There be Dragons

I don't think I ever wrote about the time my brother rescued me from the shark.

To make sense of the story, you have to go back to the beginning.

I am an Aquarius and true to my sign I am as much at home in water as on land. My childhood summers were spent going from lake to ocean to beach to pool and back again. New Hampshire, Maine, Cape Cod, Long Island, where ever I was, all I wanted to do was swim.

I remember the ethereal feeling of diving down, looking up at the sunlight shafting through the skin of the water and rising slowly, feeling it warm my face. There were underwater tea parties, pennies my mom threw into pools for me to dive down and retrieve, hours and hours with my friend Renette searching for crayfish. My parents always seemed to be particularly impressed by how I was completely impervious to the cold, a fact I took so much pride in that I would dive into the freezing waters of the ocean in northern Maine and pretend not to feel the hard pinch of it against my skin.

But what does all this have to do with my brother and the shark?

Me (left) and my brother, spring 1977. 

My brother and I weren't exactly the best of friends when we were little. I was five years younger and an incessant tattletale. He called me "The Tag-along," as in "Mom, do I have to take The Tag-along with me?"

Sometimes he'd pretend he was interested in me and offer to play a game. For example, there were his games of "Blind Man's Bluff" --a variation on hide-n-seek-- where he blindfolded me tightly with a winter scarf, then lead me deep into the woods and made me count to 200 as he used his secret Indian moccasin walk to steal off for home, essentially abandoning me in the wilderness.

Dublin Lake, Dublin, New Hampshire

However, my brother was a water bug like me, and some of the best times we spent together as kids were in Dublin Lake in New Hampshire, seeing who could free dive to greater depths, or sneaking up on each other underwater and grabbing the other's ankles and yanking down, or doing handstands in the shallows.

When I was about 13 and my brother was 18 he was given an opportunity to go on a trip to the Canary Islands. While there he learned to scuba dive and became knowledgable about oceanic ecosystems, fish species and their behavior and so on. When he got back he continued diving, earning his dive master instructor certificate at a local dive school.

My dad (left) and brother on the beach in Bermuda
on the trip where my brother saved me from the shark.

So when we found ourselves in Bermuda together for my parents 40th wedding anniversary, he offered to teach me how to snorkel and I jumped at the chance. We rented some equipment and went out every day for several days in a row, until we were both deeply tanned.

He taught me to cover up my shiny watch so as to avoid a lunging moray eel who thought the glinting light was a tasty treat. He taught me the names of the fish, rough names that belied the extreme colors and sleek surfaces of the creatures themselves: snapper, grasby, grunt, hind, hogfish. And we held our breath together so I could hear the sound of parrot fish chewing the coral.

I think this trip was the turning point. I went from being the annoying tag-along to a willing student and loyal companion.

But nothing solidified our friendship more than the day my brother rescued me from the shark.

At the risk of over sharing -- and this is the part of the story that has kept me from bringing it up very often -- it didn't occur to me not to go in swimming the day I got my period.

I dove into the waters and beckoned for my brother to grab his gear and follow. He was talking with our older sister and so was a little slow on the uptake. I swam out about fifty feet from shore and waved for him again. My brother got up, waved and headed in after me, but as he came up beside me I saw his smile fade and he put his finger to his lips in the universal signal for "shhhh."

"HK...you have to get out of the water right now!"
"Wha..?" I didn't even have time to finish, I was looking at where his eyes were trained and saw the shark coming toward me.

It wasn't a huge shark. But it was a shark. Adrenaline poured through me, my mouth gaining a metallic taste as panic rose in my chest.

"NOW!" He screamed.

I swam harder and faster than I ever have before or since. I didn't look back, just went for the shore and was out on the sand and gasping for breath in less than a minute.

My brother was not far behind. He hadn't engaged the shark, had just managed to distract it long enough to get me away, and then when it turned and swam a few feet away from him, he, too, made for shore.

We panted together, doubled over with our hands on our knees, water dripping onto our feet.

"It was a juvenile nurse shark. I don't know what would make it come in so close." He said at last. "They usually don't come that close unless they think there's food nearby."

