Grayson (7 page)

So I quickly told Steve I’d be fine and asked him to let his friends on the fishing boats know that we were out there. They’d let other boaters in the area know. He still didn’t entirely like the idea. He was an adult and pretty conservative, and he warned me that the closest fishing boats would be a quarter mile away.

“I’ll be careful. Besides, I’ll be swimming with the gray’s son. I’ll be swimming with Grayson,” I said, and smiled with more confidence than I really felt.

Steve smiled. “Grayson, that fits. He’s grace in the water and he’s the gray’s son.”

But then Steve’s tone grew suddenly serious, and he advised me: “Lift your head up often and look all the way around you. If a boat approaches, you move out of the way. Don’t count on them seeing you.”

I swam with Grayson one hundred yards off the pier, two hundred yards, three hundred, four hundred, and on a breath, I looked back over my right shoulder. The pier and the people on it were becoming smaller and smaller. We continued swimming near each other. Grayson led the way. He swam directly toward the oil rig and I followed in his wake. A couple of times he slowed down and stopped dead in the
water. He seemed restless and sort of agitated. He probably hadn’t eaten for at least a few hours. His energy level had to be dropping.

“Come on, Grayson. Let’s swim out there and see if we can find your mother,” I said, encouraging him, knowing he couldn’t understand a single word, but hoping he would somehow understand the thought.

Words are sometimes too small, too confining, to convey the depth of thought and strength of emotions. How does a whale communicate love, hope, fear, or joy?

He looked so small in the enormous sea and I wanted to protect him somehow.

Maybe you communicate with your heart. That is what connects you to every living thing on earth. Use your heart. It is love that surpasses all borders and barriers. It is as constant and endless as the sea. Speak to him with your heart and he will hear you. No matter how close or far away she is, she loves him. And from that he will have strength. He will.

Let him know that he is also in your heart.

The sky was changing: Thin clouds were masking the sun and the water was becoming a dull opaque
blue. The water temperature was dropping too. It must have been about fifty-three degrees.

There were a few fishing boats on the horizon. But as I followed Grayson’s “footprints” in the water—the indentations he made with his fluke in the ocean’s surface as he swam—I grew increasingly uncomfortable.

Unconsciously, I turned and looked at my feet. The tiny footprints they made when I kicked dissolved instantly. I shuddered.

There weren’t any breakwaters or jetties to buffer the strength of the current. Using the oil rig as a reference point, I could tell that we were drifting to the north at about a knot, a little faster than one mile, per hour. The oil rig that had been directly in front of us was sliding to our left. And the ocean’s surface was cracking with a northwest breeze. The sea was rising into waves a foot high.

Grayson was swimming hard against the resistance of the waves. He was breathing more rapidly, his
poof
ing sounds were more frequent. He seemed to be very stressed.

And he was changing course abruptly. He was swimming north toward the oil islands off Long Beach, and
then he turned in a half circle, and swam south toward Surfside Beach. It seemed as if he couldn’t decide what to do. Then he came to a complete halt.

He hung on the water’s surface. His eyes opened wider than before.

“What is it, Grayson?”

He turned toward me, and he tilted his head and looked at me with one eye.

He seemed to be waiting for me to follow him.

I really didn’t like being so far from shore. But I swam toward Grayson anyway, with my head up.

There was something in the distance, floating on the water’s surface.

We moved closer. It looked like white lily pads were floating on the water.

We swam nearer and the lily pads grew larger. They were ovals three to four feet in diameter with scallop-shaped tails. The ovals were different colors—gray, olive, black—and they fluttered.

They were giant fish, giant ocean sunfish called Mola mola, basking on the ocean’s surface, absorbing the sun’s warmth through their skin. They shimmered silver, and as the light shifted they became luminous
and ivory like the moon on a clear black night. They had small dark eyes and light pink oval mouths attached to a snout. They were the heaviest bony fish in the world, weighing up to five thousand pounds.

One sunfish was swimming. He was waving his top fin and bottom fin, using his pectoral fins as stabilizers and his tail fin as a rudder. And he was spitting water out of his mouth to help steer.

