Maybe it was growing up in a windswept coastal town in Florida. Maybe it was being born an Aquarian. Whatever made me this way, I love water. Not just swimming, which I do in a rather lazy, not particularly athletic way, but being in water, feeling it swirl around and over me, even just looking at it.
When some people see a new landscape, they want to explore it by climbing its hills or mountains; I want to get to know it by wading or swimming in its streams. And when heat starts to tingle in the blood, the wish to be in water becomes a lust; a bath of air conditioning can ward it off momentarily, but can't satisfy it.
Swimming comes into its own in the summer, when it's married to that other great satisfaction of the senses, the opening of space. Summer is the season of luxurious distances, high clouds, afternoons that stretch toward infinity. The narrative of the year defines itself as the evolution of swimming places toward a wider world.
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That narrative starts at winter's end, with the pool at the local fitness center. The up-and-back motion of laps is a relief from the routine of work, but it's also a counterpart of it; the benign walls and ceiling that make winter swimming possible grow claustrophobic by the end of April, even though swimming in heated water while snow falls outside the windows in January or February has its own special charm.
Chlorine, which is mercifully not overdone at our pool, nevertheless adds its puritanical smell to the scene, chews away the fiber of bathing suits and chastises the skin into a dryness I've had enough of by spring.
What's more—and this frame of feeling is definitely conditioned by a Florida upbringing—by spring I'm tired of swimming in an environment too sterile to nourish plants or creatures. Many, of course, don't share this point of view. Once a friend asked me what I was going to do after our conversation ended and I told her I was headed for Puffer's Pond in Amherst. "You swim in that pond?" she demanded. "There's frogs in that pond!"
I decided not to mention the ducks, the snakes, the turtles and the beavers. But Puffer's is frequented by multitudes who, like me, enjoy swimming in a place with its own ecology—all the while, of course, being careful not to swallow the water.
Swimming holes like the pond put the swimmer back in the landscape, back under the sky. The artificial colors of the pool are replaced by colors that are real and that change all day long with the play of light. Instead of swimming in lines, I move in loops, change direction, swim from rock to laurel bush, from color to reflected color: olive, lime, blue, brown, white, black. Maybe I chase a duck for a few strokes. On shore, birds flash from sapling to sapling on the island where grass grows over the beavers' old lodges. Who would stay in a pool inside four walls when they can have all this?
For about ten weeks I swim at the pond, sharing space on the beach with a much broader clientele than at the pool, and often with people's waterloving dogs. Thanks to the swimming hole's reputation thoughout the Valley and at the local colleges, I may hear Spanish, Hindi, Polish, Japanese or German or just about any language around me. The white laurel blossoms and the yellow and indigo irises pass away and blistering days bring a few snakes into the current. One of the pond's small pleasures is circling from one beach to the other on the little trail around the pond and watching turtles sunning themselves on big fallen branches in the water, sometimes jumping off the wood with a barely audible sploop.
The summer decadence sets in; the water warms; hot days begin the slope downward from sensuous to fatiguing. My imagination falls in love with the widest water of all, the ocean, and it's time to think of the shore.
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For 12 years, my husband and I have passed up the lure of rocky promontories and marsh roses on the New England shore for Nova Scotia, where the Gulf Stream—and you have to experience this to believe it—makes the water more comfortable for swimming. On a wide cove at the town of Ingonish, past the entrance to the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, sits a small beach resort where we've been coming since before it became gentrified enough to have baseboard heating (it still doesn't have air conditioning).
The place has its resident cormorants that stand on rocks near the shore to dry their wings—a spectacle worth watching because, since the birds don't have oil in their wings, they have to spread the wings out to full width and shake them to get them dry after their underwater fishing sallies. Silhouetted on the rocks against the glow of dawn or early sunset, the cormorants make a picture you don't forget.
You lose even the memory of cabin fever as you watch the sea and sky, looking north toward Newfoundland and east toward France or Ireland from the chairs at the end of the little row of boxy cottages (you're already one hour closer to Europe, in Atlantic Time instead of Eastern). The water is usually somewhat warmer than off the coast of New Hampshire, the undertow gentle. Swimming or just playing in the waves in cool, not cold, water gives you a physical toning that's worth waiting for all year and cleanses all manner of accumulated wearinesses.
There is no mystique to water in a pool, but to let yourself feel the ocean, with its currents swinging in all directions, its approaches and retreats, its lights and its voices, soothes even as it stimulates and engenders the kind of peace you felt as a child after a happy day. As an acquaintance of mine once remarked, it's not many people who can't relax if they can get to the beach.
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I would be lost without this way of clocking the year—the way I clock it through my relationship with water. Clocking it through the rhythm of work, a rhythm that begins in the fall, has its own importance, but it's not enough; it enriches the mind but beats the body down, making the refreshment of water indispensable for both.
Yet after a while, I have enough of heat and glare, enough of rinsing the swamp out of my bathing suit, even enough of the salt and sand and gulls' shrieks at the shore. I'm ready for fall and its adventures, and even for winter, knowing that next year the luxuries of space and sunlit swimming places will come again.
