Wave — Part 1: The First Wave
“I’m so excited!” I tell my colleague, Olivia. I’d mentioned the once every full moon “run” I did at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. It’s the first clear day after 2 weeks of rain (Friday the 13th of January 2017) and I was beyond ready. “What will you wear? A wetsuit?”
Devilish silence. At work I’m a put-together, business shirts and slacks, hard working, nothing-crazy-colleague. Outside of work, I wear colorful, patterned dresses and pants, and organize dozens of events that encourage the asking of intense questions and the experiencing of intense activities.
This evening, the Full Moon Runners consisted of myself and three friends.
Helen and I had been close friends for a year; she had an incredible Homeless-to-Harvard story, and I wanted to get to know her better the moment I met her.
Dan and I enjoyed challenging each other with intense questions and spent 2–3 nights together per week for the last several months, chatting and cuddling. We’d planned for him to stay over at my place that night.
And Evan was mostly an acquaintance — we’d met a couple months prior and he was so excited to join 3 experienced full-moon runners on this special night.
Armed with blankets, snacks, and towels, we spot an inviting cave on the beach next to the cliff house and set up firewood so that when we come back we can start a fire to cuddle and tell stories to — my favorite part of this run.
As usual, I take the lead and strip quickly. Dan beats me to the water’s edge, and I sprint after him. We jump, splash and yelp in near-freezing (40°F; 4°C) water and Evan skips in after us and gives us high fives with a tooth to tooth giggle. It’s Evan’s first time and he seems to enjoy the painful and exhilarating cold. Helen, as usual, stands calmly and meditatively on shore, fingers outstretched in the wind.
I need to pee. Out of consideration of not peeing on my friends, I walk toward the rocks on our right to relieve my bladder. The water is only up to my butt. Perfect.
It only takes a few seconds before I hear the boys yell, “Kim, come back!” I look over my left shoulder and quickly realize — I’m already more than ten feet away. That was fast — I hadn’t even finished peeing yet!
Suddenly, a six foot wave looms over and snatches my body. Watching the kidnap happen in real time, Evan dives in after me and the riptide swallows both of us. Waves crash, sucking us in loudly with its mouth as they shove us into the jagged rocks. My heart lurches forward as my body lurches back. But luck was on our side and the wave delivered us straight to a bed of rocks where the cliff met the water.
After several tries, Evan finds a way to grab hold of the rocks, hoists himself up, and calls for me to do the same. “Come on Kim!!” He yells, beckoning as he spidermans on a foothold on top of the rock.
We’re safe, thank god! I grab the rock uselessly with both hands and hoist myself upward.
Fuck.
My fingers aren’t strong enough. The water pulls me backward and I determinedly swim back to the rock where Evan is. I try again, closing the muscles in my cold hands as much as I can. I can barely feel the rocks; my fingers are already numb. Evan is yelling frantically at me.
“COME ON KIM. COME ON!! KIM!!”
I let out a low, determined grunt. Again and again, I reach up to grab something solid. Again and again I’m slapped away. With every wave I inhale a little more water and my lungs are getting too heavy for me to lift myself onto the rock.
I’m still grasping as a giant wave takes me out into the ocean and breaks my eye contact with Evan’s wide eyes. Evan becomes one white spot on a rock.
“DAN, GET HELP, DAN!” He yells in the other direction.
Neither of us can see shore anymore.
“Evan! Evan!” I scream at him helplessly as we grow farther apart.
The waves mob me at the most unexpected moments. My lungs don’t even hurt when I breathe in the salty liquid. The water slips into my mouth uninvited and I instinctively swallow so I can breathe. A huge wave comes for me and and I go under for what seems like eternity. When I resurface I only have moments to push the curtain of black hair obstructing my airways and vision back so I can anticipate the next round of attacks.
Evan screams at me from the rock. COME ON KIM. KEEP SWIMMING KIM.
Fear grips me for the first fifteen minutes. I taught swimming for a few years in a past life, and never learned about riptides. I start throwing up between every breath, projecting salt water uselessly as I retch, only so I have space to swallow more.
“YOU’RE STRONG KIM”, Evan yells at me from the rock. “SO, SO STRONG. YOU’VE GOT THIS KIM.”
I try to tell him I’m okay and a wave shoves itself into my mouth. I resurface and throw up. “Evan. Evan. I’m still here, Evan.”
Now we work together as a team. Evan can see the tallest waves and yells for me to watch out. I pinch my nose and close my mouth as it hits me. No water in my lungs this time and I don’t throw up.
“Evan, I’m still here, Evan”. I’m weaker now and can’t yell at his volume. Evan doesn’t stop yelling at me from the rock.
“I LOVE YOU”, he screams. “COME ON KIM.”
At some point my fears wash away. I’m so tired and I don’t feel cold in the freezing water. It would be easier if I just laid my head down in the water and float away. I’m so, so tired Evan.
“KIM, KEEP SWIMMING, YOU JUST KEEP GOING KIM.”
Maybe I’ll swim just a little longer, I think.
“Evan,” I whisper. I don’t think he can hear me. “I’m still here, Evan.”
I swim and swim and swim until I see light.
