Swimming with Audrey

“I like being solo in the wilderness,” says Audrey Sutherland, and it’s as simple as that. She sits on the wooden deck of her house on Hawaii’s North Shore, a six-foot inflatable kayak at her feet, the sea within view. In a few months she will be 90 years old, but she’s still sharp and capable, and her smile is dazzling. Having read her book, Paddling My Own Canoe, about her solo adventures paddling in that kayak beside the ocean cliffs of the Molokai coast on 12-foot seas and giant waves, I feel as though I am meeting a legend, but she couldn’t possibly be more welcoming and friendly. I love her even more when I notice that she is wearing a bit of eyeliner and pink lipstick, a charmingly feminine touch of vanity in a woman who has led an epic life in the great outdoors.

So here I am on my quest to say yes, approaching 60 with a desire to live life more fully and be a little braver – how could I not be in awe of this woman? And I hadn’t even known there was a sequel to Molokai. It turns out that when Audrey was 60, she became intrigued with the “total wilderness” of Alaska’s Inside Passage and decided to retire early and explore it in her trusty little kayak. Alone.

Little by little, in the course of two decades, right up to her early 80s, she managed to cover 8,000 miles of Alaskan and British Columbian coastline. Her dining room tabletop is a glass-covered map of Alaska with the portion she kayaked meticulously outlined in black felt-tipped pen. On the shelves behind it are sharks’ teeth, shells, journals, and books.

“You’re an inspiration,” I tell her, though I know she’s heard that before.

“You just have to know what you want,” she says. She has no fear of being alone, none whatever. She tells us that she saw thirty-one bears in the course of her Alaska travels, all close, within a hundred yards.

“Bears judge by smell,” she explains. “They know I am a female without cubs. Not a threat. But they're curious, and wary. I’d tell them, ‘I’m just a harmless Caucasian female, nothing of interest to you.’ One time I was writing in my journal and I heard a sound and there was a bear just thirty feet away. ‘What are you doing so close?’ I asked the bear. We were both curious and wary.”

She points to her famous kayak and offers Linette and me a chance to go out and paddle in it. And here I must confess to Audrey that I cannot swim, and that I’m afraid of the water.“

It makes sense to be afraid of the water,” she says, and I immediately feel a little smarter. “But I can teach you how to swim. It’s really very simple. Three steps: the kick, the arm stroke, the breathing. The breathing’s the hardest. But we’ll break it down. You don’t have to do it all at once. We’ll go down to the quiet water, and we’ll start where you can keep your hands on the bottom and kick, and then we’ll go to where it’s waist-deep. Come back tomorrow. I can teach you.”

What do you say when Audrey Sutherland offers to teach you how to swim? It’s like wanting to get started in Buddhism and the Dalai Lama says he’ll give you a few tips.

She chose a mask that I could wear for the lesson and said she'd find a bicycle tube to wrap around my middle. (There was some comfort in the thought of that bicycle tube when she mentioned it, but I didn't even end up using it.) She reiterated the three steps we would cover and asked us to meet her at around 10.

"Are you sure?" I asked

.And she said yes.

"Okay. I'll do it. I'll try. But if you change your mind in the morning, it's okay. I'll understand."

And she said, "I won't change my mind."

There was no turning back. I was so nervous, I called Jeanne, and I know exactly what Jeanne told me because it was so poetic, I wrote it down: "Just remember you came from water. The water will embrace you. The water will hold you."

That night Linette called Audrey's son Jock just to make sure everything was set. "Did you guys find that bicycle tube?" she asked.

"I've got a motorcycle tube," he said.

"Should we go to the temple and pray?" she asked.

"We've already done that," he said.

I did not sleep well that night.

My swimming lesson with Audrey was well-documented; Linette stood on the shore and took 127 digital images of the proceedings. Most of the time there isn't much to see, and often it just looks like some sort of baptism is taking place, with a white-haired priestess standing above a woman who is prone in the water and partially submerged, but I thought you deserved at least a glimpse or two after all this build-up. So there we are above, at the quiet water, and I am still vertical at this point, but in well over my knees. Are you impressed?

Audrey was very systematic in her approach. First step involved me lying face-down in the white fringe of surf with my face in the water, hands on the bottom, getting used to things, learning to turn my face, hold my breath, breathe. I know -- it sounds so ridiculously basic. Soon I had to forfeit the security of touching the ground; we moved out to slightly deeper water and practiced kicks and strokes, and just as Audrey said, the breathing was the hardest.

At one point I swallowed a big gulp of salt water that reminded me of the stuff they make you drink the night before your colonoscopy, and I didn't like that very much, but I was trying to be a good sport, very cognizant of the fact that not only was my instructor 89 years old, she was also Audrey Sutherland!

We went out further. Well, actually, when I look at the pictures, we weren't very far from shore, but it was deep and distant enough for me. And then there came the business of leaning back and trusting the water to hold me up. And not just any water -- this was ocean. I was, in a word, scared. But as you can see, I did it. Yes, that's me. Floating.

Briefly, ever so briefly, I was buoyant. The sounds of the world receded and I felt myself suspended in a watery realm, separate and solitary. I did not feel embraced, but I was lightly held, and happy not to be sinking, although the possibility of sinking was never entirely banished from my mind.

It has been proven, however, that I float.

And I did go out to sea.

And I felt a special bond with Audrey. We are thirty years apart in age, almost exactly, and I'll never be as brave as her, that's for sure, but she is proof that there are different ways of moving through the decades.

"Three more lessons," she told Linette afterwards, "and she'd be swimming."

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