Lat Thursday afternoon, Olivia poked her head into my office while I was hard at work writing an article on “Popular Fiction” for the Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia.  “Daddy,” she said, “the waves are huge!  Will you take me swimming?”

The good thing about popular fiction is that it’s always there — that’s what popular means, after all — so it seemed like a pretty good idea.  It had been blowing hard for a day or so, with another day of high winds and rain to come.  The tide was high, and Short Beach was, for a change, a roaring shore.

Olivia suited up and put on a life jacket, & we even recruited Alinor to join us.  The water isn’t cold yet, but it was pretty rough: when the swell smacks into the sea-wall, it creates a standing wave that is (as high school physics tells us) twice as high as the first wave coming in.

The rare waves brought everybody out — our neighbor Joe Piscatelli the surfer was in the middle of the bay on his board, trying (with little success, alas) to ride the swell.  Dave & Gay Peterson, our most indefatigable swimmers, headed straight out along the sheltered western shore of the bay.  Plus a second surfer I didn’t know and a pair of Short Beach matrons were just getting in when we finally left.

Olivia likes to float in the surf & look out as each new wave floats her up and over.  We swam out pretty far, maybe 50 yards or so, so that we could float in the bigger waves.  We could feel the power of the destructive element, but it also buoyed us up.

Olivia was the first in the family to make the leap to fall swimwear.  Any weekend with three salt-water swims — Fri, Sat, & Sun — is a good weekend.

Especially today, you can feel the change of seasons on your skin.

Alinor told me about a 67-year old man who was found dead yesterday  in Long Island Sound about a mile along the shoreline from where we swim.  He lived on Clam Island, one of the low, bare bits of rock on which people have been perching houses since the late 19c.

He was fully dressed, so it doesn’t seem to have been a case of swimming gone wrong, though it’s not clear how or why he got into the water.   What is clear is that however he got in — falling, tripping, a stroke — he wasn’t able to support himself in what Conrad calls “the destructive element.”

I went on my afternoon swim anyway — it won’t be gorgeous September swimming weather much longer — but not as far as I usually go.  The wind blew hard out of the southwest, and the waves were choppy.

Listening to Lord Jim on audio CD on my way home from Baltimore last night, I noticed a passage about swimming that’s worth making a note of for the thalassologically inclined.  The speaker is Marlow’s friend Stein, a German butterfly-collector & Indonesian traveler whose past includes marriage into a family of local nobility on Celebes (Sulawesi), the deaths of his best friend, wife, and daughter, and then a second life as an wandering ent0mologist.   It’s Stein who places Jim in Patusan.

The excerpt comes from the end of  Chapter 20.

Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is.  A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.  If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns — nicht wah? …No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.  So if you ask me — how to be?

Again, a little bit later

And yet it is true — it is true.  In the destructive element immerse.

The chapter ends with a turn away from this (German, idealist, philosophical) fantasy

Sleep well.  And to-morrow we must do something practical — practical…

Stein, however, doesn’t head toward bed at this point, but instead returns “back to his butterflies,” his own obsession.

On my way down to the Maritime Heritage Conference in Baltimore this week, I stopped by my old Atlantic haunts in Bay Head, NJ.  My parents bought a house across the street from the beach there around 1980, & that short stretch of beach, with the pilings you see in the picture, were my home waters through high school, college, grad school, & beyond, until they sold the house about five years ago to move to FL.

It’s probably over-sentimental to think I was swimming with ghosts, but there’s a lot of personal history ground into that sand. Plus September is the best swimming month on the Atlantic seaboard.

On Wed morning, little jelly fragments were thick in the water — not stingers, but marble-sized chunks of jellyfish-body, scattered in the water and swirling about.  A couple of moon jellies, too, but mostly just bits.  You can swim through them pretty easily, pushing your way through the cloud with an extra tactile sense of the ocean as a home for living, strange, inhuman bodies.

Jellyfish are the ocean’s future, scientists tell us.  They are the species that will do best in the ocean that’s coming: oxygen-deprived, warm, depleted of fish.  It’s a gruesome thought, a violation of our long shared history of ocean aesthetics.  But swimming through the jelly-cloud early Wed morning, with a solitary older fisherman just up the beach on a cloudless day, it seemed as if swimmers & jellies could manage.  The feel of them between my fingers was foreign, slimy, a little disturbing — but also something I could get used to.

A nice half-hour today in what Mary Oliver calls the “dreamhouse / Of salt and exercise.”  The weekend of high winds has churned up the sand in the water, so that swimming is like running through a sandstorm out of Prince of Persia.  About 2′ swells today, once I got past the protected part of the beach.  Post-Labor Day open water swims are precious.

Spent last week swimming on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, about 1/3 mile south of Cave Rock & 4 miles north of State Line & its casinos.  It’s a pretty extreme place: dry & windy, with thin air (6100′) & cold clear water (60 degrees, more or less).  We got good weather for late summer —  80 by mid-afternoon, down to 50 or below in the evenings & early morning.  The old family tradition of swimming before breakfast got bent a little, by pushing breakfast to 10 am so that the sun reached the beach before our plunge.

It’s one of the world’s great swimming holes: Caribbean-blue clear water, and when you’re under in that cold blue everything falls away.  Swimming’s a bit like outer space under any circumstances, but Lake Tahoe feels more moonlike than the moon: the windy chop at the surface vanishes & all of a sudden it’s just you and the still bottom, with huge granite boulders scattered haphazardly like giants’ marbles.

It was wetsuit water, mostly, except a few times in the afternoons when it was too much bother to suit up again.

Rock hopping was the way to go, mostly, moving from one barely submerged boulder to another just poking up its froth-bearded head.  A tricky place for nonwet navigators: we brought a little El Toro, which made a few abrupt stops when the centerboard found a rock before we did.