The Body Below by Daniel Hecht PDF EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Daniel Hecht
- Language: English
- Genre: Military Thrillers
- Format: PDF/ EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
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I have been taking long swims in Vermont’s lakes for the last ten years
because it keeps me fit and, more important, keeps me sane. Ultimately—
literally—it is what has kept me alive.
Ordinarily, being a free swimmer in a Vermont woodland lake is a
joyful experience. That elemental merger with water and air, the selfmastery required to sustain hours of exertion, the joy of arcing down and
challenging the deep: These are good for you. Eventually you slouch out,
shedding water, exhausted, muscles pumped, heroic. You’ve absorbed the
powers of earth and water and air. You’ve been another kind of animal and
you return to your humdrum human life bearing a good secret about
yourself, a private and sure knowledge. You’re emboldened by your hours
spent skimming just above the mysterious, the unseen.
And yet the fear of the deep is always imminent. With eyes open under
water, I see my own shadow raying away into the haze, giving the illusion
of great depth and triggering an instinctive warning: Hidden things lurk
below. I know better, rationally, but that hardwired panic nerve always fires
when something startles me as I swim.
Of course there are no monsters in these shallow freshwater lakes.
Aside from the occasional reckless speedboat, the worst danger I face is
forest debris that has washed off the hillsides. These snags can inflict a
vicious scratch or damage a swimmer’s eye.
I usually swim four to six miles, crossing from one rocky or mucky
shore to another and then back, with no way to anticipate where I might
encounter flood-dragged branches or other obstacles. By long habit, I swim
with eyes open, above and below the surface, yet these clutching things
almost always surprise me. They materialize suddenly, startling me and
sometimes scraping my skin as I flail away.
Once something caught just the waistband of my suit, barely touching
my skin, as neatly as Celine might hook a finger there when we’re making
mischief at the beach. I was a hundred yards from any shore, and my body
felt it as an intentional gesture by some thing that had been waiting for me
beneath the surface. I scrabbled away before turning to peer back
underwater. Just the witch’s claw of a tree limb, clutching up from the
bottom. A freakish, low-odds accident of timing and position. Still, it took
me several minutes to regain control of my breathing.
The day I kicked the blue-white, bloated thing, I was swimming in
Richfield Reservoir. Many Vermont lakes are diamond-clear, their water
electric on the skin and sweet on the tongue, but Richfield is not, and I had
avoided swimming there for a few years. It’s a narrow lake, and the water is
cloudy with suspended silt. I was there only out of desperation—it was just
a few miles from my office, the sun was dropping behind the mountains,
and I figured I’d better swim while I still had some light. I badly needed my
ritual ablution, so impatience won out over the will to drive another twenty
miles for better water.
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