Into the Wild Blue Ocean

“There are two things you will never regret,” writer Mary Gordon once observed, “a swim in the ocean, and the birth of a baby.” I recite this like the rosary every time I consider plunging into salt or fresh water, every time I list the usual reasons why I shouldn’t—the water is too cold, the air colder, I’m too tired, too depressed, I don’t want to get wet, I look like a Henry Moore sculpture in a bathing suit. Sometimes I talk myself into a swim; sometimes I don’t. One simple fact remains constant: the older I get, the less inclined I am to embrace the labor of plunging into cold water, especially ocean water, with its breakers and riptides, its potential to fling me about like so much sea kelp.

On the second-to-last day of September, on Crescent Beach in Block Island with the wind blowing so hard that you had to shout to make yourself heard, I repeated this homily to my three friends, hoping to convince them to join me in what would likely be the last swim of the summer. My friends are writers as well as mothers (actually, all are grandmothers, but don’t tell anyone because it makes them seem ancient as the Mohegan clay cliffs). We met years ago in a writing group in Westchester, and have mostly stayed in touch, through moves, divorces, and remarriages.

We were spending five days on Block Island, courtesy of Mary-Ann’s agent, who had generously offered to let us use her vacation home with its many bedrooms, porches and gardens in Rodman’s Hollow. We had divided the day into sessions of writing, biking, hiking, and gossiping. A swim in Block Island Sound seemed just the thing to make already unforgettable day even more so, before we headed home to drink wine and watch the sunset.

But no argument would sway Sarah, our southern belle from Virginia, who ironically was the only one wearing her bathing suit beneath her biking clothes. Sarah said swimming was a good idea in theory but that she had dipped her toes in the water and it was just too (expletive) cold, that her scrawny limbs were turning blue at the mere thought of plunging into Block Island Sound. If we were at Cape Hatteras in August, or Bermuda in March, but we weren’t, we were in the Bermuda of the North, thirteen miles off the coast of Rhode Island a week into fall and nothing would make her get wet, no matter how blissed-out she might feel afterward.

So Sarah huddled against her backpack, promising to record the polar swim on her Nikon, while we three nutty New Englanders made our way to the Crescent Beach bathhouse, which was unfortunately closed for the season. Draping a towel over a railing on the outer deck, which provided only the flimsiest cover against the gazes of passersby, including an old geezer with a metal detector some twenty feet away, as well one fortyish fellow in a golfing hat, who later approached us and confessed to watching us swim, pointing out that the water couldn’t have been that cold because we didn’t even use a towel to dry off. (The truth was, which we didn’t share as there was no need to discourage his plans to go swimming, we had packed only one towel!)

But changing our suits, we were hardly aware of him or any other idling beachcomber, shouting into the gale that we wouldn’t have dreamt of doing such a thing twenty years ago, but that now we didn’t give a hoot. Or, as Mary-Ann put it, quoting from a slogan on a tee-shirt that she picked up in Old Saybrook, a slogan that became a kind of shorthand for our island idyll,“Frankly, Scallop, I don’t give a clam!”

It probably won’t surprise you that my bathing suit was blue—with tiny white polka dots that a saleslady assured me some ten years ago were meant to provide a visually slimming effect, enhanced by the old-lady skort that reached to mid-thigh. It was the sort of suit that my mother would have approved of, would have worn herself had she been inclined to swim in the ocean in September.

But here’s what made me sad: when she was my age, my mother was not inclined to swim in the ocean—not in September or any other month of the year, even though she lived within a few miles of several beaches on the Gulf of Mexico in southern Florida. In the summer months, when she headed north to her summer cottage in Canada on Georgian Bay, where she had spent nearly every summer of her life since she was a child of five, where, in fact, she had first learned to swim, she didn’t go into the water either. She always had her reasons: she had just had her hair done, she was getting over a cold, the water wasn’t warm enough (even though Lake Huron was considered the warmest of the Great Lakes, a fact which she always proudly cited to friends), she didn’t want anyone to see her in a bathing suit as she had recently put on a “few tons.”

