just let me go spearfishing at the shipwrecks
a sketch to cheer us up
What a rotten week. We lost Blake Hounshell. I got a weird email from an editor. Our baby has responded to teething by screaming like a banshee through the nights. It’s been raining in Hollywood for about forty days and my knees hurt all the time.
On a week like this, when the mean reds are running untethered, I need to write about something bright. In my notes app, I have some very proud outlines for profound Substacks and I was going to write a sort of satirical how-to for magazine profiles. But then I thought hell, I might sell this; or at least have it rejected somewhere decent and then I remembered reading that Fitzgerald wrote Diamond as Big as the Ritz just because he wanted to cheer himself up. So that’s what you’re seeing here. I’m trying to cheer myself up. By writing about spearfishing and shipwrecks.
But first let me tell you about those summer months when I came across all these things that cheer me up. During those months, I lived with three foreigners in a shack with a long front-porch hung with prayer flags. The shack sat between the dunes and the ocean and it looked, felt, smelled like it was built of driftwood. We were beach lifeguards and we had almost no money. But we were dirt-poor in that guiltless way you can be dirt-poor when you’re young and we leaned into it. I mean, we really leaned into it. Instead of a grill, we cooked our food on a turned-over shopping cart in the sandy backyard. We drank gas-station beer from 40 oz bottles and we played chess with bits of used surfing wax.1
This was the season when the sea turtles come ashore to lay their eggs and the whole coastline turned off their lights at night (because lights scare off the visiting sea turtle mothers). And you couldn’t hear it in the dark-starry night when the sea turtles buried their eggs in the sand but you could hear the ocean everywhere. The waves stopped at the high-tide line but the sound of the ocean came up and rocked along the dunes, so that it was always throbbing around the shack. That whole summer, I never-once went out of earshot of the ocean.
And about a mile down the road from our shack was the first shipwreck I ever saw. It was 250 yards off the shore and when the Gulf Stream was running along the beach, you could stand with your feet in the hot-sand and you could see the discoloration of the wreck out there in the water. The Gulf Stream water comes up from Mexico wearing this glimmering color that you have to see to understand. You’d be tempted to call it aquamarine but that’s not exactly true. It’s faint purple and seafoam-green but also a never-ending blue, like the sky.
This particular ship — the one that wrecked near our shack — went down in the winter storm of 1877. Ninety-eight men died. Thirty-four were saved. And on the first day that the Gulf Stream came along the beach, my roommate Oz (he was Australian) and I took our fins and goggles and swam out to the wreck. The Gulf Stream water is warm and clear so that when you dip your head under you can see everything beneath the ocean. And as you swim through it, you see the white sandy floor deepening. The swimming disturbs the sand and, even when it’s fifteen deep, the sand flutters beneath you as though somebody were blowing on it.2
And you swim like mad because how else can you swim out into the horizon? And then, just when you think you’ve been overzealous and have missed it, you come upon the shipwreck. You probably see the hull first — or it’s not until you see the hull that you realize what you’re looking at. It looks like a viking longboat — how the hull rises above the rest of the wreck. And the hull was where we found the spearfishing gun we used that summer. We were swimming through the wreck and the gun was lying there, just lying on the sandy ocean floor about thirty feet down. And even thirty feet down, the sunlight was shimmering across it and it was a beautiful gun: a mahogany body and the barb still sharp. Oz dove down and picked it up and we came up to the surface and looked around but of course there was nobody. And we didn’t know a damn thing about maritime salvage laws but common sense dictated that this was now our spearfishing gun.3
And all through the summer, or as long as the Gulf Stream ran along the shore — and it ran along the shore for the whole summer — we took our spearfishing gun out to the shipwreck and tried to catch dinner. It turned out that our beautiful gun was cantankerous, hard to load and drunkenly inaccurate. We succeeded in catching our dinner only once — on the day Oz shot a bluefish that tasted like smoke after we cooked it on the shopping cart.
But, whenever I feel the mean reds coming on as they have this week, I think about those spearfishing days and here are some of the things that I remember. I remember that when you swim for a few hundred yards into the ocean, you are out of breath. I remember the quiet panic of being far-off from shore and the quiet bravery of the panic swallowed. You get to the wreck and you catch your breath and then, as you go ten-or-fifteen feet underwater, everything becomes amplified. You hear your hands moving through the water and your feet kicking. You hear the fish skirting away. If you can hold your breath long enough to dive and pick up a handful of sand and sit there, you can even hear it falling to the ocean floor. You are underwater and you can hear your heart beating in your ears but beating so forcefully that it seems to beat from inside your throat.
And it sounds like a lot but it’s not so scary. Like everything worth doing, it shoves you into the moment. Grace-under-pressure; all that bullshit. And that in-the-moment mentality keeps the fear an arm’s length away. But there is one exception: you feel the wild footsteps of terror as you swim along the side of the shipwreck’s hull — when you can’t see what’s on the other side. You get up close to the wreck, you can see the surface and the glittering sunshine way, way up there and you think oh dammit-all, what’s on the other side of this hull? Immediately, your mind goes to shark. And during the summer that Oz and I dove on that wreck, there were a lot of shark attacks on that beach. Like, a lot. We’d see the helicopters going overhead and say fuck, somebody got eaten again. But we never got eaten. I saw a lot of sharks underwater but none that would ever eat me. I saw sand tigers and lemons and nurse sharks. But it was the bull sharks that were eating people that summer. And it was the bull sharks that I always imagined on the other side of the hull. 4
But then I’d swim across the hull and see there was no shark. There were only some fish swimming through the shipwreck’s cannonball racks and Oz, holding the speargun as if it were weightless and the indescribably blue Gulf Stream water behind him. The blue Gulf Stream water going on forever. And when I think about that water, remember how the shipwreck looked down there; how quiet it was. And maybe it doesn’t make me happy but it sustains me — and some days that’s really the best you can ask for.
I remember reading somewhere in Henry James this idea that there is a guilt (or maybe it was a shame) associated with being poor in America but in Europe, that’s not the case. And I think mostly, that’s true. But there are still certain places in America where it’s romantic to be poor. Certain beaches and ski towns where you can be perfectly destitute and still perfectly happy.
There’s this wonderful book called The Wave by Susan Casey where she examines big waves and at one point she writes about how when you see these great-big waves, it’s a bit deceiving because you think it’s all that water that’s moving. But it’s not. Very little water is actually moving, it’s the energy that’s moving. And I always thought about that when I swam out to the wreck and saw how my strokes were disturbing the sand along the floor of the ocean. It’s an actual visual rendering of energy. And idk. I just always thought that was pretty fucking cool.
There are laws about the wreck — you can’t remove anything from the wreck, you’re not really even supposed to touch it — but those could hardly extend to abandoned spearfishing guns. If somebody had said “hey! that’s my spearfishing gun”, we would have given it back. But nobody ever said that.
All those fish look bigger underwater, a three-foot lemon shark looks like a six-foot animal when you swim up next to him. And when you see him, you remember reading somewhere that sharks can hear your heartbeat and if that’s the case, you’re fucked. Because your heart is thumping like a washing machine. But I never swam next to a bull shark. I saw them from the shore sometimes. They were awful — they looked like swollen torpedoes and you’d see them moving ugly through the waves. And even though we had an uncooperative speargun, it made me feel better to have it around. Because, again, the sharks ate a few people that summer and I suppose that everybody, even the sharks, must know what humans do with guns.