Gratitude

Anyone who has spent much time on the water and can tell you that there are spirits there, other beings. That is, they can, but they probably won’t. It’s not worth their while to try to convince you or explain it to you if you’re skeptical. They’ll size you up pretty quick and might pretend that they don’t know this, or that they have forgotten, but they haven’t.

Most of us have a story about how something inexplainable saved our lives. For some, it came while you were out diving by the reefs, bereft of the diving partner you tell your parents you never go in without and you find yourself stuck on the under edge of a reef, something sticking out that you somehow missed and you feel something, not a hand but something that helps you disengage. You may tell your boyfriend or another diver, but you don’t talk about it much, you don’t have too many specifics. Still, you dream about it for years afterwards, for ever afterwards and you are always, deeply grateful.

My cousin Richard was stung by a sting ray when he was very young, seven or eight. This was in North Carolina on a summer when sharks were seen close to land. He was in a lot of pain and couldn’t swim well when he felt something, a tug from underneath and then a great swell where a channel opened up and lifted him up and over a breaker. He was faint by then and close to losing consciousness when he found himself being plunged face first into to the silty bottom, sucking up sand. He came up sputtering and howling not 50 meters from shore and could not speak for quite a few minutes while he tried to sort it all out, trying to decide how much to tell. He had a bad cut on his leg and told a screwy story about it that people didn’t actually believe. But that screwy story saved his life.

Then this other time, after I moved to Northern California to go to college, my then boyfriend-now- husband Ben and I were camping way out on a bluff near the Oregon border. Below us was the Great Blue Pacific, shining silver in the moonlight. It was a hot night and we took a couple of joints and a bottle of wine and made our way down the steep path to the beach. Ben loved to skinny dip, but he’d grown up by the warm oceans back East and didn’t believe me that the Pacific never warms up even after the hottest days, even after a series of the hottest days, which this night was. He stripped down and went hollering and whooping into the waves. The shelf drops off there, at Patrick’s Point, closer in than it does down the Coast and he disappeared suddenly but then came back up and waved for me to come in which I did, more timidly. It’s really something when the water hits your tender points and you need a second or two to adjust. I didn’t get that second or two because Ben went under a swell and he didn’t come back up. A few seconds, which felt like minutes, later he waved his hands but then he went back down again. Ben is a very strong swimmer, he’s a surfer and a body surfer and he was really in shape but he was also flailing. I’m a fairly good swimmer myself and I took out after him but I knew I wouldn’t be able to close the gap in time if he kept on flailing and sinking. I tried to go underwater, hoping to get some kind of current but when I came back up he was even further away. I wanted to shout at him to stop moving, to just try to breathe and tread water but I don’t think he heard me over his own panting and the sound of the water. I thought I saw something in the water near where he had gone down, I hoped it wasn’t a fin and then I hoped it was. Whenever I saw him he looked paler and more frantic and like his legs were caught on something under the water, a net or a propeller, I couldn’t see what. He bobbed up at intervals but he seemed to bob up lower each time.

I had long lost any trace of formal religion but the prayer of the desperate: “helphelphelphelplhelpJESUSCHRISTYAHWEHBUDDHAPLEASEGODHELPUS” pounded frantically in my head. I dove down to see if there was sunken flotsam but I could only see a few feet ahead. I saw some seaweed but nothing memorable. When I looked up this time there was a weird kind of phosphorescent glow off a ways, like somebody had spilled oil from a tanker or vats filled with bubble fluid from a kid’s toy. It was just a shape, a blob until it seemed to drift apart from itself. It wasn’t a jellyfish, not even a smack of jellyfish and anyways I’d watched Ben yell and moan and hobble around but ultimately survive a jellyfish sting or two before so I didn’t think he was allergic.

I concentrated on closing the distance between us and when I looked again I realized that the blob had organized itself into a definable shape, something like an irregular circle. Inside the circle was nothing, no spume, wavelets, no breath but I took out for it as fast as I could.

Ben’s flailing had stopped and there were no bubbles. The only thing to guide me was the peaceful center in the vast dark waters. I plunged through the circle, which felt like exactly nothing and when I was a few meters away I finally saw him, barely above the water and coughing. I got to him maybe two seconds before he went under again.

Within minutes I had my arms around him, so tightly around his neck that he spit out a bunch of water and something else and somehow told me that I was choking him. I started laughing and crying at the same time.

Somehow we made it until we could stand up on the narrow shelf and drag one another onto the beach. I didn’t look behind me until I had turned his jaw to the side and given him mouth to mouth until he grunted for me to stop. He sat up and started throwing up and gasping, but air was going in and out we put on our clothes and hobbled, rubbery and pale up the steep path to the Point.

From the butte I looked out to the ocean where a sliver of moonlight lit up the cold, beautiful waters and there was no trace of a circle, of phosphorescence or of anything else outside of the miraculous beauty that is always there.

Ben said he didn’t remember much. He thought his foot had got caught on something, probably just some kelp and he accidentally swallowed water when he bent down to free it. He said he began to lose consciousness after a few minutes and was only aware of swirling shapes in the green deep until suddenly he got a breath of air again.

That night we clung to each other like limpets, our hair clotted with salt and sand, not even bothering to change, just stripping our damp clothes on the kitchen floor. I made tea and laced it with whiskey. We huddled on the deck under a blanket and watched the ocean almost until light broke through the early morning fog.

I don’t know what saved him that night and he didn’t know either, but something did.

Sometimes I wonder why any of them, whatever they are, bother to save us, even the best of us, at all. We have been very bad guests in their world, we have done much harm to the creatures there and to the ocean itself. Maybe they do it so that we have an opportunity to do better, to stop what we are doing, to be a friend in deed to those who befriended us. But perhaps not, perhaps it’s just their nature, whatever they are.

I would like to say that I dedicated my life to saving the Ocean and all the critters in it, that I became a Marine Biologist or an Environmentalist, but I did not. I volunteered for Green Peace for a couple of years and sent them money for several years after that, but I did not repay the gift of life that Ben and I and my cousin Richard were given.

Unless this is it, right now. Unless I let you know that there is something benevolent and beautiful in the great vast deep, something that fights for us and saves us every single day of our life, whether you care to believe that or not.