by Lynne Cox
Grayson knew to avoid the tentacles. Diving into the deep water he wove his way down through the sea of purple jellyfish and out of reach of their tentacles.
Swimming on the surface, a pair of bright orange garibaldi greeted me. Garibaldi were fish that resembled giant goldfish. Usually they inhabited the shallow coastal waters along rocky shores with lush kelp beds, where they could hide from predators behind the veils of kelp. Seeing them swimming so far offshore was very uncommon. But they were a protected species and there were many garibaldi living off the shores of Laguna Beach, and also along the shores of Catalina Island. They were attracted to bright orange or tangerine colors, and whenever I wore a tangerine swimming cap, they swam around my head. It wasn’t until a friend pointed it out to me that I noticed the garibaldi had sharp front teeth, which they used to crack open the soft shells of spiny sea urchins. Then they popped the round orange roe balls out of the shell and ate them whole.
This pair of bright orange garibaldi seemed to be mates. They swam side by side very close to each other through the long, slowly waving tendrils of brown kelp. And they swam around my head, checking to see if I was a garibaldi invading their territory. They seemed satisfied that I wasn’t. They swam to within a few inches of the oil rig. I watched them become two orange dots in the dark blue sea.
Grayson continued his dive, deeper and deeper into the enormous sea, and I watched him. Why are you going so far down? I felt myself getting a little nervous. How long can you hold your breath?
Be careful, Grayson. Be really careful.
Grayson’s fluke became a tiny waving gray Y in the light blue depths and then the Y disappeared into the darkness. He dove so far down, one hundred or two hundred feet, that I wondered how he could stand the pressure changes in his ears and head. How could he equalize that pressure so quickly? How come his ears didn’t rupture? Would he have enough air to return to the surface?
I knew Grayson was born to swim and dive to great depths but I still held my breath with him. Unconsciously I always did this when I was teaching people how to swim. I never wanted them to run out of air on the bottom of the pool and have a bad experience. I held them by one arm and pushed them back up if I thought they were going to run out of air. I took another breath and ran out of air again. I took another breath and repeated taking breaths twenty more times. He was still gone. I looked at my watch. He had been underwater for at least five minutes.
Was he okay? Would he return? Where was he?
The sun shifted suddenly, highlighting the water below so that it was possible to see down into the deep.
I said to myself, This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, swimming so far out without a boat. Then I thought, No, I’ve done dumber things, like the time I was five years old and decided to climb down into a rock quarry, alone, so I could see the shiny red cranberries floating in a natural pool way down at the bottom of the bog. It was dumb when I tripped on a rock, slid down a cliff, and nearly fell into the quarry, but luckily I caught a tree branch and hung on until my mother found me. Yep. That was dumb. It was almost as dumb as the time my brother convinced me to jump out of the Hatches’ barn window to test if the snow was soft or hard before he and his friends followed. It was hard. And it really hurt. It was dumb, but I did something dumber than that when I was seven and I kissed Craig McQuade. That was really dumb. Yep, but that wasn’t the dumbest thing you’ve done: Remember when you and Sue and Kari and Kittridge had a sleepover and you toilet-papered John Mill’s house? And he caught you? Remember the time you went ice-skating on a pond after you’d been told the ice was too thin, and it was? Remember the time you said the S-word and your grandmother heard you? Hmm, remember the day you forgot you were going to have a math quiz? Remember the time you stayed out too late and got lost in the woods? Remember last month?
Okay, okay, I’d done a lot of really dumb things, but this definitely had to be one of the dumbest.
Making a few arm strokes, I took a breath and looked down. It was dumb to look into an abyss. I have no idea why I kept doing it. I guess I just wanted to see more. I wanted to understand what I didn’t already. I was just curious. I couldn’t help myself.
The water was navy blue and full of wavering and shifting shadows. I moved a little deeper into the shadow of the oil rig. Taking another breath, I looked down again. I couldn’t see Grayson.
