The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (20 page)

I flopped back on my stomach and started the crawl again. The backs of my upper arms were getting stiff and sore. I wondered how long I had been at it, and how much longer I had to go. I tried to calculate the distance. Say the ship had been a mile offshore. That would be about half the length of our valley’s beach. If I had started swimming at Basilone Hill, then by this time I’d be about to … well, I couldn’t say. There was no way to tell. I was sure I had swum a good distance, though, from the way my arms hurt.

Stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke. Sometimes it was easy to blank the mind and just swim. I changed strokes at the count of a hundred; hundred after hundred slipped by. A lot of time passed. When I did the frog kick I noticed that the fog was lifting, becoming the low cloud bank that had rushed overhead when we were sailing north in the sloop. Perhaps that meant I was getting close to land. The clouds were very white against the black sea; probably the moon was now up. The surface of the water was a rolling obsidian plain. Swirling into it were little flurries of snow, flying forward over me as much as they were falling. When they hit the water they disappeared instantly, without a splash. The sight of them made me feel the cold more than ever, and again I almost started to cry, but couldn’t spare the effort. I was crying miserable, though. If only I had those fins.

I put my head down and doggedly crawled along, ordering myself to think of something besides the cold. All the times I had looked out over a peaceful warm sea, for instance. I recalled a time when Steve and Tom and I were lazing up at Tom’s place, looking for Catalina. “I wonder what it would look like if the water was gone,” Steve had said. Tom had jumped on the notion with glee. “Why, we’d think we were on a giant mountain. Offshore here would be a plain tilted away from us, cut by canyons so deep we wouldn’t be able to see the bottom of them. Then the plain would drop away so steeply we wouldn’t be able to see the lowlands beyond. That’s the continental shelf I’ve told you about. The lowland would rise again to foothills around Catalina and San Clemente islands, which would be big mountains like ours.” On he had rambled, pulling up imaginary hipboots to lead us on an exploration of the new land, through mud and muck that was covered with clumps of seaweed and surprised-looking fish, in search of wrecked ships and their open treasure chests.…

It was the wrong time to remember that discussion. When I thought of how much water was underneath me, how far away the bottom was, I got scared and pulled my feet closer to the surface. All those fish, too—the ocean was teeming with fish, as I well knew, and some of them had sharp teeth and voracious appetites. And none of them went to bed at night. One of those ugly ones with its mouth crammed with teeth could swim up and bite me that very moment! Or I might blunder into a whole school of them, and feel their slick finny bodies colliding with mine—the sandy leather of a shark, or the spikes of a scorpion fish.… But worse than the fish was just being out there at all, with
all
that water below, down and down and colder and darker, all the way to the slimy bottom so
far
below. I thrashed with panic for a while, terrified at the thought of where I was, of how deep the sea was.

But several rushes of panic passed, and I was still there floundering. There was nothing I could do to change things. And more and more as time passed the real danger, the cold, reasserted itself and made me forget my fears of the imagination. It couldn’t be escaped, I couldn’t swim hard enough now to ward it off, and the water felt icy, no longer any refuge from the snowy wind. The cold would kill me soon. I could feel that in my muscles. It was more frightening than the size of the sea by far.

My thoughts seemed to chill, becoming slothful and stupid. My arms hurt so I could barely move them. Backstroke was hard, crawl was hard, frog stroke was hard. Floating was hard. If only I had those fins. Such a long way to the bottom. My arms were as heavy as ironwood branches, and my stomach muscles wanted a rest. If they cramped I would drown. Yet I had no choice but to keep them tensed, and go on swimming. I put my numbed face in the water and plowed along in a painful crawl, trying to hurry.

There was a rhythm I could keep to if I could ignore the pain, and grimly I stuck to it. My sense of time left me. So did the notion of a destination. It was not so much a matter of getting somewhere, as it was avoiding death then and there. Left arm, right arm, breath; left arm, right arm, breath. And so on. Each motion a struggle against the cold. The few times I bothered to look up, nothing had changed: low white clouds, flakes of snow swirling ahead and disappearing into the sea with a faint
ssss, ssss, ssss.
I couldn’t feel my hands and feet, and the cold moved up my limbs and made them less and less obedient to my commands. I was getting too cold to swim.

