VIII. Get Out of the Water

Outlandish: A Memoir in Animal Encounters

TW: This one might scare you. Do with that what you will.

Welcome new subscribers- I’m so happy you are here!

Welcome to Chapter Eight of my life story, as told through outlandish animal encounters ranging from coastal Massachusetts to the plains of Africa to the Alaskan tundra.

Every week I write and release a new chapter in this unfolding narrative, and I am often as surprised as you are by what comes out on the page. If you’re new here, and would like to catch up, you can find the previous chapters here. However, each one is presented as a stand-alone story, so you can also just dive right in- I trust you’ll put the pieces together on your own.

I have no business having even one of these ridiculous encounters in my cache, let alone a baker’s dozen. I know, I know. Alas, this is my life, laid bare for you.

Chapter Eight: Get Out of the Water

June 1999, Ventura, CA

When I was in high school, I met the woman who got eaten by the shark in the opening scene of Jaws. Her name was Susan Backlinie, and she went way back with the family of one of my closest friends. Somehow, six of us girls had convinced our families to let us go on a road trip to California to see Dave Matthews our senior year, and we ended up at Susan’s house for lunch in Ventura one afternoon.

I can’t recall the exact details- this was twenty-five years ago, mind you- but I do remember her telling us about what a dangerous stunt it had been. Apparently, there were ropes tied to both her ankles and ten men were underwater pulling her body in opposite directions to achieve the violent effect of the shark attack Steven Spielberg was going for. (This qualified as special effects in 1974- wow things have changed).

She told us she had landed the role because of her strong swimming skills. A casting call had gone out looking for a woman who was comfortable being nude and could swim for long periods of time in the Pacific Ocean. They had originally been looking for a stunt double, but Susan convinced them she could act as well, even though she’d never acted a day in her life.

I don’t know anyone who isn’t familiar with this particular scene, even if they’ve never sat through the whole movie. It seems to be lodged in our collective consciousness.

This movie poster probably doesn’t help matters….

I remember sitting across from her while we ate and resisting the urge to duck my head under the table to make sure her legs were still attached to her body, thinking that perhaps I would be cured of my own deeply embedded terror if I saw with my own eyes that it had all been a farce.

I had been so traumatized by the film when I watched it as a child that I checked the toilet before sitting down for years. (Marine Biologist Kendall here: no one in the history of the world has ever been bitten on the ass by a shark on the toilet. Ok, proceed.)

Seeing Susan healthy and hale and sporting all of her limbs that afternoon did not, in fact, relieve me of my trauma.

I would find that out seven years later, swimming in the Pacific Ocean at night, when the image of Susan’s legs dangling beneath the surface while a shadowed beast rose up from the depths nearly paralyzed me with fear at the worst possible moment.

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October 2006, Catalina Island, CA.

On this particular evening in October, I had no desire to take my group of fifth graders on a night snorkel.

It wasn’t because the kids were squirrely and full of nerves, that was to be expected. And it wasn’t because I was in no mood to reverse-peel myself into my soaking wet neoprene wetsuit in the chilly autumn air (never a favorite task, but I was used to it by then). It wasn’t even that the ocean was particularly cold that night, at just 53 degrees, and I was already dreading that first plunge into the water.

The problem was that the bay had absolutely no visibility because the Santa Anas had been blowing strong for two days, stirring up the under current, and we were most likely only going see suspended sediment on this outing.

I was going to have to work extra hard to hype the kids up, to create a narrative that made them feel as though just the act of getting in the ocean at night catapulted them into a category of humans that earned them bragging rights for the rest of their lives, regardless of whether or not they saw a single fish. (Which is absolutely true, by the way).

I would do my job. I would get them all suited up in their wetsuits- pants, vests, jackets, hoods and booties. I would press masks onto their little faces and tell them to inhale through their noses, making sure it had good suction. I would remind them not to walk around the deck with their fins on, or they would absolutely fall on their faces. I would say it at least ten times, and still that one kid would fall on his face. I would sit them in a circle, and I would give them a pep talk. I would praise them for choosing this activity over all the other nighttime electives. I would call them hardcore because it was not appropriate to call children badass. They would ask about sharks, and I would remind them of the sharks in the touch tank that they had befriended earlier during the Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish) lab- our resident leopard, swell and horn sharks- and how none of those little friends were a threat to them.

