Engulfed

Key West, 2016

We fly into Fort Myers, drive to Naples, to Vanderbilt Beach. We stay with my dad’s old business partner and his wife. Nancy fixes us peach pie with real Georgia peaches and fresh cream. All the food is southern and both of their voices. Listening to them talk over the tinkling of ice in John Kay’s whiskey glass makes me homesick for places and times I haven’t been. I swim in the Gulf of Mexico for the first time since I was a child. My body seems to remember its amniotic warmth and wash. My mother and I stay in for hours. My sister and I sleep in twin beds, a fan moving in the air above each of us. We fall asleep to the sound of thunder and flashes of lightning. In the morning, palm fronds are scattered over the yard and on the short track to the beach, we find the cordoned off turtle nest — caution, ciudado — empty of hatchlings. Naturally, I romanticize the young turtles’ journey to the water in my mind and imagine them crossing the short but perilous stretch of sand during the storm, under the full but obscured moon.

We drive through a stretch of the Everglades separated from the highway by tall, chain-link fences, erected there to keep the alligators from the tarmac. The press of green at either side is dense, loud, lush, the hum of car tires barely registering against the chorus of insects and birdsong raising up from the land.

It’s a relief to see the ocean again, after the claustrophobic green tangle of wild Florida as seen from the state highway, but soon the stretch of water gives way to trailer parks and discount stores, liquor shops and rundown tourist attractions and I’m longing for jungle-green again. We stay the night in Islamorada, walk along her pretty canals. I swim short laps in the motel pool over a Marlin in mosaic on the bottom, holding my breath underwater for as long as I can. We eat coconut prawns by the water, the smell of bug spray mixing with our food. Pelicans decorate the shoreline like a postcard. There are more birds than I thought there would be. I don’t know most of their names.

We drive to Key West, the end of the line. It’s both more and less than what I imagined. The eastern beaches are covered in a fermenting seaweed that makes them unswimmable. The rest of the island seems to meet the water primarily in boats. I pay forty dollars to board a catamaran for a morning with thirty others. We motor out to a reef to snorkel. I’m the only passenger without a snorkel buddy and there are no odd pairs of people. This makes me feel brave, unusual, and lonely, and because I don’t envy the family dynamics of the passengers around me, a little smug. The crew keep an eye out for me, and I set out alone. The snorkeling is bleak: bare, lonely, not smug at all. Despite their being thirty of us I’m nervous, wary of sharks. On the way back I drink a margarita from a small plastic cup and wonder how many of them end up in the ocean.

We visit the Hemingway house where the cats that survive him sleep in front of fans. It’s hot. The large trees droop their vines. The sidewalks shimmer and crack. The shade of establishments I would normally avoid seem enticing. My sister hires a moped and only makes right turns around the island. She comes back beet red. We sit by the pool or in our airconditioned motel room, pretending we can’t hear the dozens of other guests down the hall. That evening we drink a cocktail at the Sunset Pier. It’s too hot to remember what we drank or order more. We go to sit by the water, dangle our legs in off the dock, watch the sailboats at their moorings, watch the lights of the outer islands blink on. I wonder how many feet of sea level rise it would take to transform this place, to displace the dusty roosters and the cruise ships, to drown the roots of the largest trees in saltwater.

We find a taxi back to our motel. The driver is in his late sixties, white-haired with salty, tan skin. I sit up front. He reminds me of the man from Jaws, based on the pilot who rescued what remained of the crew of the USS Indianapolis. I tell the driver about the reef, and he tells me he swims out there most days to snorkel, a return trip of about six hours. I’m surprised but I believe him. He tells me that most people don’t. Later, I write a short story about him. I call his character Tide. He lives alone on the inundated coast, long after most people have left, still snorkeling out to the reef most days.

Hauraki Gulf, 2021

While searching the rocks off the coast and their caverns for crayfish, I realize why the driver’s story has stuck with me — and others like his. They’re premonitory, portentous; signposts of what’s to come. I think of him as I’m about four and a half hours into a five-hour dive — by which I mean a free dive, without tanks, basically a weighted snorkel. My energy is waning, I’m pausing longer at the surface. My breath won’t hold for various reasons. I feel like I’ve lost two weeks of practice. When I think of that snorkel at the bare reef in Key West five years ago, I know two weeks is nothing. Tomorrow, my breath will come back. Snorkeling for six hours at a stretch is now within my repertoire, no longer unfathomable. Sure, I’m tired afterwards, but I could keep going. It’s not until I leave the water, peel the weights and layers of wetsuit from my body, resting in the hot stream of the shower that I feel any real fatigue. And then there is tea with milk and honey to revitalize me, and if we’re lucky, a meal to fix from our catch.

Underwater, the rocks and fish and weed particular to this place merge and shimmer with those particular to the Keys. The two stretches of water overlap, intermix. I swim in the Gulf of Mexico with the man named Tide. I see what he sees and transcribe it later. At the same time, I swim with another man, my friend, in the Hauraki Gulf, watching him disappear under rocks. I watch for the tips of his fins, his kina-pierced toes, in case I need to pull him from the tighter spaces. World’s shimmer over one another, not for the first time.

As we’re walking to the car, I tell my friend about the driver, about his six-hour snorkels, but I’m not good at talking about the overlap, or the meaning. In the quiet parts of our conversation, my mind reels with the memory of water, with all the things waiting to be written. He doesn’t know about any of that because I don’t tell him — the words won’t come until later, through the slow filter of my heart and hands onto pages. But he knows about the going out into water, the going down and coming up, the crossing of long distances, the way the rest of the world falls away. We don’t need words for that.

Water dissolves and dilutes. As I swim, I am reconstituted, returned to self. Old worlds lose their hold, new ones too. Meaning is made, one thing is turned into another. A body or memory is broken down; a body or memory is strengthened. For as long as I enter water, I’ll think of those I’ve entered water with and of all the bodies of water I know, small and large. The element of water and myself, the only constants. The names of the Gulf change, the names of the men and of the women. The names of the rocky precipices and secret spots and predators and all the things that can be eaten or admired. The reasons why I’m here change — or maybe they don’t. Maybe I’m only ever here for the water, for the dissolution, for the remaking in the depths, for the going down and the coming up, for the swimming out from shore.