Cold Comfort: On Learning to Love Cold-Water Swimming

How the winter ocean became my balm for eco-grief

Photo by Asya Graf, whose forays into winter cold-water swimming have helped her deal with grief over the climate crisis

The waves pick us up and drop us like they do the rafting gulls, like we too are made of buoyant feather and bone. The gulls are unfazed and judgy about our swimming. We’re cold and getting nowhere. But it’s winter and progress is not the point. We whoop as the waves slap us in the face, adapt our breathing, continue west toward the aquarium. The wind today, like most days here in winter, is westerly, which means we’re swimming right into it. The tide is coming in, and when it does here in this corner of the New York Bight, it flows into Jamaica Bay, sweeping east. So we’re swimming against both wind and tide. But we know that’s preferable to hitching a lift on our way out, then fighting to return. Always start against the tide in the colder months.

We make it to the last jetty before the aquarium, the part we call “the shark tank,” and race back, tide and wind shoving us along. With every passing minute, my fingers splay more on the pull, my muscles tense, my heart races in a futile effort to warm me. My little pod is mostly fine, acclimated winter swimmers that they are, but I stumble out of the water dizzy and confused—the first signs of hypothermia, nothing to worry about so long as you dress fast then chug tea and jog. Not so easy with the gusts of wind that mess with our changing, sending unattended plastic bags saltating down the beach, too fast to catch on numb feet. We picnic afterward, our little community of swimmers and polar bear old-timers, bundled into our parkas, hoods pulled down low over our eyes, like our own bird colony, sharing tea and donuts with shaking hands. The donuts are crunchy but we learn to surrender to the sand along with the cold.

Our beach has eroded as more intense winter storms encroach ever higher up the sand, carving out an elevated berm that cuts us off from the terrestrial world. The backshore has been reclaimed by colonies of gulls (laughing, herring, ringed) and terns (common). They stand facing into the wind. The still-warmer upper layer of the ocean is churned up by the wind and mixes with the thermocline, the colder deep water welling up from off the continental shelf. The overturning brings the last of the season’s nutrients to the surface, and the birds are here for it, dive-bombing for plankton and mollusks. Up on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, where it’s less windy, mostly elderly immigrants from various reaches of the former Soviet Union sit on benches sunning their faces. They’re a match for the gulls with their judgy vigilance.

This coastal ecosystem of shivering swimmers, rafting gulls, and ex-Soviets that speak my language: this place has become my home landscape, more home to me than anywhere else in my city.

---

I didn’t mean to become a cold-water swimmer in my late thirties, in New York City, far from the warmer ocean off Southern California where my family and I settled after our immigration from the Soviet Union. I grew up swimming competitively in the Olympic pools of suburban San Diego, a controlled environment of optimized water temperatures (78-79 degrees, ideally), exact lengths, smooth surfaces, gutters to reduce surface turbulence. And even when, years later, I ventured into the ocean, the goal still seemed to be, obviously enough, to swim. I wasn’t prepared for the cold or how it would undo me, my stroke, my definition and felt sense of swimming. I didn’t know about the wild at the heart of cold, or how this experience would force my body to surrender.

I wasn’t prepared either for the upwelling of eco-grief. The more I swam in the cold ocean, the more I thought about the ocean’s temperatures, what the cold means to life in the ocean—and what warming oceans means for life on our planet. I became not just an obsessive swimmer, but also an anxious post-swim researcher, trying to understand what I observed in my ocean swims. Mostly I wanted to know: What is the impact of the climate crisis on my ocean, this tiny sliver of it I’d fallen in love with off my home coast?

Bear with me for a short lesson on the ocean’s thermal capacity. The ocean is the largest solar energy collector on Earth, as well as the largest carbon sink, far greater than all the forests and rainforests combined. This means that the ocean absorbs tremendous amounts of heat without a large increase in temperature, at least not for a while. This ability to store and release heat over long periods of time gives the ocean a vital role in stabilizing our climate. Without this reprieve on paying our dues for the carbon we’ve already released into our atmosphere, the devastating heat waves of today would be far worse. The world would be even more on fire.

But the ocean is losing its resilience and its temperature is finally rising, the effects of global warming from several decades ago. The marine heatwaves of today are the result of our profligate burning of fossil fuels back in the latter half of the 20th century. Since 1970, the ocean has absorbed some 90% of excess heat added to our atmosphere by the combustion of fossil fuels and other human activities. That number scares me. Another way to put this: More than 90% of the warming of our planet since 1970 has occurred in the ocean. No matter what else we do from now on, we have committed to this additional warming. The oceans will give back what they have taken in—what we have put in them.

What my swimming body wants, which would reduce its pain and increase its pleasure, is warmer water, the very thing that is devastating for life in the ocean. Besides, it would do me no good. In a little over a century, temperatures have risen approximately 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the upper 2,300 feet of the ocean. That increase would barely register in my body (think dipping into 38 vs. 39.5 degree-water in January), but is more than enough to decimate corals and mollusks, who need cool water to build their shells. My body wants warmth in December but I’m grateful that it hasn’t come, not yet.

