I learned from a cheap book I read once on dream decoding, back when we read books, that if you dream of swimming or of the sea that what you are really dreaming about is your subconscious. This was a paperback-trash sort of book that you buy at an airport newsstand along with a bag of Peanut M&Ms, but this truth did seem self-evident: There is some primordial connection between water and swimming and our deepest emotions. The water is the repository, the Deep.
This water-psyche or water-memory connection, in addition to seeming obvious to me, also seems not just an association we acquire through social conditioning (as people raised in Australia associate the taste of Vegemite with happiness) but to be atavistic and inborn (like a fear of snakes). It must date back hundreds of millions of years to when animal life wriggled its way out of the sea and began to crawl and wonder. Or at least a million or two, to the far dawn in East Africa when early humans gathered around the drinking place.
Water-psyche explains why, as a teenager, I more than once dreamt that my father, who died when I was 13, had bobbed up to the surface of Gardiner’s Bay as I was swimming to shore from a boat. In these dreams he bobbed up from the Deep with his arms at his side, looking skyward with his eyes but not lifting his face to the sun. “I thought you were dead?” I remarked, but he didn’t answer.
These thoughts — a bit morbid for a sparkling Thursday morning in pumpkin-spice season when the sky is scrubbed clean of clouds, and for that I apologize — came to mind on Sunday when I was standing up to my thighs in the saltwater at the bay beach at Camp St. Regis, all alone, preparing for one of summer’s last swims. I like Camp St. Regis, which you may know as Mile Hill Road beach, because there is hardly anyone else there.
My eyesight is poor and when I take off my glasses to get in the water, the blurriness adds to the dream quality of bay beach swimming. On Sunday I stood in the shallows with my red rubber Birkenstock sandals still on my feet, because the last time I swam there, on Friday, a crab pinched my toe, making it bleed. There’s an unusual amount of seaweed in the water at Mile Hile — rockweed or wrack, the kind with the little bobbles you can pop, and codium, also known as dead man’s fingers. Looking down into the water without your eyeglasses on, the dead man’s fingers takes on a mesmerizing effect, pulsing in the calm water like a psychedelic animation. It looks fuzzier and more alien; if you grab it and lift it out of the water it becomes just seaweed again.
Another woman did come down to the water while I was standing there thinking about kaleidoscopes but she practiced excellent beach decorum and walked farther away from the parking lot and from me toward the old rock pier to strip down to her bathing suit. She was wearing a swim cap and meant business. I hastened to dive in before her. The dance of the middle-aged-lady swimmers.
The other swimmer dived in and performed a few butterfly strokes. Showoff.
What I like to do when I am alone at the beach is swim up and down for a few minutes parallel to the shore pretending I’m getting exercise, intermittently rolling over on my back like a seal to look at the sky and to admire my pedicure. On Sunday, I had to hold my red rubber Birkenstocks in my hands like paddles, because they kept drifting off my feet.
The competitive swimmer with the bathing cap got out, toweled off, and left.
Looking back at the shore, I thought a couple who came strolling down with their dog on a leash looked familiar. If you have bad eyesight you may be familiar with this phenomenon: Your imagination supplies identities at a distance to people you cannot quite make out through the myopia. The couple both wore jeans and popped collars and looked like they had money. The man had curly hair and looked like Ira Kornbluth, my mother’s attorney, who died in late 2017. He looked like my late English teacher, Mr. McFarland (for whom I wrote my first haiku, about how the reflection of an evening sun on the water of the bay was like a scattering of gold coins). This was not unpleasant, however.
Another attraction of Camp St. Regis, in addition to the fact that a middle-aged swimmer can feel unself-conscious walking around the beach afterward as she lets the sun and wind dry her swimsuit because there is hardly anyone else there, is the treasures you find at the tideline. There used to be a gut or inlet, where there is now only a trickle, that led to an active harbor, where there is now only a hidden pond — glassy and algae-green, bottle-green — where you might see an egret, cattails, and minnows but no workboats or even canoes. My friend Nisse told me as we were swimming in August at Mile Hill that this disappeared harbor and wharf were so active and populous in the last century that there was a hamburger joint back there. It’s all quietness now, no Bill Haley and the Comets with “See You Later, Alligator” from the ghost jukebox, but you come across interesting pieces of brick stamped with the name of the brickmaker (“Mack”), or a piece of curiously serrated pottery that looks like it was part of a cog-and-wheel machine.
Also, there are good shells. This summer for some reason I have been drawn to the little jingle shells you find at the tideline. You know, anomia simplex, the pale-yellow or lingerie-peach shells that are translucent if you hold them up to the sun? When I was a little girl, someone, probably my father, told me these were “mermaid’s toenails” but — I shouldn’t say this, because it’s gross — I associated them not with mermaids but with my Uncle Howard, who lived down the beach from us at Promised Land and had some sort of fungus that made his toenails yellow, and you could examine, from your short perspective as a 5-year-old, his yellow toenails because he wore Greek fisherman’s sandals, in the Picasso fashion, in fine weather. (That is a grotesque image that doesn’t belong in this week’s dream reverie. Or maybe it does.)
Anyway, this summer I have found a lot of unusual silver-colored jingle shells down on the shore at Camp St. Regis. Really very, very silver, a color I’d never noticed elsewhere or before with jingle shells, and I certainly have a long personal history with jingle shells, having been raised — like the primordial East African ancestor — at the mouth of another brackish estuary where bivalves grow.
I don’t quite know what I’m collecting these silver jingle shells for, I admit to the friends I’ve dragged down for a swim when they ask me why I want only the silver ones.
Is it not self-evident that these metallic-silver shells have more intrinsic worth than the common peachy-mermaid ones?
I say, “I could make a sequined sweater-vest with these silver jingle shells.”
I say, “I could make a silver-sequined minidress.”
They are as silver as the silver paillettes of Paco Rabanne’s chain-mail minidress, 1967.