A Lesson in Swimming
“Doggy dey?”
Everyone I asked just pointed to the water. It’s like walking into a joint, and asking about that one person, and everyone just knows exactly where they’d be.
Oniru Beach is a joint too. It’s not like other beaches. The distant music is louder than the waves here; there are no big waves. It’s more like a bay in the real sense of it. There’s new land ahead that used to be water years ago.
That new land is Eko Atlantic.
The beach itself is never really crowded; a long line of chairs and umbrellas, a suya stand behind this line. Or two. Someone selling chewing gum and cigarettes. Or two. One elderly man singing to visitors with his shekere hoping they get generous.
Just this one man.
At night, the beach is mostly empty, and little crabs that spent the day hidden away, like they’re avoiding human cruelty, come out to play.
This afternoon though, I noticed there were two life boats at shore instead of one. None of them, familiar.
That’s when I saw him. He walked with the sun behind him and I couldn’t make out his face. The Bob Marley and the Wailers shirt he was wearing though, and the way he walked, I could make out.
“E done tey wey I see you o!” He was semi-shouting and walking faster. “I never see you this year.”
Doggy gives boat rides here and doubles as a lifeguard. I’ve met him here almost every time I came, night or day. The last time I saw him, he was boatless and selling little teddy bears to earn.
He started gushing about his new boat as he took me to it. The old one he had was bright yellow and ended up with a leak. This one, he didn’t stop saying, would last longer. It’s an American white Sea Eagle; sturdy seats, better design.
Doggy took the boat back into the water and paddled for a few minutes. I felt genuine happiness seeing him again, and it had very little to do with boat rides.
“This guy is owing me gist,” I told Samson. He’s the one I managed to drag along to come to the beach with me. I’d already told Samson about Doggy more than once.
My plan was straightforward; I get in his boat, and we row as far away from shore as possible, and then I just listen to him talk.
This plan didn’t work out.
“Let me wear this life jacket for you,” Doggy said after he’d paddled for a while. Zips together, and up. Buckle one and two. Click.
“Today, we’re going to swim.”
I didn’t ask any questions or say anything, I just jumped right behind him and walked into the water.
The first swimming technique I learned was kicking my legs. I learned this off my little cousins’ Waterproof Kids DVD about a decade ago. I tried it in a crowded pool, where everyone else was too busy playing around to notice me flapping around like a fish out of water.
The next thing; freestyle strokes. These have kept me alive in every pool so far.
The water at Oniru shows you two colours, the brown and the blue-green. Brown is the colour of sand at shore, and blue-green is the deep.
Don’t go to that part.” That’s what someone had said the first time I was in this water ever. “It’s very deep.”
In typical fashion, I got carried away while flapping around that first time with Ayoola and Segun in the brown. It’s a drop. literally. Like dropping down a hole you didn’t even know was there.
There I was, under water, with empty lungs, and the two closest people to me not being able to swim to save their lives. It took a few seconds to understand my orientation, and with all the adrenaline and chill I could muster, I swam back to the brown.
The second time I made it to the deep, I was holding tightly to the rope of Doggy’s last boat, knowing fully well that if I left that rope, I might die.
And now, here I was, with no rope. As I walked into the deep, my heart climbed two gears.
“No fear,” Doggy said, smiling back at me a short distance ahead.
I swam right after him, and with each stroke, I felt better. Swimming is technique, and a lot of guts.
“Have you ever swam to the bottom,” I asked.
No, Doggy laughed. Too far. It’s not fear that’s his problem, it’s distance. I looked down at my bright orange life jacket and it dawned on me again that my life depended on me remaining attached to it. I gave it a squeeze, for reassurance.
And right there, I remembered my favourite scene from Nolan’s Interstellar:
A claustrophobic Dr. Romilly is sitting on a bunk, in a ship swimming through space. “This gets to me Cooper.” He says as Cooper joins him. “This,” he taps the wall beside him, “millimetres of Aluminium. That’s it, and there’s nothing out there for millions of miles…”
Cooper then says, “you know, some of the finest, solo yachtsmen in the world don’t know how to swim. They go overboard, and they’re gone. We’re explorers Rom. This is our boat.”
