Grayson (2 page)

People were starting to get up. Second-floor windows that had been dark gray and vacant were becoming large glowing squares of gold, and as the people moved into their bathrooms and then downstairs more windows became gold squares. I imagined how warm it must be inside those homes. I let my mind enfold me in that golden warmth.

I was cold. The Pacific water temperature in March is in the mid-fifties; the surrounding water was constantly pulling heat from my body. It was like being wrapped up in a warm blanket on a snowy day and then having someone pull the blanket off. To overcome the heat loss, I had to swim at a rate fast enough
to create heat, but still my skin always felt cold; it was as cold as the water. I could feel the cold working its way deep into my muscles.

An offshore breeze carried the warm sweet smells of smoky bacon and fried eggs, buttery pancakes, and the rich acidic aroma of brewing coffee across the water. I had been swimming for more than an hour and my stomach was grumbling loudly. All I had to do was reach the north jetty, turn around, and swim the last half mile back to the pier and then I’d be finished with my workout.

I was starting to relax, stretching out my arms, feeling my hands and arms pulling the thick water, feeling the rotation of my shoulders and core, and the light kick of my feet. My body was slipping through the water like silk sliding across ultrasmooth skin. My breaths were long and easy, and I felt good: I was back into my pace, moving with the flow of all creation. Everything was in sync, the currents flowing around me, the song of the ocean, the breeze—except everything below was strangely still.

All the fish had disappeared.

Lifting my head, I looked to my right and then to
my left. I couldn’t see anything. I put my face back down, and stared into the water through clear goggles. It was like looking into a well at midnight. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew something was there.

The water began shaking harder than before and I was being churned up and down as if I was swimming through a giant washing machine. The water shifted, and I was riding on the top of a massive bubble. It was moving directly up from below, putting out a high-energy vibration. I felt like there was a spaceship moving right below me. I had never felt anything this big in the water before.

Turning sharply to the right, I tried to sprint for shallow water, but the creature diving below me was creating a huge hole in the water, and I had nothing to pull. There was no resistance. No support. I was tumbling into that huge hole, free-falling as if from the top of a cliff. I couldn’t stop the fall, so I tried to bail out.

I spread my arms and legs out on the water to increase my drag, to increase my surface area and create more water resistance, but I was tumbling out of control, dropping deeper and deeper into the hole.

Every nerve was on high alert. My mind was trying to figure out what to do and my eyes were wide open, staring into the opaque black sea.

Pulling my hands rapidly and directly under my body, I tried to gain lift, enough to pull myself out of the hole back to the surface. But I was powerless.

Whatever was moving below was swimming so fast that it was dragging me along in its vortex.

Spinning my arms as fast as I could, I attempted to snap through the watery web. I kicked my legs as fast as I could move them. I rarely kicked. I used my legs mostly for balance—I was a lazy kicker—but adrenaline was shooting through my body, my heart was pounding, and my breath was quickening. My mind was racing.

What could be large enough to drag me along in its slipstream? Was it a California sea lion? They weighed up to two hundred and fifty pounds and grew up to six feet long. No, it felt a lot bigger than that, more powerful, faster, and it had displaced so much water. Was it a shark?

Seal Beach had always seemed like a safe place to swim. It was an area where I had worked out for years at all hours of the day and night. But things change. And I kept thinking, What is it? Is it a whale? What is lurking under me?

Holding my breath to slow my heart and the pounding in my throat so I could sense the slightest tremor in the water, I stretched out my right hand. The ocean currents were flowing under me, like a cool, constant breeze across a Nebraska cornfield. I tried to detect an irregularity. There were crosscurrents moving below, shifting under me like the winds across the northern plains. There was nothing erratic, nothing unusual.

Whatever it was had swum off—I hoped.

Then I lost control and focus. I took a couple of fast breaths and put my head down, sprinted toward shore. I couldn’t keep doing this. I decided I had to swim just outside the wave break. It would be safer there. That way I could get out of the water quickly if I had to.

