Seadomasochism
In the ocean today, I discovered a new game. I took an inflatable raft out beyond the waves and sat myself square in its middle. I was perpendicular to the five tubes of the raft's width – my legs on the plane, my trunk up the vertical axis – and the vertical weight began to make the balancing difficult.
For the literally imbalanced, such as myself, one's own top has a terrific chance of proving the heavy in top-heaviness. Add water and there the game begins.
Out a ways, I began to kick myself back to the beach and get the waves more birthed and rolling underneath. The raft took more pitch and in more shallow water I kicked sideways to turn and find the rockier yaw. (The sea was angry that day, my friends, like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.) The crests built up and started to tip the sides, but I kicked in a little further.
The wave rode me up, taking the raft faster into the beach, then out from under my back and over my head, tumbling me once with the wave, twice into the sand, and tumble three into a splayed back float-bump over the ground shells, along the shore edge for a return to light and back in the undertow a few yards to get smacked around by the baby waves coming in next. One hand held onto the raft, the other to my bathing suit, both hands moderately successful, leaving my head free to fill with water and sand, the grains of which I'd now certainly be taking home in my ears.
After picking myself up, I trudged in again to spit and get back on the raft. Wash, rinse, spin and the morning was filled. I kept coming back for more and, not surprisingly, so did the sea. The Atlantic has really established itself with its persistence. Eventually leaving the water, I decided I would be the perfect person to start whatever you would get if you crossed Stephen Crane's The Open Boat with a fantasy sports camp.
"Where the land meets the sea and where pleasure meets pain, come get your jollies at Jolly Rodgers' Raftorium, where we put the real in realism and raft in Raftorium…" or something. Maybe our ad agency would even find mermaids to sing a jingle. Maybe "sea only comes when sea's on top" if I appealed to James' maritime spirit. (You know what would make that Ikea lamp really sad, James? "Crustaceans complaining 'bout the noises above.") The jingle mermaids could be beautiful women dressed as mermaids, ugly men dressed as mermaids or even actual mermaids dressed in their native mermaidwear.
Because today was, if anything, marketable. You wanted something to sell at the beach? You could have gone and sold your damn T-shirts. Sucker. What I found out there in the waves this morning was gold, the kind of wet gold that makes old men wet and young women wet too. Water, baby, here there and everywhere, and the natural forces of Earth and I made it all happen.
I've got the badges too. The cut on my right thigh, the shell line on my neck, the bruises on my back. Light injuries all, but signs of the sea nonetheless. These Wednesday markings match the bright red sunburns on my arms and knees – Monday's sunscreen forgetfulness celebration – but are products of a more inspired stupidity.