And of course that's when it hit me how I had gotten the attention of the shark. My cheeks burned with embarrassment as I told him what had happened, but he just wrapped his tan, muscled arm around my shoulders and pulled me into a hug. I hugged him so tight my arms hurt.

That incident made me more cautious, but never took away my love of ocean swimming, in fact, I never felt scared in the water like that again...until yesterday.

My wife and daughter and I left early in the morning to make our annual pilgrimage from New Jersey to Cape Cod. For the sixth year in a row we are staying right on the tip of the Cape in a pretty condo that is walking distance from the beach.

Having been cooped up in the car for 6+ hours and needing to stick to my triathlon training schedule, I decided to take an afternoon swim. I figured I could practice open water sighting, if nothing else. I was excited to test out my new Garmin in the water, but just as I got to the sand I realized it had somehow turned on in my bag during the trip and was now completely out of juice.

But I wasn't going to let a little electronics glitch stop me.

I picked a trawler moored a short way out in the bay and told my wife I'd swim out to it and back, maybe do a few laps. She looked pale, which is hard to do if you have dark olive skin. Her eyes caught mine.

"Don't get hit by a boat."
"I won't."
"But really...be careful!"
"I will. I promise."

A picture from a July 9th Boston Globe article. 

But then I realized it wasn't so much the boats that worried her. I remembered how she'd seen an article online about great white shark sightings in Cape Cod Bay just last week.

"It'll be fine." I reassured her, but it felt like her stare was sending images of sharks directly from her eyeballs into mine.

I slipped on a pink swim cap left over from some triathlon or other, pulled on my yellow TYR Special Ops goggles and made for the water.

Only it was low tide, so the bay was sand flats for about a tenth of a mile out, and the water was knee deep for another quarter mile or so. I waded along, trying not to step on sharp shells or crabs. I heard the sound of a wind whistling through the edges of my cap by my ears. The wind was picking up and the water was more choppy than I had expected.

By the time the water was up above my knees I was in a broad field of sea grass so high I would have been unable to see at all if I had tried to swim through it. The waves kept shoving me sideways and backward as I waded farther out. When the water was chest deep I finally began to swim.

The trawler in Cape Cod Bay taken the day after
my swim, when the water was definitely calmer. 

When I picked the boat, with it's two big balancing beams pushed up like the ears of a doberman, I'd figured it was about 500 meters out (that's 10 laps down and back in a swimming pool). I had planned to use the Garmin to see if I was gauging open water distances accurately, but, like I said, the Garmin was dead. By the time I was in the water, I knew the boat was definitely more than 500 meters out. It was at least twice that. I'd treated it like the end buoy on an out-and-back tri course, and because it was so much bigger than a real buoy, it had tricked me into seeming closer.

I can swim 500 meters in less than 10 minutes even in choppy open water, and, although I wasn't wearing a watch (my next mistake), I knew at least 20 minutes had passed by the time I was closer to the boat than I was to the shore. But I still had a good way to go.

The water was foggy with salt and churned up seaweed. I felt the seaweed slithering into the top of my swimsuit, dangling out in hairy strands at my armpits. Sometimes it caught on my goggles. I swam on but wished for windshield wipers. I even got a strand or four in my mouth. Ptoowie.

To get to the boat I was swimming on a diagonal from the beach and the waves kept rolling high so I couldn't sight every third or fourth stroke, it was more like every ninth or tenth, which guarantees a messy course rather than a straight line. As I got farther out, the chop forced me to stop periodically and wait til I crested a wave to get a good view of the boat, otherwise I found I was swimming straight for the horizon and the shipping lanes.

Ordinarily, in an open water swim, I'd try to pick a good landmark behind the object I am swimming towards, maybe a building or geological feature that can help guide me. But here there wasn't anything useful to sight. The only thing I could see behind the trawler was the lane where the ferries and other boats went in and out to MacMillan pier. Looking past my the trawler at any given moment I was apt to see a variety of non-stationary objects going by.

