Swimming with the [jelly]fishes

The Neuse River near Camp Sea Gull in North Carolina is about three miles wide, brackish, downriver from hog farms and full of jellyfish. I decided to swim across this river. And I'm a really bad swimmer.

Twice a summer the Aquatics staff at Camp Sea Gull — primarily a sailing and boating camp — leads a program called "Swim the Neuse" in which counselors and older campers train in the camp's swim lake over a few weeks with the eventual goal of swimming across the river.

So I did the training. Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. practices. There were accomplished swimmers among the campers and counselors. I wasn't one of them. At first, I took a different approach — something along the lines of flailing wildly and gulping in gallons of water, but I soon got better.

"Why are you doing this?" a friend asked me a few days before the actual swim. I couldn't give her a real answer.

Because we had to get up extra early the morning of the swim, I was able to go to bed a little earlier the night before, as a good night's rest was essential.

My alarm goes off at 4:38 a.m. Already?

I didn't own a speedo, or any of those special swimming shorts, but I did have some lower-thigh length Under Armour that looked like those special swimming shorts and that was enough for me. I had to at least look like a swimmer.

We met at the swim lake at 4:50 for a final pep talk. We were each given a bright pink swim cap, partly so that the lifeguards in the boats could see us, but mostly because they looked totally sweet. I kept mine.

We waited for a few stragglers, loaded onto motorboats, and drove to the other side of the river. On the way over, I was on a boat with the group leader, Dale, and Matt Foglia '09, the only other Princeton student at Sea Gull. We had an almost-empty bottle of "Sea Safe," a lotion that claimed to protect us from jellyfish stings. That was a dirty lie; it didn't do a thing.

The boats unloaded, and we all started wading in the shallow area. "Y'all see that white light over there?" someone said. "That's where we're going." It looked like a star. I had to swim lightyears.

"So what song will everybody have in their heads while they swim?" Foglia asked. When I did cross country in high school, I very often ran with a song in my head. The songs are never premeditated, but randomly arise on the occasion. I had a few that morning.

We started swimming at almost exactly 6 a.m. "This isn't so bad," I thought. I can do this, maybe even swim freestyle the whole way.

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Breaststroke is a good stroke. So is sidestroke. I quickly decided that I would do mostly recovery strokes the whole time, with bursts of freestyle when I felt like it.

The first jellyfish stings came five minutes into the swim, on my right side near my chest and on my right tricep. I didn't see the culprit, but I knew. It would be the only sting for a while, until the second half of the swim.

The song for the first segment of the journey was Kelly Clarkson's "Behind These Hazel Eyes," which for the majority of my freshman year held the highest play count on my iTunes, almost entirely from secret listenings while my roommate was away. The second song was a camp tune (that has its own accompanying motions) about a misguided cowboy. At other times I was pleasantly surprised at what songs popped in my head: "Don't go chasing waterfalls..."

When Sea Gull's pier, which over 1000 feet long, finally came into view, I smiled at my progress. I then realized that the shore behind me looked the same as it did when I started. So much for progress.

I always had difficulty swimming in a straight line, and during one particular fit of freestyle, I heard a lifeguard yelling at me.

"Hey! Hey! You realize there's an engine on the back of this boat, don't you."

I was only feet away from a large gray Yamaha engine, with a "90" inscribed on the back that I took to mean either horsepower or the number of pieces errant swimmers are chopped into. Just to be safe, I avoided it.

About halfway through the swim, the jellyfish stings started to pile up. Chin. Neck. Hands. Calves. Forearms. I generally responded to these by flailing wildly. In fact, for most of the trip, anytime I brushed up against a piece of straw or debris, I responded the same way. By the end of the swim, I had been stung seven or eight times, and apparently the jellyfish weren't that bad this year.

Another one of the songs in my head was Georgia-based Perpetual Groove's "Teakwood Betz," which I had heard during a Mess Hall skit a day or two earlier. It kept me in a nice, steady kind of rhythm that seemed impossible to interrupt.

I only briefly enjoyed this lull until a jellyfish broke my cadence with a sharp sting to my face. I could feel it on my nose, cheeks, and lips. I violently slapped my own face. I littered the river with four-letter words.

I had been in breaststroke for a while when this occurred, but at that moment I went into freestyle, the fastest freestyle that I could, the fastest freestyle I would do the whole morning, like Michael Phelps-style, because if I were going that fast the jellyfish couldn't catch me.

This lasted maybe a minute and a half until I settled for breaststroke again.

Eventually I made it close to the pier, and I could hear the bugle blow to wake the rest of camp. It is 7:30 a.m. I am not that far away. The beach where I started finally looks distant. I could see the shore ahead where people had already finished.

I made the final push, began wading and then running, because the water became too shallow to swim in. I stepped on some sharp rocks that really hurt. Dale, Foglia and many others who had already finished cheered me on as I completed the final stages.

Once out of the water, each person runs up the beach to the Sail Loft and touches a plaque on which a quote by the camp's founder, Wyatt Taylor, is inscribed.

"Things don't just happen," Taylor said. "You make them happen."

It was 7:46 a.m. I had finished in less than my stated goal of two hours, and though I was in the last quarter of people to finish, I was content with the fact that I actually did finish. And didn't die.