The sea seemed empty without him.
Suddenly I felt more alone than ever before. I was scared for me and for him.
Could he dive to five hundred feet like an adult whale? How long would that take? How long could he hold his breath? Where could he have gone? Would he return?
I wondered: How long do you wait? How long do you wait for anyone?
I hung on the upper inches of the water and wondered.
Should I go?
No, he has come to me for help. I have to find him.
I pulled myself underwater with wide breaststroke pulls. I dove deeper and deeper into the dark nothingness.
My head throbbed with the pressure. The dark blue world whirled around me. The emptiness tightened around me like a boa constrictor. I waited. I held my breath until I was nearly out of air then raced for the surface.
From the tension of the dark empty depths an idea began to emerge.
It was that space between not knowing and knowing, that tension between losing and finding, that blank page between silence and song, that emptiness that creates the need to create, to try, to imagine, to solve.
I stared down again and it was like looking straight down from the top of the Empire State Building, but I couldn’t see the ground or Grayson, so I swam farther out, floated on my stomach, and looked down again.
The sun shifted slightly and the water became more transparent. Now it was like standing on the very edge of the Grand Canyon and looking down deeper and deeper as if a trapdoor had opened below and the bottom was dropping. (Now the water was so clear I was afraid it wouldn’t support my weight.) I felt like I might fall into forever. I had to lift my head up quickly and take a couple of fast breaths.
I don’t know why, but I had to look down again. I had to see one more time if I could find Grayson. I had to figure out how to look down without feeling as if I was falling.
I imagined I was hovering a foot above the moon’s surface looking down onto the earth and ocean. When I visualized myself way above the earth, the water depth no longer seemed so frightening. By changing my thoughts, I was able to alter my perspective, to calm down, and to refocus.
I floated on the surface, rolled onto my back, and told myself to relax, and as my body relaxed, my mind did as well, and then new ideas began to flow.
Maybe I couldn’t help Grayson, but I knew that he had someone out there with him, and sometimes just having someone with you is enough.
There are all sorts of ways to think about the world, and so many people who think differently. Still, I believe there are two basic ways of thinking: one of possibility and hope, the other of doubt and impossibility. When I think about impossible things, I think of a friend of mine who did the impossible, and that makes me believe impossible things can become possible. If I try, if I believe, if I work toward something, and if I can convince other people to help, the impossible isn’t impossible at all.
At age fifteen, I swam across the English Channel. Most people didn’t think that was possible. And now, looking back through time, I remember that my friend Greg Miller once asked me to drive with him at three in the morning to a deserted runway in Bakersfield to watch him attempt to be the first person to achieve human-powered flight. His goal was to fly the Gossamer Condor a mile in a figure-eight course. The plane was created by Paul MacCready and a group of friends from Caltech; its wings were made of balsa wood and Mylar sheeting, and were attached to a bicycle with piano string.
All Greg had to do was to pedal as fast as he could to get the airplane airborne, keep pedaling as fast as he could, maintain an altitude of twenty feet off the ground,
and keep the plane stable while making a giant figure eight.
Greg became one of the first to achieve human-powered flight. Like him and his crew, I simply believed he could do it. He worked hard, trained hard, studied birds in flight and in taking off and landing; he looked to nature and tried to emulate it. And he worked with a group of rocket scientists and inventors who saw the possibilities in life; they saw what was and what could be.
I never questioned why Greg would want to attempt to be the first person to fly using human power. It was something that he and his team believed was worth achieving. And I think I felt the same way about the baby whale. Like Greg I believed in trying to do things that people may have thought impossible.
I believed we would find Grayson’s mother in the vast ocean.
I had heard that whales sometimes dive into very deep waters so they can talk to each other. Their voices carry a much greater distance in the deep, where the water is denser and colder.
I wondered if that was why Grayson had swum so far down, to listen or talk. He had been gone for seventeen minutes. And it had seemed like forever.
