"Immortality"

As an American, and more important a “human”, we tend to think that we are more immortal then most other species on the planet not only because we have the capacity to think and reason but also because of our vain sense of place on the food chain. I can attest to this as I seem to have grown up with very little sense of fear.

Fear is something we develop and sometimes overcome as a child growing up. I have the unusual handicap of not being able to remember much of my childhood. I grew up with a father in the Air Force which necessitated my family and I having to move from place to place every four to five years. This has had an adverse effect on my childhood memories as I don’t seem to remember any of them to any great detail, in fact, what I do remember comes to me in broken flashes with a dreamlike quality leaving me with the impression that they may be more dream then reality. What memories I do have, have been foretold to me by my parents and I’ve come to realize over the years are more an exaggeration then the real truth.

In the absence of any memories that I can truly trust, I don’t really have a sense of fear, in the traditional sense. I have no allergenic adversities nor phobias and the things that most people fear I actually gravitate towards. I do recall as a child a reoccurring nightmare that I don’t know whether it is based on reality or a manifestation of a deep down fear.

The dream originates during my pre-adolescent age when my family and I lived in Louisiana. I don’t know what age I am at only that my mother and father are driving the car and I am in the backseat. I don’t think any of my siblings are in the car with us (I have two sisters and a brother) but I am in my seat belt and we are crossing over a large drawbridge. For most of this trip I am oblivious to what is going on around me as my attention is focused on some toy. My attention is only diverted when I realize that the car has stopped midway on the drawbridge and bridge suddenly begins to split in half and raise for no apparent reason. Now, in reality the action of the bridge splitting in half and raising would cause gravity to pull all the cars downward which it does to every other car on the bridge except for my father’s which hangs split eagle in the center as the bridge is being raised. My parents are oblivious to the catastrophic situation we are in but I watch in terror as we continue to rise high into the air and the water below becomes ever so more terrifying.

When the bridge stops moving my father’s car is perfectly balanced on the edge of the split bridge and only I know what’s really going on. Then all of a sudden the car tips over the edge towards the watery abyss below. My parents never seem to notice as they continue whatever conversation they are having as the car plunges head first into the water. As the car begins to fill with water my parents still don’t seem to realize the situation as I scream and yell for help in the back seat. The water engulfs my parents and soon comes for me as the car continues to plunge deeper and deeper into the abyss with no bottom in sight. I look through the rear of the car only to see that the surface is farther away then I ever thought possible. When the water does finally reach me, I begin to panic as it becomes apparent that I cannot swim nor breath under water.

I never know the end of the nightmare as I’ve always woken up before it ends but it’s the only dream that has haunted me since my childhood and the only one that I remember. It’s also the one thing that resurfaces every time I’ve tried to learn to swim. Unlike my father (who won’t go anywhere near the water because he can’t swim) or my mother (who can’t swim but will go in the water regardless as long as it isn’t higher then her waist), I like the water. I just can’t swim. I’ve been told that once you learn how to swim you never forget. Well I’m testament that this isn’t true as I took a swimming class in elementary school where I was forced to swim so I at one point in my life was taught how to swim. I even vaguely remember jumping off the high board with a life jacket and I remember learning how to float and everything but in a practical application outside of the class I don’t know how to swim.

I like to say that when it comes to my childhood memories they have been “Swiss cheesed” as was a common saying in reference to Sam Beckett in the hit television show Quantum Leap. I remember some things by nature and some by instinct and others not at all. For the longest time I’ve always thought of my inability to remember how to swim in this same manner and that when the time came it would all come crashing back to me. By this admission I liked to believe that I was still “immortal” in spite of everything to the contrary.

I bring this all up now because on Saturday, July 26th I came to realize for the first time in my life that I am far from immortal. Like I said previously, I have no fear of the water in the usual sense so I ended up going to a water park and river tubing with a very good friend and her daughter and friend. I thought I had never been to a water park prior to that day but everything at this water park (located in Helen, Georgia) was all too familiar to me leaving me to believe that I had been to one such as this long ago when I was a child. I was nervous getting on the water slide for the first time but my friend was with me and everything seemed to go off better then expected. In fact, the entire experience gave me a sense of déjà vu. The experience was a blast and I ended up going on the individual slide soon after. We spent a good two hours at the park before deciding to go tubing down the river.

Tubing down the river should have been a cake walk next to the water park as the river was practically manmade and no deeper than two feet (on many occasions we had to wade through the shallow areas of the river) but my disrespect for nature and my arrogance to the fact that I wasn’t a swimmer would soon got me in trouble.

My tube was linked to that of my female friend while her daughter and her friend were also linked. We had come to a calmer moment in the trip down river when my friend recognized an area of the river in which people used to swing from a rope attached to a tree and dive into the river, which would mean that at some place in the river it was deep enough to dive from. When we came to that area of the river the rope tied to the tree was gone but there were several people who decided to detour from the river and dive for themselves. The water only came up to their chests and they were only teenagers so I assumed that the water wasn’t all that deep.

I was feeling pretty good from the water park earlier and when one of our party wanted to know just how deep this part of the river was, for some unknown reason I made it my mission to know. I jumped out of my tube and into the water. I couldn’t touch the bottom nor could I swim so imagine how much of a shock it was to me when that reality finally hit me. I plunged into the water causing my tube to overturn itself. I didn’t have a handle on it so I ended up going down into the water. If I had completely panicked I would have probably drowned but instead I managed to flail my arms around when my head first disappeared under the water but when I peaked back up I grabbed hold of the link between my friend and my tube and pulled myself above water.

My friend told me she helped me grab hold but I don’t seem to remember this. The only thing I remember and that came to me at that exact moment when my head was under the water is that damnable childhood dream and the knowledge that one of my best friend’s brother (who also could not swim) drowned when he was carried away by a rogue wave in the ocean when he was only walking in waist deep water along the beach. That’s what came to me and what caused me to believe that I very well could drown right then in there.

I didn’t experience any sudden ability to swim. The only thing that saved me that day was my friend and the fact that I didn’t panic. I did in fact experience fear for the first time in my life.

Once I grabbed hold of the link between the tubes I over turned my tube and used it as a flotation device to swim towards more shallow water before I was able to jump back into the tube.

Before that day I hadn’t thought about that childhood nightmare nor the death of my friend’s brother in a long time, but my coming so close to death did have an affect on me. I’ve been thinking about just how fragile life really can be and the fact that as much as I like the water I really should know how to swim. Because of my complete disregard of my lack of ability to swim I could have died and when a person comes so close to dying they tend to see things in a different light.

There are so many things I did wrong that day that I can’t undo. There are so many regrets but the one thing I learned is that I am just as mortal as anyone else and that I should make it an imperative to learn how to swim if not only to prevent a repeat of this incident but to also help me rid myself from that childhood nightmare which tends to continue to haunt me to this day.

None of us are immortal, so why do we continue to think and act as if we are?