Water makes me think about evolution. And monsters. But mostly evolution.

I’m afraid of open water. By “open water,” I mean anything but the shallow end of a swimming pool. I don’t like to wade, wondering what stirs in the bed of soil underfoot. I don’t like to feel waves crash against me in the ocean, certain I can identify shiny gray fins a dozen feet further out. I don’t like sail boats, or paddle boats, or ferries. I really hate ferries.

I don’t like to think about how, a few generations ago, some contributor to my genetic makeup was swimming peacefully in the deepest parts of a hot new ocean, proud of itself for being composed of multiple cells. It makes me feel small and young, the way I’ve felt my entire life and am still expecting to outgrow.

That’s what water makes me feel: small and young and powerless. It can be made safer with chlorine and tile, but still, if I close my eyes and lay back, I become disturbed by the slow lapping, as though the water has thoughts of its own.

My fear is not entirely intellectual; I wouldn’t give myself that much credit. I was afraid of water when I began swimming, as most children probably are, and never was able to effectively coordinate my limbs to stay afloat. Later, out of determination to survive if cast overboard, I established a basic dog paddle, but reached no higher level of ability. At the public pool, all females were the victim of merciless dunking and wrestling, entirely inappropriate and initiated mainly for adolescent boys to make contact with the acceptably bare skin of adolescent girls.

Being plunged, powerless, into the alien, airless underwater seemed to me the worst torment. I could have been made to say anything by holding my head under. Even brief “dunks” lifted a panic in me that could linger for hours, leaving my body humming with adrenaline. Once, dunked in a crowded pool, I became disoriented in the tangle of other bodies, held down in part by my own struggle - a struggle so fierce my swim suit top slid out of place. When I climbed out of the pool with shaking white fists, my friends called after me, believing I was embarrassed. No: my cheeks flamed in the wake of that terror. I didn’t go to the public pool again.

What a strange thing, the physical distance. That my ancestors were things I couldn’t have seen, smaller even than a small component of my eye. What about time motivated complexity? Why didn’t the tiny aqueous beings remain as they were?

Stranger, the emotional distance. What would my many-times great grandmother/father (I believe they were asexual) think, were s/he to know that I fear the seas that birthed me? That the places they hatched and lived, down deep in the lightless press, are places I will never touch?

I have always been afraid and fascinated by the scientific explanations of human origins. Science attracted me from a fairly young age, and I took accelerated courses at the high school while in junior high, mesmerized by the busy activity of cultures and cells under a microscope, eager to become a person who could understand, if not the entire world, at least some of its individual parts. This phase came after my attempts at being religious from about nine to twelve, following any friend who would take me to church and youth group, trying to pray with my eyes closed so tight I got head aches, certain there was something wrong with me if this faith I tried so hard to embrace wouldn’t come.

I have felt this way for as long as I can remember. I have a clear memory of myself at six years old, standing on a stack of athletic mats in the carpeted hall outside the gymnasium. I have just watched several of my friends spring from the mat to the floor, an act of what appears to be very basic athleticism. I hesitate, staring the short distance to the ground, knowing with grim certainty I will not drop to the balls of my feet with the coordinated ease of my predecessors. But they are telling me to jump, and it never occurs to me to say “No, I will not.” The possibility of escape never crosses my mind. I understand that I will jump and fall and it will hurt, but in my mind there is no alternative.

So I jump, and for a moment my legs are underneath me and my balance is steady and I am sure, for a moment, I have unknowingly evolved, my body has suddenly become my ally, I am just like all the others who jumped and landed and laughed. And then the moment ends, and something goes terribly wrong, and I close my eyes and slide across the carpet on my face.

A week later, my sister and I each got a Golden Retriever puppy. My aunt spent rolls of film on us on this occasion, and so I am immortalized on every near relative’s mantle, hair French-braided, smiling with gaps in my teeth, pressing my cheek into the fluff of my puppy’s ruff, sporting a nose of festive bright red. My aunt continually forgets about my injury; when she shows the picture to visitors and they ask about my face, she is certain I somehow got jelly on my nose.

This memory is not constructed entirely of images in my mind. The then-adults in my family have retold the story in my hearing and I can’t reliably call most parts of the experience mine. The moment that did strike me – and only me - was the one in the air, when I felt hope, even joy, and a glorious sense of belonging. And then the fall, but not the pain; only the way my chin approached my chest and my elbow went beneath my body, and the odd feeling that a large hand was pushing me forward.

Religion seems a necessary part of human culture. Anthropologists point to the way the structures of religion reinforce and empower the specific peoples’ social structures. Hunter-gatherers are nature worshipers, assigning spirituality and connectivity between themselves and the biome they rely on. A New Guinea creation myth describes a woman giving birth to the trees, the animals, and man, designing a sense of species siblinghood. Agriculture and its resulting large populations, specialized trades, and internal heirarchy give birth to religions of similar complexity. I always think of the caste system and the Hindu religion, the idea that the untouchable is penitent for a previous life and obedient to this one in order to be born well into the next.

