To Live and Die in Paradise Pt.2

I’ve come-to lying on my back on the sand. The sky above is grey and the sound of the crashing waves is the only thing to be heard over the screams of a wailing mother.

I feel sick. Like I’ve just eaten at Golden Corral then climbed into a tumble dryer. My legs are jelly and I’m covered head to toe in sand and my own vomit – it is a new low point, but I am happy to be alive.

“Is the boy OK?” I ask.

An older Khmer with shock white hair steps forward from the crowd. Neatly pressed, with a kind face hiding behind large spectacles he kneels beside me with a bottle of water. Hardly recoiling at the smell he whispers in my ear.

“He will live. You saved him. You are a hee-ro.”

Despite the funny way he over annunciated the word, it nevertheless cut through me like a knife. Wanting nothing but to curl into a ball and disappear I closed my eyes to shut the world out, but when I opened them the crowd that ringed me had only grown.

In the moment I was filled with an utterly devastating guilt. Is this what heroism is?

Does it come with the nagging knowledge that things could have easily gone the other way and you would have played the villain instead – the living breathing embodiment of their collective sadness. That a hundred times I made a terrible decision to save myself and let this boy drown? That every time I went back, every time he clawed my skin and pulled my hair to fight for every breath, every time I broke away – the look that will haunt me screamed “don’t leave me”.

There was nothing heroic in the water. The decision to go in the first place – to set off exhausted into the sea in search of an unknown, that was as much as I was willing to accept. The rest – the fight, was something I’d rather bury deep inside or, in this case, exorcise through the telling of it.

As a child I would often have nightmares of being alone in the middle of a furious ocean. The peaks and valleys of white eclipsing any view out or hope of rescue. In these dreams I would kick and kick, but with no direction I always sank beneath the waves before waking in a sweat, the imagined taste of salt water in my mouth.

Despite this, I have an ingrained love of the ocean. Being born on an island it was my only toy. Yet even as a toy I learned early on to respect the sea – it’s power always limitless, ours so terribly finite.

Living on an island you feel in your bones the power of hurricanes and rogue waves. You feel the pull of the swells. You feel the boat heave and list in the storm – something that maybe only moments earlier seemed solid, stable, now being tossed uncontrollably.

You feel small. 

As I waded through the breakers and out onto the relative safety of a wide sandbar the ocean beyond took on the same nightmarish tone as my childhood dreams. Gone were the long rolling waves of Spring favored by local surfers, these were fast and aimless, crashing into each other from seemingly all sides with no break.

Between the waves, out of sight of land, the ocean almost resembled a sandy desert. A bleak wasteland of white.

This particular beach, known locally as Long Beach, or simply Empty Beach, is just that, empty. The businesses that had previously occupied the area in the heady days of lawless expansion had been cleared by armed crews and their structures bulldozed. In their place a charming (for Cambodia) promenade was built along the beach. Free of business clutter, they had even gone so far as to install public restrooms (purely for show and closed three years running).

Despite the toilets being locked up tighter than Fort Knox a large group of Asians had chosen my normal swimming spot as their camp. About 30 or so were milling around in and out of the water, and a big rented coach waited for them at the muddy road.

I paid them little mind and dove in a little further down to begin my swim.

That first shock of cold water, far from it’s soothing Summer warmth, is invigorating at first. Diving beneath the massive waves, letting them glide silently over my head, I am at home. The soft swish of the sand and the distant chop of a fishing boat propeller are the only sounds beneath, while above the constant howl and crash of a thousand waves breaking upon each other echoes down the beach.

Save for the occasional jellyfish or octopus, the bottom is flat and barren. There is no reef, and as such very little life that hasn’t already been fished out and either made into soup or sold. With nothing to run into or harm I am free to flail about as wildly as I like, and I do, for the 45th day in a row.

An hour a day of getting kicked, tossed, and tumbled to within an inch of my life – I found it to be great excercise. Always pushing it, always on the edge – either riding a monster on it’s back, or being swallowed up by it.

Daily, with each beating, the pounds I’d packed on in Nepal wasted away. Slowly but surely my endurance had gotten better, my lungs stronger, and what few muscles I possess began to peek out from under dumpling-induced flab.

But, as I cut beneath the surface that day there was a different feel to things. The currents were stronger – the swells and riptides creating a vacuum of rushing water below while the wind and whitecapped waves roared above.

Fully spent after an hour, and with every muscle burning, I longed for a cold glass of ice water and so caught the next passing wave towards the beach. As the water drained from my ears I began to hear loud shouting in my direction. Between the waves I spotted a young Asian man calling to me. People here are very friendly and I initially assumed (or hoped) he just wanted to say ‘hi’.

I waved back smiling, but the strained look on his face said it was far more serious than a hello.

“Help my friend!” He yelled, pointing frantically out to sea.

“Where?” I screamed back.

“Very far. Please. I cannot.”

His face was a mixture of fear and guilt.

He gave one final point vaguely into the distance, I fixed it as best I could in my mind and dove headlong into the waves.

Getting out into the deep ocean showed how big the swells truly were.

With nothing to stand on and only my head barely above water, each wave towered overtop of me. My first thought after only a few minutes of searching was that I could not do this for long. Had I not just spent the previous hour purposefully making myself tired, perhaps it would not have been as difficult, but already at the outset I was running on fumes.

I kicked on in the direction that he had pointed but began to feel outmatched by the serious currents in the open sea. Doing my best to ride each wave to it’s crest I used this vantage to scan for movement, but the foam layered the water so thickly that it took what seemed like ages to finally spot a small patch of black hair in the vast field of white.

On seeing this man for the first time the immediacy and difficulty of the task became clear. I was happy I had found him, but, as difficult as it had been, that was the easy part.

Now exhausted and out in the open ocean the fear began truly to set in. How do we get home?

To be continued…