He dove deeper and deeper and deeper into a cold current to cool off, and when he resurfaced, he rolled over to let the sun warm the other side of his body.

Grayson maneuvered between the shimmering sunfish; they seemed oblivious to our intrusion. And we continued heading toward the oil rig. I felt very exposed; my legs were dangling like worms in the water.

Four hundred yards from the oil rig’s base, we entered a sea garden. It was filled with long ribbons of golden brown kelp, which had short ruffles and a mermaid’s necklace of pearl-shaped air bladders attached to the main stem that enabled the kelp to float and dance on the water, signaling the speed and direction of the water currents.

On the seaward side of the oil rig, a large cluster of kelp smoothed the waves and we were able to swim to within two hundred yards of the rig.

The oil rig rose above our heads like a mini–Eiffel Tower with metal cranes and drilling equipment that towered twenty feet or more above our heads. These were connected to a large metal platform and the platform was attached to multiple metal stilts that had been drilled deep into the ocean floor.

The oil rig was an amazing and yet ominous structure. As the rig pumped oil out of the ocean floor, I could feel its energy emanating through the water. It felt very different from the natural energy of radiant sunshine or the quiet energy of the earth.

It felt like being in New York City. Being among the city’s skyscrapers was like standing between power transformers with the energy flowing all around all at once. All of this energy bounced off the surfaces of the buildings and was amplified by the wind blowing through the open spaces. The energy from the oil rig was like that, but it was more diffuse, a softer force that was transmitted in waves through the water.

The energy from the oil rig was a constant hum—a sort of
ooommm
. And there were loud metallic noises, creaking, groaning, clanging, and hammering.

Men who worked on the oil rigs had told me that they noticed the energy attracted fish into the area and lulled them to a state of inactivity. There was a deep-water-fish metropolis around the oil island.

As I breaststroked closer to it, I noticed schools of sunfish clustered together near the base of the rig, floating peacefully on the water’s surface, their bodies conforming to the shape of the waves rolling under them.

Grayson swam past the sunfish, and he didn’t even notice the green sea turtles paddling by, like a green turtle swim team. They all pushed off near the oil rig and swam together as if they were setting off on a series of sprints.

Slowly, a school of sea bass swam past, moving like a shimmering curtain of silver blue.

Grayson took a big breath and dove five feet down, past a cluster of clear moon jellies. They were beautifully transparent except for white circles on top of
their domes. Grayson swam by purple jellyfish that were larger, like large Jell-O salad molds, and they were beautiful, graceful swimmers. They moved by contracting and expanding their domes, like opening and closing umbrellas.

Their long, flowing tentacles stretched up to six feet beneath them. I hoped they would stay below me. The moon jellyfish didn’t sting, but the purple ones did. The purple ones had tentacles that had tiny little barbs attached to them. The barbs were trigger-loaded with stinging cells called nematocysts. When a swimmer brushed up against a tentacle, the barbs snapped off or stuck to the swimmer and that movement fired the stinging cells. I had been stung before and it hurt. The intensity of the sting depended on the type of jellyfish. The sting of the Pacific jellyfish wasn’t as bad as a bee sting, but a swimmer could be stung multiple times at the same time. It felt like running through a field of nettles naked.

Grayson knew to avoid the tentacles. Diving into the deep water he wove his way down through the sea of purple jellyfish and out of reach of their tentacles.

Swimming on the surface, a pair of bright orange garibaldi greeted me. Garibaldi were fish that resembled giant goldfish. Usually they inhabited the shallow coastal waters along rocky shores with lush kelp beds, where they could hide from predators behind the veils of kelp. Seeing them swimming so far offshore was very uncommon. But they were a protected species and there were many garibaldi living off the shores of Laguna Beach, and also along the shores of Catalina Island. They were attracted to bright orange or tangerine colors, and whenever I wore a tangerine swimming cap, they swam around my head. It wasn’t until a friend pointed it out to me that I noticed the garibaldi had sharp front teeth, which they used to crack open the soft shells of spiny sea urchins. Then they popped the round orange roe balls out of the shell and ate them whole.