“Did your mothers stop swimming when they got to be a certain age?” I had asked my friends earlier, as we made our way from the Greenway Trail down to Mansion Beach, scouting a spot in which we might take our swim.

“Yeah, even when we were kids going to the Connecticut shore every summer, my mother rarely went in the water, she always said she didn’t want to mess up her hair,” Mary-Ann said, explaining that her mother reported that your skin gets more sensitive as you get older, and that she had never been able to bear the cold even when she was younger.

“My mother swam a lot when she was young growing up in England,” Sarah remembered, “but now that I think of it, she hardly ever went in as she got older.” Sarah’s mother had been a smoker, and had died of emphysema at the age of 78.

“My mother doesn’t swim as much as she used to, but she still does a kilometer in the pool almost every day,” Christine offered brightly. Christine’s mother was the only one of our mothers who was still alive, and maybe, I theorized, there was a connection; maybe when you stop swimming, stop submitting yourself to the baptism of cold water, something shuts down and you start preparing to die.

“On the other hand,” I continued, “we can’t forget that it’s only been in the last hundred years that women have been encouraged to swim, or engage in any other sport, for that matter. There was no women’s swimming competition at the Olympics until 1912.”

“And when they did go in the water,” Mary-Ann said, “think of the bathing costumes they had to wear—bloomers, caps, trousers. Who would want to get wet wearing all that stuff?

When we reached Crescent Beach, we agreed that we were the lucky beneficiaries of feminism. If it hadn’t been for pioneers like Annette Kellerman, the woman who designed the first one-piece suit that she wore in attempting to swim the English Channel in 1905 (and was, in fact, arrested for wearing on a Boston beach two years later), and Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the entire English Channel in 1926, completing the feat in 14 hours and breaking all previous records, we might not be here today, plunging, in our one-piece Spandex suits, into Block Island Sound.

Then, with Sarah capturing our posteriors for posterity, we charged into the surf, whooping and hollering, repeating that it wasn’t all that cold, except when the wind scattered bits of cresting wave on our goose pimpled arms. We counted to ten, asked each other who was going to be first. In seconds, Mary-Ann, the oldest and gutsiest among us—and what you should know about Mary-Ann is that she has earned enough money from the ten books she was written to buy a condo on the Connecticut shore--dove into the surf. Christine was next. I was last, breaking out into a lusty, mangled French version of La Marseillaise—“Allons, enfants de la patria, le jour de gloire est arrive”--that would have given my high school French teacher a mini-stroke. (“Rebecca,” she used to say in a voice that let me know I was going straight to the guillotine, “You don’t roll your r’s.) But I digress: in a quieter moment between breakers, I explained that singing the French national anthem was what my first husband, Len, had done when he went swimming, and that belting out the rousing verses never failed to warm me.

“Three cheers for Len,” they cried. All these dear ladies, including Sarah on the beach, had known Len. All, if I asked them which I did more than once during our reunion on Block Island, could tell me one funny story about him that I had forgotten. Then Christine and Mary-Ann screamed out their own mangled versions of La Marseillaise, and it made my heart sing like a barking harbor seal. How many friends could I go back with twenty-five years and have it be as brief as the lull between one breaking wave and another?

Sarah, who shared the dozen pictures she had taken of us that evening after an Indian dinner of Mary-Ann’s lentil dahl, remarked that what was so amazing about watching us was that we went into the water as droopy-butt middle-aged ladies, but that once we got wet, we became girls again, our oldest, deepest selves suddenly laid bare, like sandbars at low tide.

“The experience of swimming is both sexual and spiritual,” observed Annette Kellerman, who continued swimming just a few weeks before she died in California at the age of 88, “The sensation of water flowing over the body is dynamic, erotic, enlivening, and yet it awakens, at every moment, our consciousness of the fragility of our breath.”