I would pair them off in five groups of two and give their duo a cool sounding name like Alpha or Bravo or Delta. I would emphasize the importance of always staying with one’s buddy, and then I would hand each pair a flashlight and two bright red glowsticks to attach to their snorkels with rubber bands. One buddy would secure the flashlight strap around their wrist, and the other would hold and direct the light -a surefire way to keep them together, as no one wanted to be alone in the dark for a single second out there.

They would follow me down to the water’s edge like ducklings, and we would spit in our masks and rub the saliva around the plexiglass to keep them from fogging up, and we would rinse them in the sea. Then they would put them on, and I would check each one for leaks, making eye contact and winking at them as I pushed tendrils of hair out from under the rubber lining. We would sit in the sand, the sky transitioning from dusk to full darkness, and we would slide our feet into our fins. Then, I would lead them into the ocean. I would inhale sharply when the water hit my armpits and cheer them on as I watched them walk backwards, two by two, into the darkening water.

Can you see us there? Me, with my blue glowstick shining on the end of my snorkel, surrounded by ten red lights? There’s a green one too, the group’s chaperone, a teacher or a parent pretending to be brave but who very likely just peed in their wetsuit in fear, because even grown-ups get scared in the ocean at night. The instant warmth after emptying one’s bladder provides sweet relief, at least (yes, I do know this from experience).

Imagine yourself out there now, braving the unknown.

On a good night, on a clear night, once the nerves settle a little and your heart stops pounding in your ears, a kind of stillness comes over you when you dip your face into the water and follow the beam of your flashlight to the seafloor. Sweeping it back and forth, you become entranced. All you can see is a sliver of the scene, and this is somehow calming, less overwhelming than trying to take in everything all at once.

If you’re brave enough to turn your flashlight off and roll onto your back, letting the inky water hold you in suspension, you will be behold a bowl of stars above you, and you will leave your body for a moment, and see yourself from a distance, a silhouette suspended in a vast ocean, laying under a dark blanket pierced through by the light of incandescent bodies of hydrogen and helium burning light years away. You will feel very small. Your body will gently rise and fall with the undulation of the sea, like you’re lying on the belly of a beloved friend. You’ll notice how the moon paints a golden path on the surface of the water, and your eyes will follow it all the way to the horizon. You’ll listen to the sound of snapping shrimp while Orion winks at you from the heavens. You’ll breathe in the salty air. You’ll be baptized in wonder.

When you roll back over, the ocean will feel more familiar to you now, a home you are getting reacquainted with. If you are lucky, and I hope you are, the bioluminescence will be in full bloom. With your flashlight still turned off, you will wave your hands in figure eights in the darkness, and now the stars will be both above you and below you. Thousands of plankton will light up at your touch, leaving a trail of fairy dust in your wake. Your fins will make an even bigger lightshow, and you will be a child again, and you will believe in magic, and you will want to cry. You’ll notice now that the ocean is not completely dark at all- everything sparkles in this miraculous universe. It is as though someone is painting the movement of the creatures below you in glittering silver and indigo. There, the outline of a lobster swimming backwards, a quick jolt and a glide. There, the slow undulation of a larger fish, perhaps a sea bass or a sheepshead but you cannot be sure. And right below you now, the shimmering flutter of a bat ray flying into deeper water.

Not everyone who braves the ocean at night gets to experience this magic. Sometimes, your beam of light only picks up sand dancing in the water. Sometimes, you can’t even see your own fins because the water is so murky. Sometimes there is no bioluminescence, and the sky is filled with clouds, obscuring even the stars.

On nights like this, you may hurry to the cove at the far end of the bay, hoping with every ounce of your being that the water will be calmer there, protected from the currents by the surrounding rocks. You suspect that the kids, who are understandably complaining and restless and still quite nervous, will settle down when they see a bright orange garibaldi or even a kelp fish. Maybe you will find a lobster, and catch it, and place it on the head of the kid who tripped on the deck, and it will grab on tight to his hood with all ten legs, and everyone will laugh, the tripping kid loudest of all.

No matter what, it will be a night you will never forget.

---

On this particular murky autumnal night, there was neither bioluminescence nor lobsters to behold.

Instead, when we finally got to the cove, I noticed something floating in the water. I squinted at it in the dark and worked out that it must be a black bag of garbage. Sad as it is, boaters often bail their trash overboard, and sometimes those bags wound up in our little bay. I swam towards the object, clucking in disgust, and planned on putting in on top of the boogie board that was strapped to my wrist in order to bring it back to shore with me (the board was something I carried with me at all times in case I needed to tow kids around who were panicking or too tired to swim anymore.)

