 |
||||
| Sink or Swim How I Hit the Beach and the Beach Hit Back. |
||||
Rummaging around my drink in search of a straw but half-expecting to find Dr. Livingston, I looked up to discover my wife standing in front of me holding a diving mask with a snorkel and a pair of flippers. "Let's go snorkeling," she said. "No thanks," I said, content to continue basking in the sun, reading about German spies and investigating my drink. To the best of my recollection, I had never been snorkeling--at least not underwater--and wasn't even particularly comfortable saying the word. "Come on," she prodded. "You'll see the ocean in a whole different way." Actually, the way I was seeing the ocean--dry and from a distance--was okay with me. The truth is, I'm not a water person. Oh, I can handle myself in a swimming pool well enough. But, to be honest, I don't so much swim as stand. I get in the pool and assume a stance not unlike that of Yul Brynner in The King and I--hands on hips, head cocked to the side--as if to suggest to the world that I possess some sort of mastery over the water and that my lack of horizontal movement is by choice and not motivated by a fear of drowning. The ocean is a whole different story. When I assume my Yul Brynner stance in salt water, I'm usually greeted by a crashing wave which sends me tumbling out of control, transforming me from the King of Siam into the Clown Prince of Tides. But, I could tell from the look in my wife's eyes that she wasn't going to take no for an answer, so I took the mask and pulled it over my head. I then wedged my feet into the pair of rubber flippers, which made it almost impossible to walk and, as far as I was concerned, constituted a major evolutionary step backward. Looking like a penguin, I waddled across the sand and into the water. Feeling like a fish out of water even while I was in the water, I put the plastic tube in my mouth, plunged my face into the sea, and began snorkeling. Actually, I'm not sure it qualified as snorkeling, since I achieved but a single snork before my mask began filling with water. I then dipped my head completely beneath the surface, filling the tube with water, as well. No, I didn't snorkel, but I did invent a new game called "Bobbing for Air." For a brief moment I had visions of ending up in Davy Jones' locker (or worse, Mickey Dolenz' locker), but I finally made it to the surface. My wife said the problem was that I wasn't getting an airtight seal between the mask and my face. I'm not sure how that could be, since on my way out to the water several people mistook me for Jack Nicholson as The Joker. After a few more unsuccessful attempts, I abandoned the snorkeling idea altogether. I decided that if I was going to stay in the water, I'd best stick close to the shore. I wrestled off the flippers, mask, and snorkel and lobbed them onto the beach. To cope with the waves, I developed a maneuver that made me look as if I was leading a one-person conga line. (It's amazing the moves you can make underwater that if you did on dry land they would cart you away.) Although my swimming style was less like that of Mark Spitz and more like that of plankton, it did allow me to keep my contact with the ocean floor at a minimum, lest I have a close encounter of the crustacean kind. I was actually doing okay until I planted my foot right on a sharp shell. The pain was intensified by the fact that my heart was now beating the theme from Jaws, and since I was bleeding and a feeding frenzy is pretty high on my list of things that I'd rather not be a part of, I decided to head for the shore. Salt-water-logged and seashell-shocked, I crawled out of the ocean and limped back to my beach chair where I plopped down and drifted off to sleep, safe at last. Or so I thought. When I woke up several hours later, I felt a stinging sensation on my arms and shoulders, making me wonder if my #10 sunblock was doing the job. After a while, the stinging began to grow more intense, and I made a mental note to pick up a stronger sunblock. By the time the stinging segued into intense burning, I was not only contemplating a more powerful sunblock but wondering if it would be possible to put sunblock on my soul. Looking at my arms and legs, I discovered that I had turned a bright Day-Glo red. Forget sunblock altogether--I was now considering aluminum siding. I hobbled to my hotel room and stood in front of the mirror. It turned out, to add insult to injury, that my sunblock was not only too weak, but I had applied it unevenly, leaving me not so much sunburned as tie-dyed. Great. I start off my Perfect Beach Vacation a regular person and end up as a fried chicken of the sea. Illustration by Barry Willis |
||||
