“…From The Water”: The Chesapeake Bay and the Profound Perpetuity of Youth

We’d build pillow forts and tree houses…we’d put on impromptu plays…we’d excavate clay with our bare hands. We’d play red rover until sunset…we’d linger in the water for hours on end…we’d laze around on outdoor hammocks! This was my childhood…a millennial childhood…that final golden era before touchscreens took over all our lives.

They say your cousins are your first best friends, and that was certainly the case for my extended nuclear family. The cousins…all eleven of us…dominated a slice of Virginia’s Chesapeake region in the small bayside village of Deltaville.

Docks, pools, schooners, and motorboats…fishing rods, diving boards, bicycles, and makeshift waterslides. These all provided the excitement and entertainment we craved during our stays at our grandmother’s rustic cottage. Granted, we did also live on the brink of the new internet era, so it wasn’t all outdoor escapades. We loved our TV and movie time (which we enjoyed on our designed “kids” side of the house!)

Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective (basically, Sherlock Holmes, but with animated rodents) was a favorite of mine to watch. I must have watched it 50 times. I’m kidding. 50 is way too low a number. Nintendo Gameboys, other Disney flicks (on VHS, of course), and an array of age-appropriate films (such as Last of the Mohicans, a hyper-violent war movie filled with butchery and scalping) filled our days too.

But the outdoors was our main setting for weeks on end! Were we ever dangerous, daring, and reckless? Absolutely. There were of course the obligatory sailing misadventures (co-piloting a sloop with my cousin and nearly capsizing it). But, mainly, how we hopped up and over and flipped off all the piers and other platforms we did without incurring a whole slew of spinal cord injuries…I don’t know. It’s a miracle.

But therein lies the magic of youth…. the unthinking adventurous impulses for which the natural unfolding of things grants clemency and staves off serious catastrophe. Nature forgives. Sure, we’d break a few bones or step on a nail. One summer we all ended up with lice and another with scarlet fever. We used to think you could catch AIDS by playing in the mud (this was the early-late 1990s after all). But here we all are now…alive and well…waxing nostalgic…contemplating the various roads taken or not taken.

Picture yourself on a motorboat. The roaring engine…its fiberglass hull clearing the waves like ski-slaloms. There is the smell of gasoline…your whole body bumping up and down with each “slalom” …slamming you down on your tailbone. Then the water clears…You slip on a life jacket and leap off the side of the boat. The water is cozily warm. A long rope with a handle appears. You inch closer to it and clench it tightly. The rope goes taut. You slip your feet into the board’s rubber boots and bindings, and then, after several heart-pounding moments, the motorboat jettisons forwards, yanking you headfirst back into the water. It floods your nose and mouth.

The boat returns and you repeat this routine. After several frustrating, apprehensive tries, you figure out that you need to relax…let the boat pull you. Then it does. You don’t fall. You’re pleasantly surprised. It’s an incredible feeling…gliding effortlessly along the surface…the rope pulling on your arms with elephantine force…. a misty stream spraying in your face…the golden sun shining gently upon you…the experience of apparent perpetual youth!

It was one of our premiere summertime highlights—wakeboarding and waterskiing. Occasionally we’d frequent amusement and waterparks, but this was the ultimate, proximate endeavor! Really, playing in and upon the water in general was. I suppose that bodies of water—lakes, bays, oceans, rivers- have that appeal…that magnetic draw…an ancient beckoning of sorts to those single-celled, primordial days. The water really was where we “lived” (that is, unless jellyfish or stingrays appeared). There’s a good reason why they say living by the sea is good for your health!

Our grandmother (my mom’s side)—93 years of age– approaches that final stretch. We, of course, don’t want that to be the case and wish her many, many more happy and healthy years. But, even in the absence of any critical, imminent condition, we understand the inevitable “sunrise and sunset” of life. The ancient “sunrise and sunset,” though, takes on a far more calming and life-affirming quality when we look at the actual versions of it.

The Deltaville sunrise…the sky melting into the water (the two indistinguishable); the Deltaville sunset…the etching light of dusk upon a placid horizon. The Deltaville night…a blanket of stars above and the waves gently lapping against the shoreline below. Different tides…different currents…the water remains the same. The very water we’d linger, explore, and reside in for all those lazy summer days. It welcomed us back then and one day, in that profound singularity of all things, it’ll perhaps welcome us all back again.