But as I got closer, those little crimson lights bobbing behind me, I noticed that it was not a garbage bag. The shape wasn’t right.

I was close enough now to shine my beam of light on the object in the murk, and I froze.

It was a dead sea lion.

A freshly dead sea lion.

Its head hung onto its neck by the thinnest thread of skin, the lifeless whites of its eyes glowing in the yellow light of my beam. Blood bloomed into the water all around it. There was so much blood.

I knew right away what had happened. There was only one animal that hunted sea lions of this size, and I’d never seen one out here. Not in the three hundred plus snorkels I’d done in this bay, not in nearly two years of boat rides in the surrounding waters, not even on the early morning staff outings we’d occasionally do in deeper waters, tossing chum overboard, hoping to see one. I only knew one person who had ever seen this creature in our corner of the Channel Islands, and that was fifteen years ago, in a bay just north of us, a good story but an old one, the details faded like the ink on an old map. We told everyone who asked that this was not their habitat, even though we knew they passed by on the very rare occasion. Better to not stir up undue panic.

This was the work of a great white shark.

A mature great white shark by the looks of it, as juveniles only ate fish for the first few years of their lives.

Full grown white sharks can reach lengths of 20 feet, though that’s rare. Most top out at 10-15 feet. They are crepuscular hunters, primarily feeding at dawn and dusk, and they kill their prey by biting them once, hard and fast, and then leaving the prey to die as slowly or quickly as the bite strength and location determines before returning to eat them in relative peace. They don’t have great eyesight, but their sense of smell is astounding. They can detect a single drop of blood in 100 liters of water. Even more impressive than that is the fact that they can sense electric signals emanating from other animals- muscle movements and heartbeats- using tiny sensors on their noses called Ampullae de Lorenzini. Even in the dark, even in murky water, they know where to find the living and the dying. Mostly, they bite humans because they think we are sea lions. Mostly, they bite once and leave us because we taste terrible- all neoprene and surfboard and uric acid- although that one bite can be fatal in the mouth of a great white, as the sea lion in front of me could clearly attest to.

I knew all of this. I knew too much.

I saw Susan Backlinie’s legs kicking just below the surface of the water, unaware, and the beast rising up below her. I saw her being violently pulled, this way and that. I saw all twenty legs of my kids in my mind’s eye, small and equally unsuspecting, flailing around behind me, the thick barrel of the shark’s body casually cruising below them.

How close was it? Five feet away? Fifty? It had to be nearby. It would want to return to eat its fresh kill, of course, the one who’s pectoral fin had just bushed my leg, causing me to nearly jump out of my skin.

I felt the predator in the water. Every instinct in my animal body felt it. We even had a word for this feeling among the instructors- sharky. We would say it casually to one another on the dive deck “It was sharky out there today!” and we’d know exactly what that meant, though we wouldn’t be able to tell you what, exactly, we were picking up on. Often, I would get the feeling and turn around to see a large leopard shark gliding through the kelp forest. There you are, I would think.

Now, the feeling was stronger than ever, but I was blind. I could not see beyond the tips of my fins.

GET OUT OF THE WATER! The animal inside of me screamed, pleading, clawing at me.

I fought the animal. CALM DOWN! I shouted back at it. I forced myself to take a breath. The kids. I had to protect the kids. I had to be smart. If I panicked, if they panicked, someone might not make it out of this bay intact.

I swam towards my group, forcing myself not to think about legs- theirs or mine or Susan’s.

“What’s that?” one of the boys asked excitedly, shining his light at the decapitated sea lion.

I couldn’t find my voice. My heart was pounding in my chest.

Think, think, think. I ordered myself.

“That is a moon jelly.” I said slowly, not knowing why or where that had come from. Some distant part of my brain told me that moon jellyfish did not live in this part of the Pacific, that I should have picked a different species. I shushed it. How absurdly irrelevant.

“Cooooool!” He said, peering over my shoulder. “You guys, there’s a big jellyfish in there!”

One of the girls shrieked. My heart flew into my throat. She was ok, just scared of the jelly. Breathe.

“It is cool,” I said in a measured tone. “And it also has tentacles that could sting you, so we need to stay away from it.” I lied. Moon jellies don’t have tentacles, they actually can’t sting at all, the unhelpful voice said. Are you serious right now?! I snapped.

