Undertow
My first published essay
Friends,
It’s funny how major life changes carry echoes of earlier periods in our lives. If human history rhymes, the same is true of our private pasts.
This week I’m sharing the first essay I ever published. It appeared in 2003 in Quarterly West, a little journal founded in 1976 at the University of Utah. One of George Saunders’s first stories appeared there in 1992, and he’s always remembered it as one of his major breakthroughs. That’s how it felt to me, too: someone heard what I was saying.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the “why” of the writing life, how easy it is to lose sight of purpose in the “how” of this platform and others. I’m not sure that the why has changed much for me since this piece was published. I still think of essays, stories, and poems as bi-directional bridges leading us out of isolation whether we’re reading or asking to be read.
Quite a lot conspires against us. This piece serves as a useful reminder to me of where my writing life began. I hope it echoes in some meaningful way with you. I share it today free of edits, just as it appeared 21 years ago.
Josh
Undertow
So this is what it’s like, I thought. To drown. Heavy current pressed my head under blind force, beating my ears to deafness. One hand held me off the rock face slanting below in an underwater overhang. The other hand groped above the surface over curves of wet stone battered by spray. My legs began to drift down toward empty space under the overhang. I beat them back to horizontal, just barely. Tried to lift my head, braced on one arm, my legs fighting for their own balance. Not a chance. No leverage. No handholds. Neck muscles against pounds of pounding water. I held position, fading. My skin felt ice water for a moment. Then it turned warm and the surging current felt like stroking hands. The overhang beckoned silently. I let my legs trail that way, turning slowly upright underwater. It was almost done. Then I felt the quiet of that buried space and white heat fired up my spine.
To the side. You’ll come back up.
I kicked back with my legs and felt how weak I was, focused all remaining strength in my feet and thighs. I got horizontal again, pushed to the left, glided around a corner, and was suddenly part of the current. White spray blinded me when my head broke the surface and I paddled wildly to get my mouth high enough for a breath. It filled my lungs like sunlight. I went back under with strength and came up again with seeing eyes. A black, tooth-like rock rushed up on my right. Through breaking foam, I saw an inlet behind it, stroked that way, rolled into dead water and found bottom.
***
Sometimes near death comes up in conversations and I get to be a storyteller because I’ve had a lot of close calls. You could hear about the time I was felling hazard trees with a Forest Service crew and looked over my shoulder just in time to see a ninety-foot Douglas fir swooping down on my head. It might excite you to hear how I only had time to tuck a shoulder and roll away, throwing my head clear, leaving my legs vulnerable. It makes me shiver when I remember getting slapped hard by the branches on the back of the neck and hearing the trunk crunch down on a stump maybe three yards from my head. I might be tempted to tell you that I jumped up and leveled the idiot who forgot to pound a wedge into his back-cut and couldn’t stop the tree when it slipped off the stump. In truth, I crawled out of the mess of broken wood and sap and walked to the government pickup, where I lay on the front seat with my eyes squeezed shut until quitting time. I could spin it as a tough guy story or as a fable of frailty. Either way, you’d listen, I think.
But I wonder what you’d think if I told you about the times my apartment falls silent and the rows of books that are supposed to mark what I’ve been given and can give back instead seem like cold, hard challenges, accusations even — times when memories of touch swell and dance like bright water shapes on a ceiling that sees only a man, alone—times when layers of where I’ve been and what I’ve done clank off and leave only hunger. You might think from my stories that I know who I am. You might feel embarrassed if I told you about moments when years of backcountry stamina shrivel into weakness, reflected in the eyes of a student whom I can’t seem to reach. How many inner thresholds of fear has that student fought? What happens when the underwater overhang of lost hope reaches up and pulls us both down? What use are our stories then?
writes .
You capture so well that feeling all teachers dread, that we can't get through, that the divide between us and the student remains as wide as ever. The switch from action to quiet despair, from solitary panic to shared angst is beautifully done. It felt almost like reading an essay in sonnet form.
"times when memories of touch swell and dance like bright water shapes on a ceiling that sees only a man, alone" —staggering vulnerability, this fleshy human experience. You capture this uncertain fragility and all the valiant attempts to conquer it beautifully.