October 12, 2021

One More Time

I know that loving swimming is not a substitute for having a personality, but it’s come to constitute a large component of mine, which I sometimes think might be me hopping on a bandwagon, as I’m prone to doing, back around the time that #WildSwimming became a trending hashtag. But then I remember how much swimming has meant to be always, and all the sometimes impractical places I’ve jumped in—the Danube, the Sea of Japan, a duck pond in the middle of our Midlands town where there was nowhere else for a dip (and let me tell you I got a rash from each and every one of these)—and I think that loving swimming has been a part of me for a long time. And, since June 18, after a very long hiatus, I’ve been back to swimming on the regular. As in, I last went swimming this afternoon, and before that was yesterday, and my next swim is scheduled for tomorrow.

How can a single life contain such riches?

But it’s yesterday’s swim I want to talk about now, my last lake swim of the season, which comes two weeks after which I’d previously thought was my last lake swim of the season, though I think I really mean it this time, because today is the twelfth of October after all. I wore my bathing suit on the bus down to the beach, and brought a towel and a pair of underwear to change into, though I wasn’t making any promises. I don’t like swimming in cold water, really, am physically incapable. But the forecast was calling for 20 degrees and anything is possible. I was with my family and our friends, and I told that they were going to watch me dip my toe and then turn around again, because I’m certainly no polar bear. But then it wasn’t cold. A little bracing, yes, but getting right in was only a pleasure.

And then I was floating, the waves large and dramatic, but playful enough, and I couldn’t swim, really, with the water so rough, plus I’d left my goggles at home, and so instead I just let the lake carry me, and everything in the world was reduced to the essential, to blue, to water and sky, and me, and the odd seagull, and I could have floated forever, save for my people on the beach, and when I returned to them, I couldn’t stop smiling, what we call my “resting beach face,” a goofy grin which doesn’t even begin to equal the euphoria of the experience, how it makes me feel so small and alive and connected to a big incredible world, blood coursing through my veins like the waves onto the beach, and just the sheer power of it all, I can feel it, the way the beach and the lake feel like the edge of the world, the beginning of all possibility.