by S. Ray with photos by Juliette Paige Viera

I want to write as if this were the end of a very long story and be able to wrap things up nicely. I would speak in terms of how far I or we have come and what we have learned, and I would do my best to illicit a tone of melancholy, such as you might experience on the road alone after so many hours, soon to arrive. But I have written that way before, and while each time it is somewhat satisfying, like when you first read the last page of On the Road or the first page of All the King’s Men, it isn’t true to the story I am about to briefly share.

When I was quite young, I had an intense fear of water. I could handle taking a bath alright, but as soon as my mother would pour water over my head to rinse out the shampoo, I felt as if I had to use every ounce of energy just not to die. I would envision a red brick wall that trembled and threatened to fall down.

And at night I would dream of the following scene, often: I would be standing on a small pedestal about a foot in diameter with warm water up to my jaw. There was no current but if I moved too quickly I would risk losing my balance and falling into unknown depths, and I could not swim. So in the dream, I simply held as still as I could to not die, until each time a massive voice came from somewhere in the strange dark dream sky and yelled unintelligible words so loud that they would send waves over my head while I used my arms to stay as stable as possible.

At the age of perhaps nine, something transformative went down. My younger sister taught me how to hold my breath. In the pool, wearing nose plugs, goggles and with silly putty in my ears, she showed me that if you kept all the holes in you head sealed off, it really wasn’t that bad. So we would stand in the shallows, count to three, then submerge and sit under water for five or eight seconds at a time, going through the motions of an imaginary tea party. Believe it or not, the rush was incredible.

Eight years later, on a vacation to Southern Mexico, my mother and I were invited on a night lobster hunt by a Spanish dive instructor and the owner of a scuba shop. The water was deep, dark and warm when the boat stopped a mile or so off shore.

“There’s a deep trench on the sea floor between here and the lights you see,” Fernando explained, “Maybe a couple thousand feet deep. But here it is shallow and there are plenty of lobster.”

As he and the owner of the shop disappeared into the sea, my mother and I watched a trail of bioluminescence  follow behind them into the void. There was a mask on the boat and it took every ounce of courage I had to stand on the seat, put the mask on and dive as far as I could into the glowing light. I swam some strokes away and saw each movement of my arms produced a bright explosion of light that followed like the tail of a comet.

The following summer I got my first job away from home as a river guide, where I learned to swim in wild rapids with a life jacket. On weekends I would go with other guides to the coast where I learned to paddle a surf board and duck waves. One such trip to Big Sur, a foggy day, on the outside, it struck me that I could not see the shore. Only the direction of the gentle, rolling gray waves kept me oriented. My friends each caught waves and disappeared into the mist, leaving me alone. Surrounded by the color gray and the substance water, wearing the color black, on a white board, I felt almost as away from the world as I could imagine.

At that point a sea lion raised his head above the water about 15 feet away and barked at me, then slapped the water with his flipper. I didn’t know what else to do, so I barked back and slapped the water too. Seconds later, a wave came, faster and stronger than the rest, breaking right on top of me, driving me down to the gravelly seabed. I could feel the contours of my face in the rocks. Surfacing, my feet had become tangled together in the leash of the board. As I realized this, a second wave came even stronger than the first, with similar yet slightly more dramatic consequences. One after an other, the waves pushed me towards shallow water, via the bottom, where I was able to crawl to land.

Since then, I have jumped off cliffs and been trapped under boats and stuck on rocks in the middle of raging rivers where there is no other option but to eventually lower yourself back into the current and continue downstream. And nowhere along the way have I ever for an instant considered overcoming the fear of water I first experienced getting my hair washed as a child. Instead, it has become more and more evident that there is a certain exchange that takes place when I rush towards that which terrifies me. In all areas of life, not just swimming. Back country skiing. Business. Love. I bury myself in my fear and my fear, for a few moments, has me, which means that all is right with the world, and all tension is released.

The reason I take so long explaining and illustrating this simple confrontation isn’t to seem bold or express a moral that we as people need to confront our fears or anything like that. I don’t think shoulds or oughts make a lot of sense most times. I just bring this up because each one of these situations that took place after the point in the pool with my sister felt, in their time, like the end of a book. Like, “Then I learned to overcome my fear and that’s that.” But we all know that after the last page in any story, something else must occur to cause the characters to continue their lives. And it raises a question that I’d like to pose to you now: What do we gain in life, either on a personal or social scale, from maintaining and consorting with our fears? I don’t know if I would have ever learned to guide boats if it had not seemed so contrary to my own nature.