So Meta and I almost died

[RedImperator]

So Meta and I just spent a week in the Outer Banks (North Carolina barrier islands) and had a really great time right up until Friday afternoon, when we almost drowned in the Atlantic Ocean. The surf all week had been fairly rough, but our usual swimming spot, near the condo we were staying in Duck, NC, has a very shallow slope and then a sandbar maybe fifty feet out. Anyone who can swim at all can get to it; you just duck under a few breakers on your way out, and then you can stand waist deep even at high tide, rising and falling with the swells. It's easy to get back in a hurry if you need to (as we found out on Tuesday when the lifeguard ordered everyone out because a thunderstorm was approaching). At low tide, I can wade comfortably from the beach to the bar, and I'm not all that tall (5'10").

Unfortunately, on Friday, we weren't at our usual spot--we were about fifty miles south, on Hatteras Island. We had come initially to see (and climb) the lighthouse there; it's very picturesque and famously tall, and was built to guard some of the most dangerous waters in the Atlantic basin. We climbed the interior staircase (about 12 stories), incidentally spending much of our energy reserves (my leg muscles were shaking by the time we got back to the ground), changed into swimsuits, put on the sunscreen, and went to the nearby beach.

The surf there was about as high as it had been back at Duck. I think if I'd just arrived on the first day of vacation and seen those swells, I wouldn't have gone in, but the surf had been building gradually all week (there was a hurricane approaching Bermuda the whole time we were there, and as it came north the swells built), and we'd been able to handle it easily; it was fun, way more fun than the pool or the sound. There were also other people out in the surf; I didn't notice until later that they were all surfers, who are 1) guaranteed to be better swimmers than me, and 2) carrying their own flotation devices.

So we wade out, and immediately I notice two things: first, the water near shore is rough enough to threaten my footing at only a few feet deep, and second, the breakers are coming from two directions. The contour of the island is bending the incoming swells so that we're near where waves are meeting like the point of a "V". If you've never been swimming in the ocean, this can be a problem because if you're not paying attention, you can get hit from the side or behind by a breaking wave. This is when we should have pulled the plug, but we were cocky because the surf was only a little stronger than what we'd swum in before, and the breakers weren't too far out--once you get past them, all you have to do is float with the swells and you could keep your hair dry if you tried.

We lost the bottom quickly; I don't know exactly what the bottom contour is like off Hatteras beach, but it's not like what it is up north. Stupidly, I figured that since there's a sandbar off our usual swimming place, there must be off Hatteras; I spotted people out beyond the breakers who looked like they were wading waist deep; later I realized they were surfers on their boards. We pushed out into the surf and I started to have trouble; sets of waves were breaking over me so close that I barely had time to draw breath between them. We weren't far from the outermost breakers, and I wonder now if we'd just kept pushing if we would have made it to calmer water; unfortunately, at that moment, I got hit from the side unprepared and turned upside down. I swallowed a big slug of seawater and at that moment I realized I was, ha-ha, in over my head.

Now, Meta is a far more experienced ocean swimmer than I am, and a better swimmer in general; I wanted us to stay together when we went out beyond knee deep. Once, a few years ago, we were at our usual spot, on the sandbar, and the tide started coming in. I said earlier that I can stand waist deep at high tide on the bar, but that year the bar was lower and I went from waist deep to neck deep to can't touch shockingly quickly. I started to panic there, even though the water was gentle and if I'd kept my head, I could have dog paddled all the way back to the beach. Meta, who is five inches shorter than me and at least 100 lbs lighter, grabbed my wrist and swam me forward a few yards, enough for me to gather my wits and start kicking on my own. Since then I've tried to stay near her when we're out, and a few days before we went to Hatteras, we talked about what to do if I started to feel uncomfortable in the water--I'd shout to her that I wanted to go back, and we'd go back to shore together.

I got back to the surface and immediately called for Meta; she must have heard something in my voice, because she called back sounding alarmed. She tells me I was only a few yards from her, just barely beyond her reach, but I couldn't see her and, already starting to panic, started kicking for shore. We got separated; Meta, the stronger swimmer, got ahead of me (I saw her once, ten or so feet ahead, before another set of waves washed over). That's the last I saw of her in the water. I'll let her tell her own story if she wants, but afterwards, she was torn up inside because she felt like she abandoned me; I told her then and I still believe now that if she'd stayed with me, we both would have drowned.

