I have joked often with myself about the way that my writing is over-saturated with metaphors about the way water moves us through our lives. The way we coast currents, splash through puddles, walk through the rain, ride the waves, and try to avoid drowning
My name is Jaws, and I have never considered myself to be a strong swimmer.
I have always been surrounded by water, even during my time in landlocked states. I grew up swimming in icy reservoirs, drinking hose water, and jumping on sprinkler-soaked trampolines. I have spent summers sitting by lakes, floating down rivers, and chasing waterfalls at the end of long hikes. And still, my friends and I joke that I do not know how to swim.
I love water deeply, with a stoic reverence for the ways in which it is infinitely stronger than me. I have always been afraid of big waves and dark corners of the river, and I believe justifiably so. But still, I am drawn to beaches and the rocky side of rivers, wading on the days when I do not have the courage to swim.
And oh, how I love to write my relationship with water into metaphors in my life. Similes about strength, sadness, patience, and persistence. The saltwater of a tear. The freshwater of a spring downpour that pulls the flowers out of the soil. The forces that carved the Grand Canyon and dripped the stalagmites into existence. The same water that constitutes a sopping 80% of our fragile human bodies.
I have a distinct memory from my childhood of believing for a terrifyingly long moment that I was going to drown. My whole life I have been plucky, stubborn, enthusiastic, and sometimes foolish as a result. At age six, with little thought put into it, I tried to follow my older brother in a swim to cross the Chetco River. As an adult I can’t remember how wide the river truly is, but in my memory it stretched out infinitely, farther and farther as I struggled more and more to swim.
I remember so vividly the way it felt to have cold water growing higher around me as I sank deeper into a current stronger than I anticipated. I didn’t make it across that day, I turned around. But I came back again another day, eyeing the water with more scrutiny, evaluating the narrowest part of the river. And eventually I did make it across, hell or high water, one might say.
Since then I have gathered a moral from that story, of bravery intertwined with naivety, of accepting defeat and trying again, of commitment, of learning, of fear. I have done much swimming since then and maybe you can see where I’m going with this metaphor, but I have crossed many rivers in the years since that day. I think I have learned that not everything works out, and actually many things don’t work out, but you’ll never cross a river you shy away from dipping into. So I reflect on my life as full as rivers, streams, lakes, and oceans. Of challenges, obstacles, adventures, and the unknown. And I RELISH in the cliche.
My fondest memories from college are the days my friends and I spent lounging on the rocky edges of the rivers of Humboldt County. Six rivers run through the Redwood filled county: Trinity, Mad, Eel, Smith, Klamath, and Van Duzen. Some are sandy, warm, shallow, others rocky, roaring, dangerous. And we’d buy sunscreen and beers and strawberries to prepare for the hours we’d swim and laugh and hoot and holler until the setting sun pulled us back home.
When I left misty Humboldt County for wet and slushy Bellingham in 2021, rain turned to treacherous ice on the roads and I found out what the ABS on my car was for. A long winter melted into a blistering hot summer and my friends and I flocked to the lakes surrounding the city. We spent days on Lake Padden despite local claims that we shouldn’t swim in the water and hours exploring beaches along the 30 miles of Lake Whatcom’s shores.
I remember windy grey days spent on the beach at my grandparents condo on the Oregon coast. For most of my life I had never known a warm ocean, or one you swam in at all. So I fell in love with the ocean from the beach, admiring without needing to engage. There is a beauty in simply being able to observe something and asking no more.
The small Colorado town that defined my late childhood was threaded down the middle by a cold and fast river, dangerously high in the spring from the snow melting off the mountains. There was a spot down a trail close to my house, underneath a bridge, where I’d sit by the water when things were not good at home. And I let my fears and sadness run away downstream, feeling afterwards like my soul had been washed off, wrung out. Then I’d walk back home to hang it up to dry.
When the Colorado snow above treeline melted in early June, or late May if we were lucky, friends and I would trek long miles roundtrip to reach deep bright blue lakes just a few degrees above freezing, fed by the same snowmelt that carved the river through the middle of my hometown five thousand feet of elevation below.
One day after four miles of steep hiking, my friend and I chose to swim out to the small piece of land located in the middle of the aqua-blue pool we had arrived at, aptly named Island Lake. Taking turns, we struggled through the coldest water I have ever been in.
As I swam, I felt fear thicken in my throat as my breath quickened. I have since learned that water that cold triggers involuntary hyperventilation; sometimes our bodies tell us when we should be afraid.
And in that moment, again I was a child crossing the Chetco River. Stubborn, plucky, sometimes foolish. After we each survived our swim, we raced back down the mountain in our raincoats to escape the impending high-country storm that was sweeping in. Some days we chase the water, other days we run from it.
There is no real ending to these stories, but this essay ends with the saltwater of Golden Gardens on the far western side of the city of Seattle. The bay that I plunged into on the nights when it felt as though my bones were trying to crawl out of my skin. It closes with the heavy gloom of the seemingly unending rainy days of Seattle winter. The dampness in my heart that I struggled through obstinately as my therapist told me this city just simply might not be for me.
And I will leave you with the sentiment of the sweet joy of the light that awakens in all of us when the sun peeks out and treats us to a glowing warm spring day. My story currently swims in the waves of Lake Union, turned even saltier by the tears of gratitude I shed each time I cross over the Aurora Bridge.
I love the water. I love life’s rising and receding tides. And I love to write dripping wet, irony-soaked cliches into the stories I tell about my life. And I am grateful each day for the river crossings I have survived.
My name is Jaws, and I am learning to be a strong swimmer.