Or maybe this is all wrong. Maybe religions are more truth than emotional mechanism, and the absence of some receptor inside me keeps me from perceiving it. It has occurred to me lately that we humans are susceptible to rusting with age, a sort of corrosion of the heart, a film that buffers us from pure emotional experience. I remember the painful clarity of childhood, the joy of being outside with no assignment but to muddy hands and knees at the pond's edge catching minnows. The misery of chores, the ache of perpetual discovery, the way a winter day wears when there are forts to be built, yetis to imagine.

More than that, I am still waiting on growth, adulthood, understanding. The main thing that has changed about me in the many years that separate who I now am from the kindergartener with the rug burn on her nose is the new suspicion that this might be as good as it gets. Adulthood might be a mythical thing, characterized by a wisdom no sane person ever achieves. As a child, I was eager for age so that the overwhelming complexity of the world would come into focus, so that the unpredictable stranger whose body I occupied would identify herself. But I’m still here, looking at my reflection in surprise, beginning to doubt the epiphany will come.

The thing I always tried to avoid was having my head pushed under, to the point of no longer going swimming with my friends. Sometimes I would go under myself, just to escape notice, evade attack. The universe below seemed less threatening when I entered it voluntarily. In fact, the underwater was full of pleasing sound, as though every note was swollen, and an odd sense of slow motion.

I remember standing at the window, and I don't know what window or how old I am, only that I am watching my sister get on a bike and pedal up the street with her friend. I cannot break my unhappiness down into its individual parts: source, reason, duration. I know only its intensity, an unnatural, tangible urgency, and the rhythm of a heartbeat that seems to exist outside my body. It’s possible this younger me is accompanied by the future self I now am, standing out of sight, assessing all that is foreshadowed by this brief moment of meaning. It is as though I am swallowed by the living, changing relationship between my sister and me, aware of but uncomprehending its future of trust and anger and friendship.
Sometimes I wonder if time really separates the stages of a person, or if our linear existence is in fact simultaneous. I don't really know how to describe a static, basic identity of self any other way, but that if the future is tied to the past the past must be tied to the future, so the future's fingerprint pervades even before it seems to have been pressed into the paper.

I like to think about a connected universe, but one so vast that, relative to the rest of existence, polar bears and jellyfish and frogs and I truly are indistinguishable relatives. Mars is a planet we know to resemble Earth; aside from orienting themselves similarly in the solar system, the two are also nearly equivalent in density, are composed of the same materials, and have hard crusts and dense cores. Evidence of channels, canyons and other topographical formations typically created by surface water led many scientists to believe Mars might support life, that it once boasted oceans to rival those of the Earth’s. Smaller than the Earth, its weaker gravity dismissed the bulk of its atmosphere to too great an extent. Life requires water, and Mars’ thin atmosphere allows liquid water to dissolve almost instantly. Its surface it is an unpopulated desert, the bed of its ancient ocean dry. Mars’ example intensifies for me the beauty of Earth’s many accidents, of which my species is one. What unlikely miracles are our aging ocean and the specific stability of our atmosphere, together an improbably perfect womb from which our planetary family has sprang.

I am composed mostly of water; the ocean is essential not only to my origins but my life in every tomorrow. I am swimming in myself. So why the fear? My list of favorite animals is densely populated by the aquatic: whales, dolphins, seahorses, manatees, frogs. And while I can’t call jellyfish a favorite, they do occupy my imagination most.  Jellyfish can boil up by the billions, piled upon themselves, choked by their own numbers. One of the planet’s oldest species, they have drifted through the oceans with a mysterious, brainless brand of intelligence, able to survive shallow inlets and the pressure of the depths with similar vigor. Warming conditions favor them over fish, but their numbers begin to threaten their ability to flourish. The sea, though vast, offers limited resources, and regardless of the jellyfishes’ underwater prowess, the ocean’s surface is a barrier they cannot breach. So too the human, staring at the unreachable stars from the crust of her spinning planet.

My out-of-water favorites are more disappearing species: elephants, polar bears, bees. I suspect it’s their rarity that makes them seem valuable to me. My mother used to have a photograph taped to her desk at work of a baby polar bear sleeping on top of her mother polar bear, perfectly echoing her posture, their eyes closed, their pointed noses pointing ahead. One of the first animal trivia I knew was that polar bear fur is clear, not white, their skin black, their coat and hide a perfect example of the warming potential of sunlight.

