Near-death on the West Coast
July 3rd, 2008I almost died today. Well, yesterday, but that’s just a detail. The greater point is that I am alive. Who knows what would have happened if there didn’t happen to be lifeguards at the beach in Encinitas just outside of San Diego?
This is definitely not what I expected to write about in the first entry of this travel-log. I expected to make remarks about the fun we are having with our Honda Civic hybrid rental car, or detail our trip to the Getty Museum and Santa Monica yesterday after a delightful plane ride, or describe the joy we had driving down the highway to meet a former Major League Baseball starting pitcher for an interview in San Diego but instead I find myself writing about a near-death experience. That’s life.
The story I have to tell can be summarized in one sentence, really. It is not a sentence I expected to hear at the beach, nor is it one I could have imagined through pure imagination. As I prepare to type it, I am reminded of an argument made in this article about the nature of non-fictional narratives: “Nonfiction has to be true, of course, but it doesn’t have to be believable, which may help explain why so many recent best-sellers are of the Ripley’s variety. Coincidences that no novelist could get away with happen all the time in ‘real life.’ And while characters in fiction have to be consistent, people rarely are.”
Once we had arrived at the shore, and I had stood on my own two feet for the first time in several minutes, the lifeguard looked me over and said: “Good God, man. Are you wearing pants?” I was. Slacks. And a golf shirt, with socks. Grey socks. It had to have been the strangest rescue he had ever had to make. I did not intend to go deep into the ocean at all when we pulled up to the beach, partly because I was not wearing shorts and partly because I am not an exceptional swimmer and it has been awhile since I went for a good swim in deep or deepish water, but I was floating backward in relaxed pose when I realized that I was rather far from the shore. I attempted to swim back but could not for the life of me move from where I was and in fact seemed to have been swimming backward. I looked across the water and saw a young man about thirty, forty feet away and I asked him if he would get me help, please. “You need help?” I do, I told him. “I do not think I can get out of here alone.” I was starting to tire from swimming in place, and I did not believe that I could return to shore of my own strength. (I am generally aware of my limitations and my strengths. Fighting strong currents is not a strength. And I was probably right, but I will never know as the lifeguard arrived half a minute afterward to tether me to him and bring me back to land.)
“That’s a nasty, nasty rip there, man,” he told me as he tied me. “I need you to kick for me, okay?” He set off, carrying me behind him as if I were a corpse, motionless but for the thoughts racing around inside my head about the situation I had just found myself in as I simply could not generate the strength for a good kick but thoughts are not “heavy.” I apologized for my inability to help him help me, and he took it all in as his duty. Then he noticed that I was wearing normal clothes, and told me that I should be in as near a state of total undress as legally allowed when I go swimming, if I wish to swim efficiently. I will certainly keep that in mind, and I will always remember the look on his face when his voice rose to heights it likely hasn’t reached since before he hit puberty and said “Good God, man. Are you wearing pants?”
Believe it or not, I did not know what a riptide was, but I do now. I will avoid them, and I won’t wear pants into the ocean.
I would write about my interview but I will be working on an article about it for a different publication and so I will not go into details at this time. I will write about the other things we have done since we arrived on the west coast tomorrow, in all likelihood. Right now I am rather tired and somewhat busy, so I will return to the first day tomorrow. Today’s near-death experience, coupled with a more pleasant start and finish to the day, has left me exhausted. I do recommend you look here for images from the trip. I am not a good photographer nor do I have a great camera nor am I the sort of man who likes to just snap picture after picture (I would rather be sharing word after word) but I have taken some, and I’ll share them even if they are nothing special. Tomorrow I will write you, with the blessings of a lifeguard.