A Late Love Affair with the Ocean

Every summer, busloads of chattering children drive from Australian primary schools to local pools, where swimming teachers hand them kickboards and blow whistles as they glide up and down the lanes.

I was a woeful swimmer when I was young.  My thin limbs were good for raising my hand to answer a maths problem but they flailed helplessly in an unfamiliar aquatic environment.  I watched in awe from the shallow end as other children learned lifesaver skills by leaping, fully clothed, into the dark abyss of the diving pool to lift dummies out.  I practiced frog kicking and sculling with grim determination, desperate to get out of the water and back to the Young Adults Fiction nook in the library. 

My swimming lessons seemed redundant because our family hardly did outdoor activities.  When my mother began wearing a long-sleeved shirt back to front to protect her arms from the sun while she was driving, it was clear that she was unlikely to take her children to the seaside to roast like Peking ducks and dangle as shark bait in the water.  Although we lived 30 minutes from one of the most iconic stretches of coastline in the country, it was much later in life that I fell for the charms of the ocean.

The watershed moment happened in Rio de Janeiro when I stayed at a backpackers’ hostel that was block away from the beach.  Every day, I knotted my bikini and sauntered with other backpackers down to the shore, where we alternated between frolicking in the frothy waves and lying quietly on the sand with our arms thrown over our eyes.  I felt clean after ducking underwater, a welcome relief after months of sleeping between sheets I avoided looking at and showering in dank bathrooms where mould blossomed on shower curtains and drains were clogged with hairs from around the world.  In the coolness of the umbrella, with a t-shirt covering my face, the whooshing of the tide soothed me into a stillness I had never felt before.

Duly besotted, I returned home with a new appreciation of the beach.  I now spend summer afternoons at Cottesloe, supine on a towel with a novel in my hand. The cockatoos babble in the pines and seagulls strut around beachgoers dipping chips in aioli. The water, clear and luminous, creeps up and down the stark white sand where toddlers wave plastic shovels and gaggles of teenage girls in string bikinis pose for Facebook profile pictures with their iPhones. 

When the sun begins to make me squirm and sweat, I tiptoe down the grassy hill towards the shore.  The shock and sting of the cool water make me buzz with pleasure.  My hair glistens and is heavy with salty water as I smile beatifically at the other heads bobbing along the surface around me.  When I turn to look away from the shore, gazing at the vastness of the ocean is like popping a Valium as the horizon engulfs my anxieties and the breeze clears the clutter from my mind.