THALASSOPHOBIA

Dorothy and I are headed next week to the Oregon coast where she will revel in beach-walks and the ceaseless crashing of waves, and I will mostly cower inside my sweater while pretending good cheer at every moment. 

            I am frightened by the sea. 

            There’s an ancient term for it: thalassophobia.  From the Greek thallasa, meaning sea, and phobia, meaning fear. I have a mild but definite form of it. Our AI friend helpfully tells us that the fear is irrational and disproportionate to any actual danger, but it “can trigger physical symptoms such as sweating, nausea, and shortness of breath.” I show no such extreme symptoms. My fear of the sea expresses itself as a profound discomfort pretty much every moment when I am proximate to the realm of Poseidon. A good share of it comes from sound: the ceaseless roaring of the waves. The Left Coast is particularly loud. The goddam thing never shuts up. I have often said the government ought to do something about it.

            Dorothy grew up in a middle-income Baltimore suburb and enjoys pleasant memories of family vacations on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Little beach cottage rentals with warm white sand just out the door, and old-fashioned blue crab suppers back when mere mortals could afford local shellfish, and of course the endless swimming in a friendly Atlantic bay. I share none of that, but I would enjoy the crab, shipped a safe distance inland. The swimming is especially appalling to me.

            I hate swimming.

            I am able to swim (barely) but I do it only when I have no choice. Like when our canoe might capsize on a gentle river (hasn’t happened yet, but as Dorothy says, the day is still young). In fact, my fear of vast waters may have originated in childhood – an unfortunate incident at the YMCA in Johnstown, PA, when I was just starting grade school. But here I’m getting ahead of myself, as to origins. Better to go back a generation and introduce my parents. My desert-reared, blue-collar, landlubber parents.

            Both born and raised in Utah, but far from the Great Salt Lake with its fabled buoyancy, neither of them ever learned to swim. Dad lived to 79, Mother to 95, neither could swim a stroke. And no wonder. They came from the redrock country of what Utahans refer to as Eastern Utah: Carbon and Emery Counties, average annual precipitation, 8-10 inches. There were no public pools where they grew up – towns so tiny, they had no parks. My parents came from  poor families, so no country club memberships, but that would not have mattered, for there were no country clubs. The landscape of their birthplace was indeed formed by oceans, but the oceans withdrew 70 million years ago, leaving few lakes and only tiny streams, all of them sucked dry by 20th century irrigation systems.  In a place so parched, lots of people never learned to swim; slickrock makes for a bad breaststroke. Yet my father loved to fish, especially loved to fish from a motorboat, and he and my mother (and I, all the way through high school) spent thousands of summer hours trolling on huge reservoirs in the mountain headwaters, nothing between them and certain death but a quarter-inch sheath of molded fiberglass. It wasn’t something they thought much about.

            They did want their kids to learn how to swim, though, so when I was five years old, now living in the unctuously humid East, an avid neighbor family persuaded my parents to buy me a YMCA membership with the express attachment of swimming lessons in the big chlorinated pool. This was the Johnstown “Y” I mentioned. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

            I lasted for one visit.

            A sensitive little bugger, I was horrified to learn that the policy of the Johnstown “Y” was to prohibit swimsuits in sex-segregated classes for children. The stated reason was hygiene, but I suspect a pedophile ran the swimming program. I was among the passel of naked kindergartners  who rushed wetly out of the men’s shower room into the chilly confines of the pool hall, the air inside virtually popping with a fog of chlorine coming off the water. It was back in the sink-or-swim days of tough love directed at children, so all the boys seemed to know that as soon as you reached the pool, you jumped it. I had never been in a swimming pool. But I jumped in nonetheless, as eager as every other nude recruit – into a sensation I’ll never forget. No one bothered to tell me to clamp my nose; no one said we were jumping into the deep end. A pimply teenaged swim instructor had to rescue me. It was tough, but it was not love. I didn’t set foot in another pool for the next thirteen years. 

            It was embarrassing, not being able to swim. I didn’t know anyone my age who suffered from this disability. I was the love-struck high school kid who sat on the concrete edge of the municipal pool while my girlfriend cavorted in the water with everyone we knew. I smiled lamely and shook my head every time she crawled out to coax me in. Truthfully, I was there in the first place just to look at the girls, but the embarrassment became overwhelming. And the jealousy. Every guy there but me lustily enjoyed the water. Every girl there could wriggle in the depths like a selkie. I could only sit on the rim and sulkie.

            I did, finally, learn how to swim. And hated every minute of it.

            Freshman year, BYU, 1969, I resolved to break my lifelong swimming fast. The college catalog listed a P.E. class labeled “Beginning Swimming.” I signed up, innocently expecting a cohort of insecure dry-dockers like myself, all of us finally getting past our aversion. I was the only guy in class who was actually beginning swimming; one of our classmates was a California high school state champion in the backstroke.

            The instructor was, of course, a Teaching Assistant and member of the university swim team. He told me on the first day that he had never met anyone who could not swim. I told him I was an extraterrestrial alien who did not come from a water planet. We hit it off, mostly because he had, of course, never actually taught anyone to swim, and I was his special challenge, with a sense of humor.

            The class met three afternoons a week. By the third or fourth session, my eyes were so red from chlorine burn, my English professor insisted I visit the campus clinic. My eyes, too, were sensitive little buggers. But I stuck with it to the end, learning, first, how to stay afloat, then how to doggie-paddle across the pool width-wise. I did that for a couple of weeks while my classmates swam laps, performed races, perfected various strokes employed by the varsity swim team, played water polo. I mostly had our instructor to myself, mostly because he feared I might die in the pool if he left me unattended. Over the semester, I gradually learned the basics of the crawl stroke, the side stroke, the back-crawl, and the butterfly. The very basic basics of each. My butterfly resembled the motions of a dying frog.

            Our instructor was kind to me but he did not spare me the final exam. To pass the course, one had to swim a mile. Any strokes we chose. No exceptions. No way to cheat. He sat atop the lifeguard’s tower with a clipboard and recorded every swimmer’s laps. I finished more than an hour behind the next-slowest swimmer.

            I don’t use bathtubs; I avoid hot tubs; I never swim for fun because swimming for fun is an oxymoron, like fucking for chastity. I love hot showers but despise any form of total immersion in water. My Mormon baptism at age 8 was a full-scale trauma, but that story is better left for a later time. The ocean, to me, is nothing but an infinitely large bathtub filled with infinitely cold water. No wonder the ancients were terrified of it; no wonder they placed their most wrathful god in charge of it. The ancients had much better sense than modern blind romantics, all starry-eyed and gaga over a roaring monster ready at every moment to end our lives.