I flopped back on my stomach and started the crawl again. The backs of my upper arms were getting stiff and sore. I wondered how long I had been at it, and how much longer I had to go. I tried to calculate the distance. Say the ship had been a mile offshore. That would be about half the length of our valley’s beach. If I had started swimming at Basilone Hill, then by this time I’d be about to… well, I couldn’t say. There was no way to tell. I was sure I had swum a good distance, though, from the way my arms hurt.
Stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke. Sometimes it was easy to blank the mind and just swim. I changed strokes at the count of a hundred; hundred after hundred slipped by. A lot of time passed. When I did the frog kick I noticed that the fog was lifting, becoming the low cloud bank that had rushed overhead when we were sailing north in the sloop. Perhaps that meant I was getting close to land. The clouds were very white against the black sea; probably the moon was now up. The surface of the water was a rolling obsidian plain. Swirling into it were little flurries of snow, flying forward over me as much as they were falling. When they hit the water they disappeared instantly, without a splash. The sight of them made me feel the cold more than ever, and again I almost started to cry, but couldn’t spare the effort. I was crying miserable, though. If only I had those fins.
I put my head down and doggedly crawled along, ordering myself to think of something besides the cold. All the times I had looked out over a peaceful warm sea, for instance. I recalled a time when Steve and Tom and I were lazing up at Tom’s place, looking for Catalina. “I wonder what it would look like if the water was gone,” Steve had said. Tom had jumped on the notion with glee. “Why, we’d think we were on a giant mountain. Offshore here would be a plain tilted away from us, cut by canyons so deep we wouldn’t be able to see the bottom of them. Then the plain would drop away so steeply we wouldn’t be able to see the lowlands beyond. That’s the continental shelf I’ve told you about. The lowland would rise again to foothills around Catalina and San Clemente islands, which would be big mountains like ours.” On he had rambled, pulling up imaginary hipboots to lead us on an exploration of the new land, through mud and muck that was covered with clumps of seaweed and surprised-looking fish, in search of wrecked ships and their open treasure chests…
It was the wrong time to remember that discussion. When I thought of how much water was underneath me, how far away the bottom was, I got scared and pulled my feet closer to the surface. All those fish, too—the ocean was teeming with fish, as I well knew, and some of them had sharp teeth and voracious appetites. And none of them went to bed at night. One of those ugly ones with its mouth crammed with teeth could swim up and bite me that very moment! Or I might blunder into a whole school of them, and feel their slick finny bodies colliding with mine—the sandy leather of a shark, or the spikes of a scorpion fish… But worse than the fish was just being out there at all, with all that water below, down and down and colder and darker, all the way to the slimy bottom so far below. I thrashed with panic for a while, terrified at the thought of where I was, of how deep the sea was.
But several rushes of panic passed, and I was still there floundering. There was nothing I could do to change things. And more and more as time passed the real danger, the cold, reasserted itself and made me forget my fears of the imagination. It couldn’t be escaped, I couldn’t swim hard enough now to ward it off, and the water felt icy, no longer any refuge from the snowy wind. The cold would kill me soon. I could feel that in my muscles. It was more frightening than the size of the sea by far.
My thoughts seemed to chill, becoming slothful and stupid. My arms hurt so I could barely move them. Backstroke was hard, crawl was hard, frog stroke was hard. Floating was hard. If only I had those fins. Such a long way to the bottom. My arms were as heavy as ironwood branches, and my stomach muscles wanted a rest. If they cramped I would drown. Yet I had no choice but to keep them tensed, and go on swimming. I put my numbed face in the water and plowed along in a painful crawl, trying to hurry.
There was a rhythm I could keep to if I could ignore the pain, and grimly I stuck to it. My sense of time left me. So did the notion of a destination. It was not so much a matter of getting somewhere, as it was avoiding death then and there. Left arm, right arm, breath; left arm, right arm, breath. And so on. Each motion a struggle against the cold. The few times I bothered to look up, nothing had changed: low white clouds, flakes of snow swirling ahead and disappearing into the sea with a faint ssss, ssss, ssss. I couldn’t feel my hands and feet, and the cold moved up my limbs and made them less and less obedient to my commands. I was getting too cold to swim.
The time came when it seemed I would have to give up. All my fine stories for the gang were going to go to waste, told only to myself in a last rush of thought on the way to the distant bottom. A waste, but there it was. I couldn’t swim any more. If only I had those fins. Still, each time I thought to myself, Hanker, this is it, time to sink—I found the energy to slap along a few strokes more. It felt like swimming in cold butter. I couldn’t go on. Again I decided to give up, and again I found a few more kicks in me. I imagine that most of the people who drown at sea never do decide to give up; their bodies stop obeying, and make the decision for them.
On my back I could frog kick, and flap my arms at my sides. It was the only way left to me, so I kept at it, anxious to postpone the moment of letting go, though I knew it wasn’t far away. The thought of it was terrifying, sickening. Like nothing else I’d ever felt. Being taken to Catalina was nothing compared to it, and now I knew for sure I had made a fatal mistake by jumping overboard. Swells swept up out of the dark, becoming visible as they lifted me. Maybe they could do the work for me, if I could stay afloat. I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t willing to quit. But I was too cold, too weak. On my back like I was, I had to work to avoid swallowing water when the crests of the swells passed over me, for one mouthful would have sunk me as fast as a hundred pounds of iron. Only dimly, at first, did I notice that the swells were getting taller. That’s all I need, I thought. A bigger swell, how wonderful. Still—didn’t that mean something? I was too cold, I wasn’t thinking anymore in the way that we usually think, silently talking to ourselves. I had only the simplest sort of thoughts: sensations, a repeated refusal to sink, instructions to my feeble limbs.
Cold fingers brushed my back and legs, and I squealed.
Seaweed, slick and leafy. I struggled around the floating clump, granted a bit of strength by the scare. Then on top of a swell I heard it. p-KKkkkkkkkk… p-KKkkkkkkkkk. Waves breaking. I had made it.
Suddenly I had some energy. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard the sound of the waves before, it was so plain. At the crest of the next swell I looked landward, and sure enough there it was, a black mass big and solid under the clouds. “Yeah!” I said aloud. “Yeah!”
I ran into another clump of seaweed, but I didn’t care. Disentangling myself from it I crested another swell, and from there the clear sound of the breaking waves told me my troubles weren’t over. Even from behind, the long irregular crack of the waves falling was louder than the Mayor’s shotgun had been. And following the crack was a low roaring krrkrrkrrkrrkrrkrrkrrkrr, that faded away just enough to make the next break noticeable. All the sounds joined together in a fierce trembling boom; it was hard to believe I hadn’t heard it earlier. Too tired.