other shellfish often make up the greatest proportion of animal biomass in tidal ecosystems.

  But the noun mass implies inertness—it is derived from the Old French masse: “lump, heap, pile”; Latin massa: “kneaded dough, lump, that which adheres together like dough.” It’s important to see the actions of this mass, its verbs. Bivalves aggregate; they reticulate. They send out strong, flexible threads and lash themselves together in floating condos. They become food for creatures above them on the “org chart”—the food chain—and supply habitat space for creatures below them. In their filter feeding, bivalves also remove contaminants from the waterways, improving the water habitat for other organisms. And so on. The takeaway: Biomass is mass—“adhering together like dough”—yet it does its own kneading, to the benefit of the greater ecosystem.

  11/12—Conomo Point, air 33°, water 46°. A sudden drop in air temperature, but the water was still relatively warm. We decided to go for it, plunging into the buckling dark of the channel. Swimming around the western tip of Cross Island, we saw, for the first time, what looked like a barge. Closer, though, it turned out to be a fishing boat.

  Clammers’ motorboats mostly go home with their owners each night. The pleasure boats that had crowded the Point had been taken out weeks ago, now shrink-wrapped and hibernating in marinas. This boat was an outlier, like us, the crazy swimmers.

  We didn’t last long; we’d gotten in the water at about 5:30 and were back in the car, shivering, by a little after 6:00. Hot tub: oh yes.

  11/13—Slight fever, no swim. I spent the evening curled up on the couch under a blanket, remembering things long past, like Ivan Muise’s gas station on the Essex causeway. (Somewhere back in the late ’70s/early ’80s, as he and I waited for my tank to fill, Ivan had excitedly pointed out seals in the Essex River, their dog faces bobbing around the boats and moorings. “That’s unusual,” he said; “they don’t normally come this far upriver. You see them more often at Black Rock, near Coles Island.” Right at that moment, I’d seen one flip and float on its back.)

  I asked Robert why he floated on his back so much. “That’s what makes it like flying,” he said. Sensing my incomprehension, he added, “When you tip your head back, you see the horizon not as a line but as a circle. Like cats, which seem to orient themselves upside down.” (All clear now?)

  11/14—Ebben Creek, air 59°, water 49°; in just before 11:00, out by 12:15. This was the first of several days of “king tides,” the semiannual twelve-foot high tides that transform estuaries into temporary bays. I’d been looking forward to this for weeks. I finagled several hours off work, drove home in the middle of the day, and squeezed into my wetsuit. I’d left it hanging over a door, where it would heat up in the sun.

  The box culvert under the bridge had been entirely flooded; the waterline was inching up concrete that had eroded to a coarse graininess. Thousands of tides had flowed in and out of this narrow opening since the bridge had been built, a few of them even reaching the date marker near the top of the bridge: 1934, in the font of the times.

  Instead of entering Ebben Creek from the rocky platform below the bridge, I slid in just below the guardrails. My sense of scale shifted as I swam over the marsh lawn, and over the channels rather than down in them, floating over a school of minnows suspended between my body and the murky depths of the creek. I swam past small, temporary islands where herons stood and fished from currents they knew all about. The red-tailed hawk was in its usual perch in the uppermost branches of the oak tree at the first bend, but the bends were gone.

  I tried to avoid shallow spots, places where I had to semicrawl, poling myself along by gripping the grass. In less of a deluge, I could still have read the channels by following the winding path of tips of grass and the flow of water. But now the currents flowed everywhere, and the water’s surface was textured by wind currents that had nothing to do with the tides.

  In a tide this high, stuff gets flushed out of places where it’s been lodged for weeks, or months. I spotted something small and rectangular floating up ahead in the grass. I swam toward it, approaching what turned out to be a toy-size wooden barge carrying one passenger: a plastic toy soldier glued to the platform, an avatar in a vast, roiling sea.

  11/15—Ebben Creek, another over-twelve-foot tide, and still unseasonably mild: air 60°, water 54°. This time I was trying to stay in the channels; scooting myself over very shallow areas the day before had left my elbows and wrists sore. Back at Farnham’s, I floated near the mouth of the bridge, waiting for the creek to slow down to a quivering stillness.