There was a splash—a huge splash. It was bigger than anything I’d ever experienced before. Large crescent waves bounced me up and down like the tail wave from a cigar boat moving at thirty miles per hour.

Instinctively, I turned and sprinted toward shore. I wanted to swim on the very edge of the surf line. I miscalculated.

I was slammed like a pancake between the griddle
and the spatula: A wave roared and crashed on my head, spun me horizontally side over side, hurtled me into the hard sand. Sand filled my swimsuit and lodged in my ears. Backwash tore me off the beach and dragged me backward into an approaching wave.

The lip of the wave caught me, pulled me deep into its mouth, chewed me and spun me so I couldn’t tell up from down and then it flung me again into the hard-packed sand. It hurt.

Everything was a beat or two off. I couldn’t get focused. My mind kept racing back to the question: What was swimming under me? I was scaring myself. Fighting with myself to stay in the water. I wanted to get out.

But I coached myself: You need to stick with it. Refocus. Get yourself back in gear. If you climb out now because you’re scared you’ll want to do the same thing when you’re on a big swim. You need to do your workout so you build up your confidence and your strength, but you also need to be tuned in to what’s going on around you. You need to be aware so that if something happens, you can respond immediately.

Psyching myself up, I stood up on the hard cold
sand just as another wave crashed on me, shooting saltwater up my nose. I stumbled to my feet, slid them along the bottom as fast as they would move and, when I reached waist-deep water, dove under the wave. I didn’t like touching the bottom near the San Gabriel River jetty. It was dangerous.

There was an Edison power plant a couple of miles up the river. Water used to cool the turbines was dumped into the river. This warm water flowed down the river, swung around the jetty, and spread out along the shore. Here, the water was as much as ten degrees warmer. In winter you could see steam rising off the ocean. Stingrays loved the warm water. They congregated here, and it was a place where they had lovefests and multiplied to a point that the river jetty became a stingray city. This wasn’t a thinly populated city like Cincinnati where there was plenty of room to spread out, room for spacious homes, porches, and big backyards. It was more like a stingray Manhattan, where the stingrays lived inches apart in the fine soft sand, and others lived right on top of one another in their own form of underwater apartments and condos.

Usually stingrays are docile. At the local aquariums
they lie in the touching tanks looking for humans. They push themselves up out of the water to have people pet them like puppies. Stingrays are flat fish that feel like a wet grape. They are light gray on top, white on the bottom, and they measure roughly two feet in diameter. Normally they bury themselves in the soft sand to hide from predators and look up at the world with two eyes on the top of their head. They have long tails that they use to propel themselves through the water.

At the end of those tails is a barb encased in a sheath. If a swimmer or wader inadvertently steps on a stingray, it will, in an effort to protect itself, whip its tail around and inject the barb and the sheath into the person’s foot. The sheath has a protein substance on it that is very irritating, causing the foot to swell up two to three times larger than normal. Just as dangerous is the barb, which looks like an arrowhead with two spines pointing backward on either side. When the barb is injected into the foot, it locks into the skin; the only way to get it out is to have it surgically removed.

I was careful as I reentered the water, but I stepped on the edge of something. I felt it wiggle under my toes. It squirmed and I couldn’t help myself: I screamed. I screamed really loudly. I never scream. And I jumped high out of the water. I wasn’t thinking. Definitely wasn’t thinking.

My feet were coming up off the bottom and before I knew it, I could feel them falling down. I wanted to stop them, but I wasn’t thinking fast enough, wasn’t able to get my mind to pull my feet back up. Even in the water, gravity was rapidly pulling them down.

My feet touched and I sank rapidly up to my calves in the fine mucky sand.

Things violently rammed into my legs. They were swarming and fluttering all around me like giant bats. I held my breath wondering if I would be stung.

Whatever I had stepped on had upset the entire colony of stingrays, and their neighbors too: guitar-fish, shovel-nosed sharks, and halibut that had been sleeping or hiding in the soft sand. The stingrays set off a chain reaction. The whole ocean floor was suddenly swimming with fish. On high alert, they were
frantically trying to escape, bumping into one another and into me.

