The Trickster I Know

Originally written in 2020 as part of a YeahWrite weekly competition:

It’s summer in south Jersey, and that means the drownings have begun. This week alone, three swimmers, a teenager from New York, a young adult from northern Jersey, and a local elderly man succumbed to the ocean.

I grew up ten minutes away from this vast trickster. As a kid, I learned that under still water lurks danger. A rip tide tears you away as quick as a large break can push you under. A jellyfish can sting you as fast as a shark can bite. And the ocean never forgets what it could not take.

My scariest memories involve water. Eight years old at a birthday party and pushed into twelve feet of chlorinated water. I sink to the bottom and look up, seeing the sun filtering down as water enters my lungs. A hand grabs mine and pulls me up. I cough and choke and live.

Twelve years old in the ocean. The water comes up to my ankles. My feet sink into the sand, shells and crabs and stones swirling around. I turn—and the water slams me in the face, tripping my feet like a martial artist, and taking me down to the sand. It’s all salt and foam and water—water in my eyes, water in my nose, water in my mouth. A whistle. A pull. I pant and choke and live.

We call tourists shoobies because they brought their lunches in shoeboxes—or so the legend goes. But tourists bring more than food and money. A thrill, a confidence, that the ocean, no matter how vast or unknown or rough, is no match for them. They see the ocean as giving. They lose a shoe or a boogie board and the ocean returns these items to the shore. The ocean always returns what is lost.

These shoobies bring their ignorance and naivety to the ocean. They do not know they’re lucky when the ocean lets them return to land. They do not know the currents underneath the low waves wait for them.

But I know. A day before two of those aforementioned men drowned in the ocean, my friends and I walked along the waves, letting the warm water wash over our feet. The sky was grey with hints of pink and splatters of red. The waves started soft and gentle, and then as we continued our walk, they pulled back and slammed into the shore. We shrieked and ran to higher ground. Shoobies near us laughed, still standing in the shallow water, unaware of what held their lives in its watery, tricky hands.

For my friends and I, we know the ocean is a vengeful child, calm one moment and raging the next. We know the ocean never forgets what it could not take.

It did not take me that day when I was twelve. The waves reach for me with every crash onto the shore. It beckons me to break through, to dive in, with a promise that it will return me to shore. But I am not a shoobie. I bring no ignorance nor naivety in my reverence of the ocean. I bring my awe and deference, an appreciation, and an acknowledgement. I walk along the shore like one may walk by a sleeping guard dog. It is only luck that I leave unscathed.

I do not enter the waves, no matter how calm, how still, how enticing, because the ocean remembers what it could not take. One wrong move and it could take me still. For all those the ocean has taken, their bodies return to shore, like a lost shoe or boogie board. The ocean always returns what is lost, but I will never give it the chance to take me.