This pair of bright orange garibaldi seemed to be mates. They swam side by side very close to each other through the long, slowly waving tendrils of brown kelp. And they swam around my head, checking to see if I was a garibaldi invading their territory. They
seemed satisfied that I wasn’t. They swam to within a few inches of the oil rig. I watched them become two orange dots in the dark blue sea.

Grayson continued his dive, deeper and deeper into the enormous sea, and I watched him. Why are you going so far down? I felt myself getting a little nervous. How long can you hold your breath?

Be careful, Grayson. Be really careful.

Grayson’s fluke became a tiny waving gray Y in the light blue depths and then the Y disappeared into the darkness. He dove so far down, one hundred or two hundred feet, that I wondered how he could stand the pressure changes in his ears and head. How could he equalize that pressure so quickly? How come his ears didn’t rupture? Would he have enough air to return to the surface?

I knew Grayson was born to swim and dive to great depths but I still held my breath with him. Unconsciously I always did this when I was teaching people how to swim. I never wanted them to run out of air on the bottom of the pool and have a bad experience. I held them by one arm and pushed them back up if I thought they were going to run out of air. I took
another breath and ran out of air again. I took another breath and repeated taking breaths twenty more times. He was still gone. I looked at my watch. He had been underwater for at least five minutes.

Was he okay? Would he return? Where was he?

The sun shifted suddenly, highlighting the water below so that it was possible to see down into the deep.

I said to myself, This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, swimming so far out without a boat. Then I thought, No, I’ve done dumber things, like the time I was five years old and decided to climb down into a rock quarry, alone, so I could see the shiny red cranberries floating in a natural pool way down at the bottom of the bog. It was dumb when I tripped on a rock, slid down a cliff, and nearly fell into the quarry, but luckily I caught a tree branch and hung on until my mother found me. Yep. That was dumb. It was almost as dumb as the time my brother convinced me to jump out of the Hatches’ barn window to test if the snow was soft or hard before he and his friends followed. It was hard. And it really hurt. It was dumb, but I did something dumber than that when I was seven and I kissed Craig McQuade. That was really dumb.
Yep, but that wasn’t the dumbest thing you’ve done: Remember when you and Sue and Kari and Kittridge had a sleepover and you toilet-papered John Mill’s house? And he caught you? Remember the time you went ice-skating on a pond after you’d been told the ice was too thin, and it was? Remember the time you said the S-word and your grandmother heard you? Hmm, remember the day you forgot you were going to have a math quiz? Remember the time you stayed out too late and got lost in the woods? Remember last month?

Okay, okay, I’d done a lot of really dumb things, but this definitely had to be
one
of the dumbest.

Making a few arm strokes, I took a breath and looked down. It was dumb to look into an abyss. I have no idea why I kept doing it. I guess I just wanted to see more. I wanted to understand what I didn’t already. I was just curious. I couldn’t help myself.

The water was navy blue and full of wavering and shifting shadows. I moved a little deeper into the shadow of the oil rig. Taking another breath, I looked down again. I couldn’t see Grayson.

The sea seemed empty without him.

Suddenly I felt more alone than ever before. I was scared for me and for him.

Could he dive to five hundred feet like an adult whale? How long would that take? How long could he hold his breath? Where could he have gone? Would he return?

I wondered: How long do you wait? How long do you wait for anyone?

I hung on the upper inches of the water and wondered.

Should I go?

No, he has come to me for help. I have to find him.

I pulled myself underwater with wide breaststroke pulls. I dove deeper and deeper into the dark nothingness.

My head throbbed with the pressure. The dark blue world whirled around me. The emptiness tightened around me like a boa constrictor. I waited. I held my breath until I was nearly out of air then raced for the surface.

From the tension of the dark empty depths an idea began to emerge.

It was that space between not knowing and knowing,
that tension between losing and finding, that blank page between silence and song, that emptiness that creates the need to create, to try, to imagine, to solve.