The best thing about summer in Short Beach — one of the best things — is the feeling of salt on my skin.  The water was cold today — NOAA says 60.4 degrees but it feels a touch colder — and my feet numbed up a bit before I got all the way in.  For a short stay.

It’s like a hint of an exoskeleton, or gritty fairy dust on my eyelashes.  Just an afterthought of ocean clinging to me several hours after my swim.  A tangible sense of the changing season.  The smell of the world, sticking to me.

I swam a fast 75 yards fly yesterday to warm up in the cold water, then turned over on my back to float and look back at the shore.  It was good to be back in the salt water.  Short Beach was in full summer madness, overflowing with people and colors and noises.  There was no wind when I’d plunged in, and the salt tang I’ve been missing all winter blended with the smell of a carcass of a 32″ sea bass, caught that morning off the point and already fileted for Memorial Day dinner.  The red body caught me eye as I walked down onto the beach to set up the kids on surfboards & inflatable rafts.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a sea bass that big.

Once out on the water, it was like I’d never left.  Salty, silent, isolated from sand and people, with a slow roll once I got past the sheltered cove.  The water was cold — 60 degrees 1 meter down, according to a UConn buoy, somebody said — but I wore my shorty wetsuit & felt fine.

How different is it from the pool, where I’ve been spending my early mornings since January?  That’s the question I’ll be mulling for the next few weeks.

Swam out to Half-Tide Rock & then timed myself on the way in.  6:18.  Probably a bit under 500 yds.  Could have gone faster with goggles, b/c I’d have been able to see better.

The real excitement yesterday was on land, at the fire up the street.  We watched all four of Branford’s trucks barrel down past the beach, responding to a house that had caught fire due to a cigarette left burning while someone ran to the store.  Pretty exciting, & also dangerous in our neighborhood of small yards and close-together houses.  Quite a scene, with the fire engines butting up against the surfboards and fishing poles.

Summer is here!

Who was the first person to feel joy when jumping into the sea?

That’s a harder question that it might seem, since our modern swimmer’s pleasures seem to have been pretty foreign to ancient and medieval culture.  Surely on a hot day fresh water would have been welcome, but the deep sea, home of monsters and tidal surges, might not have felt so enticing.

One possiblity came to me when I was finishing up Marcus Rediker’s brutal but essential book, The Slave Ship: A Human History.  Rediker notes the pattern of slaves escaping by jumping overboard, even when the ships were out of sight of land.  “One of the most illuminating aspects,” he notes, “was the joy expressed by people once they had gotten into the water.”  Isaac Wilson, a sailor testifying in 1790, wrote about a slave who hurled himself into the sea and swam away underwater.  The ship’s surgen described the escaped swimmer making “signs which it is impossible for me to describe in words, expressive of the happiness he had in escaping from us” before drowning.

Ecstasy, freedom, and death.  The cultural history of immersion does not end there, but it needs to go there.

That’s a picture of a freediver in Dean’s Blue Hole, a 660-foot deep vertical cavern in the Bahamas.  Yesterday’s Times Sports section has a story about Vertical Blue 2011, the world championship, for which the winning dive was 121 meters (nearly 400 feet) at a time of 4:13 underwater without oxygen.  Some amazing stories of nitrogen narcosis, fear, and the limits of what the body can force itself to do.

I am thinking two thoughts about blue holes.

First, freedivers, amazing as they are, remind us how poorly human bodies manage in the ocean.  Four hundred feet is a long way down, but the average depth of the world ocean is around 12,000 feet.  The opening description of the story, in which a crowd urges a just-returned diver to “Breathe, breathe, breathe!” so that his body could recover from his minutes submerged shows what a shock these immersions are to our systems.

Second, the picture above also reminds us that, no matter how deadly the blue is, we love it — or perhaps we love these deep holes because of their  deathly  quiet and nonhuman embrace.  Are freedivers explorers of a post-sustainable future?  Do they provide images of how to live in an uncompromisingly inhospitable natural world?

Here’s a gorgeous YouTube video of former world champion Guillaume Nery doing a free dive in Blue Hole, filmed in one over-four minute breath.   Might be worth writing about someday.

The high tide was too tempting a few minutes after noon today, & I took a brisk plunge.  Hard to swim very much when the water’s that cold.  Will this be the last swim of the season?  Or will the wet suit get me a birthday swim in early Nov?

At some point I’ll make time to post about Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno & the lure of the “last cigarette.”

I think I’ll get at least one more in.

I remember this time of year — that awkward pause between the last swims of fall and the closing-in of the season.  I don’t really want to go to the pool, b/c that would be admitting that’s where I’ll be all winter, but I can’t easily get into the water.  Olivia says she’s got a swim or two left in her this year, but the tide wasn’t right last weekend.

So I’m running instead, & left home this afternoon around 2 pm under bright sunshine.  Heard a slow rippling grumble as I passed the post office.  A sharp crack at Sweet Bears, our local coffee-shop-cum-ice-cream outfit.  The sun blazed off the sound to my right & I thought I’d get my short run in before any storm came.  The wind had been off the water when I’d left home.

The rain started as I was running down Double Beach Road toward the headquarters of CT Hospice (formerly the Double Beach Club & still a great place to swim — long story).  The wind now came from the northwest, inland.  It blew hard, making a cold, sharp staccato on my shoulders and back.

Hail mixed in as I turned into the Turtle Bay condo complex, & I started to think about the physical properties of water.  All three states surrounded me: liquid rain, solid ice, and water vapor.  Shakespeare talks about a “sea of air” somewhere, Timon I think.  No need to get in the Sound to get wet today.

By the time I got home I was soaked, and the sun was shining.  What was it Mark Twain said about the weather in CT?

In Short Beach, Columbus Day is the semi-official end of the swimming season.  When it’s chilly but clear, like this weekend, it’s not all that easy to get in the water.  I ended up making the shift to wetsuits on Friday afternoon.

What did Columbus discover?  Certainly not America: he thought it was China, it had been visited many times before by Northern Europeans since the time of Erik the Red, and he had no interest in new places.  The thing he found that was new — or at least new-ish, for the part of Europe that had been formerly oriented toward the Mediterranean — was the deep sea.  “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” was what the Spanish called him.  He wasn’t really a land creature.

Today Olivia & I pulled on our 2mm Body Glove suits & walked past the fall colors to the beach.  A few teenagers were diving off the Yale boathouse docks & then shrieking as they rushed to get out.  The wet suits make it a little easier to get in, though it’s still a shock.  The real payoff is that as soon as that film of water gets warmed up, you feel ready to stay.

How many more swimming days are left in 2010?

Not enough.

Got back from the rock-wall climbing birthday party after the second soccer game just as the sun was starting to go down.  A quick three-mile jog to warm up as the evening star poked her seductive head over Killam’s Point in the east.  The tide was just coming up to full, a wide, still pool of a flood.  In the last flashes of sunlight out on the Sound I could see white sails, round-bellied but still.

The water’s cooler now, & it takes me about 50 yards of fly and 50 free to get my body comfortable.  As soon as I stop my skin starts to tingle.  I turn to look back at the houses of Short Beach, every third one lit from inside.  No one else is visible on the bay.  Even the seaweed is silent, floating in stolid clumps.  I float on my back and watch the sky.

Timing is everything.