It was after that set washed over and I got back to the surface, gasping, that I realized that I was in actual serious trouble. I swam as hard as I could, but I seemed to be making little headway; a surfer told us later that we'd gone out into a rip. I'm not sure if we really were in one, or if we were in one, were we in the center of it, because the stories I hear about rips always have a part where someone says "and he was swept out and under so fast that even though the lifeguard responded right away, he still drowned", but I do know that when the waves broke and started washing back out, it was like being on a treadmill. I had the presence of mind to try to bodysurf on the waves as they came in, and maybe that helped a little because I definitely got closer in, but I was running out of energy faster than I was approaching the beach. At any rate, the waves hurt far more than they helped; they came in sets of four or five and each one tossed me around. I was getting disoriented and frustrated and maybe even a little outraged; at one point I was so tired and disoriented I knew a wave was coming up behind and I didn't take a deep breath, which left my lungs screaming for air almost immediately when my head went under. I was aware on some level I was being stupid, doing every dumbfuck thing every dumbfuck tourist who'd ever drowned on the Outer Banks ever did, but I couldn't pull my mind together long enough to do anything better. It's easy to think "oh just swim perpendicular to the rip", and I even started once or twice, but each wave that hit was like a reset button, and every time I came up, I saw the beach and tried to swim in a straight line for the closest point. I waved for help a few times and shouted once or twice, more out of anger than anything else; I knew nobody would hear me on shore. I distinctly heard Meta scream, but at the time it didn't occur to me that she might be in trouble too; I had assumed, I think, that she had made it to the shallows or the shore safely, and was calling for me. In fact she was still only about ten feet from me, as exhausted as I was and was struggling in the same current.

I think now if I had been thinking clearly, I could have swum across the rip, out of the zone with waves coming from two sides, and swum to shore a few hundred yards south of where I went in. Or I could have tread water, waved so I could be seen, and waited for help (there were, as I said, surfers all around). Unfortunately, all I was actually thinking at that time was "This is real. This is actually happening. I am actually going to die out here." Also how I was getting so tired, how I was losing the ability to time the waves, and how if I got thrown unexpectedly again, I was probably going to inhale water and that was going to be the end of the show.

Sometime near the end of this, before I spotted the surfers heading in my direction, the water went flat between a set of breakers, and I looked up at the beach and could see the lighthouse. I wasn't wearing my glasses in the water, so I'm sure what I really saw was a tall white blur, but in my memory I see it clearly. I didn't find it comforting, or associate it with safety; rather, I hated it. Hated it. I thought "I'm going to die in sight of that fucking lighthouse". It's possible in the future that I'm going to paint layers of meaning and thought onto my memories. I'll start believing I was angry because the lighthouse had lured us down to Hatteras to begin with, or had tricked me into exhausting all my energy reserves, or even that it seemed like it was staring at me. But none of that is true--it was pure, irrational hatred, and some of it's still with me. Meta says it's still her favorite lighthouse, but right now, I don't think I'd actually be that sad if a hurricane came and blew it over.

My memories at this point are more like a series of still images; wave washes over, come back, look to shore, wave washes over again. Not long after Meta screamed, during one of these moments when I was above water and looking into shore, I saw two surfers entering the water nearby, pointing their boards in my direction. At first I thought they were just going out to catch some waves, and it was just a lucky break they were coming my way; I waved at them frantically. Another set washes over; every time I come up, they're closer, and now I know one of them's coming for me because I'm staring right at the point of his board and he's keeping eye contact with me. It's slow going for him--he's trying to push what amounts to a sail through the chop out to me (the other disappears from my sight; he picked up Meta and hauled her in). I get my wits together and think about how I'm going to grab the board and how I'm going to hang on, worrying that my arms won't be strong enough to keep a grip when another set washes over. One last wave and the board is in reach; I throw my entire upper body on and lock my arms around it; my grip is tested immediately by yet another wave, but I barely budge, and now with the board under me and the surfer kicking I'm riding into shore like I've got an outboard motor. Just for a change of pace, my brain worries about sharks.

I make it as far as the wet sand, right in the zone where the water sometimes makes it and sometimes doesn't, where I let go of the board and crash to the sand. Without any buoyancy, I'm not strong enough to stand up. Meta rushes over and helps me to my feet (at this point, I still thought she had made it in on her own). The surfer who pulled me out says "The Lord be with you, man"; 20 years of Catholic call-and-response training kicks in and I reply "and also with you" even while another part of my brain is going "I'm an atheist" like that fucking matters or ever has.

We rested in the shade for a while and drank water--once I was safe on dry land, I realized how much my throat and nose were burning and how close I was to puking in the sand. After we'd recovered enough strength and I drank enough water to cool my throat, we trudged back to her car and started the long drive back north; we were done with Hatteras Island. We smoked cigarettes and drank beer on our condo's shaded balcony and looked out at the whitecaps past the dunes. Later we went out, as we had planned, to a restaurant called the Black Pelican in Kitty Hawk (fun fact: the restaurant building was once the Kitty Hawk lifesaving station; Orville and Wilbur Wright used its telegraph to report their successful first flight to their father back in Dayton). I had a fillet, rare. I guess this is where I'm supposed to tell you it was the most delicious steak I'd ever had, but it just tasted like a steak. Not complaining, it was pretty good, but I've had equally good before. At one point I almost swallowed a piece wrong and thought "Here we go again".

