The Drowning – Jude Oliphant.

The rip tide pulled me out to deep water. Tumbled me over beyond breathing, deep turquoise milky churned turmoil, tossing me about with powerful oceanic rhythm – up was down, down was up. I was thirteen years old. Head up in the air at last, but I forgot to gasp, too busy listening to all the happy screams of fun and summer, trying to orient myself to the beach. Too busy thinking of the trouble I would be in for going out so far. Pulled down again, I screamed out the last of my breath in the next plunge and for wonder had the presence of mind to not inhale. My head hit sand, disoriented limbs thrashing, I turned and pushed off the bottom with piston legs, the strength of fear, rocketing upward to air. Inhale! Drawn down, again. Down over and beyond a drop off, deeper than before. Dumped on the ancient rock-crush and shells made grit over a billion years especially for abrading my elbows and knees on that day. A point in geological time brought to meet the flesh of a child on a beach in Australia. Sand scooped and congregating in the crotch and bottom of my bathers, making me heavier. The water grabbing shoulder straps and pulling down the top of my bathers exposing my robust teen body, shame filled, clutching at the straps, even in my drowning I was thinking of dire-mother consequences. Body is sinful.

Fighting to the top again. A breath! Yes, a breath deep but with spray, don’t cough, do not cough. With my brain filled with oxygen, the return of knowledge, drummed into me from five years old at Surf Life Saving Nipper’s Club. I can swim. A Holy Remembrance of the Swimmer’s Way.

Swim out of this, go sideways across the rip, swim and breathe. Swim and breathe, swim and breathe. Arm over arm, past the shelf, towards the shore, catch the wave and body-surf in. Legs kicking strong, shoulders and arms square now.  Feet touch the bottom in a momentary triumphant landing. Then shaking, a brief crying-in-fright, now I’m safe. I could hear nothing but the thundering of my own heart and the rasp of my own elemental breath. The essence of life, learned.

All childish merriment and the beach cricket games going on around me receded to a mute slow-motion show. “Thank you breath.” I prayed as I dumped out my sandy bather bottoms and straightened my straps.

I walked shocked up the beach towards our family’s spot on the busy beach – toward our red and white umbrella, the brown and orange checkered wool rug and wicker picnic basket. Then, flooded with the realisation that I could have let go, I should of let go, but life is irresistible even when you want to die. And what do thirteen year olds know of death? Just a wishing to cease to be. That moment was when my father took my photograph. He didn’t see me almost drown. Throughout my childhood he was always there behind the camera, watching life through his distant lens, but never present. I survived.