Look Mommy! It’s a Merman!

~New Moon Over La Jolla~

I suppose it was a perfectly reasonable conclusion in the mind of the four-year-old girl who, sitting not twenty-five yards away, dining by candlelight on the patio of the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club with her extended family, watched the strange creature, body of a man, red-neoprene head, big plastic eyes, and a rainbow swirl of colors flashing from its ears (multi-colored night light), emerge from the dark waters onto the beach before her. What didn’t seem entirely reasonable was the response of her grandmother: Jumping up from the dinner table and rushing onto the beach to see what the sea had borne: “Are you a merman! Where do you come from?” Come, came…I couldn’t resist the tense error: “I come from the sea and I come in peace. Take me to your leader.”

How a 4-year-old sees a swimmer emerge from the darkness?

After a shared laugh, she, realizing what she had said and still infinitely curious: “I mean, where did you start?” And, thus, another night swim at the Cove offers up an unforgettable experience.

After a few minutes of chatting with the highly animated and most amiable woman about sharks, the differences between bravery, bravado, acceptance and resignation; charities, and a seemingly insane group of people that are going to swim 75 miles at sea in hopes of making the lives of a few of America’s Wounded Warriors at least a little bit better, the “merman” strode off into the darkness to be reunited with his kind, just as they swam ashore some hundred yards north at the boat launch.

And in the mind of the grandmother who sees the same.

While the weekly night swim wasn’t meant to be done solo (I swam ahead and in a different direction), it almost seems as if the sea requires some breaking of the rules now and then; not following the plan. And for those who have never experienced solo swimming at sea, there are only a couple of Earthly experiences that compare…   And when the Great Mother puts away Her sun and moon, scatters Her stars across the blackness of space, and warms Her waters to a therapeutic  70°,  well...it is difficult to know where the sea ends and the swimmer begins; and there is no place I would rather be.

Beyond Avalon, there is a healing…

Team Members in attendance: Dan Henry, Lee Grove, Penny Nagel

Special thanks to Penny, who doubled her swim by putting glow sticks on the B buoy earlier in the day.