A lot of times, when someone tells a story like this, they mention that before they went in, they had a bad feeling or went against their better judgement or something like that, and the lesson is "Trust your instincts, even if you feel silly or cowardly for doing it". But I think the most important thing for Meta and I to take away here is that we didn't have any sense of that, not when we were on shore, not when we started wading out, now when we were swimming through the breakers. Until I swallowed that water, I felt safe and confident; after I did, I was alarmed and knew I had to get back to shore, but by then it was too late. Looking back, I realize what we did: we had a set of assumptions about the water conditions based on our experience 50 miles north, and we applied them in a place where they were all wrong. We assumed the slope would be gentle, so even when it became obvious that it was not, we kept going out (there are low spots in Duck, too, and if you push a few feet past them the bottom rises again). We saw people out beyond the breakers, so we assumed it would be possible for us to get there, not noticing or realizing these were all strong, experienced swimmers, not dog-paddling tourists. I saw people torso-deep past the breakers, and assumed they were standing on a sandbar, not sitting on their boards. There were no red flags, as there had been in Duck the day before, so we assumed the lack of flags indicated the water was safe for everyone--as opposed to the reality, where flags only mean the water isn't safe for anyone. We had both been swimming in ocean swells before, so we could handle these. In retrospect, we would have been better off in every respect if we'd had no experience at all, because I can guarantee that I never would have gone deeper than my waist if that was my first time swimming in the ocean. We knew just enough to fuck up.

I'm writing this from my favorite armchair at my house in Delaware, watching the NFL halftime show (Philadelphia 10, Cleveland 3 after a sloppy and frustrating first half). I've been trying to think of a way to wrap this all up, but I'm at a loss. We almost died, but we didn't. That will have to be it for now.

[Aaron]

Well man, I'm glad you guys didn't.

[Oxymoron]

I hope you're both doing okay.

[Aaron]

Good on those surfers too.

[Metatwaddle]

Yup, that's basically what happened.

It's funny that we both had the exact same stupid assumptions. There's gonna be a sandbar out there, where those surfers are. The swimming will be fun. It'll be like Duck. Those waves hitting us from a 45-degree angle will just make it more exciting.

Even after I couldn't stand, I wasn't immediately scared. Since I was little, I've been swimming in water deeper than I am tall, and it's never worried me. I expected to swim past the breakers easily and find a sandbar. After a couple of rough waves, I realized there were still a lot of breakers left, and I didn't want to try to get past them anymore. I wanted to go in. I shouted something to Red like, "I think I'm gonna head toward shore," and then I ducked under another wave. When I came up, I saw him floating farther out than me, maybe ten or twenty feet, and shouted, "Matt, please come in." I don't know if he heard me. I thought he was still trying to swim past the breakers, but now I realize he was probably trying to swim to shore and failing, like me.

After that, it was just a hellish alternation between ducking under the waves and trying to swim toward shore. Every time I went under, I was there for maybe half a second longer than was comfortable -- and that half-second felt like forever. Every time I came up, I gasped and struggled and tried to swim while keeping my head above water. The next wave always came too soon; I couldn't do anything except take a big gulp of air -- it never felt big enough -- and hope that I'd make it back to the surface. It really was like being on a treadmill, but the words "rip current" and the associated advice never crossed my mind. I only knew that I was not making any forward progress. Or if I was, it wasn't enough. I was getting tired a lot faster than I was swimming to shore. I glanced over my shoulder at Red and worried about him and shouted his name, but I couldn't swim to him. He was only ten feet farther out than me, but in that current, it might have taken me three minutes to get those ten feet back. And I didn't have the strength to help him swim, anyway. I'd be no help at all. All these thoughts went faintly through my head, but it wasn't some sober-minded assessment of the situation; I was just trying to survive.

After a few waves I started shouting "Help!" and waving my arms, which cost me valuable energy that I could have been using to kick toward shore. At one point I swallowed a few ounces of burning salt water. At another point my left foot touched the sand, and I thought I could get to shore, only to find that I couldn't touch bottom after the next wave sloshed over my head. I shouted and waved and watched the surfers on shore standing around; I thought they were just leaving us out there to drown. Desperately, I switched from shouts to a piercing shriek -- and a wave later, a couple of guys were heading out from shore, pointing white surfboards in my direction. Another wave and they were there and I was grabbing one of the boards.

