Ode to Swimming

Get Back to Where You Once Belonged

Yesterday I swam for the first time in over a year.

Since 1985—that’s 35 years—I’d gone swimming at the Y three times a week.  I’d been a jogger before that, but the North Carolina heat and my aching joints made me turn to swimming at the age of 37.  I’d always considered myself a strong swimmer, but that first day I could only swim four lengths without stopping.  I gradually worked my way up to a half mile—36 lengths—then after a few more weeks, a mile.  Since then I’d swum a mile three times a week, almost never missing.  Let’s call it 150 miles a year.

It was one of my favorite things.  Even when I felt lousy when I got to the pool, I always felt better when I left.  Swimming is an adaptable sport: when you don’t feel well, you go slower.  Occasionally I shortened my distance, but almost never.  I was in no hurry.

Swimming is a sport that famously uses the whole body, and there is something about being in water that is profoundly healing.  Maybe we’re amphibians; we come from water and long to get back.  One time I was leaving the Y and ran into one of the most avid of my fellow swimmers, whom I frequently swam beside.  She’d had a hard day and was late getting there, held up her hands as if to claw something: “Water,” she said.  “Water.”

I knew the feeling.

An added feature was all the friends I used to see.  For years I went to the Lakewood Y and knew a bunch of guys who played racket ball and talked trash in the locker room.  When the downtown Y came along I went there because it had a much nicer pool.  At first it was one of the best kept secrets in Durham, but in more recent years it’s been well used throughout the day.  There’s a group of us who swim somewhere between 1:30 and 3:00.  I even found a particular friend who always showed up when I did, so we got out after our swim and talked for a while.  He was a Republican and Trump supporter, but I let that go because we root for the same basketball team.  There were any number of other guys I saw in the locker room; when you hang out someplace for twenty years you’re bound to make friends.  I didn’t always know their names.  But I knew them.

All that disappeared last March.  My wife and I spent a week at our cabin in Asheville around the time of spring break, though we’re both retired and the whole year is a break for us.  People were just beginning to talk of the pandemic as a reality in this country.  My wife went to a conference of the Organic Growers School, where they told her to wash her hands a lot, and I, despite some trepidation, went to a movie (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the last movie I saw in a theater).  We returned to Durham, then realized we wouldn’t leave her 68-year-old autistic brother in his Asheville job, bringing in shopping carts at the supermarket; by the time we saw the full ramifications of the situation we realized we couldn’t let him live alone; we had to move to our cabin.

As we packed my wife said, quite memorably (this was March), “You should bring your winter clothes, they’re saying this might last a year.”  And as we got set to load the car, she said, off the top of her head, “I’m never going to see this place again.”  Meaning our house in Durham, which we both love.

She was right about bringing our winter clothes, wrong about never seeing this house again.  I’m sitting here typing in it.  But it was almost a full year until we got our vaccinations, which seemed to mark the end of something.[1]  And yesterday, as if to really mark a new beginning—though I had to reserve a lane, and the parking lot was two-thirds empty, and they took my temperature as I went in—I went swimming.

My arms were so tight on my first length that it was as if someone were scraping them with a rake.  I swallowed water and felt out of sync; at the end of my second length I had to stop to adjust my goggles, which had filled with water.  I thought I’d try for ten lengths, but after the third and fourth my muscles were aching and I was gasping for air; I had to stop every two lengths for the rest of the afternoon.  I managed 24 total lengths, a third of a mile, but never more than two in a row.  I couldn’t believe what dreadful shape I was in, but had begun to feel at home in the water.[2]

I saw my Trump supporter friend in the locker room, two more friends out at the pool, and in the shower a gay couple who had always shared a locker near me; this was their first day back too.  I took a shower, washed my hair, toweled off, put on body lotion, all in a locker room that never had more than one other person in it.  I walked past the basketball court, where there were four or five guys, as opposed to the huge raucous games they used to have.  I walked out to the parking lot and drove home.  All those ordinary actions suddenly seemed miraculous.  I’d taken them for granted.  Now they were like traveling in a foreign country.

I resolved never to take them for granted again (though I probably will.  I’m a human being).  Never again to laugh at some poor old fart who wasn’t in as good shape as I was.  Never to take my health for granted or the good condition of my body.  Never to fail to see that these simple actions—just driving downtown—are miraculous and not to be ignored.

Just to be alive is enough, as Suzuki Roshi said.  To go swimming is like hang-gliding through the Himalayas.

[1] That in itself is a miracle, when you think of it.

[2] My wife and I have done close to a four-mile walk almost daily since the pandemic began, and I ramped up my yoga practice to 40 minutes per day, but the swimming muscles are different.