The light shines into the ocean, searching and missing and searching and missing as Evan frantically points toward me — a tiny dark speck in the ocean with six foot waves. For the first time, a new word escapes my lips.
“help.”
“help me.” I say, again. And again.
And nobody comes. The light shines on me and shines on me as the waves mob me.
Fifteen more minutes pass and a man appears by my side as if in a dream, holding a white and red floatation ring the size of a large pizza. By this time, death had been flirting with me so hard I thought I’d go home with him tonight — a helpless truth I’d accepted.
“Just hold on here,” the man says, offering me the small, white and red ring. “My name is Huck. What’s your name?”
“My name is Kim,” I say. “Thank you for coming, I’m sorry for all this hassle.”
The riptide swallows us both. He’s stuck in the vortex with me! I’m probably a stronger swimmer than Huck the Hero. I then calmly articulate, “Huck, if you need to let me go, let me go.”
“Nobody’s dying tonight!” Huck said, as another wave takes us.
I don’t panic for a moment. I was not sad for myself, but I felt guilty that Huck was going to have to go through what I just went through.
Huck and I get tossed around the water helplessly. I’m not sure how many minutes it took, but two divers in red wetsuits, rope and floatation devices soon appeared next to us.
One diver hooks her arm around my neck and tries to drag me back. I’m calm enough to notice this is the maneuver lifeguards use in case someone in the water panics and drags the life guard down. “I wouldn’t do that to her,” I thought. I calmly tell the diver that if she needs me to, I can help. The riptides were too strong and the diver isn’t able to swim back to shore without my help. Seeing that I’m calm, talking, and not thrashing around, she loosens her grip around my neck and with the last energy I can muster, we kick as hard as we can back to shore, and the next thing I know I’m being half dragged, half walked to an ambulance.
I don’t feel my arms or my legs, except a dull and shooting pain every time I take a step. My stomach is so queasy I think I’m going to collapse onto the beach and start retching. I’m strangely calm and say, “Can we slow down a bit? I might throw up…” We don’t slow down and I don’t throw up. There are perhaps thirty people at the scene — police cars, ambulances, a fire truck…I apologize to every human I could lay my eyes on. Guilt plagues me. I dragged everyone into this. This is my fault. All these people are here because of me. I made my friends worry.
I am covered in scratches everywhere but my face. Helen later tells me walking out of the ocean with long red scratches all over my arms, legs, chest, and torso, that I looked like Zena Warrior. I should probably watch that show. Dan runs over to embrace me and puts a sweater over my head which I gratefully bleed on. I lay down in the ambulance, still apologizing, now convulsing from the cold. I didn’t feel cold.
Dan sits behind me and puts his hot hands on my face to steady the riptide of shivers. I see Helen outside the ambulance, worried eyes peeking into the window. I ask if she can join. They let her in. My speech is now different renditions of the same apology. My friends forbade me to continue apologizing and my guilt slowly subsides with the tide, getting farther away as the ambulance drives toward the hospital.
The paramedics were Brian and David. Brian says the last time he came to Ocean Beach he’d pulled out a 22-year drowned girl out of the water. The reason why the divers didn’t get to me sooner was because they’d done all their calculations based on time of night, location, and rainfall in the last two weeks. Hypothermia alone could have killed me in ten minutes. Panic could have overwhelmed and drowned me.
Statistically speaking I shouldn’t have made it and they and were waiting for me to float — it’s much less dangerous to rescue a floating body than a conscious one.
The reason the divers swam out was because Huck the Hero jumped into the water after me. I later learned that Huck had gone against orders and ran in to save me in the dangerous waters, and nearly got himself killed if divers didn’t come out to rescue us both.
Brian tells me I remind him of a Hope Study. In this experiment, they put a mouse in the water. In 30 minutes, the mouse gives up. The second mouse, they took out after 25 minutes and put it back into the water. It kept paddling for the next 3.5 hours before stopping. “You’re like that mouse,” Brian says.
Evan, screaming at me from that rock, kept me going against all odds.
If I hadn’t been such a strong swimmer, I would have died. If I hadn’t implemented intense non-negotiable gym every week for a year, I wouldn’t have lasted that long. Had Dan been in the water with us, Helen and Dan wouldn’t have been able to get help.
Every thing that could have gone right went right.
Eventually we enter into the emergency room. I have my private room — #26, and Helen and Dan pop up on either side of my bed, chatting cheerily. Before I finish shivering, Dan puts both hands on my cheeks, and says, “Kim, now that you have your life back, what do you want to do?”
“That friend rule? You know, the rule where I don’t date any of my friends? That’s really dumb, right?”
Helen nods vigorously. She always thought that was a stupid rule but never voiced it until I came to the realization myself.
‘You only live once’ is SO real right now.
“Where’s Evan?” I keep asking. The last time I saw him was when he was a white speck on the rock pushing me to keep swimming.
I keep getting reminded that Evan is okay, in the other room, and asking about me. I ask Helen to go check on Evan and keep him company; he’s been alone this whole time and doesn’t have his close friends nearby like I do.
Helen takes a video of me thanking Evan and hops over to Evan’s room — Room #14, if I remember correctly.