I put my face down in the water, and in my mind I shouted, Grayson! I hoped he would somehow hear me.
Grayson popped up from below the water and swam beside me.
“Grayson, you are so beautiful. How in the world did you ever find me? How come you came to me to help you? How could you have known that I would?”
Grayson rolled over and looked at me. In his eyes, I saw a brightness, a sense of vitality, and a gentle sweetness. I held him in my eyes and in my heart.
His poor mother, though, had to be frantically searching for him. How in this big ocean would she ever find him?
Do what you can do, I thought, don’t get overwhelmed by the enormity of something. Break it down into smaller pieces like you do when you swim. Do one thing at a time.
“Grayson, let’s swim back to shore now,” I said. I had to. I was cold. And tired and depleted. My eyes were burning from the saltwater leaking into my goggles.
Grayson seemed to understand. He turned with me and started swimming toward shore.
The current seemed to rise on our backs as if a giant hand was lifting us and carrying us toward shore. I felt a deep sense of relief. I was ready to reach the beach.
But all of sudden, Grayson dramatically changed course.
He turned almost completely around. Had he heard his mother’s voice?
seven
Grayson was swimming so fast underwater that I could see streams of darker water flowing over his head.
He was dolphin-fast; his footprints were snapping up to the surface with each giant flick of his fluke. His footprints were spaced closely together.
Grayson was holding tightly on to the water. As his speed increased, the resistance increased. He held on tighter and tighter, swimming faster and faster, and he moved through the water in a line as straight as a torpedo.
Then suddenly he leaped out of the sea. He transformed his body into something like a giant cymbal, with the sea’s surface as the other cymbal. He breached.
He intentionally hit the water at a sharp angle to make an enormous impact that would create noise—and a giant splash. It was the best sideways cannonball I had ever seen.
Gray whales often breach to dislodge barnacles and sea lice from their skin. But they also do it to communicate with other whales. And I hoped he was trying to communicate with the other whales that might be passing through the area.
He paused and then took off again, moving like a plane speeding down the runway for takeoff. He converted his speed across the water into lift and, this time, got his body more airborne. He flew five feet above the sea’s surface and when he hit the water I felt the impact. His splash soared six feet into the air.
For a couple of minutes he caught his breath and then he sped off one more time, faster than before, and this time when he leaped, he adjusted his position in midair and launched himself ten feet across the water. This time the splash flew twelve feet into the air. If there had been an ocean Olympics for the long jump, Grayson would have received a gold medal.
I waited for him. And wondered how much longer I could wait. I was cold and tired. But, I thought, maybe he’s down below talking with the other whales that are traveling along the whale trail north. Maybe they heard his breaching sounds. And maybe they know where his mother is or maybe they will tell her where to find Grayson.
All that I knew, though, was that I was really tired. And that soon I would have to get ashore. I strained my eyes to spot Grayson’s fluke. Pulling my goggles off my face, I placed them on top of my head and rubbed the soft skin where the goggles’ rubber gasket had pressed against my eye sockets and forehead. They were sore and my eyes burned from the saltwater. My neck hurt from lifting it way too much. I was whining. I checked my watch. It was nearly nine a.m. Grayson had been gone for ten minutes. I knew I should head home soon or my parents would be wondering about me.
I made my feet move in small circles, toward each other, one foot and then the other, like an egg beater, then I did it faster so that the action would lift me two or three feet above the water and I could get up higher in the water to see if there was anything out there.
It was hard work. I was breathing heavily so I decided to alternate between doing a slow and a fast eggbeater. I rested during the slow eggbeater and worked on the fast, and I moved slowly in a tight circle so I could see all the way around. Twelve minutes had passed since I had last seen Grayson.
Putting on my goggles and taking a breath, I put my face under the water, and made small slow circles with my feet.
Had he found his mother? Or had he swum off? Should I swim to shore alone?
