Nearly Drowning – And What It Teaches
On the day I nearly drowned I distinctly remember the color of the sky (charcoal), the smell in the air (wood smoke), and the sound of a dog barking (mine, a shepherd-collie mix named Ranja, running up and down the shoreline). It was Halloween, 1980.
What had been a long, glorious summer had faded into late fall. I was 26, living in the heart of Iowa, running a weekly alternative newspaper which I also co-owned, giving me the freedom to have sailed or wind surfed almost every day since early May. I know what you’re thinking…sailing and windsurfing in the middle of Iowa? The Army Corps had recently dammed a couple big rivers, creating sizable reservoirs, which had become boating oases in the middle of the heartland. Four, often five times a week that summer around noon I’d call a buddy, load a cooler and head for the smaller of the two, called Big Creek. I owned a pair of 16-foot Hobie Cats, which we raced, and raced, and raced.
This final day of October though, I was on my own, hadn’t even bothered to call anyone to join me. Who would have come anyway? It was brisk, overcast, the wrong season to be on the water. But I’d had such a great summer I wasn’t ready to let it end.
Even while rigging the boat on my own, struggling to step the mast, which usually takes two, it never crossed my mind that this might be unwise. The lake was empty and so was the parking lot and the boat ramp. But that was part of the brilliance of the day. Who would go sailing on Halloween in Iowa? It was beyond the pale on anyone’s safety meter yet somehow seemed a perfect challenge for a young, fit, adventuresome twenty-something.
I wore a long, blue skanorak over a paddling top and wedged a life jacket under the webbing on the boat’s trampoline as I pushed the boat into choppy, cold water. A stiff wind banged the jib taut as soon as I turned the boat away from shore. As the boat picked up speed immediately I was quickly aware this would not be a day for racing back and forth across the two-mile wide reservoir but for a cautious sail on a gusty day.
As soon as I cleared the last protective point of land the wind exploded, the main sail boomed and the catamaran rocketed into the air, immediately up on one pontoon. Grasping the butt of the rudder extension in my right hand, I let the sheet out as far as it would go with my left and leaned back over the edge of the airborne pontoon. Within seconds a 40-mile gust blew the boat over, tossing me into the cold lake.
Though I didn’t come from an adventurous family, I had taken to the water early and had always had a canoe, a couple kayaks, some small sailboats. My father could not swim, thanks to a traumatizing youthful experience involving local thugs tossing him into a quarry. Despite that, we had always spent summers on Midwestern lakes, where I’d live on the water for weeks at a time.
I had righted tossed catamarans dozens of times in my life, often by myself. But this day I tried for 15, 20, 25 minutes, leaning back on the righting line, pulling with all my strength to turn the floating boat into the wind to help lift its water-soaked sail. No luck. I scanned the shoreline for help, but there was no one.
“Never leave your boat” is the hard and fast rule. But as I watched the shoreline grow farther away and the skies darken, a strong wind pushing my floating boat towards a remote corner of reservoir many miles walk through thick woods back to my car, I made a decision that was almost my last. I would swim to shore.
My guide was Ranja’s barking; Lassie-like, he sensed trouble and I could see him running back and forth along the shoreline. As I dove off the boat I left my life jacket secured beneath the webbing, figuring it would slow my swimming and I knew I didn’t want to be in this cold water any longer than I had to be.
I was a half-mile offshore, a long swim on a warm day. My arms and fingers turned numb and I struggled against the cold, the wind, the chop. I just kept swimming, targeting the barking onshore, urging myself over and over, “You cannot drown. Not here. Not today.”
I managed to drag myself onto the sandy beach, thankful the car keys were still in my pocket. The next day I returned with a friend and found the boat blown into a far corner of the lake. Righting it on a much calmer, sunnier day I sailed it back to the marina and de-rigged it for the season.
In the years since I have spent many hours, days, weeks, even months in small boats on much wilder seas, all over the globe, from the Aleutian Islands to Antarctica, Tasmania to Gabon. That day on Big Creek has often popped into my head, reminding me to be careful out there, wherever I am. That day, I was close enough to the worst possible scenario to understand consequences of a small mistake — or, perhaps, small, adventurous decisions compounded.
Now, hile I always take being on the water seriously, that’s not the same thing as being earnest about it; that day never dampened my joy of being on a river, a lake, in a vast ocean. A year ago I was on a sailboat in the middle of the South Pacific, midway between the Cook Islands and the Tuamoto Archipelago. We stopped near a barely exposed, mid-ocean reef. Jumping into the wild ocean, naked but for a pair of shorts – no fins, no mask, no snorkel – it was the most exposed swim I’d ever made.
As I peered down into the three-mile deep ocean I felt very, very small and vulnerable. Yet very, very much alive.
If you title an article “Almost Drowning..” you damn better be telling a story about almost drowning. Not taking a dip in some chilly water. If you were the average boating enthusiast then I would understand. But how is this the closest an aquatic adventurer has come to drowning. And how does a professional journalist write a story about almost drowning in which the climax is, “my fingers got numb, and then I got out of the water.” Granted you only wasted about 3 minutes of my life, but christ man, get over yourself. Learn to tell a better story, or self censor. I’m gonna go have the neighbor boy tell me 20 minutes story about finding a caterpillar to cleanse my brain.