The last time I swam in Brooklyn was on the 4th of July, at Fort Tilden. The water was 72 degrees, and we dipped in and out, bobbing in the waves, taking breaks to drink canned rosé and eat huge Italian subs. We’d walked so far down the boardwalk that the beach was nearly deserted, a long stretch of sand cordoned off in some areas to protect the endangered plover’s breeding grounds. It was idyllic.
The first time I swam in the Irish Sea was at the 40 Foot, a rocky little outcrop jutting into Dublin Bay. Peter took me there last March, promising that the ocean stays basically the same temperature year-round due to the Gulf Stream coming in from Mexico (or something). This assessment would turn out to to be true, but not exactly in the way that he’d pitched it. The whole truth is that the ocean does stay the same temperature all year round, but that temperature is always fucking freezing. I didn’t know that yet.
The best way to enter the water at the 40 Foot is to jump in from one of the boulders overlooking the sea. The water is very deep. This is no beach: this is a slab of concrete for a changing area, and a few rocky ledges clinging to the edge of the world. (The New York Times once listed the 40 Foot as one of the best swimming spots in the world - make of that what you will.)
Peter jumped in first. Several men had gone ahead of him, and when their heads resurfaced they immediately began screaming. These reactions weren’t exactly selling it for me. I tried to climb in using some stone steps, but the water was so cold that my body recoiled as soon as it hit my feet. (I know now, from Googling, that the Irish Sea is around 47 degrees Fahrenheit in March.) I shrank back, embarrassing both myself and all of the tiny Irish children on the steps around me, who seemed unperturbed by the whole thing. Peter was miraculously swimming laps while waiting for me to join him. I had a dawning realization that the only way I’d be able to get in was to do what everyone else had done: jump before I could stop myself.
I clambered back up onto the tall rock. The sea looked wild. I needed to jump in fast because a bunch more stoic Irish people were lining up behind me, so I did. The drop wasn’t actually has far as it looked, and I was underwater almost instantly. My eyes were shocked open by the cold. I saw gray-blue. A huge jolt of adrenaline as my head surfaced, and then the immediate feeling that if I stayed in that water for more than a few moments I’d start to lose feeling in my extremities. (This was demonstrably not true, since Peter was still swimming nearby, but it’s how I felt.) I swam quickly to the nearest ladder and climbed out as if supercharged, scrabbling up the mossy metal steps. Peter followed me out, cold yet basically nonplussed.
We dried off and Peter held a towel around me as I changed out of my swimsuit. I felt so calm all of the sudden, like I’d been sedated, like I’d just completed a yoga class and could now lie down for meditation. We climbed back up the steps heading away from the changing area. I stopped and turned, staring out over the water, feeling almost hypnotized. When I came to I looked around and Peter was gone - he hadn’t noticed I’d stopped, he was heading to the car - and for a surreal moment I was totally alone on a seaside cliff in Ireland, next to the round stone tower where James Joyce had briefly lived while starting to write Ulysses. Life was so strange.
Since then, I’ve swam at many other places along the coast. Last week at the Vico Baths - another old-school swimming hole where you plunge straight into the sea off some rocks - we went for a swim at 9pm. It was still bright outside, and the water was a balmy 58 degrees Fahrenheit, just about the warmest it ever gets. I was able to swim a couple of laps this time, which made me proud of myself. Next to me in the water, I noticed Peter was shaking. I pointed this out and he corrected me, saying, “sometimes the body shivers.” Disassociation is one way to handle these types of temperatures. Other Irish people swam around me in the water, goading me to dip my head under. Why? “It’s just what you do.”
The bathing culture here is one of extremes, of spending a short time feeling a whole lot so that you can go home and say that you’ve done it. Also so that you can access something very precious: the almost euphoric feeling upon exiting that cold water. Precautions have to be made to swim here. Peter said that once, in November, he and a friend tried to swim out to a buoy, but by the time they got back to shore their torsos had started turning blue. I can’t say I fully understand the draw yet, but I always feel good after these swims, even if I have to force myself to do it. That’s not nothing.
Then, there will be the rare swim that almost transports you to a different place, when you get a glimpse of precious warmth. We swam at Fountainstown Beach in Cork in the late afternoon, at low tide, trying to recover after a late night of wedding celebrations. You had to walk a long way down the sand to get to the shallow water, and it was a sunny 80 degree day. The water actually felt pleasant, I wanted to stay in it all day and float.
I turned away from the group and faced outward, towards the open sea. I could have been anywhere: I could have been back at Fort Tilden. I could have looked behind me and Will and Ellen and everyone else would be there, and we’d have Italian subs from that special spot down in Sheepshead Bay, and nothing would have changed. Instead Peter and his friends and I finished up our swim, our hangovers miraculously cured, and then we walked to a little stall and bought fresh Belgian waffles covered in Nutella and crushed Oreos.
I’ve been back in Dublin for two weeks, and I still feel like I’m in an in-between state. I had a dream - a nightmare, really - about giving up my beloved Brooklyn studio. I am wondering what it means to love the place where I’m settling, love the idea of the life that I’ll have here, while my thoughts are still largely with the place I left. I miss my daily walks in Prospect Park, but I have a really special park here, too, and another flock of baby swans that I get to watch grow up. We don’t have as many food options in the neighborhood here in Dublin, but we do have a yard, and a little outdoor furniture set where we can eat dinners on sunny evenings. The sun doesn’t set until after 10pm in Ireland in the summer: the nights stretch on and on, you almost can’t fall asleep, you have to go out and experience it. Maybe you even have to go out and swim.
And the water is so cold here, but then again, I never swam in New York when it was warm, not really. How can I grieve an ocean that I only visited a couple of times a year? I am trying to learn how to appreciate the differences between these cities without asking Dublin to be the thing that I gave up. It’s not a fair comparison, anyway: nothing else is New York. I am wondering if that’s okay.