  11/16—Along with a sudden upswing in air temperature, it was the highest tide of the year: twelve feet, six inches, which meant even the tips of the grass were underwater. We swam a long way: By the Tidelog, high tide was supposed to be at 11:17, but in the creeks it can vary by as much as forty-five minutes, for complex weather- and hydrology-related reasons. We were trying to swim from Farnham’s to just above Grove Street with the tide still coming in, then back the same way, also with the tide in our favor.

  11/17—Conomo Point, air 35°, water 46°. In at 5:25, out by 6:10. We swam around the island past the blue house into the next little cove, pausing at a houseboat belonging to friends; it had been boarded up for the winter. We hung on to its dock for a few minutes, floating in black water, the current flowing around us in streaky silver curls and ripples. Shaping up to be a starry, starry night.

  “Cold is relative,” Robert said afterward, as we peeled off first our gloves and boots, then our suits, rinsing them off in the shower, filling its basin with little flecks of straw and seaweed. “I was as cold at certain times in August as I am at certain times now.”

  Temperature was out of our control, but we could manipulate other variables. That would affect—somewhat—how we experienced the cold. We ran up and down stairs to get our heart rates up before even putting on our suits. We kept in mind that the initial shock of cold water shooting down the spine was fleeting. We pushed off against a dock or a boulder, and swam right past that shock. Perhaps most important, we tried to remember to quit while we were ahead, turning back before we started really feeling the cold. Resiliency can turn on a dime.

  11/19—Ebben Creek, air 28°, water 38°; ice on the marsh like cake frosting. We lasted only twenty minutes. Afterward, thawing out in the hot tub, hands and feet stinging, we wondered if we’d still be doing this at Thanksgiving.

  WINTER SOLSTICE

  After months of tilting farther and farther away from the sun, at the winter solstice the Earth begins its long journey back toward spring. There is no absolute pause—just as there is no actual hiatus at the top of the tide. But it’s deeply ingrained in humans to seek out a still point in a spinning world.

  As we swam closer and closer to this still point, cold was a constant presence that had to be managed and appeased. We’d heard about divers consuming lots of water before a dive and then periodically peeing in their suits to keep warm. We did them one better: Just before entering the water, we took turns pouring the contents of a gallon milk jug full of nearly hot water into each other’s suits, then pulling up the zippers and tamping down the Velcro neck tabs.

  The first infusion of seawater would turn the water inside our suits gradually lukewarm. It was not toasty, exactly, and we instinctively adopted more defensive postures in the water, not sprawling on our backs as we had earlier in the year. But this relative warmth made swimming possible in water now mostly in the low forties.

  Bodily limitations held at bay, we had the privilege—unlike most other humans for most of history, unlike the other creatures around us (the muskrats and otters and minnows)—of focusing on things that were not purely necessary for survival.

  11/22—Air temp has dropped into the 20s. No swim.

  11/27—Walker Creek, and the gift of an unseasonably warm Thanksgiving Day: air 40°, water 46°. Mary took photos of us disappearing under the bridge and emerging on the other side, both of us looking vaguely astonished.

  12/1—Walker Creek, air high 40s, water 42o. In at 11:30, out at just past noon. We swam in pewter-colored water toward the sun, which barely cleared the tree-tops above Great Ledge. On the return trip, the water was battleship gray in the backlighting. Then fog rolled in from the west like a blanket unfurling.

  12/2—Conomo Point, air 40o, water 42o. Overhead, Venus, Jupiter, and the moon formed a tight triangle. We entered the channel at about 5:30, pausing before heading across, unsure which way we’d go. But the current decided, carrying us to the eastern side of the island, where we ran aground on a large field of seaweed-covered granite. Robert had worn a headlamp, and he pointed it downward on tiny surprised fish. Up above, the triangle had finally merged, but not really: The moon was 240,000 miles away; Venus, 3 million; and Jupiter, 359 million. (Put differently, if you were traveling at the speed of light, you’d reach the moon in two seconds, Venus in thirty seconds, and Jupiter in about nine minutes.)

  12/7—Conomo Point, air 32o, water 40o. From the water we saw Christmas lights strung on trees and houses. One house had been strung with particular care: windows and corner boards and roofline, the lights obliterating the pith of the house itself, leaving only geometry.