It’s autumn here in Aotearoa, which is to say it’s getting cold, and I live in Wellington, which tends to the cooler side anyway, except for a few weeks in January and February where it’s too hot. On a cool, dry autumn Saturday I went swimming in the ocean with my friend Kirsten at Freyberg Beach.
Kirsten has been swimming every day for… quite a while. She won’t tell me exactly how long, because she reset her tally when she had to isolate at home due to her flatmate getting Covid. (Personally I think mandatory isolation doesn’t count and she should continue her streak minus that 7 days, but it’s her tally, not mine.) And I’m bad at estimating the passage of time but I’m sure it’s well over a year since she started. All this to say, it’s been a long time and I’m impressed by her consistency. I have trouble being consistent with anything. Sometimes Kirsten shows up for our friend group’s Wednesday dinners with a glow about her, and it’ll be because she’s just come from a swim, and she’s still wearing her swimsuit underneath her clothes.
When I asked her why she decided to start swimming every day, she said “I just like swimming”. I expected some sort of self-improvement explanation, and I find it another thing to admire about her; she does it because she likes it, rather than for any grand or complex reasons. When we went camping in January she went to the river every day, with or without the rest of us. Sometimes my son (who has adopted several of my friends as pseudo-parents) has gone swimming with her in the pool. She’ll swim anywhere, but she mostly swims in the sea. I knew that when I asked Kirsten if we could go with her that weekend that she would say yes.
I prefer swimming in a pool. It’s safer. Predictable. There’s no seaweed, no crabs, no waves, no surprises. The pool is controlled by humans, but we can never control the sea. The ocean is coming to get us, and we’re not doing enough of the things we could do to keep it at bay.
Recent data released by the NZ Sea-Level Rise project shows how much sea levels could rise around the coast of New Zealand, given a range of potential climate futures. The map is alarming. The news about these data is what made me want to swim in the ocean.
The oceans have been helpfully absorbing most of the additional heat from climate change, but as water warms up, it expands. Physics is not my strong point but even I understand that much. So sea levels are rising which means many things but one of them is that we humans are losing coastlines. Our available land is shrinking at an accelerating rate, and because we have built homes and infrastructure near the coast, some people are about to lose everything to increased flooding and encroaching shorelines, like in the small town of Granity on the West Coast. Some of us are shielded from the impacts of climate change for now but many are already suffering its effects. This will continue, especially as the icebergs and glaciers continue melting due to the increased temperatures.
I don’t like the beach much. Despite spending most of my life on islands in the Pacific (always near or in a coastal town or city) I don’t like the beach because of the texture of sand, and I don’t like swimming in the sea because there are creatures in it and I can’t see below the water. Yet it feels foreign when I spend time further inland and don’t have a view of the ocean. It’s a complicated relationship. Some things feel like home even when you don’t necessarily want them to.
The new data show sea levels are rising much faster in New Zealand than previously thought. The combination of the sea level rising while the land is sinking (vertical land movement) means that here in Wellington we could have less than 20 years before there are serious effects, such as floods damaging homes, roads, and other infrastructure. We can’t do anything about the land sinking but we can take action on climate change and with local development to mitigate the impacts.
On that chilly autumn day, Kirsten and I ran into the ocean. It’s no big deal for her, and I wasn’t going to wimp out at that point. It was very cold, and it took a while before I became numb to it. To my surprise, my twelve-year-old water baby danced around in the shallows for a long time before venturing closer to us. At one point, after he’d gone further in, he said “I’m going to summon the waves!” as if waves weren’t coming every few seconds regardless. He stood there and yelled, “RAAAAAAAAAAAAR” at the water. It makes sense to me that he needed to yell. The ocean is a huge, overwhelming thing.
One of the absurd things my brain tells me is that I would have a chance to escape a mountain lion or a bear, but I’d be doomed if I came across a crocodile or a shark. My body is at least made for the land, even if, in reality, I’d have no chance of outrunning or fighting a bear. But it feels possible. In the water, I could only survive for the length of one breath, maximum.
Humans are not made for the sea. People have been clever enough to engineer incredible boats to travel far distances both across and under the water. Those who live much of their lives at sea wobble on the land. I admire those people but I don’t understand them. I want the security of the land underneath my feet.
I’ve been on plenty of boats; it’s inevitable when you live on an island. I’ve swum with the dolphins, paddled in rock pools, travelled on ferries, sailed those tiny Optimist dinghies. Once when I was a kid (maybe 12?) I was sailing an Optimist and a huge stingray-shaped shadow appeared underneath me. This was many years before Steve Irwin died but I still knew to be wary. Those little boats tipped over very easily, and I did not want to be flung out on top of a huge ray that could flick a barb into my flesh. I sailed carefully back to the shore, and the ray (I’m not sure what kind it was) stayed with me much of the way. At one point I stared at it in pure wonder and fear. The image that was first a shadow had clarified in the shallower water and I could see the texture on its skin, the way it pulsed as it swam. Perhaps it wasn’t the shallow water, perhaps it had gotten closer to the surface and to me, seeking the sunlight.
I wanted to go swimming in the sea that weekend because I felt like I needed to make friends with it. I’ve long been nervous about the ocean. I would never live in a beach front house. When I go to Island Bay I make note of the tsunami zones: the blue lines on the road that theoretically show where you’d be safe were a tsunami to happen. (And where you wouldn’t be safe.) But the ocean is coming to get us and perhaps I thought if I just threw myself in, if I insisted to myself that I wasn’t squeamish about unknown critters in murky water, if I pretended to not be afraid of stingrays, that I would somehow be better suited to cope with how much more dangerous the ocean is about to become? Except that implies that it is somehow a personal issue, which of course it isn’t. It’s much bigger than just me, or my city, or even my country.
When I was a child, a doctor told me that there were three career paths that I couldn't take, due to my type 1 diabetes. One was pilot, another was scuba diver. The third one I immediately dismissed as not being something I'd be interested in, so I've since forgotten it. (Perhaps it was astronaut. I have absolutely zero desire to go to space. Earth alone is unfathomably huge and interesting to me, and I don’t need a suit to breathe, so I’m good here.) This prohibition didn't spark a desire to prove the doctor wrong, to show I could overcome all odds. I just accepted that I can't be a pilot or a scuba diver. Very well. There are many other career paths available that don’t involve being responsible for the lives of hundreds of people in a plane high in the air, or having a medical incident deep under water.
Living in a coastal city, the information from the NZ SeaRise project feels overwhelming. It’s hard to imagine what this place will be like with the sea rising 30cm in the next decade or two. How many businesses and homes will be destroyed, how many people will be vulnerable (especially those who are poor or disabled or are stuck in situations beyond their control and aren’t able to change where they live or work).
Sometimes I think about the things we can’t do, and the things we shouldn’t do. There is a lot to be afraid of in the ocean, but the real thing to worry about isn’t sharks or seaweed wrapping around my ankles, it’s the ways we are causing our own ruin. We’re looking directly at it and not seeing it.
Unlike Kirsten, who swims because she likes it, I did do it for some kind of complex self-improvement reasons. It didn’t work. My feelings about the ocean haven’t changed, although it was a fun thing to do on a Saturday morning. The ocean is coming to get us, and we are not built for the ocean.