The feeling just before you die

Everyone has a point in life when you realise you are fucked; and then everything goes into slow motion. Like that moment just after you loose control of a car, and just before you crash. The part when you realise you are going to have to work really hard to live through the next few seconds. I don’t profess to be good at too much in life, but I seem to have a knack for surviving those seconds. They don’t happen that often, but when they do the world shrinks to the size of your dilated pupils, you gain a total zen focus on the immediate task at hand. Nothing else matters and nothing else gets through. I don’t believe in God, but that’s as close to a religious experience as I have ever had.

Religious; in the sense that it is what everyone must feel when they see their impending doom, and the last thing everyone must feel if they don’t escape it. It’s a profoundly humbling experience if you make it out alive, but paradoxically it’s the biggest rush you will ever feel, better than any drug. It’s the feeling that you just escaped a fate that could have been yours: hell, maybe in some parallel universe it was. But it’s also affirmation to me that we control the ‘fate’ of our own ‘destiny’.  That it’s your life in your hands through the actions you make and no one is pulling the puppet strings above.

As those moments come, this one was kind of unexpected. I suppose most of them are, lest we would try harder to avoid them. But I didn’t feel like I was in any danger, I’m a strong swimmer and have been in enough hairy situations to know my way around in the water. We had just arrived at Monterrico on the sweltering coast of Guatemala, to a town sandwiched on a narrow spit of land between the pacific and a vast swamp. The result being a sauna of heat and humidity with a large dash of malaria. The black volcanic sand soaked up the sun so that it burnt you through the soles of your shoes and made the oppressive heat soar to incredible temperatures.

You might think this was a good time to go for a swim, we did.

This ocean was strange. The waves were big, really big but when you looked out to sea it was almost calm, something like what you might see on a boat far out at sea with no wind. There was nothing to discern approaching sets and no rips which we had been forewarned about. It was a sea where the edge of the beach was the edge of the continent, plunging down into an ocean trench. Fuck it, it’s so hot I would have happily swum to the bottom of an ocean trench. I jumped in first and quickly realised these waves were a lot bigger than they looked. You could hear these things hit the beach from hundreds of meters inshore and as they came in they soared up and up and thousands of tons of water dropped straight out of the sky plunging into the ground.

I wasn’t too worried, just swim out past the breakers. I started to swim through the turmoil of white wash and after a couple of minutes was past the last breakers and into deeper smooth water. Not without considerable effort swimming against the surging wash and a few deep duck dives though. I took a moment to grab a few breaths and signalled to Nett not to come out as this probably wasn’t as fun as it looked. And then I turned, and the world went into slow motion.

This was the biggest wave I have ever seen and I’ve seen a few. I mean this thing had been carved by Poseidon in an abyss of doom and hurled at humanity to teach it a lesson. This wave had been born out of ferocious winds over countless days in a tropical cyclone a thousand kilometres away. It slammed into the continental shelf like a freight train and as it did its wave speed slowed in substitution for enormous height and thickness. And it wasn’t even getting started yet. The monumental momentum of so much water built and built on top of itself until it was a towering sheer wall of water of unimaginable height. A soaring tsunami of raw energy that has only one place to go. The kind of wave you know without a doubt is going to kill you, and it was about to break.

Time slowed to a crawl and then some more, every action you make from here on is the difference between life and death only you never know if was the right decision until it’s all over, or all too late. Split second decision time, I took a short breath in and out to exhale the carbon dioxide and took the biggest breath I dared. Half a second too long a breath and I wasn’t going to get deep enough, half a second too short and I was going to run out.

I dived fast and deep, down and down. I felt the shock wave through the water rather than heard it, as the pressure of so much water falling from such a height hit a few meters in front of me. Then I got slammed. Slammed like a king kit to the solar plexus and it knocked most of the air out of my lungs from the force of it. It was chaos, I was being spun, tossed, turned and crushed and I had no idea which way was up. It took everything not to panic. I knew it would pass but not when, and I was running out of air. Decision time, after what felt like an age I started swimming in a direction I thought was the surface, but it was so dark and deep after the wave had passed over head it was only and educated guess. Then I saw lighter coloured water and kicked hard.

I hit the surface and took a huge breath of foam. There was about a foot of it and it meant my head couldn’t get above to true surface in so much white wash. I fought through the surge and got sweetest lungful of air I’ve ever tasted. It was at this point that I thought (as if Nett had any doubts) that I better signal for Nett not to come in as I wasn’t having much fun. Then I turned, and the world went into slow motion.

If hadn’t seen these waves with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it possible. The next wave in the set was rearing up even more massive and utterly terrifying. It was at this point that I knew I was going to have to work very hard to live through the next few seconds. I was still choking on foam, and I was filled with a sinking knowledge in the pit of my stomach that sets of waves come in sixes. I took a few huge gasps of air and dived.

The second wave was bigger, but that fact gave me time. The massive wave couldn’t support its own weight, curling into a dive about five meters further out, transforming into an explosion of water and spray. I wasn’t mucking about to watch, this was make or break time. I swam straight down, I would have swum to the bottom of the ocean floor if it helped, but it wouldn’t have. These waves took everything with them and as it hit me in the chest in identical fashion it was everything not to choke as I tumbled.

This time I kept my breath through sheer determination, glimpsing a flash of light I swam hard for the surface. I didn’t need to see what was coming, I knew and I swam as hard as I could straight into it.  There weren’t many options left, I knew the next one or the one after I would loose my air and drown. I couldn’t swim for shore and if I tried I’d be tumbled into disorientation and drown. It didn’t make it any easier to swim into something you know is probably going to kill you but it was something. This one was slightly smaller that the first two and it was going to be close. I was swimming as hard as I could and I knew if I lost this race I wouldn’t have any breath to hold on to as I tumbled. I felt the sucking of the water being pulled towards to face of the towering wave and swam for everything I was worth. As it sucked me towards it I realised that it was probably going to pull me over the falls, if it did it was too late to do anything about it.

It felt like I was swimming downhill, and in fact I was, the depression created by the suction of the wave pulling the water and me unstoppably towards the falls. Then I hit the face. It was about as close as you can get, in that grey zone after a huge wave goes over your head that you miss the falls but get sucked backwards into the turmoil created by the air gap in the barrel . But it was enough; I swam as hard as I could straight into the next wall of a wave and over the next.

It’s only in retrospect that you get time for reflection, there’s too much going on and too narrow a focus for your mind at the time. But I did have one thought; that was that life’s pretty good really; an absolutely ludicrous thought to think of as your about to drown and that very life is about to be extinguished. But it’s true, life’s pretty good really. A thought made even more profound to me when a local Guatemalan man drowned the next day 100m up the beach. It’s the little things in life we don’t appreciate and one day it will be gone. So chin up, enjoy it, because in the end, life’s pretty good really.

Jack