Fatigue and a Jump in the Cold Ocean

September 6,2020

My fatigue has lessened.  Now when I sit in the chair, the peculiar gravity I’d been feeling has lifted from my body.  I feel light enough to rise.  My limbs feel capable of movement across the room. Perhaps the fatigue lessened because I made some small psychic peace with the losses the pandemic presented to me, or perhaps it is because I put language to some of my fears and tracked down their ghosts and said their names.  Or perhaps it was the days at the lake with F. and A. when I learned to play, to dive into the cold water and come up laughing. 

Both of my adult children are big proponents of the many health benefit of swimming in very cold water.  They can wax at length about the boost to the immune system, the increase in serotonin and dopamine, the heightened blood circulation that results from this plunge into the cold sea.  Until now, I thought their penchant for this behavior to be unbalanced and, even more dire, evidence that they perhaps were switched at birth and not my blood descendants.  Not until Addie took me by the hand and led me into the cold lake and I resolved to be a good sport and not whine did I have any inkling that they were on to something.

Since then, and since returning to Addison, every afternoon at high tide when the water has come in over the warm sand at the beach across the street, Bob and I have gone for a swim.  If you haven’t been to Maine, haven’t been about as far East and North as you can get in this country and taken a dip in the ocean, you cannot fully understand what a feat this swim is.  After about twenty seconds my legs and arms begin to feel numb.  But at the same time, I feel totally awake, as if the cold force of life is rushing through my body at warp speed. Every pore in my body feels alert.  My eyes feel wide open and clear.  When I get as far out that I can’t stand, I am moved to let out a whoop, a cry of wild exuberance that rings across the water and the empty beach. 

When I get out of the water, I feel free of time. Ageless. I am not cold. Rising from the sand is a long, smooth outcropping of rock, dark, basalt, ancient, rounded.  The sun has warmed its back.  I lie on it and listen to the waves.  Lapping.  I recall how Addie held me by the hand, led me into the lake, brought me to this moment.  I forget, for a small pulse of time, how fractured and divided and unmoored the world beyond these rocks is.