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water, allowing me to feel the swells, to sense the depth of water beneath us.

 

Then we returned to shore.  “If you let it,” he told me, “the water will support

 

you.”  It was the only lesson, on the subject of trust, I ever had.  But that said

 

it all.  He demonstrated his premise by swimming out and turning on his back

 

He floated effortlessly on the surface, gently rocking in the swells.

 

With this preparation, swimming came easily.  My father was a good

 

teacher.  He understood that the learning of a physical skill was primarily a

 

matter of observation and emulation.  He knew I had been watching him

 

and that I already “knew” how to swim.  He gave me the confidence and the

 

support to put that knowledge into action.  In a matter of days, I was

 

thrashing about, just beyond the breakers, in something remotely resembling

 

free-style swimming.  Form would come.  I couldn’t have been happier.

 

The night before we left for home, we got out the cots.  We had a fire,

 

toasted some marshmallows, and watched the fire dissolve to embers.  The

 

summer sky was almost audible with the brilliance of its countless stars;

 

the solitary light on earth, it seemed, the beacon at Sandy Hook, across the

 

black expanse of ocean, on the Jersey shore.  My father pointed out the Big

 

and Little Dippers and the North Star.  And then, to the drumming of the

 

ACCABONC                                                                           Fred W. Nagel

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surf, which seemed to me the heartbeat of the earth, we slept.

*                 *                  *

 

That night I went to Gerard Point.  There was not the slightest breeze, the

 

air clear and cool.  The silence and the darkness were profound.  I walked

 

down the beach and looked across the blackened water toward Tick Island.

 

I could barely see its outline.  The water, at the shoreline, was quiescent.  I

 

could almost feel it envelope me, as it first had that splendid day at “The

 

Point”, as it did that very afternoon, as it now held Nancy, forever, in its dark

 

embrace.  I whispered goodnight, as I had done so many times before.  The

 

summer sky was alive and shuddering with the incandescence of a million

 

stars.  It seemed the same as that wondrous sky in Rockaway so many years

 

ago.  And, of course, it was.