This summer I went swimming, this summer I might have drowned,
But I held my breath and I kicked my feet and I moved my arms around.
This summer I swam in the ocean and I swam in a swimming pool
Salt my wounds, chlorine my eyes, I’m a self-destructive fool.
~ “The Swimming Song” by Loudon Wainwright III
When I was in my early 20s, I was a recent college grad living in Tampa, Florida. I took a summer job as an aquatic director before I joined the lockstep of the Real World. Henry David Thoreau is quoted as warning against any enterprise that requires a change of clothing. I want to be quoted as suggesting that if you ever find work you can do in a bathing suit, take it.
Aquatic director was a fancy title with zip and status, and I have to admit the way it sounded was part of the appeal. But type aquatic director into Google translate and what you get is swimming teacher. Four mornings a week I woke early, marinated myself in sunscreen, threw on a suit and pedaled my bike a few miles away to Our Lady of Perpetual Chlorine, a pricy, bayfront Catholic school that leased out its pool for summer classes.
I was the only teacher; there was no one to direct. My day began with sampling the pool water for the correct chemical balance, stacking kickboards poolside and aligning chaise lounges. Then I taught four hour-long classes with names like guppy, minnow and flying fish.
The first class was for babies and their moms. The babies gurgled and reflexively thrust their fatty little thighs into the water like frogs at a square dance. The moms cooed into their faces, showing them that water! is! fun! The second and third hours were intro classes for a dozen grade-school kids who wanted to make farts in the water and wait for the stinky smell bubbles to percolate to the surface. The last lesson of the day was for adult swimmers. I had three in that class; two dropped out after a few days, and I was left with Bobby, a woman in her 60s who had a fear of water so strong it was a force field.
With all the classes there was some instruction in there somewhere: pointers on a flutter kick, a step-by-step breakdown of rotary breathing for the crawl, entreats to relax while floating. But as my summer progressed, I saw that it wasn’t technique I was teaching. My real job was to show people that water does not have to be scary.
For so many it is.
According to a 2016 survey by the American Red Cross, two-thirds of Americans are afraid of deep, open bodies of water. And about 46 percent are afraid of the deep end of a pool. Not only are they afraid, the survey says they can’t perform what the Red Cross calls fundamental swimming competencies: jumping into water that is over your head, surfacing, finding an exit, swimming to it and safely getting out.
I cannot say that I understand fear, but I know how it feels when it colonizes my body. Water does not induce it. Heights do.
During that summer I watched Bobby, the adult swimmer, wrestle with what I read as terror. Bobby spent weeks looking at the pool as if it were a vat of poisonous liquid. Many of our classes were spent with her sitting on the edge of the pool working up the courage to dangle her feet in the shallow end of the pool. We didn’t talk about the genesis of her fear. Instead, we small talked. Her summer success was inching herself into waist-deep water without retreating in a froth of panic.
I grew up with water the way others have grown up with snow. Moving water, frozen water. When I was a child, I saw how grownups lost their grumpiness when they inched into the ocean or stood in the shallow end having their grownup conversations. The punitive nuns at my grammar school transformed into kindly women with legs and hair who splashed one another and laughed when they gathered in my grandfather’s swimming pool. I was taught to swim when I was 6. In the water, I lost my angles and my awkwardness. My self dissolved from self-consciousness when I held my breath and submerged. Time lost its architecture. I blurred into the larger cradle of blue. Noiseless, weightless, formless. Less, less, less.
I see that water induces real fear, and I know it has the power to take me down, but what I mostly know of water is its power to transform. It is my medium of shapeshifting, of expansion, of play. It is where I am realized. On the land I fear engulfment; in the water I welcome it.
Last week was my birthday. I had one wish: to be in the water somewhere. Floating, brining. I wanted salt in my hair, water in my ears and wrinkles on my fingertips.
And so it came to be.
