The Wind Over the Water

The bay is black at that hour, and the wind arrives before the light.

You feel it first on the wet skin of your shoulders as you walk down past the pier, and it is not a metaphor yet, it is only weather: the south-easter coming across Algoa Bay with the whole cold width of the Southern Ocean behind it, pushing the swell into short unfriendly stacks, lifting sand off the beach in long hissing ribbons that sting the backs of your calves. There are perhaps a thousand of us on the sand. Neoprene. Silicone caps. The particular silence of people who are frightened and have agreed not to say so. Somebody laughs too loudly. Somebody else is praying, or being sick, or both.

The cannon goes. And then you go in. Almost one at a time.

The first thirty seconds of cold water are an argument your body loses. The chest clamps. The breath goes shallow and high and useless. Your hands, which you had thought of until this moment as instruments, become paddles that belong to someone else. For half a minute you are not a swimmer, not an author, not a father, not a man with opinions about beauty. You are an animal in cold water, and the only question your entire being is asking is whether there will be air.

Then, usually somewhere around the first buoy, the argument ends. The breath lengthens. The stroke finds itself. The body remembers what it knows, and the mind, which has been shouting, goes quiet, and something opens.

And you notice the wind.

Not as inconvenience. Not as a factor in your projected time. You notice it the way you might notice a person entering a room: something moving that you cannot see, over water you cannot see the bottom of, in a darkness that has not yet been divided into anything. Wind over water. Breath over the deep. The oldest weather there is.

I have swum in that bay for years. I have swum in it badly and well, before races and after funerals, in water so clear you could count the sand ripples four metres down and in water like weak tea after a week of rain. And I keep returning to that thirty seconds, and to what comes after it, because I have come to believe it is telling me something about making things, and I have spent most of my adult life making things, and I have spent a fair portion of that life making them for the wrong reasons.

Something is present before anything is produced.