Shore was farther away than it had been ten minutes ago. The ebb tide was pushing me beyond the oil rig. Catalina Island’s mountain peaks were clearly visible in the distance. I reminded myself that I had swum there before, but that didn’t matter. I was becoming impatient.
How much longer do I wait?
I told myself to wait for five minutes, and when five minutes passed, I asked myself again: How much longer should I wait?
The answer came to me. Wait as long as you need to. The waiting is as important as the doing: it’s the time you spend training and the rest in between; it’s painting the subject and the space in between; it’s the reading and the thinking about what you’ve read; it’s the written words, what is said, what is left unsaid, the space between the thoughts on the page, that makes the story, and it’s the space between the notes, the intervals between fast and slow, that makes the music. It’s the love of being together, the spacing, the tension of being apart, that brings you back together. Just wait, just be patient, he will return.
But the reality was that I was growing colder, more tired, and more hungry.
I checked my watch. Three minutes. It had seemed like thirty. My thoughts were becoming negative.
I knew that if I changed my thoughts, I would change the way I felt about what I was experiencing. I was hungry and all I could think of was food. So I let my mind go wild and I began imagining what I would have when I finished my workout.
All I wanted was a toasted and chewy bagel with peanut butter, or with jam; or a flaky, slightly sweet, buttery croissant and hot, rich French coffee and milk. A cup of hot chocolate with a mound of whipped cream as big as Big Bear Mountain in the distance. I could eat it and float on it. All I wanted was a pot of hot orange spice tea and a chocolate chip scone. That would be delicious too. Even better, thick moist chocolate cake with chocolate butter-cream icing, or carrot cake with pecans and cinnamon and clove, pineapple, and coconut, or a slice of hot apple strudel—any of these would do.
My stomach was moaning, sputtering, and growling. I couldn’t help myself, the more I thought about it, the hungrier I got. I imagined a steamy plate filled with penne pasta and thick marinara with thin shavings of Parmesan cheese, or a dish piled high with linguini and scallops, shrimp, mussels, in
a white wine and garlic sauce. Or salmon, I love salmon—grilled, poached, marinated—or New England lobster with butter, or steamed clams. Really anything would be more than fine. I would love a cracker or a thick, juicy grilled New York steak or a rare filet mignon with spinach. Something hot and spicy would warm me up from the inside out: I would love Thai eggplant, Indian jade curry, Hunan beef, Sichuan shrimp, or a hot steamy bowl of sukiyaki. I could eat a cheeseburger with Muenster cheese, or I could eat a Chicago or New York pizza, with mushrooms and long stringy cheese. I kept thinking of food and I got hungrier and hungrier. Then I thought of Grayson. And that made me feel guilty. I had discovered guilt is a great motivator. I thought of him instead of me. And his needs, not mine.
Grayson had to be famished. His mother must be too. She hadn’t eaten at all during her migration south, during the birth, or on her migration north. It was amazing the way she swam north with her baby, fed him, giving herself to him with her milk, her body shrinking as his body grew. I hoped we could find her. Sometimes you just had to believe that things would be okay. Sometimes it made no sense to be optimistic, but it sure beat being pessimistic.
The wind was diminishing, the ocean becoming smoother. There were long silky areas and lined sections rippled by the breeze: They made the ocean look like the petals of a flower. As the sun shifted, the water changed to a bright purple blue and it was like floating on Van Gogh’s irises and across the fuzzy yellow, gold, and white blaze.
Rolling onto my stomach I took a breath, looked deep into the purple-blue water. Seeing nothing but purple, I closed my eyes and listened. There were so many sounds. Tiny crackling noises like plankton bumping into one another, and the sound of shrimp growing.
Grayson had been gone for fifteen minutes.
But I had been in the water for three and a half hours. And the water was three or four degrees colder out near the oil rig than it was near shore. And when I was floating, I wasn’t creating any heat through exercise. The cold was starting to work its way deep into my muscles and I knew that I was getting closer to hypothermia. If the cold water made my body temperature drop too far, I could pass out or die from exposure.