Chapter 3: The Invisible Enemy

Nothing will devastate you more than a colorful story.  

On my first day at the swim club at age 7, old coach Galina left an indelible mark on my vivid imagination:  look you kids, she said, don’t even think about spitting chewing gum into the water, I don’t want my pool teeming with these!! She took out a folded napkin and produced “the creature”, a flattened chewing gum hosting an assembly of human hair, thick and wiry, the size of a sea urchin.  Unfortunately, I was standing next to her and from my 7 year old height got an eyeful of every nauseating detail of that exhibit.  I can still remember the feeling of rising panic and abject horror.

Things live on the bottom I learned.  And not good things.

A few years later, I discovered Moby Dick in the home library.  My impressionable pre-teen brain was hit hard by the imagery of the unknowable, undefeatable, unkillable gigantic whale roaming somewhere in the pitch dark of the ocean.  By Chapter 59, as I was already in the firm embrace of terror, they introduced a giant squid.  The squid, I found out, is a common food of sperm whales. We know because the whales would sometimes vomit up the undigested squid tentacles.  

My fear of Things That Leave On The Bottom grew new layers.

Magadan sits right on the seaside.  Anywhere you go in town, you smell the sea.  A seagull could fly from the weathered lighthouse to my window in under 10 minutes.  And you could always hear the seagulls, who established a noisy colony on the rooftop of our apartment building.  When Moby Dick came into my life, the seagulls turned from the white noise I never used to register to an omen of things beyond human control: giant cold blooded beasts roaming, waiting, stalking their prey just a stone throw from where my bed stood.  For a long while I would struggle to fall asleep at night, staring at the window for hours in the dark, imagining myself drowning into the cold darkness without beginning or end, and a pair of gigantic eyes without a body appearing well beneath, slowly inching up toward me.  

And then came the mortal blow from the West.  Stephen Spielberg created “Jaws” a little before I was born, but thankfully the Iron Curtain kept that monstrosity off my radar for a long while.  I was well into my late teens when the pirated VHS tapes started seeping into the country in the 1990s.  My phobia was already very well developed by the time Jaws came out of the left field, but apparently it still had room to grow.  Or blow up, like a toxic pufferfish.  I started researching everything I could on the human history of shark encounters.  It became clear that even a good swimmer stood no chance of escaping that aquatic hell hound.  (Did you know shark embryos sometimes eat their siblings in utero?  Google shark oophagy.  Thanks, science…)

By age 12 after 5 years of swim club I had decent technique and could hold my own on water.  But my brain was now running its own cineplex of never ending nightmares, with their own prequels, sequels, and cross-overs.  Sometimes it would be about me drowning in the ocean.  More often, it would be the same recurring dream about being in that swimming pool, all lights off, alone in the dark water, something giant moving slowly beneath, something ominous that promised me no chance of survival.  

For decades after,  well into adulthood I would wake up right in the middle of that feeling, heart racing, suffocating from dread, until I would remember the swim club is over, I don’t even live there anymore, and the ocean belongs to us, the pirates.

(to be continued)

Days to race:  10

#dardadiary