The Gulf cooled a bit. Mid-August on. After a week of storms lashing the coast, rip current warnings and red flags flying up and down the beach, the water dropped by what felt like two precious degrees. For late summer, that is a gift.
I swam out past the sandbar where a few leftover waves were breaking. The water was still churned up from the week of weather but it had lost that bathwater warmth. I positioned my mask, took a breath, and went down to the sandy bottom to look around.
Something touched my back. Then he found my leg and gave it a gentle nibble.
Any touch underwater sends a jolt through your body long before your mind catches up. My first thought is always the same. Shark? Friends love reminding me that sunset swims are how shark stories begin. I surface, exhale, and look. Most of the time it turns out to be a manatee, curious and harmless. You do have to check.
Last night it was my little companion again. A common snook, unmistakable with the bold black stripe running from gill to tail. He must have worked this same stretch of beach for months now. I forget about him between swims, go days without a thought of him, and then out of the blue, literally, he is there. He brushes against my back, nudges my leg and occasionally nips at me, as if making sure I’ve returned. There is a familiarity to it now. The first few encounters unnerved me. Now I look forward to seeing him. I know better than to read intention into a fish. But something out there knows my stretch of beach.
It sounds silly. This man has been underwater too long. I cannot say for certain that he remembers me. I would like to think so. Anyhow, it has some meaning to me, more than a fish pecking at a leg has any right to carry.
The same thing happened on land. I have passed a woman sitting under a tree by the bank for weeks now, out in the heat with nowhere else to be. I never knew her name until today. I went into Staples to return a package for my wife and finally had the chance to stop and talk to her. She told me her name was Monique. She spoke fast, faster than I could follow, and most of what she said got away from me. I stood there anyway and tried to understand – the same way I try to understand a fish that has no way to tell me what it wants. I do not know yet how to help her. I would sure like to find a way.
I dove again and swam along the bottom, watching for whatever the storm had turned up. A thought caught me down there, the kind that only shows up when you are holding your breath and the world above has gone quiet. What if I woke up one day and found the life on shore had only been a dream. The deadlines. The noise. What if this, the snook circling, the sand settling after each wave, was the real one.
I do not have articulate words for what that hour in the water gives me. Something in me settles the way sand comes to rest on the bottom after it has been stirred. The restlessness I carry around on land gets laid down out there, at least for a while.
I’ll keep going back. And, I hope, that little snook will keep finding me there. And maybe next time Monique will still be under that tree, and I will know a little better how to help.