The time came when it seemed I would have to give up. All my fine stories for the gang were going to go to waste, told only to myself in a last rush of thought on the way to the distant bottom. A waste, but there it was. I couldn’t swim any more. If only I had those fins. Still, each time I thought to myself, Hanker, this is it, time to sink—I found the energy to slap along a few strokes more. It felt like swimming in cold butter. I couldn’t go on. Again I decided to give up, and again I found a few more kicks in me. I imagine that most of the people who drown at sea never do decide to give up; their bodies stop obeying, and make the decision for them.

On my back I could frog kick, and flap my arms at my sides. It was the only way left to me, so I kept at it, anxious to postpone the moment of letting go, though I knew it wasn’t far away. The thought of it was terrifying, sickening. Like nothing else I’d ever felt. Being taken to Catalina was
nothing
compared to it, and now I knew for sure I had made a fatal mistake by jumping overboard. Swells swept up out of the dark, becoming visible as they lifted me. Maybe they could do the work for me, if I could stay afloat. I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t willing to quit. But I was too cold, too weak. On my back like I was, I had to work to avoid swallowing water when the crests of the swells passed over me, for one mouthful would have sunk me as fast as a hundred pounds of iron. Only dimly, at first, did I notice that the swells were getting taller. That’s all I need, I thought. A bigger swell, how wonderful. Still—didn’t that mean something? I was too cold, I wasn’t thinking anymore in the way that we usually think, silently talking to ourselves. I had only the simplest sort of thoughts: sensations, a repeated refusal to sink, instructions to my feeble limbs.

Cold fingers brushed my back and legs, and I squealed.

Seaweed, slick and leafy. I struggled around the floating clump, granted a bit of strength by the scare. Then on top of a swell I heard it.
p-KKkkkkkkkk … p-KKkkkkkkkkk.
Waves breaking. I had made it.

Suddenly I had some energy. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard the sound of the waves before, it was so plain. At the crest of the next swell I looked landward, and sure enough there it was, a black mass big and solid under the clouds. “Yeah!” I said aloud. “Yeah!”

I ran into another clump of seaweed, but I didn’t care. Disentangling myself from it I crested another swell, and from there the clear sound of the breaking waves told me my troubles weren’t over. Even from behind, the long irregular
crack
of the waves falling was louder than the Mayor’s shotgun had been. And following the crack was a low roaring
krrkrrkrrkrrkrrkrrkrrkrr,
that faded away just enough to make the next break noticeable. All the sounds joined together in a fierce trembling boom; it was hard to believe I hadn’t heard it earlier. Too tired.

I swam on, and now at the crests of the swells I could see the waves breaking ahead of me. As each wave broke water sucked over the back of it like it was the edge of the world; white water exploded into the fog, and the whole churning mass tumbled in to the beach. There was going to be a problem getting to shore.

The swells kept pushing me in until one larger than the rest picked me up and carried me along with it, getting steeper and steeper as it went along. I was caught under the crest, and slowly it dawned on me that it was going to pitch over and throw me with it. I took a deep breath and plunged into the wave, felt it pulling me up as I struggled through the thick lip and out the back side. Even so I was almost taken over the back of the break, and into the churning soup. The next swell was nearly as big, and I had to swim as fast as I could to get over it before it broke. I breasted its top while it stood vertical, and looked back down at the foam-streaked water some fifteen feet below. Had that black area down there been rock? Was there a reef under me?

Whimpering miserably I swam out a good distance, so I wouldn’t get caught inside by a wave bigger than the two that had almost drowned me. The idea of a reef was horrifying. I was too tired for such a thing, I wanted to swim straight in to the beach. It was so close. It was possible that what I had seen was a patch of black water in the foam, but I couldn’t be sure, and if I was wrong I would pay for it with my life. I treaded water for a time and studied the waves as they broke and sucked water over behind them. The place where they consistently broke first marked the shallowest water, and if there were rocks they probably were there. So I swam parallel to the beach a ways, to the spot where the waves consistently broke last. The cold was in my thoughts again, and my fear grew. I decided to start in.

I attended to the swells, because if a wave broke before it reached me, it would roll me under and never let me up. No, I needed to catch a wave and ride it in, just like we did for fun in the waves off Onofre. If I caught one right, I might take it all the way onto the sand. That was what I wanted. I needed a big wave—not too big, though: medium big. Waves usually came in sets of threes, a big one followed by two littler ones, but floating over them in the dark I couldn’t get any sense of that. Looking back and forth I accidentally swallowed a mouthful of water, and it almost sent me to the bottom. I saw I couldn’t afford to be picky, and I struck out backstroking, determined to catch the very next wave. If I ran into rocks that would be it, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to take the chance.