“Can it kill us?” One of the boys asked.

I swallowed hard. “No. But we can’t go into the cove now and there’s nothing to see out here in this murk, so let’s head back to shore.” I tried to sound jaunty, unfazed, upbeat. I was pushing back a panic attack. Some of the kids cheered, some awwwwwwed in disappointment.

GET OUT OF THE WATER! The animal screamed again. I’m trying, dammit! This voice was even less welcome than the damn jellyfish expert, though admittedly more understandable.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said, trying to breathe. Why was it so hard to breathe? “We’re going to race back to the beach and whichever buddy pair wins is going get an amazing prize once we get to the dive deck.”

One hundred feet. We were one hundred feet from safety. My pulse was deafening in my ears. I was starting to feel dizzy.

The kids lined up. It took ten seconds; it took ten thousand years.

“Ready, set, GO!” I shouted without preamble, and the water exploded into a flurry of fins and arms and knobby knees. This was the exact wrong thing to do- to flee from a predator, but what choice did we have? We were sitting ducks out there.

One little girl did not go. She had no flashlight. Her buddy had taken off and she was frozen in the darkness. I took off towards her, away from the beach, away from safety, and as I dunked my face in the water, I saw a shadow, something large, right on the periphery of my beam. My skin prickled. My vision narrowed. There you are.

SHIT, SHIT, SHIT! The animal and the jellyfish expert and I screamed in unison.

I grabbed her by the waist, threw her on the boogie board and told her to hang on. I didn’t try to keep the panic out of my voice. It didn’t matter now. Everything was in motion. I began pulling her, but it didn’t feel right, having her behind me- it reminded me of chumming, which was so terrible, so horribly funny, I almost laughed. I choked instead, made an unintelligible noise. I grabbed the board and positioned it in front of me. I pushed her with all of my might, kicking until my legs burned.

Catching up to the group, the animal told me to pass them, to just get to safety already. They are swimming too slow, damn it, this is not a game!

But I remembered looking in their eyes, pushing tendrils of hair from under their masks. I would not pass them. Absolutely not. I would see them to safety.

The woman who would someday be a mother, who would understand how readily a person could give their life for another, surged up within me.

She told the animal to STAND DOWN, even as she shook, even as she fought the rising tide of terror. All the voices quieted.

What divinity is this, inside of us? What compels us to protect another over and above ourselves?

There is primal, lizard-brain instinct embedded inside of our ancient animal bodies, but there is also something else. There is this intangible deep knowing. Both are wild, both forged in fire, but only one is rooted in love. Only one understands itself outside of the limited confines of the singular self.

In the most terrifying moment of my life, my instincts for survival faded into the background, and something else rose up. I stayed in the water, my legs swishing below me, and I counted green glowsticks as they emerged from the sea.

One by one they tumbled onto the beach, each one an answered prayer.

One, two, three…. four, five, six, seven… eight, nine… ten…. chaperone.

I counted again.

And again.

When I was certain they were all safe and my feet found solid ground, I almost cried. I rushed backwards onto the sand, pushed by a wave, my beloved ocean ushering me away from the danger.

“Does everyone have their buddy?” I panted, sitting on the sand.

“Yes!” They yelled, buoyant, happy, oblivious, dancing in the moonlight.

“Who won?” Someone yelled.

“You all won.” I said, my nose prickling with tears. “You all get a prize.”

Everyone cheered. I laid down and turned my gaze to the stars.

Orion winked at me. I exhaled and closed my eyes. Thank you, I said, to all the voices within.

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When everyone was wrapped in towels, tiny hands cupped around steaming mugs of hot cocoa brimming with fluffy white marshmallows, excitedly chattering about how scary it was out there in the dark but how brave they’d all been, I finally excused myself to the back room of the dive deck.

I lowered myself onto a wooden bench and peeled off my hood, dropping it to the floor. I stared unblinkingly at my feet and began to shake.

I shook and shook, salty tears running down my salty nose.

The next afternoon, we would find another eviscerated sea lion on the opposite side of the bay, and we would cancel snorkeling for the rest of the season, blaming the Santa Anas.

I wondered if I’d ever be able to take kids out in the water at night again, but of course I did, in the end, and thank God for that.

Danger and magic sit side by side, you see. To be alive in this world, you must dance with both, even if it scares the shit out of you.

Afterall, my friends: even sharks shimmer in the dark.