I looked back to see how far I'd come and got caught by a breaker crashing over my head sideways, filling my ears deep with salt water. The shore behind me was easier to mark, with a tall green water tower, and the facade of a large hotel called The Sandcastle, but even so, I could no longer make out anyone or anything on the beach from which I had started.

As I treaded water an image bubbled up from the depths of my subconscious: the image of how my pale, tasty white feet must look from the depths below. I chided myself for being silly and began to swim with renewed effort.

It felt like another ten minutes passed as I swam along but it could have been twenty or two. My arms were not tired, but my eyes and neck were strained from trying to sight the boat. The ocean and time itself seemed to be moving accordion style. When I paused again to get a clear view, the boat was now well defined: a white hull, a long blue stripe down the side, an otter trawl net tucked neatly up like the shaggy head of a Chinese New Year's parade dragon. I could see the decks; no one appeared to be on them.

And then I heard a scream like a baby's cry and looked up in time to see a seagull heading straight down at me.

"What the F**K?!" I yelled at it, waving an angry fist as the bird swung back up in the air.

Then I noticed it was flying with at least ten of its friends, a seagull biker gang. It was a scene right out of Hitchcock.

At this point I just wanted to get the swim over with. I sighted the trawler again and began to swim hard.

The gulls responded with outrage, diving toward the water around me then pulling up sharply at the last minute, calling to each other, laughing.

I felt absolutely certain the seagulls were getting more aggressive as I went along. I have some experience with fishing boats and know gulls often follow behind them when fish are being dragged to the decks and treasure is pouring out the scuppers, but this trawler was moored and inoperative. There was no reason for the gulls to be acting this way. I couldn't imagine why they were so interested in me.

My mind began to drift into dark places as I felt my hands catch in the water and pull me forward again and again.

"'ello...Name's Bruce!" 

Maybe there was a dead fish nearby, something large the birds wanted to keep to themselves.

But if there was a large dead fish, I reasoned, then other animals would want it too. A black dorsal fin reappeared in my mind's eye. I pushed it away with every technique I have for calming an overactive imagination.

I tried talking sense into myself. I tried picturing the imaginary shark as the big reformed shark in the kids' movie Finding Nemo, the one who has sworn off eating fish reciting the slogan "fish are friends, not food!" But then I remembered how, when Dory the angelfish bonked her nose and began to bleed, that shark lost all control.

I worried perhaps I had stepped on something sharp when I had waded through the flats, maybe I had a cut on my foot and I couldn't feel it. What if I was bleeding? The dark place in my mind whispered the words: nurse shark.

As the boat grew nearer I thought I saw some dark patches in the water off the boat's stern. They did not look like animals, they looked more like debris, but they were too uniform in shape to be debris. They were large, rectangular shaped, like doors.

I kept swimming.

The objects in the water became more clearly defined. They were, indeed, rectangular. It now looked like a group of black coffins floating with just their lids bobbing above the surface.

My heart was hammering. The gulls were screaming. One side of my goggles jiggled loose as a wave broke over me. My eye filled up with salt water. I had to stop and tread water again to fix the goggles and all I could think of was how much my feet probably looked like rare tuna steaks.

You don't get into triathlon if you aren't willing and able to push through your mental limits on a regular basis. As the adage goes: "Triathlon is 90% mental and the other 50% is physical." I had no intention of stopping before I reached the boat. Physically I was fine. I was winded, but only from fighting the waves and my rising heart rate. I laughed at myself for getting up in my head, reminded myself I probably wasn't even a mile off shore and that the bay was less than 20 feet deep at that point.

But those infernal gulls were getting more agitated, coming down so low around my head that at one point I could feel water from one of their wings spraying my face between strokes.

And then there were those black shapes.

Go, Holly, go! I used one of my old fallback tri mantras to keep pushing forward. What if this was a race, what if there was someone right behind you? You can swim. Now, swim!

Thirty feet off the boat's starboard side I could finally see what the black objects were. They were a dozen floating clam nurseries made out of mesh cages and kept afloat with black plastic pontoons, which, by the look of the white drippings all over them were the gulls' hangout.

