Intro

When I was four, my mother took me to a pool in Alexandria, Virginia, and paid for me to have swim lessons. I was terrified. The instructor said, “Don’t worry, if you drown your parents will sue me, so I won’t let that happen.” This was cold comfort, and the lesson was an abject failure. We never went back.

The next summer, we found a pool closer to home and an instructor whose instincts were nearer to the heart. He was gentle, methodical, and patient, and under him I thrived. By the end of the summer, little me was lapping the fifty-meter length. With the fervor of the converted, water became my passion. I took years of swimming and diving lessons, became a lifeguard, made friends with people who owned boats, got my open-water diving certification in a quarry in a December so cold I heard my teeth crack, bought a twenty-five dollar beater surfboard and drove to the Maryland shore to attempt