This thought didn’t make me feel better, or worse. It was just that, a thought.
“Oya,” Doggy said, and I swam up to him.
“Is this how you swam to Italy?”
He laughed. “I never made it to Italy.”
“They sent you back?”
“That time, there was no need. In Ghaddafi’s Libya, life was good. One canned food was 100 dinars. You go belleful.”
“But why did he swim out in the first place?
“Business,” he laughed. He mentioned an Arab friend and business partner.
We swam further, and when I looked back, Samson was a tiny dot and the shore was a thick line.
“You dey fear?” he asked me.
“No.”
“Your tall Arab friend…” I picked up where we left off.
“Yes,” he tries to remember a name, “Hassan. Hassan. We used to swim out together then. We’d carry many men and women that time and swim, all those Bini and Ijaw them— ”
“Women?”
“Yes na, women follow. Because we know the water, we’ll charge them 700 dinars. We used to discourage them, because nothing was in Italy. Life in Libya was good. But they wanted Italy.”
He talked about the patrol boats and their huge torches, and how when a light was coming close, everyone would go under, bring their nostrils out for air every few minutes.
“No forget say all these people go still carry their things inside nylon.” No life jackets.
Forward we went, and now I started to make out what was on the other side of the water.
“Do you want us to cross,” he asked me.
“Yes.” I didn’t know I wanted to cross until that moment.
Then he told me about a Filipino who challenged him to make the cross just last week. They’d swim, and rest, just like we were doing.
And we swam some more. And more. And we got to a point where I couldn’t tell if we were closer to our starting point or to our destination.
“We used to go to Tripoli Beach that time, and I used to sell one kind of tobacco,” he said, “like snuff.”
“You just put it inside the corner of your mouth,” he put a finger in the corners of his mouth. “You leave it there till it dissolves.”
Weed, he said, was only smoked indoors.
“You will enjoy Libya that time as long as you don’t do anyhow near their women. They can kill you.”
“When did you come back from Libya,” I asked.
“Around Nigeria ‘99,” he said. “I left around 1995. I be small pikin that time. I never even reach twenty years old.”
“How old are you now?”
“Forty-two.”
“Will you ever go back to Libya?”
“Ah, never. They’re fighting there now. All my friends done come back sef. It’s Canada I want to go now.”
If “I want to go to Canada” was a song, it’d top every Nigerian chart right now.
“Let’s swim back,” he said.
“No jare.”
He looked back at the beach, and I looked too. More tiny dots were walking around, and we knew that when we got back, it’d be to a busier beach.
“Make we go back,” he said again, “business dey.”
A tiny white line sat beside a yellow one at shore. A few weeks ago, Doggy didn’t have to worry about competition. Now, every time he spent out in the water was a customer lost to the owner of the Yellow Boat.
I wanted to insist we keep going, but it’d be pure selfishness.
He started swimming back, and I followed. And for the first time, I felt the strain in my calves and shoulders. I was fatigued.
The journey back is always shorter. I wonder if it’d have taken longer to get to the other side, or shorter.
Samson was sitting under an umbrella when we got back, and I couldn’t tell if he thought I was mad or suicidal.
“Water is his life,” Samson said at some point that afternoon.
You bet. He’s from Bayelsa State. He’s swam in every kind of water there is. He’s made a living off water. “It’s from this water I married and had a son,” Doggy had said. His son is 16 now, and in secondary school.
“I fit stay inside water from morning to night.”
I was dipping in the brown later while Doggy was waiting by his boat for customers. We talked about selling dogs for his brother, where he got the name Doggy. If you come here asking for Maxwell, no one will help you find him. But Doggy, that’s more familiar.
We talked about Canada again.
“How are you going to get to Canada, I hear you can’t swim.” It was a lame attempt at a joke.
He laughs. “Any which way, na way.”
“I wish we crossed sha,” I said, while we’re on dry land. “E pain me small.” It actually pained me that we didn’t. A lot.
“Next time you come, we’ll cross.”
