A very old woman with enormous fins

On women and water

I don’t know if I’ve ever admitted to this before, but when I was a kid, I used to bring home my English textbooks on weekends and read them, often cover to cover, just for fun. This continued through high school and into college. I’ve never met an anthology that I didn’t want to go full-nerd mode on.

Because of this, essays, poems, and stories I read clandestinely in 2nd grade, 6th grade, and beyond, tend to randomly return to me to this day. One such essay that lives rent free in my in head was an account of one of Jacques Cousteau’s seafaring expeditions called “My Friend the Grouper.” Other than having a banger of a title, though, the essay was otherwise standard English textbook fare: new vocab words and questions to ponder interspersed with photos of guys in wet suits, photos of guys readying scuba gear, photos of guys holding court with the titular fish friend. Photos of guys, guys, guys.

Though I grew up “down the shore” as we say in New Jersey (see my love letter to my state here) and the sea was the heart of our community, I was rarely exposed to examples of women intrepidly exploring the water like Jacques Cousteau did. I knew a lot of surfers down the shore, but all of them were men. I knew crabbers, clammers. Also men. Even farther afield, I noticed men dominating seafaring spaces. On a trip to Orlando during middle school, for example, I noted that all the animatronic pirates on a certain famous theme park ride were men. (The animatronic ladies were only on dry land. Maybe because of the corsets?)

At any rate, these days I’m getting different messaging about who can and cannot wet their feet on ocean exploration. And recently, I’ve been seeing an influx of stories of amazing women having their moment in the waves, and under them. And not just any amazing women, either, but older, mature amazing women, in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond.

Forget “Girls in bikinis, boys doing the twist.” Here are grannies in wetsuits and meemaws hanging ten.

These stories may not inspire you to go out and buy a pair of fins for your auntie when she retires, but they may help rebalance the nautical scales a little. Neptune might be the god of the sea, but in a fight with him, I’d put my money on these dames any day of the week.

The Last of the Sea Women

I can’t stop thinking about this AppleTV documentary about the last remaining haenyeo, a group of women divers in Korea who have been foraging food from the ocean floor for generations. With no scuba tanks, and following the traditions passed down from women before them, the current haenyeo still brave cold waters and perilous conditions to provide for themselves and their families. But that population of haenyeo is on the decline, and nearly all of the haenyeo still diving today are well into their golden years. The documentary follows a small group of divers in their 70s and 80s who still take to the water every day, as well as two next-generation younger haenyeo who are trying to keep the way of life alive (and becoming social media stars in the process.)

The documentary is inspiring in all the ways you would expect of a film about extraordinary women doing extraordinary physical feats. But the film’s unexpected second half that follows the haenyeo as they organize to stop an existential threat to their livelihoods is doubly inspiring. By the film’s end, it’s not the physical endurance of the haenyeo that is most memorable, but the remarkable sense of resolve that the community shows in the face of an unprecedented crisis.

Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage

Photo courtesy of OLAUG website

On the other side of the world from the haenyeo, another group of women meet up and dive together in the cold waters of Cape Cod. They call themselves “Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage.” Unlike the haenyeo, who have been diving for generations, OLAUG was founded much more recently by a local woman in her 70s looking to make a difference in her community. Now there are more than 30 women, aged 64-85, who meet up on the regular to haul trash out of local ponds by hand.

I can’t recall ever seeing my grandmothers in bathing suits, let alone imagine them diving to the bottom of freshwater ponds to lug up abandoned toilets. But listening to this StoryCorps interview with the organization’s founder and one of its newer recruits did remind me of lots of nannas I’ve known. There were plenty of laughs during the interview, something both of my grandmothers liked to do, and as well as references to Tupperwares and cookies, two old-school grandma standards.

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book

Photo courtesy of BBC World Service

No post about old women and the sea would be complete without this portrait of Finnish writer Tove Jansson swimming on the island of Klovharun, where she spent her summers. A septuagenarian in a flower crown (and possibly nothing else?) grinning blissfully while submerged in bracing Scandinavian waters? That is the energy I want to bring to all of my writing.

If you want to channel Jansson’s energy too, check out The Summer Book, her 1972 novel about a very old woman and a very young girl spending a simple summer on a remote ocean-battered island. It’s tender and philosophical and silly and sad. And it is summer perfection. Would you expect anything else from a woman who swims with this much joy?

I wrote about my love for the book in a micro-review in Issue 5 of Revolute.

What’s your favorite book about the ocean? Who is your favorite badass grannie?

Shout-outs

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” deserves a shout out for inspiring the title of this week’s post. And my friend Elyssa deserves one for putting The Last of the Sea Women on my radar in the first place.

Writing prompt:

Write a scene that begins with a character bounding into the ocean. Will the waves propel the character closer to what they want? Or will the waves keep pushing the character further and further back?

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