Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [49]
On July 6, the newspapers declared it a fine beach day, made more precious by the rain predicted to arrive over the weekend from the South and Midwest. As the sun climbed that morning, bathers made their pilgrimage to the sea. On the broad, sandy beach, knots of children built sand castles, a beach activity being popularized by Lorenzo Harris, the one-armed sculptor from Philadelphia, who was molding “Neptune's Court” nearby. Wispy clouds decorated a china-blue sky, the air was warm and brilliant with light.
If young women on beach and boardwalk were demurely watching young men in their swimming sports, the glances that morning turned frank and blatant, for as the sun tipped toward afternoon, a young man suddenly demanded unseemly attention. Robert W. Dowling, nineteen years old, stood on the beach and declared he was going to swim four miles straight out into the Atlantic, sharks be damned. Long-distance swimming being an amateur sport of the Edwardian wealthy, men and women would have taken the measure of the young man in a glance, then turned toward the horizon, bidding their children do the same. It would be an impressive sight from shore, a story for a postcard or a letter home, something to witness. The quick feet of gossip deepened the anticipation. Robert W. Dowling was the well-known son of Robert E. Dowling, president of the City Investment Company in New York. The boy had made headlines the previous summer, making a forty-mile swim around Manhattan Island. This new feat should not tax him, and the presence of a shark was not a true concern. And so Dowling swaggered to the line of the surf and plunged in. Soon he was as an arrow splitting the blue.
Not far south on the beach, Leonard Hill attracted no such attention. He was a wholesale druggist from New York City, treating his wife to a stay at the Essex and Sussex. That a hardworking American businessman could mingle with the social queens and princes said something about democracy then that William Jennings Bryan would have cheered. More ambitious, perhaps, was Hill's planned swim. He intended to swim straight out a quarter mile from the coast, then stroke five miles due south. If there were rogue waves about that day, Hill would be more likely to find them, but he was a strong swimmer and unafraid. He was unconcerned, too, about the reported shark attack down the coast, in the direction he was heading. Few people saw Leonard Hill as he gracefully turned in the water some distance from shore, and, powerfully windmilling his arms, struck out in the direction of Beach Haven.
Both swimmers grew smaller on the horizon, dissolving finally in distant trails of white.
To Find Prey
Off the coast, a tall fin divided the sea into precise segments, signaling the path of the huge fish to the unbounded emptiness, to a few gulls and smaller fish that scattered. The fish appeared gray and white and moved with the precision and trajectory of an enormous bullet, a shot somehow fired in slow motion through the medium of the sea, moving with a purity and suppleness that were eerily beautiful. It is a principle of aircraft design that “a good plane is a plane that is nice to look at.” The great white swam on the surface of the deep like an airship given the lift of a summer sky.
Yet the shark's design was sophisticated beyond the flying machines of Langley or Wright or Curtiss, beyond human understanding in 1916, for it swam and hunted with the inborn perfection of thoughtlessness and genetic memory. It kept a steady keel that afternoon, and its fins wobbled slightly to one side or the other. Invisible lateral lines running down the length of its body recorded changing water pressure. They