TREADING WATER
I first crossed an ocean, the Atlantic, when I was fifteen. Feeling the water beneath me, its depth and breadth so immense, I was overjoyed, even euphoric, but also terrified. I was not afraid that the boat might sink; it was clearly staunchly seaworthy. What I felt seemed life changing, inalterable—a great adventure into a greater unknown. Nothing to do with my destination, which was fixed and assured.
In my social studies class I had learned about the first crossing of modern humans from Africa to the middle east. That required a fording of the Red Sea Strait. And that crossing fostered the romantic fantasy of humans inventing a craft able to carry them over water. The thrill of that experience, of a triumph not just of navigation but of surviving a journey off the earth. Much like the first flight in air by heated balloon. The awesome wonder of release from terra firma clearly was evoked in me when I was sailing on that boat over the Atlantic ocean.
At fifteen I regarded the ocean only as an immense basin of water, its surface stirred and churned by the wind into waves of sometimes massive proportions but, under that surface, I thought it was dull and amorphous. Much later I learned that the sea is a spectacularly organized medium teeming with fixed currents running around the entire world, one shallow and one deep, one warm and one cold.
Oceans, of course, are the habitat for a great chain of underwater being. This system of sea life not only mirrors life in air. It interconnects to form an even greater chain of being. Life in the air and in the sea hangs on a sturdy, historically evolved balance that resists change. It is a balance that can endure shifts and displacement. But a balance that could be toppled.
Our human curiosity has aimed into the air and in the last six decades has plumbed the space outside. We have also explored the ocean waters down to its complete depth. And we have used those depths, as we have the air, to make war.
But the special thrill of piloting oceans, lakes, rivers, any body of water, still enchants us, lures us to test that surface conveyance or simply offers a method to get to another side.
Swimming, a skill like reading that must be taught and learned, has its own history. Even late cave paintings reveal evidence of people able to propel themselves along the surface of water using the body’s flotation capacity paired with arm and leg movements. Modified swimming can take us down into a depth of water made deeper by oxygen cannisters and stronger propelling swim fins. So we play and explore the water. And we have fashioned submarines as stealth ships patrolling the deep. And there are the extreme deep sea exploring devices, manned and unmanned.
We channel water for bathing purposes, which process also has a long history. Bathing itself has served us as methods to cleanse, to heal, to anoint, and simply to enjoy.
Now, as I write this, I am sitting on an enormous boat, a kind of luxury hotel laid out horizontally. It reminds me of a great mountain inn with expansive dining rooms, a theater, special public places, and hundreds of staterooms, some with balconies that faced out to the world around it. This cruise ship plies the ocean waters with deliberate ease. Its buoyance, impossible to conceive when seen from shore, affords me that thrill of riding the ocean on a true dream ship. Water, water is everywhere.
Eons and eons ago our antecedents emerged out of its aquatic origins. And here, and now, I am back in its midst, comfortably challenging its depth. Treading its water.
