Beached
on facing fears and taming monsters
I whisper to the ocean, “I am not afraid.”
The water snakes around my feet and I feel the pull of the ocean rushing beneath me, imploring me to let myself go. I wobble a little and for a moment I think I might fall but I steady myself. It is night and I can’t see the reach of the sea. I can’t fathom the depth of it.
****
I live on an island. It’s a long island — hence the name — and I’m sort of in the middle between the north and south shores. I’m a twelve minute ride from the bustle of Jones Beach…that is, if it’s fall and four in the morning. During the summer, in the heat of the day, the ride is longer, the wait at the tollbooths interminable, the traffic torturous.
I don’t go to the beach much.
When I was a child, my mother took us to the beach even though we had a nice backyard with a perfectly good pool. I think it was just a Long Island rite of passage to crowd your kids (and most likely the neighbor’s kids) into a station wagon and and endure the heat of the Wantagh Parkway for half an hour, just so you could endure the heat of the sand for a few more hours. Our mothers forced us into activities, like building sand castles and playing in the water. While I was OK with the sand castles, I was not OK with the water.
I felt small and lost standing at the water’s edge. The ocean is vast and deep and those attributes loom and magnify considerably when you’re a small child. There’s no way for a child’s mind to measure the dimensions of the water. In my mind the ocean was an endless horizon that wrapped all the way around the world, perhaps even stretching to a different world altogether. The power of the waves, the way they shrunk back only to bloom toward me again. The threat of a wave possibly drawing me into an endless horizon of water, nothing around me but the gray, murky waves of the Atlantic ocean. Water behind me, water in front of me, water — deep, deep, water — below me. The mere sight of the ocean left me breathless, as it moved and collapsed on itself like lines in an illustration. I never felt so alone, so helpless, so afraid of drowning in my fears — fear of loss, of loneliness, of breathlessness — than when I was at the beach.
I can’t pinpoint a precise moment when my fear of water and all my attendant fears crystallized, but I can guess at the events that slowly shaped it. When I was young, I was thrown into a pool so I could reflexively learn how to swim. Years later my older cousins would shove my head underwater in some sadistic game of Drown-the-Cousin, me gasping for breath, water blooming in my lungs. I emerged from the pool crying while everyone else laughed.
Maybe it was the murky lake water in upstate New York, the kind of lake where you took two steps in and the mud and reeds would pull at you, like a swallowing darkness. The substance of the darkness seemed thick with snakes and sea monsters and other fantastical — but real to me — creatures spoken about in hushed tones around a midnight campfire.
There’s the family story of my father’s brother — a brother he never met — who drowned at the beach when he was a toddler, a story I heard first when I was a small child myself. The story of the ocean consuming a child like some ambiguous monster never left me. What could make the ocean so angry that it would grab a young boy and fold it into himself forever? Was it avenging an unspoken slight, an unforgivable insult? I was so careful not to anger the sea after hearing that story. I threw no stones into its surface; I didn’t taunt it by ducking beneath its waves during a game of hide-and-seek.
I thought I’d outgrow my fears, that a day would come when I’d mature and magically accept oceans and lakes and pools as something benign. It never happened.
As a young adult, my abject fear turned to ambivalence; I was still afraid of the ocean, yet I was drawn to it. The beach was still a monster — the wet sand waiting to suffocate me, the heat and the haze making everything unreal and dreamlike. Whole days would be spent in a heightened state of anxiety. The only escape was to the boardwalk, crowded with weekend revelers, everyone yelling, jostling, not giving me enough space to breathe. In the state of claustrophobia, expansive places can terrify just as much as deeply compressed ones. If I removed myself from the panic of being caught in a swarm of people and returned to the water, I’d look out at the neverending sea and mutter to myself world without end, world without end. The waves would gently land at my feet, the water burying itself underneath me, trying to carry me back with it, like it took my father’s brother so many years ago. I held fast. I buried my toes in the wet sand. At the same time I was afraid I’d let myself go. I no longer trusted myself to not tempt the ocean, just to see what it would do.
I stopped going to the beach. The ocean had defeated me. Perhaps I more or less conceded. I no longer had to pile into a car with the expectation of having a good time only to have my fears overwhelm me once we arrived at the beach. I don’t know why I thought each time would be different, that I would somehow have been stripped of my phobias, free to tromp through the sand, weave my way through the crowded boardwalk, frolic among the waves.
Many years passed. Then one day, out of nowhere, the beach called. I had been going through a rough time — my marriage ended, a friend died, everything was falling apart — and I sought a place of solace, where I could sit and think about things but not really think at all. Just be.
The beach called. I answered.
It may seem strange to deliberately visit a place that enveloped me with such anxiety, to try to find peace there. It was evening at least, and the idea of the beach in the evening seemed less monstrous to me, as if subtracting the sun and haze would reduce its convulsive menace.
***
It is late, late enough that there are very few people around. We’re not supposed to walk on the beach after sundown, but here we are, treading lightly along the water’s edge, some of us talking softly, whispering so as not to disturb whoever it is that watches over it at night. I stand facing the ocean, and it looks different. It is shrouded in soft darkness. I can barely see fifty feet in front of me. I cannot imagine the depth of the sea. I can see only the small waves in front of me, feel only the sprays of water lapping at my feet, sense only the waves draining back into the ocean to be reabsorbed into the whole again.
I stand at the edge and listen to the water. I wait for it to roar, to make a sinister noise. But the waves only speak in hushes, as if the darkness has laid a blanket over the sounds of the beach. Again, I don’t trust myself; for a moment I fear that I might walk straight into the ocean, meeting it head on, ask it to take me under, end whatever pain had been surging through my body for so long, which had become its own ocean, ambiguous, shapeless, restless. I imagine how it would be, the water creeping up to my knees, my waist, my neck. I think about unseen hands reaching out and pushing my head under, swallowing the salty water, my life slowly pulled away from me.
I realize I am holding my breath and I exhale. I steady myself against the incoming tide, and I start to cry — deep, heavy sobs that carry along the beach. A couple walking hand in hand along the shore stop and ask if I’m OK, if I need anything. I manage a small smile and say. “I’m OK. Just letting go.” They nod, almost knowingly, and leave me alone with the ocean again.
I face the ocean, gathering whatever strength I had left. I will not let the water take me. I will not let the monster win.
[picture by me]