I am an ocean creature. Two summers ago, you could find me every week tossing up and down in the choppy waters of Kits Beach, clad in a wetsuit and pink cap like some sort of bald, neoprene seal, although I’m convinced a seal feels less panic every time a wave hits her in the face. As a human, I spluttered and struggled through the waves with an ever-decreasing fear but ever-growing numbness in my extremities, until I completed my long lap (2 minutes faster than last week!). Transitioning from sea to land is an awkward process at best, involving uncooperative legs and feet and certain choice curse words when a sopping, sticky wetsuit refuses to part ways with your ankles.

Let me paddle backwards a ways: my love of the ocean began with my mother. We are cold-water addicts, the sort of people who feel that the New Year hasn’t really begun until we are salty and frozen from ocean water. Really frozen sometimes, like the year we swam in the ocean at Victoria’s Gonzales Bay, then went skating on a farmer’s icy field some hours later. And trust us to never pass by our favourite lake in the summer months (months loosely defined as April – September, occasionally reaching into October depending on the weather) without stopping for a dip. We even keep a set of bathing suits and towels in the car for such occasions. We do live in Canada, by the way— Victoria has a temperate climate year-round, but its waters are hardly tropical even in the blistering 25°C breezes of midsummer.

My mom and I spend some quality time at Mystic Beach, Vancouver Island, BC.

This hypothermic habit is not shared by very many of my friends here in Vancouver. A few of us have enjoyed the occasional midnight dip at Wreck Beach, however. When we hit the beach on sunnier occasions, I think my friends see my compulsion to swim long distances from shore in frigid ocean water as unnecessarily hazardous. They are right; it is not a particularly safe activity, especially alone. But this is something that makes me joyous. Time is suspended and I focus completely on playing with the surf, or in the absence of waves maybe investigating the water’s biological contents. I rely on my friends to recognize the warning signs of impending hypothermia and to lure me out of the waves, usually with some sort of food reward. My latest ocean adventure was on a cycle tour in California over winter break. My friends and I would stop for lunch at a city beach as a break in our ride each day. Predictably, my first move would be into my bathing suit and out onto the water, and once I was in there, hard luck getting me out. There’s nothing like big surf to make me ignore the numbness of toes and fingers while competing with neoprene-clad surfers for some wave action. Fortunately, lunch always involved both avocados and chocolate, so my friends were able to roust me from my marine trance without much effort. In fact, we all enjoyed the waves, as they offered a chilling therapy for sitting in the saddle all day.

My ecstatic relationship with the ocean draws from a strange mixture of comfort, abandon, and unpredictability. Effortlessly, I float over the tops of massive waves and watch their surge and crash at the shoreline. Maybe I choke and blindly struggle to maintain forward momentum when swimming a long distance against the surface wind. Or I spend too long in a front crawl daydream, only to look up too late and pinpoint my destination, now located to my rear. Or perhaps I get sucked under a wave I am trying to surf down, performing a series of possibly graceful underwater cartwheels as I gradually lose speed to the sandy or rocky or weedy bottom. My suspicion is that in a past life, I was a sea turtle. Not an exceptionally fast swimmer to be sure, but well equipped to navigate oceans all over the planet.

Swimming in a small ocean: part of the Georgian Bay in Bruce Peninsula National Park, ON.

I think my seafaring family did a wonderful job of instilling a sense of home within me. It is the ocean I carry with me when I am stressed or overwhelmed, my place of detachment from care and worry. And it is a home that I am lucky enough to visit every day.

Works Cited

“About us.” Vancouver Open Water Swimming Association, 2009. Web. 31 January 2014.

“Durrance Lake.” Secret Lakes of Southern Vancouver Island, 2013. Web. 31 January 2014.