7–5–16 Portovenere

The Mediterranean is ideal for swimming. Its cool, but not so much I want to wear the insulated swim cap, and once you get away from surf churned sand its clear down to the bottom. There are no surfable waves, but outside secluded bays, the chop can be quite rough, so you get moved up and down and learn to hold ground during the up and pull through the down. We swam today and yesterday in “Byron’s Cove” where Alfred Lord Byron supposedly left to swim 75 kilometers to Lerichi to visit Shelly, who I suppose had gotten a different hotel. I didn’t get far out of this cove, but it’s a long, beautiful lap, with a floor of massive boulders from the cliffs above, dropping out to endless, agoraphobic blue outside the buoys.

I’m normally cautious around surf and rocks, but people here seemed to have no anxiety about children playing in the waves and being washed several meters back and forth between boulders. It never looks as dangerous once you get in and are part of the moving thing. The method to emerge is to find a foothold as the wave comes in and a balance point, then stand as it goes out. As the wave leaves you, all your insides sag and pull you to whichever side is weaker, and you reconsider the wisdom of leaving the water. It’s like aging 40 years in one second.

There are secret places on the earth, if known then forbidden, which hold a primeval feeling, where there is no time, which are exceptional to daily traffic. The tops of many trees. High places in rocks. Places in certain churches, though these seem a weaker imitation of where gospel occurs in nature. I used to leave the office to climb trees on corporate campuses to find such places. It turns out most of the earth is like this, and only heavily traveled paths which are not. From the main road, it seems like the world is off limits, and much of it is, but I have always been a trespasser and so has Laura. She taught me the secret distances of water. That when you swim a few meters, especially in darkness, you move miles into wilderness. That water of any temperature is like a thousand cold winds changing you in a breath and this change is always a kind of baptism. There are no security guards to turn you back from the ocean and swim buoys are not barriers but congratulatory markers of your exit. Trespassers need no warnings. To go where one is not intended to go by other people is to be on guard and properly reverential. Resentment and disappointment are impossible to one who is paying such close attention.

I became less hungry for these places when I had Eliza, because my fear on her behalf moved the line of risk and attention well within the beaten path. As it does. This effect subsides as she gains autonomy and distance from me, and agility in navigating the world herself. I find I am still drawn to high and forbidden places and I do my best to arrange and old age where I can indulge myself. Swimming, for its rehabilitative effects, seems like a likely mode for future adventures. Eliza is deathly afraid of jellyfish at the moment, and not the best swimmer, but is bolder in the water than any of her peers. Though she does not share my tastes yet, she has the identical adventurous nature, and it’s one of my greatest hopes that someday she will lead me down secret paths, invisible to the crowd, to places where I can feel the breath of of God through my clothes.