"Go help my boyfriend," I told them, waving my arm in Red's direction.
One of them said, "Oh, is he--?"
"Yes," I said, even though I wasn't sure what he was asking. Oh, is he with you, too? Who cares? Oh, is he in trouble? Of course he's in trouble, what the hell is wrong with you, can't you see him waving his arms and sputtering, can't you hear him shouting for help? I think I said "thank you" after they hauled me in, when I was waist-deep and staggering back toward the shore under my own power, but all I remember is grabbing the board and ordering them to help Red.

I don't remember watching them haul him in. The first thing I remember is Red saying, "And also with you," to one of the surfer guys, and then taking a couple more steps before collapsing to his knees on the wet sand where the waves sometimes sloshed up. The ocean was no danger to us there, but I said, "Let's go in," because I wanted to put more distance between us and the water. I helped him stand and we wobbled over to our blanket in the hot sun. A couple of surfers, not the same ones who had hauled us in, handed us a big bottle of water and ushered us over to the shaded towels under their beach umbrella.

We made oddly light small talk. Red was too exhausted and thirsty to chat, for the most part, but I talked with them about what they were doing (renting a house in Avon to go surfing here at the Cape), where they were from (Toronto), their accents (they said we had been swept oot, a dead giveaway), and by far the weirdest, what it had felt like for us to swim out there. They said the surf had been a little rough, that our area in particular had had rip currents. I said it had been tough going, rough waves, blah blah blah, while a corner of my brain was shouting: Why are you talking about this like it was some fun adventure? It was sheer terror. You'd never have made it in on your own, and for damn sure Matt wouldn't either, and it's your fault because you wanted a fucking ocean adventure at Hatteras Island.

They call it the graveyard of the Atlantic for a reason.

[zhaktronz]

One of the big things advertising and awareness campaigns for surf safety push here is never ever go out deeper than you can still stand up on an unpatrolled beach.

Good to see you're both ok

[Bakustra]

I'm glad both of you are OK.

[Zod]

One of the big things advertising and awareness campaigns for surf safety push here is never ever go out deeper than you can still stand up on an unpatrolled beach.

Good to see you're both ok

There were warnings of rip currents all over the beach in San Francisco, where they were powerful enough they could drag you under even if you were on the sand. Doesn't seem like it's pushed enough through most of the US.

[Losonti Tokash]

goddamn

[timmy]

I'm very glad to hear you both got away with that one. I'm going to reread that later at home, though no comment seems necessary; with time to reflect you know well what went wrong and how easily it happened. We're very lucky for the outcome that was.

[magic princess]

My father was one hell of a yachtsman. He took the entire family across the pacific on his ketch when I was eleven or so, had been sailing by that point for something like sixty years. A marvelous swimmer, too. He once jumped off the side of a ship in WW2 in a tropical lagoon and went swimming for a long time; then he paid for it with an ear infection by some kind of fungal growth that lasted for eight years.

He never let us swim in the ocean. Puget sound; Grays Harbor, Willapa Bay, even the Strait of Juan de Fuca, so we knew very well how to swim in the ocean in principle, but out on the beaches around Quinalt and so on directly on the coast, with its rocks and sea-stacks and lighthouses on offshore islands, the waves endlessly crashing home on the iron-bound shore, there was most assuredly no going out. A rip tide meant death, and I learned it pretty early on; I've spent hours swimming in salt water before, wading and playing and sometimes working, but I've never gone out like that.

The sea is, I know it's a stereotype, an intensely cruel mistress. She didn't want you; so you were lucky and she should be thanked for the indulgence. I reserve my superstition for dealing with matters like this. It is the graveyard of the Atlantic and your experience is exactly why a lot of sailors prefer to stay aboard until things are hopeless fighting for the ship, right in those waters.


It may seem trivial now, but you should massively appreciate it, really. The situation you described is virtually a tailor-made description of half of all the coastal deaths I've ever heard of, but you didn't die. And that does matter for something.

[Phantasee]

I'm glad you guys aren't dead.

[Darth Tedious]

Wow, that's some scary stuff.

Thank the Lord for religious surfers, I guess.

[Metatwaddle]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone.

[Gands]

Sorry I missed this thread.

I'm glad to hear/read to that you guys are ok. The ocean is scary, and I've got the scarring to prove it.

Please remain safe.

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

Man guys I cannot even express how happy I am that neither of you died.

[weemadando]

It's pretty awesome that you didn't die.

Like many, I grew up with an appreciation of the murderous power and intent of the ocean (and water in general) and still almost got myself killed once.

Reading this story though, I couldn't get Bondi Rescue out of my head. That makes me a terrible person.