The LAST Swim!

Yesterday was the last balmy summer-like day and I spent the entire day indoors working at a desk, crunching numbers, with an air conditioner blasting on my forehead. As I glanced out the window, from time to time, I began to pine over the last days of summer. I never was this way: obsessed with the endings of things. My husband did this to me. After 33 years of living with someone telling me, “This is the last day of summer,” and, “This is the last day of our vacation,” or, “This is the last time we will be sailing until next summer,” it’s no wonder I was fidgeting all day to get out on the water one last time.

At 11:00 AM, I shot a quick e-mail to my husband: What do you say if I make some sandwiches for dinner and we take the boat out to that little spot we found last weekend? We could take one last swim. His immediate reply: Absolutely. I’ll try to be home by 5:45.

And so, the adventure began…

I hurried home and slapped some leftover chicken between two slices of bread, packed a cucumber and some cherry tomatoes to dip into hummus, boiled water for a thermos of tea and brought some cookies for dessert.

“Do you want to bring a bottle of wine?” my husband asked.

“Nah, let’s just throw in some beers and get out before the sun goes down,” I replied. Bringing the wine would have meant taking precious minutes to gingerly pack two wine glasses because my husband won’t drink wine from a plastic cup. In hindsight, we should have packed a few bottles of wine.

Upon arriving at our “little spot” on the Great South Bay we began eating our sandwiches and laughed at the wonder of being alone like this anywhere on Long Island. “I won’t throw an anchor,” my captain said, “because the tide is going out. We’ll just drift into deeper water until we reach the channel and then we’ll head home. By then it will be dark.”

“It seems awful low here,” I said. “Are you sure we won’t get stuck?” My captain, an auxiliary Coast Guard member, chuckled and assured me that he knew what he was doing and I should just relax and enjoy the last sunset. I should have known something was wrong when he finished his sandwich in a hurry and jumped up to look for the one oar he keeps on the boat. He stumbled and landed his big toe in the hummus and I threw my cucumber overboard to the fishes.

“It was just my toe,” he said, “the rest of this hummus is still good.”

“No thanks,” I replied.

I stretched out and relaxed while he went up to the bow and began rowing and testing the water’s depth with the oar. It was still too low to run the engine. I was enjoying the sound of silence interrupted occasionally by the gentle ripple of the oar in the water, a distant call of a lonely seagull, the soft chirping sounds of crickets on the island.

“We’re a lot farther away from the channel than I thought,” my captain called out from the starboard side.

“You know we’re going in circles,” I informed him, “and the mosquitoes are starting to bite.”

I covered my head with my hood to keep the little buggers out and closed my eyes. I was in a gentle reverie imagining that we were teenagers again, stranded out here in the warm dusky evening in a low tide on the last day of summer. I was thinking how differently we would be responding to this situation if we were 18 again, when I was awakened by the sound of a clumsy splash.

“Move up to the bow,” my captain called to me from the water. “I need your weight up front while I pull the boat.” Happy to accommodate him, I lounged in the vee seat in the bow observing how much lower the depth had become and how much darker the sky was and how little progress he had made with his one oar.

“Why is it getting lower?” I asked. “I thought you said we would be drifting into deeper water.”

My captain’s quick response was a firm command: “You’ll have to get out of the boat now and help me push or we’ll never get out of here until the tide comes up at midnight.” It was dark now and I couldn’t see what was in the water – jellyfish? crabs? weed? Did he really expect me to jump in the water beside him? Did he take me seriously last weekend when I playfully called him, “my captain,” and assured him that when we were boating he was "my commander" and I would follow his orders – no matter what? The alternative was to sit out here on this dank dark night and get eaten alive by mosquitoes.

I pushed while he pulled, then we both pushed. I’ll admit that I was faking it at some point, making pushing sounds and not exerting much effort until my foot landed in some mucky mush that pulled me down like quicksand. I screamed and let go of the boat and moved back a few paces.

“What happened?” my captain called out.

“Mush! I stepped into a pile of mucky mush!” He continued to push the boat without me, ignoring my cries and I stumbled after the boat screaming, “Don’t leave me out here alone!”

Then my heart sank at the sound of sand pressing into the hull as the dead weight of our 17 foot boat was in front of us. We were now firmly beached in the pitch black dark in the Great South Bay. I remembered the old joke my brother used to tell my mother when he went boating as a teenager. “Don’t worry so much, mom,” he would reassure her. “If we get stuck out there, we can just walk home.” Har! Har! Har! I was now living that joke. I thought of the wine bottle we left at home and longed for a swig.

For a split second I saw the look of defeat pass over my captain’s eyes. “NOW WHAT!” I screamed. He quickly snapped out of it and began shimmying the boat from left to right and I followed his lead. We were slow dancing with this boat, creating a rhythm of motion as I was whispering endearments to it under my breath, “come on, baby, let’s go, let’s get out of here, we can do this!”

At last! I felt it loosen and the water was up to my knees. “Can I get back in the boat?” I asked timidly at first, and as the water inched up to my thighs I was almost in tears as I cried out, “NOW?? Can I PLEASE get back into the boat?” And then those beautiful words, my captain’s orders: “Get back in the boat.”

The engine started up in deeper water and I saw the green and red buoy lights ahead. We were home safe in the state channel. So why was my captain heading away from the buoys? The engine stalled when we hit bottom again, and then I remembered, the captain was color blind. The oar came out again and I guided him back to the colored buoys. I heard him click the switch to turn on the boat lights but saw no lights. He tried over and over, and I realized all the clicking in the world wasn’t going to turn those lights on as I panicked and called out to alert the captain of an approaching boat. “Don’t worry; I see him!” he shouted out above the roar of the approaching engine.

“I see him, too!” I screamed, “but he can’t see us because we have no lights!” I grabbed a life jacket and clumsily fumbled with the strap to adjust it to my girth. Worst case scenario, I thought, at least they will find my body after the crash. I saw my grandchildren’s faces flash before me. I thought of all the people I loved in my life and gave each of them a two second farewell hug in my mind. I closed my eyes and prayed.

I kept silent for the remainder of the ride home. My life jacket was so tight I could hardly breathe, let alone speak. My heart took awhile to get back to a normal pace. Before my captain could finish tying up, I jumped onto the dock, and in a final gesture of farewell to the summer of 2009, I flung my ruined wet, muck covered sandals across the lawn. That was the last time I would wear them. That slow dance with the boat was, undeniably, my last swim of 2009. As for my captain, those were the last commands he would issue me and the last time I would call him “captain” -until next year.