When I was eight, my mother took me and my friend to the Denver Zoo after twin polar bear cubs were born. Their mother wouldn’t raise them. I remember asking my own mother to clarify this point several times. I have an unusually excellent mother, and her example has made me define motherhood a certain way. On this day, through the one-way glass outside the makeshift nursery designed for the cubs, I see them splashing in a blue plastic baby pool. I decide I will one day be a zookeeper, like the two privileged women who each collect a cub and offer a bottle of replacement milk. Later my mother tells me they are actually veterinarians, while we stand beside the enormous body of a female polar bear suspended in the salty water of her imitation ocean. She is the cubs’ mother, and she swims at the glass without seeming to need to go to the surface for air, staring into my eyes, her vision apparently superior to the supposed limitations of the one-way glass. If I help her get free, I think, she will take her babies to the cold place where they belong, and feed them herself.

At this age I also had a pet turtle named Swampy, purchased before salmonella became such a scare and pet shops stopped carrying them. She was a Red-Eared Slider, an aquatic turtle with a dark green shell and two brilliant red patches behind her yellow eyes. She had the diameter of a coffee mug when I got her, but over the three years I spent with her she required three aquarium upgrades to accommodate her growth. Yet no matter how much space she had, she inevitably wedged herself into a corner, pushing fiercely at the glass with both forelimbs, pressing her cheek or her beak against it desperately. Here she had food, a heat lamp, and sometimes live goldfish to hunt, but she always looked for the weakness in the glass that might mean a way out. She sought the rest of the world, the rest of the water, either unaware or unafraid of its perils.

Once humans were creatures such as this, acclimated to a planet without fences, latitudes or continents, knowing instead the command of the seasons, the universe of a single ecological niche. I would go there, I think, back there to occupy the space nature designed me for. I would go back to be born there, ignorant of how we will all live in ten thousand years, and I think the fear would disappear. It manifests itself, I theorize, in the ways we remove ourselves from our origins of air and soil and its potential for disaster - or at least inconvenience. I think this is the true religion, familiar to every species swimming the seas in a harmony interrupted only by our interference: the cycle of all life, our great network. But we insist on separating ourselves from the unity of what is in and on and above this planet, a planet formed by the death of stars and fed by a star that will one day be redistributed, all united in all time, until the expanding universe at last goes still.

But religions are difficult, requiring one not merely wade but dive in, all the way down, past the range of sunlight to the unseen deep. In Sunday school my teacher regarded us nervously, because we were five years old and outnumbered her only in quantity, not combined years. We were a nation of tiny pagans only recently colonized, our loyalty not easily transferable from Santa Claus to Christianity. I remember our uncanny ability to ask the exact questions she couldn’t answer with confidence: What’s the difference between the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost? Does Jesus have a special job in heaven? What exactly do I have to do to get him to take me with him when he comes back? I remember it all so well because I was very aware of her discomfort. She was, I’ve come to think, beckoning for us to jump into the middle while she stood knee-deep at the shore.

We acknowledge our family in spheres in most human cultures. The immediate family is most valuable, the extended less so. I would give my sister my kidney without thought should she fall ill, but possibly not my surly Uncle, certainly not some descendant of similar ancestors I’ve never met. And perhaps this is the central issue, keeping us all from a clear conscience, a human trait directly in conflict with the insistence on personal survival that emanates from the remnants of our pre-sentient brains. Why should we not all surrender a kidney without thought to any unmet relative? Why should we not sacrifice to protect our family in its entirety? These are the unconquered fears that keep me from the threshold of the peaceful adulthood I always imagined. The clarity of my neglected responsibilities and the prospect of physical death shackle me, no matter my belief in the endurance of my smaller components, and thus their participation in an eternal future.

During my parents’ first separation, I am in the passenger seat and my dad is driving. The world is bright and blurry outside the window. My bare thighs are sticking to the leather. We have just played miniature golf. What “separated” means has been explained to me by my older sister, but I am a self-involved creature, and the significance of this event from my perspective is my father’s renewed interest in my story writing, my watercolor paintings, and my complicated entrepreneurial effort to open a reptile zoo.

“There was a car in the driveway,” my father says casually. I am distracted by the coffee table book of horse photography that is his latest gift. “Yes,” I say, offhand. “That’s mom’s friend who’s visiting. He’s been staying the night.” There is a painful silence, and in a slow moment I see what I have implied to my father. I understand this oddly alluring power that is our ability to hurt one another. My moment of marveling is shadowed by shame, but I do not erase the implication. I do not say mom’s old friend is strange and sad and slept outside by the goldfish pond in a sleeping bag. I pretend instead that I have had no realization, that the thing binding us so tightly is still invisible to me.

A day later my friends are swimming in the lake, bounding from the rusty boat to disappear in the water, going under to reappear, slick and vibrant, seconds later. I linger at the bank, feeling the organism of the water, the pulse of the mossy soil underfoot. The water is warmer than the air. I go deeper, until my shoulders are submerged, and this is as far as I can go. It seems essential, and perhaps it always will, that I keep my head above water.