A Thanksgiving Dip

What you do at the sliver of dawn on a cold wintry day when your daughter wakes you up and says, 'Hey! Are we going swimming or what?'

It all seemed simple enough. A dip in the ocean at dawn. On Thanksgiving. It was Plymouth, Mass and not a Pilgrim nor Wampanoag in sight. It was 28 degrees. It was snowing. And blowing. And even the waves looked cold.

It was 6:30 a.m.

My youngest daughter, Lily, was game. My other children were not. Nor was my wife. Nor were any of the other 24 family members in the house. None was up for that matter.

So we went. Down the 129 steps to the beach, careful not to slip on the ice-crunch steps or touch the railing caked with half-inch crusted snow.
Peeling down to our suits wasn’t the tough part. No. Walking to the edge of the water, amongst the rocks pointed and bumpy, and then, well, getting into the water. That was the tough part.

Our feet were pained on the rocks. Each step a challenge. Then, midst our howls and expletives, we finally dove into the milky, sandy green waves and felt the rush tingle exhilaration as we rose to the surface, turned and ran out, our feet feeling nothing this time, making our way to the rock and our towels and shirts and sweaters and coats and hats and, oh, how excruciating it was getting our feet into our sandy, scratchy boots, but by then everything felt warm and we had a sense for what it would be like to die in this weather, when you get so cold and your body has decided to shut down and all of a sudden you feel hot, unbearably hot and you peel off your hat and clothes and boots and that’s why they find so many people naked as a penguin and dead from the cold.

Which is what my daughter had asked when she poked into the room to ask me whether we really were going to do it and then “Are we going to die from this? Me saying, ‘No, Lily. We won’t die.’ even though I wasn’t sure about that.

And so she said ‘Hell yah.’ and we were off, suits on, out the door, coats on, out the door and making our way down 129 stairs, stripping and me finally reaching the edge of the water, the part where it actually has enough sand to stand on and it feels so good but godddddddamned that water is cold and thinking, too, that this may have been one of those ideas that sounded nice, but… and at that moment my daughter came blistering by me, splashing water all over, laughing, yelling, whooping as she drove into a wave.

So I followed.

And after we got our sandy blue feet into our boots, we climbed the 129 steps and went indoors and stoked the fire in the wood stove and drank our thick coffee and stared through the stove’s glass window at the orange flames and felt the warmth inside and out, wide awake and so thankful that we had not died and had, instead, grabbed that moment on Thanksgiving day.

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