Ten Miles Out

A Reflection from Myrtle Beach

Ten miles offshore, the water is a different color. Not the pale green of the shallows or the bright chop of the nearshore break but something deeper, more deliberate — a blue that seems to come from below rather than from the sky above. The boat rises and falls on swells that were born somewhere else entirely, a thousand miles out, traveling all that way just to pass through you on their way to the shore.

I went out yesterday. We chartered a boat and were ready before dawn. I wanted to go. I had been looking forward to going. And for the first hour, before we cleared the inlet and turned east and the captain opened the throttle, and we crossed into open water, it was everything I’d hoped for. The spray. The speed. The pelicans dropping like stones into the wake.

Then the engine cut and we were sitting in it. Just sitting, the way you have to sit when you’re fishing, patient and still while the boat does everything but stay level. The swells moved under us in long, slow intervals, and the boat answered each one with a roll and a pitch and a yaw that my body could not make sense of. My eyes told me one thing. My stomach told me another. Somewhere between those two reports, a negotiation was happening, and I was losing it.

I fixed my eyes on the horizon, the way you’re supposed to. I breathed the way you’re supposed to. I am a grown man who has been to the ocean a hundred times, and I sat on the gunwale of that boat ten miles from shore and felt the world come undone in a very specific and humbling way.

The same ocean.

That evening, I sat on the beach and listened to it come in. The same water that had been moving through me all day in that slow rolling pitch was now arriving at the shore in its familiar way, breaking white and clean and retreating with its long hiss through the shells. I sat there until it was dark, and the sound of it settled something in me that the day had loosened.

There is a right distance from everything. Not a distance of safety — the shore is not safer than the open water in any absolute sense. But a distance of relationship, of proportion, of being close enough to feel the thing without being overwhelmed by the thing. Ten miles out, the ocean owns you completely. On the shore, it meets you. It offers you something — the shells it has carried, the rhythm it keeps, the cold edge of it moving across your feet. You already know this, even if you haven’t had words for it — the thing you love that becomes the thing that undoes you simply because you got the distance wrong.

I have been ten miles out from other things, too. From people I loved at the wrong distance. From beliefs I held so deep I could no longer see the horizon. From institutions I trusted so completely that when they rolled, I rolled with them, with no shore in sight and nothing to fix my eyes on. There were years when I confused depth with devotion, when I thought the further out I went, the more seriously I was taking the thing. The water was the same water. I just couldn’t find the shore from where I was standing.

The ocean was the same. I was the one who had gotten the distance wrong.