Semifinalist
Terrain.org 15th Annual Nonfiction Contest
Nowhere does it say not to swim. We find a sand entrance where the ocean floor isn’t hiding urchins or anemones. The sand leads to froth around our lips, so we swim. We say “luna de miel” like honey is sticky on our tongues. I am 16 weeks pregnant. We are honeymooning in Isabella, Puerto Rico.
The hearts of pregnant women pump 40 percent more blood.
In minutes, we’re behind where the waves crest, in a calm field of water that carries us nowhere we can stand. I want to stand. When I swim towards shore, I travel nowhere. We’ve stumbled upon a riptide. A surfer’s beach.
A pregnant woman’s resting heart rate increases ten to 20 beats per minute.
I am gasping for air; new and piercing alarms sound in my body. My husband tells me to turn over and float. A wave or two crash over before I can hold an inhale. He swims beneath me, swims for us both, parallel to the shore.
An exercising heart is a heart greedy for the oxygen needed to feed the muscles.
When a wave’s ten-foot muscle separates us, he finds the ocean floor, which isn’t sand you can squeeze your toes into for grip. It’s reef, which feels like sandpaper crumpets, and he falls when waves yank. The next wave smears the length of my body into the reef and the tide rewinds itself, indifferent to its barbaric hunger.
I look around, limp with cortisol and adrenaline, sand clumps weighing down the crotch of my bathing suit. It is all so fucking beautiful. Caves and tidepools cozied by giant boulders. The sea water slapping and retracting in haphazard gulps, reaching for absolutely no people, no towels, no volleyballs, no Sally Rooney novels.
If I was scrolling Instagram, my thumb would stop and double tap. But the ocean was so indifferent to my staying alive. To the life contingent on my life. What nearly killed me was so dreamy. It deserved many likes.
In her 2023 book Saving Time, Jenny Odell writes: “I think of the sign I sometimes see on Northern California beaches which have riptides, sleeper waves, and no lifeguards, and where unsuspecting people are sometimes swept away. It says, ‘Never turn your back on the ocean.’ That sign always puts me in my place. It reminds me that the beach is not an amenity for humans, that I can be there, but I better learn the laws of the ocean if I want to stay alive.”
Once, hungover on a funyaking trip with a former partner, we cross mild rapids on the Hiwassee River when I approach the rapids sideways without aggressively paddling. He yells on the other side:
“The river isn’t your friend. Nature doesn’t love you.”
Where did I adopt this unspoken belief that beauty will keep me safe? That finding oneself in the outside elements—when indoors provide easy regulation and comfort—is a kind of virtue that would somehow be rewarded? I dread being anything but wonder-dumb in beautiful places, and I carried my unborn child straight into this delusion.
At the risk of reducing human history to a pleasing cause and effect timeline, let’s see how we got here: The agricultural revolution shifted people’s lifestyles from wandering and foraging to being more rooted, as growing food required staying power and a closer attention to the weather patterns of a place. The industrial revolution moved more people into cities and inside factories to work longer shifts and towards a more globally interdependent economy—and further from nature’s unpredictable cycles. The information revolution took our professional lives further inside, operating smaller and smarter machines. The digital revolution put computers in our pockets, and an entire day’s work will often consist of a person sitting in one climate-controlled space looking and speaking to the same screen with at least a dozen other browser windows splintering our attention, producing guilt over what’s still left to read, write, purchase, do.
When I was a high school English teacher, I taught Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and one day, the students commented on how the 19th-century characters were ALWAYS standing and looking out the windows of the house to see who passed. They couldn’t understand it. What was so interesting out there on the gravel road? They asked this with their laptops open, even though nothing about our day’s discussion required it.
In Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, he calls this state of being physically one place and virtually elsewhere, the state of being “always elsewhere.” It’s one thing to be inside a home and looking out the window where neighbors, mail carriers, or drones could stop by and deliver news that could break your heart, but having the windows of your inbox or your Instagram feed live in your constant peripheral awareness seems, well, different.
Speaking of vision, half of the world could be nearsighted by 2050, or so estimates the World Health Organization. A 2021 study looks at the eyesight of homebound children during COVID-19 whose time was spent primarily indoors and online to complete school work. For children six to eight years old who had been a part of this study since 2015, the lockdown months showed a more dramatic increase in myopia. When your world of interest is a two-dimensional rectangle, the eye muscles created for spheres, for redwing blackbirds and boats on the horizon will atrophy.
It’s no wonder people are scrambling to the outdoors in desperation, why phrases like “Go touch grass” have become a joke for the hyper-online to return to a more spherical, sensory reality. To sit among the fire ants. It’s no wonder spending time in nature has become synonymous with church, therapy, and self-care, and therefore reduced to its benign qualities—the Spanish moss! The dolphins surfacing in sync! The canyon, a lasagna of interiority! It’s also no surprise that the outdoor “industry” has grown 6.7 percent per year from 2018 to 2023, shepherding more t-shirts into mountain town boutiques that say things like “I’d Hike That.”
Years ago, I loved teaching British Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth. His righteous indignation over industrialization fired up the teenage environmentalists. He elevated the natural world as transcendent and sublime using the commoners’ English. But these days I am growing weary of romanticism and nostalgia. It pairs so nicely with fear: of technology, climate change, worsening weather patterns. And while I fear those things too, I am pregnant in a spherical world, spit out by an ocean I hadn’t studied the patterns of and had approached like an Amazon shopper. I walked into that sea like I was penetrating the Instagram square.
During the workday, I step away from my laptop to check on how the tomato seedlings outside are faring the wind. How the French lavender’s purple could possibly be that purple. I, too, suffer a fear of myopia and wonder how to introduce another human to a world that is spherical and nuanced and unjust and dangerous and so beautiful you could just cry. You could just walk right in and think it’ll save you from itself.
Corrie Lynn White is the author of Gold Hill Family Audio (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2022). A 2021 Tennessee Arts Commission Fellow in Poetry, she holds an MFA in Poetry from UNC Greensboro and currently lives in Chattanooga with her husband and son. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, New Ohio Review, and Best New Poets, among other places. Read more at www.clwhite.work.
Header photo by Corrie Lynn White.
