Testing the Water(s)

Because hell has frozen over and pigs can fly

The lure of deep water. Photo © Cheryl A. Ossola

I am swimming. I should probably put that in all caps—I AM SWIMMING—because this is news, and here’s why: for years, for decades even, I have said, often and vehemently, that I hate pools. Hate swimming. Not dislike, but hate. Hate, hate, hate.

It’s not like I never went swimming as a kid, but that was “swimming,” mostly, and by that I mean playing Marco Polo in the neighborhood pool, riding Lake Willoughby’s waves on giant inner tubes, and shoving friends off a Styrofoam boat in a quest to be King of the Hill. Oh sure, I’d swim out to the raft anchored a good sprint offshore, but swimming for exercise, as in doing laps in a chlorinated pool? Never, and no thank you. Pool water is hard on the eyes, especially if you’re a contact lens wearer, hard on the hair and skin. And those communal showers? Yeah, no, not a fan.

The subject came up a year and a half ago, when I was seeing a physical therapist for a chronic pain problem. My spine is a mess thanks to childhood and young-adulthood injuries, and aging has contributed such niceties as bursitis, all of it now exacerbated by the amount of walking I do. (Wait, isn’t walking supposed to be good for you?) Between exercising my dog, Aria, and living in a hill town, where my feet are the most practical means of transport, I easily clock 12,000 steps on a normal day.

My PT wasn’t happy with all the walking. (I had to laugh when, once my pain was less acute, he grudgingly said I could walk—but I shouldn’t do hills. Which would basically mean never leaving my house.) Swimming is the best thing you can do for your body, he said, repeatedly, to which I replied, repeatedly, “That’s never going to happen.” I wasn’t going to spend two hours of my day getting to a pool, taking out my contacts, swimming, showering, drying my hair, putting my contacts back in, and getting home. Besides, I told him, I hate pools, and swimming is boring.

It's not like I’m exercise averse. My longtime activities of choice have been dance, yoga, Pilates, and Gyrotonic—all available here in Perugia, should I decide to seek them out. Instead, for reasons completely inexplicable, I suddenly have this great desire to be in water.

It started when I agreed to go to a water aerobics class with a friend. I know I need to exercise in ways other than walking—I refuse to devolve into a little old lady who’s too weak to get out of a chair—and it’s easier, motivation wise, to exercise with a friend. So I went, hoping to have a blast, only to find the class boring. Instead, oddly, I wanted to swim.

But wait, this couldn’t be me, the Ultimate Hater of Pools and Swimming. But it was. A few days later I went to our community pool to inquire about schedules and pricing (for us 60-and-overs, a 10-visit card costs €50, which makes it tough to use cost as an excuse not to go). It’s a clean, bright pool with eight lanes (two swimmers per lane when it’s busy), free parking and easy access by bus, and a super-nice team at the front desk. And a bar, of course (coffee, not booze). A few days later I went back to swim laps, literally for the first time in my life, feeling quite certain this odd compulsion would soon disappear.

But it hasn’t. I like the ritual of it, the gearing up—suit and cap and goggles and ear plugs—the slipping into the cool water, the weightlessness. I like my quiet, private watery world, an experience so different from every other moment of my life that it seems like stolen time, an alternate reality. I have nothing to focus on except my body and how it feels—no dog to keep track of, no architecture or flowers to distract me, no cars to dodge. I have nothing to think about except my breath, the extension of my limbs, the gentle resistance of the water against my muscles. The sense of freedom.

It’s like this passage from the opening pages of Julie Otsuka’s novel The Swimmers:

“Most days, at the pool, we are able to leave our troubles on land behind. Failed painters become elegant breaststrokers. Untenured professors slice, shark-like, through the water, with breathtaking speed. The newly divorced HR Manager grabs a faded red Styrofoam board and kicks with impunity. The downsized ad man floats, otter-like, on his back as he stares up at the clouds on the painted pale blue ceiling, thinking, for the first time all day long, of nothing. Let it go. Worriers stop worrying. Bereaved widows cease to grieve. Out-of-work actors unable to get traction above ground glide effortlessly down the fast lane, in their element, at last. I’ve arrived! And for a brief interlude we are at home in the world. Bad moods lift, tics disappear, memories reawaken, migraines dissolve, and slowly, slowly, the chatter in our minds begins to subside as stroke after stroke, length after length, we swim.”

Oh Julie, you have absolutely nailed it.

With time, as I become more habituated to the water, I’m sure my movements and breathing will become more efficient, my presence in this alien-yet-familiar environment more natural. And then, I hope, my mind will be free to wander, to shift into creative mode. I’ve long had the habit of stashing a thorny question (often writing related) on a mental back burner, then going out for a walk or (in another life) a run. And when I’d finished, the solution, or at least a glimmer of one, would have arrived. It’s a nearly failsafe strategy.

In the meantime . .

I’ve discovered floating, the art of letting go, of disconnecting. I’d float for hours if I could. It’s like being on another planet.

I’ve discovered swimming with my face in the water. No keeping my head up like I did pre-goggles and pre-cap, no straddling two worlds, water and not-water. It’s a kind of giving in, a purposeful rejection of everything that comes with the grounded world—the ache of aging joints, the worries about my children (young men now, but still) and my friends, the stress of the publishing world, the relentless decision-making mode of everyday life, the constant barrage of calamitous news.

I’ve discovered a gift. It’s “me time” in a way I’ve never experienced it. There’s no mirror to obsess over (or avoid), no dance partner to negotiate, no equipment to manipulate. Just my breath, my muscles, and my mind.

But why this mysterious turnaround, this compulsion to be in water, this craving for the once-undesirable? Why has the alternate reality of swimming called my name? Is it simply a matter of my body (which apparently knows what’s best for me) beating my stubbornly resistant brain into acquiescence?

If you have any thoughts on this, or have had a similar experience, please tell me. I’m intrigued by the mysterious workings of our minds, the millennia-old drive to find balance between brain and body, and, perhaps most of all, the inconstancy of our desires.

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Book of the week:

• The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

Short story of the week:

• “The Swimmer” by John Cheever (If you’ve never read this classic, you must; in the link, scroll down for the complete text. The ferociously talented choreographer Yuri Possokhov made an inventive, quirky, and ultimately heartbreaking ballet based on this story, for San Francisco Ballet. It’s called Swimmer, if you ever have the chance to see it. )

Poem of the week:

• This excerpt from On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss (which I have not read) is like a prose poem:

The day before my son was born was the first warm day of spring. In labor, I walked out to the end of the pier, where the morning sun was breaking up the ice floes on Lake Michigan. My husband held up a video camera and asked me to speak to the future, but the sound did not record, so whatever I said has been lost to the past. What remains evident on my face is that I was not afraid. During the long labor that followed that sunlit moment I imagined myself swimming in the lake, which became, against my will, a lake of darkness and then a lake of fire and then a lake without a horizon. By the time my son was born late the next day a cold rain was falling and I had crossed over into a new realm in which I was no longer fearless.