The monsoons came early that summer.
Late in June, not at all the typical season, three storms thrashed up from Mexico but never reached Tucson. From Green Valley south, rain fell intermittently for eleven days. Temperatures stayed in the nineties, but the humidity soared beyond forty-five percent, never pleasant in the desert, not popular for those of us who live here because it’s both hot and dry.
From my front yard lap pool at my home in the Santa Catalina foothills, all of Tucson stretched below me and I could watch the bands of gray cloud formations drift up from Sonora and veer toward the northwest. I’d lay in the bright sun, clouds covered my usual view of the Santa Ritas thirty miles to the south. Sun so brilliantly blue, layering southward into gray. You didn’t want to look directly up, you’d squint your eyelids shut, like when you’re on a lake, sailing in the clearest of clear days, or skiing in fresh new powder, the sunlight reflected and refracted until your eyes burned. I rarely wore sunglasses, except for the days like these. Occasional breezes would lick my Palo Verde trees and tall lantana bushes, but the sun always shone, and on June twenty-first, the longest day of the year for sunlight, the temperature slid above one hundred degrees.
In the evenings, the sun slid through the skies and through parts of the color spectrum and just at that moment before it started to dip below the horizon it glowed like a bald, orange head.
I loved to stare at that orange head, I loved watching it disappearing until, if I really focused my senses on watching, at the exact moment the sun disappeared I’d see the green flash.
“Damn,” Spider said to me that afternoon as another monsoon passed us to the south. “You think it’ll ever rain up here?”
In Tucson, you never really knew about rain. It’d come by surprise, Santa Claus unexpectedly stopping by with water. But she didn’t come out of the house to talk about rain. Holding a portable phone in her hand, staring at it with concern.
“Mom. Uh, that was Nathan.”
“Why didn’t you bring the phone outside?”
“Um. He just wanted to talk to me.”
“Tell me what he said.”
“Well. He called me, he just wanted to say goodbye. That’s all. His actual words were, ‘I just called you to say goodbye.’ What’s wrong?”
“He’s just gone.”
“Well, he’ll be back.”
“No. Not this time.”
“What do you mean?” Now showing alarm and concern.
“He’s gone up to the rez.”
“So, go up there yourself. Or wait, he’ll be back. Won’t he?”
“Not this time. He wants to live up there.”
“So? Go up yourself.”
“I don’t want to live on a reservation.”
“You don’t have to live there. He needs you.”
“Not this time.”
“You need him.”
“I don’t even know that for sure,” I said finally.
“Oh, Mom.” She sat beside me, arm around my shoulders. I can remember, not that far back, when I’d give the world just for an hour of her touches. “Call him, Mom.”
“I gave him a cell phone. But it’s turned off.”
“So call where he’s going. Leave a message.”
“He’s gone beyond telephones.”
Her head flicked around like a lizard, darting just a fraction of an inch to the right, to the left, up and down, just like a lizard uncertain of his territory, uncertain of the dangers.
“Can I help?” she said.
“Just leave me alone.”
I dove into the pool, a racing dive, a streamlined dive, crashing into another world to let the water wash all my cares away as I glide along in relative silence, my senses insulated by immersion into water.
In the first lap, I began with a slow kick, blood awakening in an all-body pulsation beginning with the head, the shoulders, the back, the thighs, all the way down to my toes, my entire body undulating into one dolphin kick, the rhythm continued as I lifted my head to breathe, lifted my eyes toward the sky. As my toes broke the surface of the water, woooooshhhh, a spurt of energy, thoughts of Nathan fading, not entirely gone, but fading and lessening as I accelerated into the power of the butterfly stroke, grabbing the water, my hands following a circular shape, like entering the top of the keyhole, hands powering around, meeting at my belly, and then the surge at the bottom of the stroke, shaping the triangular base of the stroke, pushing myself ahead and winding my arms around, stretching ahead, my hands pounding into the water, into the next stroke.
Stroke, kick, stroke, kick, a dichotomy of ease and power, my entire body fully into the rhythm, constantly adding power and strength.
Each stroke entering the keyhole, sliding through the gateway into my inner thoughts for now, when I gain this power and strength and shape, the motion and the water and the breathing are all, I’m the sum of these motions, my anxiety gone, I am entirely quiet, immersed in an isolation tank.
It’s just me.
Just me fighting the forces of nature.
And gradually becoming one with the flow, one with nature. The two-hundred butterfly, a warm-up. Next, flipping my body over for the backstroke, arching back and over then under the surface, using a butterfly kick until I’m staring straight up into the blue sky, then switching to a motorboat flutter. The alternating windmill arm sweeps and the leaning into each stroke rock me like a baby. I could breathe constantly, but I keep the rhythm. Starting a breaststroke I experiment with the old-fashioned frog kick, but switching into the power of the whip kick which propels me half out of the water with each whip.
Finally, I settle into the old reliable freestyle, the flutter kick constant, quick breaths on alternating sides with every third stroke. Whapping my legs to create a splash at each flipturn.
Fifty laps of a twenty-yard pool is more than half a mile.
I always lose count.
Lost in my own world, fused with all.
I love to swim. I swim fast. I’m physically unable to float, I’ve got to keep moving or I sink to the bottom. A small peril of being slim with little body fat.
Swimming is, I don’t really know, I guess it’s just knowing I’m good at something, and then being able to prove I can do it well.
There’s something about pushing yourself and trying to get past your physical limitations, then actually getting past that point, past being tired, I feel like I can do anything. Time has no meaning, that’s when I start cutting time off and I get the feeling that nothing can hold you back, no rules, no people, no promises to make or break, nothing except my body in the water, everything in that I have complete control over it all.
Until I get out of the pool. The dry Arizona air slaps me back into reality, the world rushes back in, and my peace is gone.