Next week: Deep water shark wrestling
A sunset in Costa Rica is an unspectacular affair: there are no long, drawn out scenes of flaming skies and a yellow globe sinking into the distant horizon (perhaps because we’re facing east). It takes about five minutes for light to become dark, like someone closed the shutters slowly. It’s dark by 6:30 or so, which means I’m ready for bed by about 9:00. The sun is coming up again about twelve hours later (imagine that!), an event that does not go unnoticed by the dogs. Kira, the older dog, bugs Colin to be let out, and as soon as she is out she starts barking almost constantly at shadows, trees, or whatever makes dogs bark. Not wanting to bother the neighbours, Colin starts calling her in, and this (when I actually hear it) is my wake up call.
If they don’t soon get some attention, the pups then start to whine. Though I usually fall in and out of sleep during this time, once everyone else is up I usually do the same, stumbling amidst puddles and turds to make my first cup of tea.
Colin or Roberto usually make breakfast, and I help by sitting at the table outside, sipping my tea and looking pretty. I try to do my share by cleaning up and washing the dishes afterward, as well as performing some of the more manly household chores that naturally baffle Colin (just kidding!). Often, by the time breakfast is finished it’s about noon. This was the case today. After breakfast, we loaded up the car and drove south along the coast to Punta Uva, to swim and get some sun in a new locale.
The sea is my friend and I love being near it and playing in it, especially here where the water is like a lukeward bath (except that the water comes above my navel and doesn’t rapidly chill). Unlike at home, hypothermic disorientation is is not occurring after twenty minutes in English Bay.
Generally, the waves are large enough to make conventional swimming inconvenient, but conventional swimming is too much exertion anyway. Here, I just stand waist- or chest-deep in the water and ride the surges. When I’m feeling more energetic, I will body surf for a while. After about an hour of that, we returned to shore to lie in the sun for a while.
The sun here is pretty hot, so tanning in it too long is like sleeping under a double broiler. Roberto and I decided to take a walk south to look at the other beaches, while Colin napped in the shade of a palm tree.
We walked along the shore, people watching. One of the great things Costa Rica has done is reserve fifty metres of the land along the high tide line all along the coasts as public property, so when you look up or down the beach you see only trees and sand, no chain resorts or (like in the United Fascist States of America) chain-link fences topped with barbed wire to keep people off of private sand.
One exception is a hotel that someone recently built to about twenty metres from shore, perhaps thinking that it would be overlooked or that a bribe would smooth things over. However, this is apparently unlikely as there is talk of either ordering it torn down or converting it into a museum or public school.
Just past the hotel is Playa Grande, a white sand beach with a long stretch of shallow water before it gets deep, unlike some of the other beaches which get deep fairly quickly. Roberto and I decided to go for a dip as it was hot and the water looked fun, as evidenced by some other people playing in the waves.
The waves turned out to be a perfect height for playing in. We were out to about waist depth and we had a great time jumping in
them, body surfing on them and letting them just wash over us. Like most friends, sometime the sea lets you down. I was about twenty feet ahead of Roberto, and there were two people just past me, to the right, when suddenly we could no longer touch bottom. I could feel myself being pulled away from shore as if in a river current. We both started swimming for shore but the force of the water was great. Roberto, a much better swimmer than I, made it to shore with considerable difficulty, but I hadn’t advanced at all, or had moved out further from shore.
I started to panic and tried swimming for shore madly. Six foot waves were crashing over my head, I was swallowing water and I was panting madly. I stopped swimming and waved to Roberto on shore so that he could see where I was, and he began looking for help. I tried to swim again but was too exhausted from my previous attempt to fight the flow and thought, “I’m going to drown out here”.
I stopped swimming, and with unexpected calmness and clarity, wondered silently to myself, “What am I going to do to get out of this?”. I then remembered reading somewhere that if one is caught in a rip tide, one should extricate oneself by swimming horizontally across it, rather than against it, until out of it, at which point swimming to shore becomes practical. Trying to decide which direction would be best to swim, I looked left and right and spotted, about fifteen metres to my left, the other two people that had been ahead of me. One was a boy of about twelve, trying unsuccessfully to stay on his boogie board. He was with someone considerably older, perhaps his brother, who had a terrified look on his face and was screaming at me to help them.
The first thing that I thought is that he must be out of his fucking mind if he thought that I was going to save them, my most complex swimming stroke being the dog paddle. However, I did my best imitation of a crawl and reached them suprisingly quickly, which confirmed for me the value of the horizontal escape plan.
As I neared them I stopped, as I suddenly had a vision two beefy Costa Ricans using my bony corpse as an emergency flotation device – I saw the Poseidon Adventure and am well aware of desperate human survival instincts. However, it became clear that the older one was not panicking for himself, as he seemed to be holding his own, but for the younger one. He pointed to the boy and gestured for help stabilising the boy. I swam around to the boys’ far side and helped balance him on the board.
Soon after, either the rip tied dissipated, or we had succeeded in exiting it’s path. After a short time, we were able to touch bottom again, and made our way slowly to shore, where we rested until recovered.
I have since read that rip tides are often caused by storms far out to see that create competing waves. When two such waves meet at opposing angles close to shore, an underwater sandbar is created, trapping water. Eventually, a section of the sandbar collapses and the trapped water rushes out to sea again. Rip tides therefore do not last very long, as once the surplus water has left, everything is back to normal.
While it was startling at the time, the psychological trauma also dissipated quickly, and rather than be afraid to go swimming again, I feel grateful to have had this opportunity to experience a rip tide. When it was an unknown element, I feared the prospect of experiencing one. Now, I feel less worried and more confident that if it ever happens again, I will know how to react without having to experience similar panic (or visions of a drunken Shelley Winters).
