Pandemic plunge: `For first time in days, I feel alive'
Exactly what the water temperature of Boundary Bay is on any given day in December has been, for the record, so variable as to be a matter of conjecture rather than a concise figure one can rely on. In a Google search for a single day, I saw it posted on three different websites as —2 C, 3 C and 9 C.
I am at a loss to explain this difference. I know little about taking the ocean's temperature, or why anyone would think it important to do so. Is there a government bureaucracy in charge of taking the ocean's temperature? And how do the oceanic water temperature-taking bureaucrats take Boundary Bay's temperature? Do they use a giant thermometer — you know, like an oversized one as big as a clown's gag prop? And where exactly is the temperature taken? From the Bay's surface? Or, to my terrier's mortification when she visits the vet, from its bottom? It's a mystery.
What I do know, and can say with certainty, is that whenever one chooses to swim in Boundary Bay on any given day in December, which I have taken to doing so of late, it is — and this is the correct, scientific terminology — f---ing cold.
I live a block from the Bay, and for reasons I suppose I will have to explain in this column, I walk from my house wearing nothing but swimming trunks, a flannel housecoat and a pair of big, garish white crocs that my children consider to be objects of hilarity.
When I first started walking to the Bay, I expected people passing me on the street to either laugh at me or ask me what in hell I was doing, or, more likely, call the police because I appeared to be either (a) a dementia patient who had wandered away from his care home or ( b) a flasher. But no one did. Quite the opposite. They would be walking their dog, say, and see me coming, and an initial double take of puzzlement would appear on their face — eyebrows raised, their mouths making a little “o” of concern — and suddenly they would spot something of such intense interest on the roadbed that they wouldn't take their eyes off it, or they would launch into an extended conversation with their dog and would pass by demonstrably not taking notice of me, as if a man walking down the street wearing nothing but a housecoat and oversized white crocs at two in the afternoon was something they ran into all the time. Their imperturbable politeness, I thought, was quintessentially Canadian.
When I reach the shore, I throw off my housecoat and stand there shivering in the cold air for a moment, straddling that pivot point between doubt and conviction, and a nano second passes when I decide the hell with it, and I step into the water, and the cold of it is crystalline and razor-sharp and stinging, a cold that goes beyond the tactile and into the realm of, oddly, joy.
It hurts, but I think, well, that's not so bad, and in seconds, I can feel my feet numbing to the bone. I begin to wade in, and the water rises cruelly past the thin skin of my shins, past the tender cup of flesh behind my knees, over my thighs, genitals and stomach — that's me, whooping with shock — and worst of all, it slips over my shoulders, which are so unexpectedly sensitive to the cold that my breath bursts out of my lungs.
And then another pivot point is reached and another nanosecond passes, and I resolve to dive forward into the waves, and when I do, something like an explosion happens underwater — the water burbling past my ears, the sudden consciousness I have of the cold on my eye sockets, the tip of my nose and the planes of my cheeks, and then there is that moment of electric-like shock flashing through my brain that erases all thought.
It's a bliss of sorts, a pure feeling of physicality, a bodily outof-body experience. And when I come out of the water and wade back to the shore, I have a smile on my face because for the first time in days I feel alive.
I suppose that is why I have taken to swimming in the ocean in the winter. The predominant feeling of 2020 for me hasn't been fear of infection so much as ennui. Time has come unmoored. The borders that once marked daily life have blurred to the point that I look at my watch not to see what hour it is but what day it is. I suppose I could devote my time to some edifying pastime: rereading War and Peace or learning French to the point of fluency or resuming my piano lessons, all of which I have been meaning to do except for the fact that, you know, screw it.
But in light of the pandemic, swimming in the ocean in December seemed appropriately — what's a good word? — unstable? Masochistic? Crazy? Coming out of the water, however, I feel none of that. I feel happy, renewed, baptized to a new start however momentary, and, for the first time after sleepwalking through the muck of this terrible year, cleansed.