As a swell picked me up I suddenly didn’t feel tired at all, though I still couldn’t swim well. I turned on my stomach as the wave tilted my feet up, and swam for it. What I would have given for a pair of Tom’s fins, kicking as I was to match the growing speed of the wave! But I caught it anyway, just, and felt it pick me up and carry me along. I was high on the steep face as it pitched over, so that I dropped through the air and smacked my chest into the water. If it had been reef that would have been the end of me, but it wasn’t, and I skidded over the water at the front edge of the broken wave, my head alone out of the white water, barreling over the suds at a tremendous speed.

The wave petered out too soon, however, and left me gasping in the soup. I stood and felt for the bottom—no bottom—sank, and hit sand with my feet almost immediately. I pushed back to the surface and saw another wave steaming in. Rolling myself into a ball I let the wave tumble me shoreward—a standard body surfing trick, but one inappropriate to my weakness. I barely struggled back to the surface when my forward motion stopped. But now I could stand, heaving, on good smooth sand! Walking cramped my legs and I collapsed. All of the water that had been pushed onto the beach by the last few waves chose that moment to sluice back down, and I knelt and clawed the coarse flowing sand as the torrent rushed over me. Then it was past, and I hobbled out of the water.

As soon as I got up the steep wash and beyond the high water mark, I fell down. The beach was covered with a gritty layer of melting hail. My stomach muscles relaxed at last, and I started to throw up. I had swallowed more water than I knew, and it took a while to get it all out. I didn’t mind. It was the most triumphant retching I ever did.

I had made it. All well and good. But there was no chance to celebrate, because now there was a new set of problems. The snowing had stopped for a moment, but there was still a wind which cut me most distinctly. I crawled up the beach to the cliff backing it. Narrow beach, cliff three times my height—it could have been anywhere on the Pendleton shore. At the base of the cliff there was less wind, and I hunkered down behind a sandstone boulder, among other clumps of fallen cliff. I started wiping myself dry with my fingers, and while doing that looked around.

Out to sea moonlit clouds obscured the view. The beach stretched away in both directions, covered by black blobs of seaweed. I was beginning to shiver. One of the blobs of seaweed had a more regular shape than the rest. Standing up to look at it better I felt the onshore wind blow right through me. Still, that clump of weed—I stumbled around my boulder and walked toward it, being careful not to hurry and fall.

A break I had not noticed in the cliff was the mouth of a deep ravine, spilling its creek onto the beach to cut through the sand to the sea. I sat and slid down the sloping sand to the creek, stopping to drink some of its water—I was thirsty, strangely enough. When I stood again it was a struggle to make my way up the three foot embankment on the other side; I kept slipping, and finally, cursing and sniffling, I had to crawl up it and then stand.

Back on the plateau of the beach I could see the black blob clearly, and my suspicion was confirmed. It was a boat, pulled almost to the cliff. “Oh, yes,” I said. Careful not to hurry, I thought, you’ll fall. It was farther away than it looked, but at last I staggered to its side, and sat in the lee of it. Held the gunwale with my numb hands.

There were two oars in it and nothing else, so there was no way to be positive, but I was sure it was the dinghy we had been trailing behind our sloop. They had made it to shore! Tom was (most likely) alive!

I, on the other hand, was nearly dead. Presumably my companions were somewhere in the area—up the ravine was a good guess—but I couldn’t follow them. I was too weak and cold to stand. In fact my head banged the dinghy’s side while I was just sitting there. I knew I was in bad shape. I didn’t want to die after taking the trouble to swim all that way, so I got to my knees. Too bad they hadn’t left something in the boat besides the oars. Since they hadn’t … I considered it at a snail’s pace, as if very drunk. “Should get … out of … the wind … yeah.” I crawled to a big clump of seaweed and pulled off the top layers. They were all tangled and didn’t want to come. I got angry—“Stupid seaweed, let loose!”—blubbering like that until I got to the middle of the clump, which was still dry. Dryness felt like warmth. I pulled as many of the black leafy strands as I could carry out of the clump, and staggered back to the boat with them. Dropped the weed.