Swimming

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.

But the beach water was salty and made my skin crinkle when I got out.  The water would soak into my towel and eventually my salty skin and the salty towel would start rubbing against one another like two pieces of styrofoam.  My hair would get sticky and dry out like a bad sponge, and the sand from the beach would get into every crevice of my body and every seam of my swimsuit; walking became an exercise in scraping the skin off my waist and bum.  Plus picnics at the ocean are always fraught: seagulls to defend against, sand and bits of dried seaweed attracting themselves to chips and sandwiches, sticky sodal spills forming a thin film on my face and fingers.  At the lake you just walked into the water and washed off any feeling of dirt or grime, but the ocean doesn’t wash you clean, it just adds another layer of saline residue to your skin.

Once I left Maine, when I couldn’t get to a lake or to a good ocean beach, I’d occasionally go to municipal pools or hotel pools for a swim, but they always ranked last in the pecking order.  Sure, the water was calm and usually the perfect temperature, but the chlorine stung my eyes, and people at a pool are never quite as happy as people at the beach or at a lake.  We all either consciously or unconsciously are aware that we are replicating an experience of nature in concrete, chemicals, and bad summer furniture.  How can draping an overly bleached white towel on a chaise lounge ever compare to flopping a blanket on the sand, or rolling out a towel on a small lakeside dock?  Even as a kid, while pools usually meant we were on vacation and at a hotel somewhere, which was always a treat, the actual mechanics of swimming in a pool – the signs outlining prohibited fun like jumping in the shallow end and not running around, the fencing, the concrete pavements that burned your feet the second you got out of the water – were not nearly as appealing as just putting on a swimsuit, walking out of a cabin, and jumping in a lake.

I’m not sure exactly why I ever stopped, but for a long time I didn’t swim much at all except on business trips when I’d occasionally stay at a hotel with a pool, and I’d just need the feeling of being surrounded by not-air for a little bit, not so much to take the feeling of road weariness off of me as to remind myself that the world didn’t consist solely of glass-and-steel office buildings, black cars whisking you from one to the next, or of airports and airport lounges and long aluminum tubes shooting through the sky at 35,000 feet.  The pools were never great but the water always was water, elemental and natural but not “natural” to my human body, designed as it is for walking and land and breathing through my nose.  But I’ve had the good fortune over the past few years of being able to swim a lot again.

Two summers ago I went on a yoga retreat in southern France which was held at a Zen monastery.  The retreat itself was a bit brutal – the heat was oppressive and I got a bad case of heat stroke – but the monastery was located maybe a half mile from a bend in a small river which formed a perfect natural swimming hole.  The current hushed to a minimum as the river wound through a small canyon, where local kids dove off the sides, and there were several sandbars as the river emerged from the sandbars where you could lay down a towel and dry off between dips into the river.  The water was also a perfect temperature, the canyon walls concentrating the sun’s heat such that the river went from ice cold at the top of the canyon to a refreshing coolness at the sandbars, to the point where instead of having a shock as you dropped into the water you felt a sensation of drinking a perfect glass of ice water and having that chill immediately radiate into every part of you, like the exhilaration of the water was a part of you, not something being created from the water-other that was outside your body.

I swam every day while I was there.  I went with my girlfriend, who when I got heat stroke would join me in the water and just hold me lying across her arms and float me around in the river, sometimes murmuring sweet nothings, sometimes humming, sometimes just silently drifting with me in the barely-there current.

We went to a couple of other rivers that summer in France but the swimming never matched what we had at the retreat.  We also swam in pools and in the Mediterranean, which really was the best ocean – so salty it held you up, the waves never more than knee-high, and a beachside bar always close by.  While every time we swam there was something wonderful about it, we both agreed on the hierarchy: lakes are best (and we kind of conflated lakes and rivers – both fresh water, both outdoors), beaches second, and pools last.  We both agreed we’d never turn down swimming in a good pool, and that it was always enjoyable, but the ranking was firm.

I returned to France for another retreat this summer, and part of the meditation practice I was given was to go to the small river near the retreat.  The first time, on the first afternoon there, I was a bit scattered and a bit scared of what was to come in the retreat, and I was also still jangly from two days of travel to get to rural France from Seattle.  Instead of meditating, I took off my clothes and just reveled in the river.  It was running shallow, and I walked down about a mile of it, swimming where I could and walking across slippery stones and gravel where I couldn’t, swimming with my hands holding my dry clothes above the water.  It cleaned me and made me feel like a boy again, and that was, it turned out, what I was supposed to be doing that first afternoon anyway.  I think my spiritual director had sensed I would veer from the assignment, but knew that the river would be the right partner for the day.

