Out of My Blue Mind

What is it about the water that is so enticing?

In an odd and turbulent childhood, some rare quieter moments stand out. I have a blissful scene forever embedded in my brain of me on the floor at the centerline of a long wooden canoe precariously holding my family of four in the middle of a calm Connecticut lake. I’m skimming my hand over the satin water surface, beagle on my lap, and eating the most perfect peach—or was it a plum...

I continue to chase this moment. We practically had to crane my increasingly feeble father into, and especially out of, this same canoe toward the end of his life when he visited the lower Hudson Valley of New York where we’d been raising our girls and spent some years as members of the Ossining Boat & Canoe Club. We were the only members holding up the canoe part of that name on the sometimes too-choppy waters of the brackish big river, until marital separation happened and I couldn’t handle this beast of a boat on my own. A minor casualty of the breakup was selling off the classic pine green Old Town to someone who might better float with his own young family.

I work “inland” now, slightly deeper into Westchester county, but live as snug to this grand river as possible. I run to it to run alongside its curves a few times a week and no matter the season, even when there’s ice, I often feel this magnetic urge to jump in. Luckily I do wait until it’s warm enough to sometimes submerge myself spontaneously—radioactive waste dumps from the decommissioned nuclear power plant upriver and some residual PTSD from being a reporter who had to cover every Tappan Zee Bridge jumper story be damned.

I can’t tolerate the claustrophobic idea of living in a more landlocked place and feel myself return to me when I round the turn to descend into my rivertown village after work, the water sparkling in the distance under the iconic span.

Upstate, my little rural pandemic-inspired outpost in the Catskills has a stream somewhere in the dark backwoods which my girls and I diligently navigated one summer in order to locate the rumored faraway falls it descends from. We had to hike in the water since there’s no path alongside it and too many ticks. Water-hiking is the best with the right footwear but nothing is without risks. Will we come upon snakes, bears, serial killers? This frigid mountain water flows all the way to our suburban taps and keeps going to the millions of NYC south of us. It’s no minor miracle that an ancient network of stone aqueducts and dams somehow successfully delivers the water the people need to live, people mostly made of water.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the price of the foldable kayaks I’ve been eyeing online to drop on time for my own 50th birthday present to myself, and researching how to turn into a swim hole the awesome burn pit that is the basement foundation to the boarding house ruin I tore down. Until then, on occasion it fills with rain in a very unpoetic fashion.

What is it about the water?

I’m not alone in gravitating to it, feeling its meditative pull, needing to live near it and visit it regularly like my atheist version of church (which near me happens to spit up spiky seed pods called Devil’s Heads). I always thought this must be about seeking an edge, getting perspective. My therapist just reinforced this theory when she introduced the concept of “orienting response,” whereby an organism shifts reactions based on new stimuli, or say, if I’m distressed by a hopeless battle over nothing-much with a t(w)een I might snap myself out of it by escaping the house and looking up at the treetops or skyline of buildings.

I found this article in the Los Angeles Times of 1989 that describes “interface”—using early computer-speak—places “where one key element abuts another.” The author laments the lack of any “science of feelings” to date, saying there’s no psychological studies to help unpack what their nice alliterative headline “Aquatic Attraction” is all about.

In lieu of 1980s data, the interesting ideas they play with instead range from the evolutionary (a return to the ancestral water the earliest life forms crawled out of) to Freudian (a return to our own personal time floating in the amniotic fluid of our mothers’ wombs).

Everything comes back to the maternal, doesn’t it? I’ve fallen under the spell of

Taegan MacLean

’s One Word videos, the latest of which is about home, a short word that’s too big for me to even begin to explore here (and would be more appropriate for a land-based post than a water one). But he interviews an antiques shopkeeper who talks about the connection between mom and home, the comfort, security, and safety that conjures. He uses the phrase “invisible umbilical,” and equates home to being in your “mom’s womb.” While I’ve lacked that sort of soft mom (I relate more to the wire monkey experiment instead), I can get with this concept of floating in the amniotic, tapping into some subconscious sensations predating memory.

In the 30 some years since that LA Times article, there has been plenty of “science of feelings” to fill this water gap, and a term for water-attraction arrives from the title of the Blue Mind book of 2014 by Wallace Nichols. From an interview with the author in QZ.com:

Many scribes, poets, painters, and sailors have attested to the feeling of wellness and peace that comes over them when they’re in, or near, bodies of water. “Whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can,” Herman Melville’s narrator declares in Moby Dick.

Now scientists are quantifying the positive cognitive and physical effects of water, too. It turns out that living by coasts leads to an improved sense of physical health and well-being, for example. And contact with water induces a meditative state that makes us happier, healthier, calmer, more creative, and more capable of awe.

“Water is considered the elixir and source of life. It covers more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, makes up nearly 70% of our bodies, and constitutes over 70% of our heart and brains,” says Nichols. “This deep biological connection has been shown to trigger an immediate response in our brains when we’re near water. In fact, the mere sight and sound of water can induce a flood of neurochemicals that promote wellness, increase blood flow to the brain and heart and induce relaxation. Thanks to science, we’re now able to connect the dots to the full range of emotional benefits being on, in, or near the water can bring.”

This biological connection between me and the world always feels obvious to me when I get my period (now almost constantly in perimenopause) and feel moon-pulled as if I might howl in the night—if I’m predominantly water, I too am tidal.

