An Ocean's Depth, Part 1

My uncle has a saying. “If I fall overboard,” Uncle Michael says, “I’ll either drown, learn to swim real fast, or sink to the bottom and walk to shore.”

On the face of it this might not seem like the sort of thing that would come up often enough to merit an official saying saying. It would be little more of a comment or a quip for most people. What you have to understand is that my uncle lives on the Maine coast, where Posideon spends as much time expressing his dissatisfaction with summer people and their yachts as the locals do. He’s also the sort of guy who spends his spare time working with his hands, building, fixing, and tinkering with anything that might have - or have the potential to have - more than one part nailed to each other.

I’m not much of a man’s man, preferring a good picnic or a quiet evening in to hours spent coaxing engines to life or building furniture that doesn’t come with an Allen wrench. Despite his best efforts, my middle school shop teacher was barely able to instill enough technical knowledge in me to identify which end of a screw driver will most effectively drag my phone close enough on the coffee table that I can reach it and dial a repairman without standing up.

Uncle Michael, on the other hand, is a wonder with such complex man gadgets as shop-vacs, band saws, and hip waders. While his skills can be applied from any thing from lobster boat go-carts for the local parade or the most involved haunted house this side of Knott’s Scary Farm, Maine has an abundance of boats and rich people who don’t know how they work. So when someone has a boat and needs it hit with a hammer until it behaves itself, they call my uncle, which is how he regularly finds himself mucking about on half-working boats with no life jackets. But Uncle Michael can’t swim, which is why he felt the need to arm himself with a handy saying with which to dismiss the concerns of anyone who might find the sight of him cursing at a broken engine while paddling back to shore with half an oar to be an appropriate time to remark on his ill-advised safety policy.

I never learned to swim either, but being from a land-locked town where the local pool is closed for “fecal investigation” often enough to incite extended debates in the Letters to the Editor colum, I haven’t had to defend myself often enough to bother coming up with my own saying, and would just borrow my uncle’s whenever the subject came up. That all changed after I moved to New York. Somehow this city has attracted an oddly high concentration of people who would respond to my news with the same sort of look that I give people who have never seen Saved by the Bell. It’s not so much a look of judgment or pity as a look of utter bewilderment that says, “But…you’re alive, aren’t you?” As I started getting this response more and more frequently, I started looking on my at my lack of basic survival skills as a matter of personal pride, something that separated me from the pack. I’d drop this little tidbit at even the slightest hint of nautically themed party conversation, or woo first dates with it as part of the rather extensive list of things that I’m not good at. (Needless to say, I struck out a lot.)

Despite their incomprehension, no one was especially concerned by my lack of buoyancy, probably because I didn’t usually spring the news on them in close proximity to the words “women and children first.” Even my mother was more matter-of-fact than concerned. Once on a road trip to Maine, I voiced my concern that if the suspension bridge gave out and our car fell in the ocean my teddy bear would end up at the bottom of it. She simply said “It wouldn’t matter, because you’d drown too.” Which, to her credit, shut me up pretty effectively, which is usually the goal when you’re trying to merge in heavy traffic and a single-digit passenger thinks your attention should be focused on a stuffed animal.

But my life of quietly paying tribute to the invention of the lung was interrupted when I made the mistake of telling my girlfriend that I can’t swim. In all fairness, telling her wasn’t the mistake. The first time I brought it up, she gave me the “you don’t know who Screech is” look, but the matter was quickly dropped and we got back to discussing such important bonding subjects as which types of cupcakes we both liked and how wonderful kittens are. The mistake came when I decided to remind her of this conversation just before Hurricane Irene hit New York. While in hindsight the hurricane wasn’t any more remarkable than any other slightly rainy day, there was so much talk of flooding, power outages, second-comings, and not being handled like Katrina that concerns were being raised with eyebrows.

I was a bit hesitant to agree at first. With thirty rapidly approaching, I’m probably getting dangerously close to the point where I can round up to being an old dog as far as new tricks are concerned. I already harumph at the mention of 3D televisions, dismiss tablet computers as ever being able to rival a good old fashioned laptop, and regard twitter with the same sort of derisive suspicion that my grandmother once gave to cordless telephones and polio vaccines.

But I eventually agreed to the lessons, though not out of any concern about drowning in the streets of Queens. Rather, I’ve been trying to combat my own laziness by finding something to do in the city that’s physically active but doesn’t make me the sort of person who goes to the gym. Somehow swimming felt less like a less soulless form of exercise than running on a treadmill while flirting with spandex-bimbos by telling them about my screenplay. Plus, if babies and moose can do it, how hard can it be? So I agreed to give swimming a very tentative shot.

-TC