I fought the sea, and the sea won in a landslide
August 31There's a first time for everything. John Elway finally got his Super Bowl, Mark McGwire got his 70 homers, and someone actually got stuck in a Taco Bell window reaching for a chalupa, which has to be a first. I'll see their first-time experiences and raise them. My first time swimming in the Atlantic Ocean is the trump card. Sure, it's tough to get within a T stop of Randy Johnson's fastball, or swing within a week of Pete Sampras' serve, but that's nothing compared to my first experience with our Eastern border. On a cold December night, at one in the morning, I took my first steps into the Atlantic, and there are still rescue parties looking for the toe that froze off. It wasn't just cold. Take your worst image of Siberia and multiply it by four. It was like being stuck in a meat locker for a doubleheader, wearing only knickers. What, you may ask, would prompt a land-dwelling midwesterner like myself to peruse the waters of the Atlantic on a Friday night? The answer is quite simple. Pride. Well, pride and beer. And a good deal of peer pressure. Throw in some good, old-fashioned machoism, and don't forget the beer, and I guess the answer isn't so simple. Well, I was up in the Cape for a birthday party in Hyannis, the Kennedy stomping ground, and I kept hearing stories, tall tales about people going swimming on the same weekend last year. I figured I had to get in on that. It couldn't be that bad. I've been in the cold before. I'm from Colorado. I ski. I knew what cold was. I couldn't have been more wrong if I thought I had spotted President John F. Kennedy himself. I did not know what cold was, but I would learn, and wouldn't forget. So the time comes to head down to the beach, and I'm getting cold just walking down there, but I've already decided I'm going in, so backing out now would have been chicken, and yellow, and embarrassing, and the smartest damn move I could have made. But, with all the pride and beer and peer pressure and machoism and beer in me, there was no backing out. So when everyone was down on the beach, looking at stars and sand, and whatever else you can do on a beach at night, the three of us were stripping down to boxers, getting ready for the plunge. Wisely enough, we had one towel for the three of us, which was equivalent to bringing a putter to a long drive contest, but we figured we'd make it work. Once we were in boxers, I was surprisingly warm on most of my body. Most. My feet had never been that cold in my life. When parents lie about having to walk to school in the snow, uphill, without shoes, this is what they're imagining. Someone forgot to turn on the heat underneath the sand, because the temperature was somewhere around zero down there. We had planned to walk confidently down to the beach, having stripped to shorts up the hill on the road, but seeing that the sand was making ice feel hot, those plans got dropped, and the three of us took off into a dead sprint towards the black waters. In my mind, I was a cross between a soldier in Braveheart (yelling and charging the whole way down) and a lifeguard in Baywatch (gracefully striding out to sea), but in reality, I must have looked like a stick man with two bad legs. I pain to think of the others that were watching, seeing my two Larry Bird-white legs struggling to get through the sand. I didn't know running in sand would be so difficult when drunk, but you can add that to the list of misconceptions I had on the night. Anyway, it was a classic struggle between man and nature, one that Ernest Hemingway would be proud of. Unfortunately, nature was a two-touchdown favorite, and it covered. I had it all planned out. I was going to take a few leaping strides in the water and then go into a nice little dive. Nature had different plans. I didn't know there were rocks right at the beginning of the water, and the pain inflicted by jagged rocks cutting my feet caused me to crumble over into the water instead of taking a dive. I looked like a crash test dummy that drives into a wall, crumbling on impact. Just to add insult to injury, I forgot about the salt water, and got that in my nose, eyes, mouth, and ears. You know, everyone accuses Nebraska of choosing powder-puff opponents - well, talk to the ocean. It could have beaten me blindfolded with one hand tied behind its back. Not only was I lying in a fetal position in the water, unable to see, and with cuts on my feet, but I was cold. I tried to run back up the hill to the towel, but was unable. I had to walk. I couldn't get through the sand. My feet were making it impossible to run and I couldn't see. I told them I was walking because I wasn't too cold. I could have told them I was dead and it would have been less of a lie. Finally, I limped up the hill and dried off, but not before dripping water all over my jeans, making them unwearable. So, now that I was a blind, shivering gimp, I also had to walk home in my boxers. A whole new body part got really cold, and it was not my foot. Sure, the ocean got the better of me, but I had my first experience in the Atlantic and lived to tell about it, so that has to be something. Of course, you probably won't see me near the ocean in the winter until the end of the next century.