The clam cages were anchored with chains and I realized swimming through them would be far too dangerous given the waves. At this point the gulls' screams reached Queen at Wembley Stadium proportions, and twice I dived down to avoid the one I nicknamed "Baron Von Richthofen." Nevertheless, I made myself swim up to the nearest cage and tap it with my fingers as a way to signal that I had completed the outbound voyage. Then I turned and began to press back for shore.

Here's the thing: by the time I had made it to the trawler, I was well east of the beach where I'd started. I could make out the water tower back on land, but the Sandcastle hotel was out of view. To make matters worse, I was now swimming with the current but the line I had to follow was on a diagonal and I kept getting rolled as if I was trying to body surf the curls.

As a swimmer, my preference is to breathe to the right, but that meant staring out at the open ocean rather than looking at the shore. I had to switch it up. It's a good thing to practice but after a few hundred meters or so it was tiring me out and I felt like my good technique --drilled into me at so many early morning swim practices-- was falling apart. I could hear my masters swim coach, Peter, reminding me to keep my right arm from collapsing under me as I breathed to the left.

Of course it was reassuring to be heading back to land, but my heart rate had been up so high, the swim out so anxiety producing that I was emotionally depleted. Breathing to the left and rolling on the waves (which wanted to push me east instead of west), the inbound voyage seemed at least twice as long as the trip out.

Eventually the beach came into view, as did the specks that I hoped were my family. But the sea grass section was even longer than I remembered and I could see massive scarlet and purple crabs scuttling under me as I went. I was in no hurry to put my feet down lest I get snapped by those ginsu knife claws. I've been bitten by crabs before and it's not the end of the world, but I was still having worries associated with sharks, moreover I had a ten mile run on my schedule for the following day: it was no time for a foot injury.

Thus I swam in until I was doing the breast stroke to keep my fingers from grinding into the sand. I stood up and waded the rest of the way onto the sand. I felt very small and humble. As I pulled off my pink cap l considered how reassuring it is after a triathlon swim to see spectators lining the exit from the water, cheering. I looked back at the boat as it bobbed, looking so close you could pick it up like a Monopoly piece.

When I got back to my wife and daughter, sitting peacefully on their beach chairs reading magazines and gathering shells respectively, I thought how ridiculous it was that I wanted a hero's welcome. I'd probably swum less than two miles all told. I wrapped up in a striped towel and flopped into my chair.

"How was it?" My wife asked, peering up from her magazine, her glasses on the tip of her nose.
"Harder than I expected."
"Oh. Okay. Glad it was good." She later said she'd been worried, but I couldn't tell it at the time.

Winslow Homer, "The Herring Net" 1937,

As I sat staring out at the boat, thinking how much it reminded me of the little blue dinghy boats we used to put in my daughter's bathtub to keep her amused when we washed her hair as a toddler, my mind turned to grander ocean voyages. First I thought of Columbus, then the Mayflower which had put to shore right at this very spot when it first landed in the "new world." I thought of the centuries of seafarers who had braved these rocky North Atlantic waters, faced freak waves, foul weather, pirates, giant creatures from the deep. I thought of Winslow Homer and Herman Melville and Jules Verne. I thought of the movie The Perfect Storm and the real life sinking of the fishing vessel Andrea Gail in 1991.

Not only did my own swim seem impossibly small in that context, but the entire sport of triathlon seemed trivial and senseless. We triathletes do not fling ourselves into the hungry ocean desperate to escape persecution, willing to live for months on a rickety wooden boat bound for a new land. We are not trying to scrape a living from the sea nor struggling to find food to survive.

But as I think on it, it seems to me that triathletes go to the ocean in somewhat of a similar spirit as those who came before. Triathlon begins with the swim and that is the portion that often unnerves participants the most. Though I don't fear the swim the way many do, yesterday's swim reminded me of the power of the ocean and the mighty forces that swell within us all. We swim to know we are alive, to force ourselves into the places where we otherwise would not go, to look hard at our limitations and see what can be done to move beyond them. Battling the traffic on the New Jersey turnpike, as dangerous as it is, doesn't cut it.

That said: I have no plans whatever to attempt such a swim again.

And I wished I'd had my brother with me. Just in case.

[Updated 7/14/14]