The Naked Truth

 Few things in life are more enjoyable than running in the nude barefoot on a deserted tropical beach. The ones that are include some illustrious pursuits like sex, surfing and skiing, alongside of binge drinking, tax dodging, and, at a stretch, burning down churches. But the principle stands.

   On this day I had with great joy and determination abandoned any pretence at civilisation, never more than an ultra-thin veneer over my natural and finely honed uncouthness, and had left my shorts, my one item of clothing, on the sand along with a towel, which had hitched a ride for the look of the thing. I stuck my legs out and ran with the joy that can only be gotten from the knowledge that, as far as the eye can see, and then for another three hours' drive after that, to the north and to the south, there was nothing but wind-heaped sand dunes and straggly spinifex looking at me, with the mighty open desert from the inland reaching right up to the dunes. More specifically, there was not another human around for miles and miles, and so there was no one to complain about unwarranted nakedness in a public space.

   I followed the shoreline, dressed at the height of latest fashion in a headband and a watch, and ran in the light of the rising sun, shyly and gawkily sticking its red-eye out above the horizon. A bit like a timorous crocodile caught in torchlight at night, but without the teeth, the shit attitude and the predilection to bone crunching. I did my target distance heading north, then turned around and went back the same way I'd come.

   A flat-out nude run on the beach can only be complimented by a nude swim, two peas in the pod of Sucking The Marrow Out Of Life. Why do things by halves. So I swapped my headband for a set of swimming goggles, waded into the water, picked what I thought was a suitable distance for swimming alongside the beach for the next half hour or so, and launched into my swim.

   The bay here is well sheltered inside a lagoon behind a fringing reef, and while the waves outside of the reef howl and roar and bash and break on the coral, inside the bay the water is virtually motionless. Placid, calm, still, as close to a swimming pool as you're likely to get anywhere. And dark. Very dark. The bottom drops away sharply and leads to great depths not far from shore at all. Depths where the water fades from its usual magnificent turquoise into a solid dark blue very quickly, and gives way to unfathomable blackness after that.

   I dragged my arms through the water, and settled into my routine. Three strokes, breathe left, three strokes, breathe right, glide, kick, breathe, pull, ... swimming is like a meditation, it allows your mind to drift off and empty itself, and fade into quiet and peaceful nothingness. Moving in slow motion, feeling the salt water flow past bare skin. Pure bliss.

   Until something moved off to my left.

   Slowly I became aware that there was something happening at the periphery of my vision, and with a start I dragged myself out of my rosy cosy fluffy state of pleasant numbness.

   I looked left.

   There, appearing from out of the deep dark blue, came a shape.

   A long shape. A swimming shape. A shape with a massive great big fat grey boofhead on it.

   I almost choked, and my eyes opened up so wide my goggles almost popped off.

   Long, pale grey tail. As I stared, frozen in shock, the shape moved towards me, and, seemingly in slow motion, passed right underneath me. Being in the nude, my cock was dangling right there, like a very ugly fishing lure. The thing glided underneath me, no more than half a metre below me, that is, in other words, no more than couple of inches below my cock hanging down ...

   I'm a surfer. My mates and me paddle out onto the ocean in the dark, well before sunrise, habitually, several times a week. We surf in the dark, and have learned to navigate the night by braille. We often see triangular fins in the water, popping up noiselessly right next to us, regularly. The first thing you do is check for the way the animal is moving. A dolphin moves up and down, its mammalian spine flexing forwards and backwards, like it's doing sit-ups in the water. The other thing, that Other Unspeakable Thing that carries a great big triangular fin on its back, is a fish. Its tail moves from side to side.

   Instinctively I checked for the tell-tale movement. My eyes locked onto the tail of the thing below me. There was a fin. Triangular, and sticking out tall and proud. I swept down the rest of the tail. There, halfway down the tail was another fin. Triangular.

   Panic rose instantly. Dolphins ever only have one dorsal fin.

   In the space of a split-second heartbeat my eyes completed the survey of the tail. Frantically, blood thumping in my ears, I checked for the direction of its movement.

   It moved side to side.

   I freaked out, heart beating manically, bile rising in my throat.

   The thing finished gliding below me, in unhurried slow motion, confident in the knowledge that it was top of the heap in the ocean. All 8 feet of it, at least. Two and a half metres, in the other money.

   A Man In A Grey Suit.

   A Taxman.

   A Noah's Ark.

   A great big fucking shark.

   I turned with lightning speed, and started swimming as fast as I could towards the shoreline. A little voice in the back of my head said "don't thrash violently in the water, it attracts them". Another voice, much louder and right at the front of my reptilian amygdala brain screamed over the top of it "fuck that for a joke, swim as fast as you can and get the fuck out of there!"

   I listened to my inner reptile.

   I thrashed around wildly and madly, putting every single bit of my swimming expertise and physical strength into generating as much water-speed as humanly possible. I half lifted out of the water and took off in a blur of frantically wind-milling arms, cutting a furrow through the water so deep you could have planted sugarcane in it, so fast three people could have waterskied hanging off me.

   I broke all Australian, Olympic, and World records. Every few seconds I looked over my right shoulder. The Taxman idly swung his tail left to right, and headed for the dark blue right there not far away. I tried to keep an eye on him while at the same time swimming like a kid with ADHD on an overdose of cocaine and caffeine. He disappeared into the black. If anything that was worse than seeing him. NOT knowing where he was was a lot more of a worry than seeing him right underneath me.

...It was then I found out I was a lot further from shore than I had thought.

   I must have drifted off to towards the open sea as I was lost in my cottonwool dream-state.

   My freaking-out went up another couple of notches, and I raced, and beat, and kicked, and pulled, and dragged, and breathed barely at all. Tried to touch the ocean floor. No cigar. Keep going, look around for his next pass. This is what they do, they come and check you out before they decide whether you're going to be breakfast or not. Where was he? Was he circling back behind me, licking his chops, ready to start in on me by getting his teeth around my feet and working his way up from there?

   After several attempts my feet touched sand. I spun around, scouting the water for a fin. No fin. I put my head under the water while walking backwards towards the beach. Look left, look right, suss out the middle distance. Nothing.

   I slowly backed out of the water, breathing heavily, heart beating a million miles an hour. Gingerly pulled my feet out of the shallows.

   I'd gotten away with it. No shark breakfast today.

   I turned on my heels and started walking back where I'd come from. Enough exercise and excitement for one morning.

 

   But what do you do when you fall of a horse? Do you panic and allow the incident to traumatise you, and undermine your belief in your ability to ride? Do you allow time and distorted recollection to build up and grow bigger and stronger, like a bullshit story in the pub, that grows more outrageous and disturbing every time someone tells it? Until the memory of the event outweighs the actual incident itself, and bears down on you like a giant rock, incapacitating you, and preventing you from getting on with life? My life includes, emphatically, the ocean, swimming, and surfing in the dark. Was I going to allow myself to have an irrational fear instilled in me, like it happens to so many people?

   After all, as everyone knows, statistically here in Australia we are more likely to be crushed to death by a drinks machine falling over on top of us than by shark attack. And while most people rationally acknowledge that, the reptilian brain predominantly takes over, and phobia and wild panic reigns supreme, in popular imagination if nothing else.

   So what do you do?

 

   The next day I went back, got in the water and swam at what I thought was the exact same spot, near as I could gauge it, where I had met The Taxman.

   He didn't turn up.

   Very good.