Day 29

Create a question we haven’t asked and then provide the answer. (Something to that effect anyway. Dartmouth used this a few years ago. I had a student who posed the following question and wrote a seven-page response: “Write about a time when life threw you a curve and how you handled it.”)

Tell us about a time you had a near-death experience.

When I was a little girl, my mother would always remind me of the dangers of the ocean. I listened, heeding her advice but secretly rolling my eyes. I knew not to swim if there was a sign warning of currents; I knew that one had to be careful of riptides. But, I had never experienced the real danger of the ocean; I had always swum in calm waters, I had never disobeyed warning signs.

Until the summer of 2010. I was traveling in South America, and I was on the coast, at a small beach where I wanted to go snorkeling. I knew that the waters near there were dangerous. At a larger beach nearby, swimming was prohibited because of the currents, currents that had swept many people to their deaths. But I wasn’t at that beach; I was at a smaller one, one that I reached through a little bushwhacked path in the trees.

So I put on my snorkeling gear and set out in the water to snorkel with my friend. We kept swimming and swimming to the right of the coast, because the ocean’s bottom was sandy, and we wanted to find coral. My friend, not the best swimmer, suddenly alerted me that her mask had broken. “Okay,” I said. “We can turn back.” But, trying to swim back to shore, I felt like I was pushing up against a brick wall. Suddenly I realized how strong the current was, and it had pushed us far to the right, out of sight of the beach. We couldn’t swim back. I stayed calm, taking a deep breath. I just figured we would make it, somehow. Helping my friend in the water as we swam and swam, we made our way with the current, because there was no way to go back, and no way to go climb to shore on the rocky boulders protruding from the coast where the waves crashed menacingly. I was so scared. I remembered reading the warning sign on the other beach; the sign that explained over 200 people had drowned. We were all alone. So we kept swimming, for what seemed like forever, until finally we saw a point that could perhaps have a beach around it. When we past the point, I saw the shining sand and smiled. My friend was exhausted, and I helped her as she floated on her back in the water. We floated into shore, the waves pulling us onto the sand. I was exhausted.

We were so close to becoming a statistic, a cautionary tale that reminds one to pay attention before diving into the aquamarine, treacherous waters.

And then I realized how powerful the ocean really could be.