So I teach myself to surrender to the cold. It’s not there for me, but for the gulls and mollusks and krill. This gives me comfort. Bring on the shivers if the corals live.

Try it with me, feel the cold, the comfort. We walk in up to our knees, stop, feel the ache of cold creep up our bones. Walk in further, up to our hips. We gasp as the cold chills our groins and bellies, but it’s only the gasp reflex; we breathe through it. We dip our hands in, feel the sawing ache of cold rise up our wrists and into our arms. We pant some more, curse, holler, and thank the cold. We haven’t yet burned, mined, refined, and driven it away. Try it next time you dip on January 1st, or tomorrow. In a world growing hotter, we may all become polar bears, the human ones dipping off Brighton Beach, the animal ones whose home ground is melting from under them. The stern touch of cold feels increasingly like a reprieve, like a temporary extension of our lease.

---

A season passes, two, now going on eight, and I keep returning to the winter ocean long past when my body tells me to stop. The longer I swim into winter, the more my body learns to relax into the cold, to open into the ache. Swimming in the cold isn’t about swimming. It’s a cold study. You don’t swim despite the cold. You swim to know the cold, and the cold ocean. As the water temperature drops closer to 40 and then below, I stop swimming and dip. Let’s call it what it is.

Cold is like grief, I’m learning. It’s not one thing as I feel it in my body. It’s a process, a journey, an evolution of states, from initial shock to acceptance to searing, elating fire to a settling in the blood and organs to the body’s eventual breakdown. I can walk the stages of cold like descending a ladder. With enough time in the water, I know I will go down, it’s just a matter of how long I’ll last. Desire to last has nothing to do with it. The cold and my body’s reaction to it win over will, over longing.

Cold swimming begins and ends in pain. But in between is joy, the alchemy of cold in the body. After the initial acclimation, the cold turns to fire, a burn coming from somewhere deep inside, spreading and holding me in a sheath of flame as I swim, and for a while, I feel invincible. I catch the water, pull while my hands can still feel and haven’t splayed into limp rag dolls. Kick kick kick. Surrender to the water, to the fire within that will sustain me a while, to the rhythm of my swimming body. Watch the gulls bop by on the waves, watching me back unimpressed. Smell the water. It’s so clean it smells like ice, like air above the tree line. Rock and mineral and wind. And a bit of gull poop.

When the body is submerged in cold water, it knows to limit cold blood flow from the extremities in a process called vasoconstriction. This is the ache we feel in our feet and hands and neck when we first enter the water and our vessels contract. Our bodies know to protect our vital organs at the cost of our limbs. Our hands and feet grow tingly then numb and limp, but the core stays relatively warm, though that too is dropping. We lose heat about thirty times faster in water than air. Vasoconstriction is not a lasting solution. It buys us time, gives us a window in which to save ourselves. It is that window in which we burn. And it’s once we emerge back on land, seemingly safe, that our blood vessels expand and the colder blood from our extremities floods back in. That’s when the afterdrop comes for us and we start to shiver.

In that window of reprieve, I learn to slow down, explore. Most days after the new year, I have less than ten minutes in me, sometimes no more than five. The water in the winter is shockingly clear. Plankton needs sunlight to photosynthesize, and in the darker months, much of the microalgae that cloud the water have gone dormant, sunk to the bottom, or died off. But the apparent emptiness of cold water is also an illusion because the gulls still plummet into the waves, and mussels still cling to the jetty rocks, slick with green algae. “There is the promise of a new spring in the very iciness of the winter sea,” Rachel Carson writes in The Sea Around Us, “in the chilling of the water, which must, before many weeks, become so heavy that it will plunge downward, precipitating the overturn that is the first act in the drama of spring.” I like knowing that spring is coming, but I’m also learning to love the cold ocean on its own terms. Sometimes it’s when the ocean is least full of life that it feels most enlivening, and reminds me that on a rapidly warming planet, the cold is the promise of life.

I’ve learned to long for the cold. Every year now, I wait for summer to end so that this other swimming can begin. So that I can remember that we still have a window of time, short as it is, and rapidly closing. What will we do with this time before the afterdrop?

Asya Graf is a writer, psychotherapist, and swimmer living with her wife in Brooklyn. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Queer Love Project, Cimarron Review, Vestal Review, Gulf Stream, and Santa Fe Literary Review, among other journals. Essays drawn from her memoir-in-progress, Everything We Lose: Reckoning with Athletic Girlhood, have appeared in Sport Literate, Aethlon, Underwater New York, and Ilanot Review. She has been supported by two artist residencies on Governor’s Island in NYC with Underwater New York/Works on Water, and has taught creative writing at Boston University as well as at the high school level in New York City. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MSW from Hunter College, CUNY. She can be found at www.asyagrafwrites.com.