It’s been a long, dry summer in Seattle, which has been perfect for swimming in Lake Washington. I love swimming outdoors. I’m not a particularly good swimmer, mind you – mostly I just doss about in the water, eventually rolling onto my back and simply floating, but I try to get a good swim in when I can. I’ve always loved lakes best, back to when I was a child in Maine and we’d head up to Kezar Lake every summer. The water was cold, pure and deep, but to a ten year old it was perfect – there was always a moment of complete fear, knowing that the initial drop in would be a shock, and then splash, you’d be in, and the shock would be even worse than you could anticipate but with it came exhilaration and then my body would quickly squirrel around to rise and take a breath. My head would quickly cool off and I’d realize that it felt, at least, warmer in the lake, and that I could swim for a long time.
I also swam a lot in the ocean as a kid, which was different but not quite as good. On the positive side, the beach always had some wave action. This made getting into the water less an exercise of dread and shock and more of a rolling series of little surprises, as the waves lapped up my body, first hitting my groin with a gut shot of cold and then the line of my tummy above my swimsuit, another hit, and finally my chest and neck, and then I’d just be bobbing on the waves. The rollers also meant more immediate fun than in the lake, where “fun” mostly consisted of simply swimming or potentially splashing my sister or my mom. I could body surf on the rollers, especially when I was little, and the feeling of being lifted off the bottom and tossed towards shore was a little like being thrown up into the air as a very little boy.