"Swimming is a geat mystery, like riding a bike, like reading. Suddenly, after days and weeks of trying and failing, one morning you can do it."
"Those summers were both active and contemplative, the weather always fair but never gentle. Morning and afternoon I learned the pattern of my life, of hunting and gathering and picking over flotsam in the outer world -- fishing, diving, swimming, surfing, lighting fires, rowing boats, feeling the landscape rush in from all sides -- and of retiring indoors to wonder and write and read where only the breeze could reach me, in there where my dreams were. I would never be content with only one world or the other. At the time it felt like the ideal life, that coastal summer idyll, and maybe I've lived all my years a hostage to a six-year-old's fantasy."
Later:
"Freediving in the open ocean, for all the other things it is, is mostly a form of forgetting. Surfing, swimming laps, drifting a bait from a jetty or a boat are similarly forgetful things. They are forms of desertion, retreat, hermitage, a stepping-aside from terrestrial problems to be absorbed into the long moment. The sea is immense, trackless, potent, but above all, neutral. ... Of all water occupations, freediving is the most forgetful. You turn your back to the land, to the sun, and slide down to where all sound is flattened to chirps and rumbles. The deeper you dive the heavier is the blanket that insualtes you. You willfully forget to breathe; you sidestep the impulse and your thinking thins out to the moment at hand. The poet Jogn Blight had it clearlt: 'All reason drowns: drowning in you.' It's a religious feeling. On the seabed, or gliding midwater with everything sharp in focus and my body aching with pleasant, urgent hunger, I understand the Christian mystics for moments at a time. I too feel swallowed, minuscule, ready. But like the monk the diver contemplates on borrowed time. Sooner or later you have the surface to return to."
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