A few days later, after I had had my soul and my body hauled back and forth across the threshold of hell several times, we meditated on the river, on some rocks that marked a boundary line, maybe the foundation of an old mill.  I was asked to face upstream and feel the river as a set of memories washing over me.  I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t reimagine the water as anything other than water, or the river as anything other than what it was, with its chestnut trees on the banks and the polished granite stones which spring floods had worn smooth.  The water was still just then in mid-summer; in spring, when the floods would be at their height, I’m sure I could have imagined the waters as being memories, but my memories just then were not of the kind that inspire a gentle smooth current, or waters which were calling me to hold me up and soothe me.

I’ve come to realize that rivers aren’t like lakes at all, and that a good river is the best place to swim, always.  The current holds you and takes over from your incorrect and overly deterministic sense of direction.  The water holds you up, and the constant current dissipates any attempt to retain the drowsy heat that turns summer lakes into a kind of soapy bath.

Plus, rivers are hard to find, at least the spots which are best for swimming.  Where I have lived, Maine, Washington, England, Canada, most rivers are either too cold – up in the mountains, or far enough north that you never really get water much above freezing – or too large, with dangerous eddies that clearly say “do not swim here”, or they are dammed for reservoirs and they lose the essential riverine quality that makes rivers just different.  What might seem the best rivers are often too shallow where they are safe to swim, making them good only for wading (and you need to be able to float and drift in the current to make it really work).  Because rivers are so useful, for farmers and fisherman and the like, what may look like a nice place to swim may in fact be criss-crossed with fishing lines and rafts, or else access may be denied by barbed wire and posted No Trespassing signs.  And plenty of rivers just get muddy and dirty, especially where they fall out of the mountains and hills and into low, slow, lazy valleys and estuaries, where the silty riverbed is easily stirred up and the topsoil of the lowlands oozes from the shorelines into the water.

So there’s also the lure of the rare and hard to find, the reward of overcoming the challenge of finding a good river in the first place, that probably adds to the beauty of river swimming.  Finding that perfect, clear flowing, warm-enough yet cool river, deep enough to float in but not so deep or raging that it becomes a hazard, is a treasure hunt, making the enjoyment of the swim that much more sweet.

For me, though, it’s the current that makes the biggest difference – being able to let go of my sense of direction and yielding it to the water, where I don’t belong but where I love being.   Sometimes being held by someone but sometimes letting the river hold you and realizing the river loves you as well as any other person, maybe even better because it has none of the fear or self-doubt that each of us holds inside of us.  Surrendering to the current in a moving stream gives us a physical way to accomplish what the universe asks of us as whole souls, to surrender to its mystery – where it will take us, whether we will be safe or drift towards the shallows or the rapids.  We will always still be a little wary; we will keep checking to see if we can touch bottom, we will keep an eye peering towards the shore to make sure we know where this strange flow is taking us.  But the river asks us to surrender, just a little bit, the water cooling us from the inside while it washes our bodies on the outside.

A few weeks ago I went on a hike, and afterwards, the group went to a state park for a barbecue.  The picnic spot was on a small bluff above a mountain river, which deepened just enough in the bend to allow for swimming.  Not much at all, really – there was a 100 foot section of the river which was deep enough to not touch the bottom, but for a few hundred feet upstream, you could walk in water just above your waist, which meant you could also float.  The current was a little quicker than the river in France – quite a lot quicker, actually; it was in the Cascade mountains not far from the line of the pass – and much colder.  My dog stayed on the shore line – he’s not a swimming dog – and watched me as I got in the shallower part of the river, floated on my back, and let the current take me into the deeper channel.  The current really picked up there and I’d have to swim just to stay in the same place, eventually finding my way over to a rock in the center of the stream where you could climb out, walk back upstream to the shallows, and start all over again.

I did this for about an hour, until my dog was getting noticeably uncomfortable with me being too far away from him.  The water was more than exhilarating, it was properly frigid.  By the time I was done, my skin was cold to the touch, and my feet were numb – I wore my sandals because of a rocky riverbed, but it hurt to walk on the ground when I finished, needles of cold stinging my heel and toes with every step.  My lungs felt cleansed and polished by breathing in the cold water, and the sun turned wintergreen when it hit me – no dull heat, even on a hot summer day, but the warmth instead reacting with my skin to create a frosty glow that felt deliciously furry around me as I walked around.  I went back to my car, the dog following loyally behind me, and changed into dry clothes which felt like being swaddled as a newborn, like my skin had never felt cotton against it before.

Seattle has been hazy and smoky lately, as clouds of smoke have drifted south from forest fires in Canada.  The sunrises and sunsets have been blood red, and the air often has a piney tinge to it.  Your body feels a bit labored as the dirty air coats your lungs, and it’s hard to feel entirely clean, even after a shower.  I’ve been back and forth across the country, and have been adjusting to a new relationship with the world, which has been difficult but I see why it needs to be, I see why this is so essential.  I’ve been swimming in the lake quite a bit.  All the same, I think I’d like to find a river to swim in this weekend.  I’d like to show my self what my body knows about surrendering to the river, about surrendering to the world.  I need a refresher course this week.