Being of a Blue Mind isn’t all relaxation and ease. I’m convinced that part of the allure in proximity to water or being on/in the water, most especially the part that stirs creativity and awe, is that element of mystery, the potential of danger. Even the slightest of puddles can have a tinge of dread about them—multiply that by x the deeper and darker they get. The most compelling things are those that have us slightly afraid.

Take that far enough and there’s thalassophobia, fear of deep water; or the junky twist my boyfriend has of submechanophobia, fear of submerged human-made objects; or the super-sized version that may or may not include a Loch Ness: megalohydrothalassophobia, fear of large underwater creatures or objects. For all we know when we float out in the Catskills there’s a whole former village under there—not entirely uncommon when some flood-prone communities were categorically drowned to make way for those drinking reservoirs.

Scribes, Poets, Painters and Sailors

A cursory glance at the “favorites” section of my bookshelf proves that I seem to like novels that assemble a cast of odd ducks at water’s edge. I immediately found four:

Sara Lippmann’s great first novel, Lech, captures the murky contrasts and characters of the fecund yet rotting region of the Catskills, centered around a Murmur lake and an old unsolved drowning that casts a pall over the community. Aging but energetic and forever-longing Ira, the type to jump in, hosts a summer renter Beth and her young son:

With a running start, Ira catapults cannonball-style and soars, the closest he gets to glory before his body crashes through the surface like a pinky ball through a tenement window, only instead of an angry smocked Fraulein shaking her fist, Murmur receives him, ripples out in embrace. This, to him, is love. Something brushes against him, a water snake, a leaf, small-mouthed bass, but it doesn’t faze him. He frogs his legs. Whatever it is skitters away.

He swims a graceless freestyle through mysterious pockets of warm and cold under he nears the center where he treads in place for his heart. Sometimes, he performs a reverse dead man’s float, belly up, sun kissing the lids. Other times, he paddles the entire length, five hundred meters. The Troller side festers with rusted machinery like the skeletal remains of the armored convoy he saw on the road to Jerusalem when he visited in ’74. Ira has no idea how his neighbors live. How much can one get for a bale of hay? Nothing seems in working order. Slender cows wade, a goat defecates into the shallow end.

Today, Ira sinks to the bottom. Mud squishes through his toes. A person drowns in your waters and there goes your innocence. His daughters never got over it. Who isn’t haunted. Take Beth. Something about her nervous energy, her hellish tattoos that enrage and arouse him. He can’t put his finger on it. What’s her story. Eventually, he runs out of air.

By the time he reaches the dock, he’s spent, legs rubbery as a prop chicken. Lately, he’s not been feeling himself. Who else might he feel like?

Galaxy Craze’s first novel begins with the detritus that collects By the Shore, where the single mother of 12-year-old May runs a sad bed-and-breakfast, that by summer becomes a place where more human-related objects accrue, and more people:

It can be dangerous to live by the shore. In the winter, after a storm, things wash up on it: rusty pieces of sharp metal, glass, jellyfish. You must be careful where you tread. Sometimes I see a lone fish that has suffocated on the shore and think for days that there are fish in the water waiting for it to return. Then I think, there is nowhere to be safe.

But in the summer, when the guests are here, there are different things in the sand: suntan lotion, coins, and flip-flops. I even found a silver watch and it was still ticking. Once I found what I thought was a piece of skin buried in the sand. I made my brother Eden pick it up with a twig and put it in a jar of water.

In Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a complicated cast gather to deal with the death of their beloved friend Percival, mortality in general, the messiness of their unfinished stories, their pains, their isolation and attempts to connect, all against the rhythmic backdrop of the breaking waves outside their windows. One young woman suffers from sensitivity:

There is then a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. The wave breaks. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.

Surely The Waves was a touchstone for Alessandro Baricco’s mesmerizing Ocean Sea (the title repeats but changes like waves) where another wildly eccentric cast of characters come to the water’s edge at a surreal hotel, the Almayer Inn, to heal, or hide, love, die. One man is researching the elusive, fleeting exact edge of the sea for his book, The Encyclopedia of Limits, while another paints ocean scenes with nothing but salt water that evaporates on the white canvas:

“That is…you see there, where the water arrives...runs up the beach, then stops..there, precisely that point, where it stops…it really lasts no more than an instant, look there, there, for example, there…you see that it lasts only an instant, then it disappears, but if one were to succeed in suspending that instant…when the water stops, precisely that point, that curve…this is what I am studying. Where the water stops.”

The immense see, the ocean see, which run infinitely beyond all sight, the huge omnipotent sea—there is a point where it ends, and an instant—the immense sea, the tiniest place and a split second. This was what Bartleboom wanted to say.

In a few weeks, my daughters will journey to the Florida coast to have an ocean-bound memorial and float a biodegradable turtle urn in honor of their deceased grandmother, my former mother-in-law. A few years ago some of my father’s ashes made their way in my aunt and uncle’s luggage to be sprinkled at the shore of his ancestral home of Denmark where the full-size marble mermaid that we had in miniature on our dining room hutch watches over the Copenhagen bay. My father’s father was a sailor who emigrated to West Haven, CT and continued launching for the rest of his wanderlusty work life from there. I never knew him, except through how much my father led us to water.

The water is the ultimate tabula rasa, blank slate, which can be whatever you want it to be. The place where the living and dead gather, the known and the unknown, the comforting and the confronting. Meanings accumulate as the words, lapping and lapping, return in waves to try to define the unfathomable edge and expanse.