I wanted to jump, to pull my feet off the bottom as badly as if I’d been standing on red-hot coals. But I fought to keep my feet planted in the mushy silt, knowing that I wouldn’t be stung if I didn’t lift my feet and step down on anything. But when something swam right between my legs and I felt the upward push of its wings, I screamed louder than before.

It took all my focus to stand still and wait forever for a wave to break. It did, lifting me off the bottom: I kicked my feet up behind me and swam like mad through the surf.

When I made it beyond the waves, I noticed that my purple-and-white nylon suit was so filled with sand that it felt like I was carrying half of the beach with me.

This was one of the worst workouts I had ever had. But I told myself to deal with it, because when I did another channel swim, like attempting to break the world record for the Catalina Channel, I would need to be mentally prepared for anything. And this
was preparing me for anything: That’s why it was practice.

Bending over I pulled the bottom of my swimsuit to one side and let the large clumps of sand roll out of each leg hole. I started to swim again, but there was sand at the top of my suit too. And it was abrasive.

I was irritated that I had to stop again and get the sand out. If I didn’t stop now it would soon be worse than running with a pebble in my shoe. The sand in my swimsuit combined with the motion of my arms would act like sandpaper rubbing my skin raw, but I didn’t stop and remove it. Instead I pulled the front of my swimsuit open, kicked my legs rapidly, and let the saltwater wash the chunks of sand out of my suit.

Even though I knew it was important to stop and fix my suit at that moment, to take care of it so it wouldn’t affect me in a bigger way later, I was annoyed with myself for stopping for so long. I needed to stay on my pace, to train the way I would do a channel swim.

Each day in the ocean was different. Each day I watched the wind move across the sea with giant brushstrokes and I’d anticipate that moment when the
sun would slide above the horizon and I would watch the sunlight spread across the constantly changing surface of the sea. The intensity of the colors, of the reds, oranges, and yellows, would be magnified if it was a clear morning; on foggy mornings, the light would be soft pastel and fuzzy.

I took a deep breath, released the tension, and stopped to gaze into the sky. The earth was spinning closer to the sun.

The light was softening. The sky was changing from a shiny black to smoky granite gray and the sea was reflecting the change, a giant mirror to the heavens. It too was shifting from glossy black to wavery platinum. Taking in a very long deep breath, I relaxed a little more.

The promise of light made me feel a little more cozy and confident. At least now I would be able to see what was swimming under me—knowing was usually better than not knowing.

I lifted my head, checking for a fin. If the fin was sharp and angular, and if it was moving from side to side, it was a shark. If the dorsal fin was slightly curved and moving up and down, it was a dolphin.

Whatever had been swimming under me had seemed enormous. But my fear might have magnified the size of it.

Blue sharks, the non-human-eating species of sharks, rarely grew to more than ten feet long. White sharks were much larger, up to twenty-five or even thirty feet.

Local fishermen occasionally sighted great whites off Catalina Island, primarily on the west coast or what’s known as the backside of the island—the place where the island is wide open to the Pacific Ocean and there’s nothing but water until you reach Hawaii. I had never heard of a white shark sighting off Seal Beach, but there were no borders or barriers off Seal Beach to keep sharks out. They swam wherever they wanted to go. There was a large seal population offshore that rested on the large navigational buoys there, rolling with the tide and waves, their furry brown heads swaying from side to side. They slept on the rocks along the breakwater off Seal Beach and sometimes hauled out near the San Gabriel River jetty, north of the pier, just where I was heading. Seals were white sharks’ favorite food. The Farallone
Islands off the shore of San Francisco were known as In and Out Seal Burgers for white sharks, which could jump out of the water and snatch seals off the rocks. It could have been a white shark cruising underneath me. It felt big enough.

The San Gabriel River jetty was only two hundred yards from me now. Once I reached it, I could turn around and swim back to the pier. I couldn’t wait to finish this workout.