FOLKLORE IS FULL OF WATER SPIRITS. HARDLY SURPRISING; THERE’S just something about a secluded pool, deep in the forest, that gives rise to fantasies of mermaids and nymphs, satyrs and fairies. The obsession is prevalent in Greek mythology—Narcissus was cursed by his own reflection in a pool of water. Celtic folklore in particular relishes tales of the sopping wet variety. Look at the Arthurian legends. At their core, the whole cycle of myths about King Arthur, Excalibur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—which sits at the core of British culture—is centered around a foundational story of a lake, and a lady who apparently lives there and hands out swords. The echo of these stories rebounds today, with Daniel Radcliffe stripping down to his skivvies and diving into a pool of water to fetch Godric Gryffindor’s sword in the cinematic interpretation of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. There’s just something about water that compels the imagination.
I’ve spent my life spellbound by pools, waterfalls, and swimming holes deep in the forest. Instead of sylphs or elves, naiads or fairies looking to sucker me in to some eternally bonding curse, I usually find a few drunk rednecks chugging tall boys of Natty Light. And yet, if I squint past the beer guts and broken glass, I can still see the hazy outlines of magic in these watery spots.
I think we can all agree; the internet has been a disaster. But if there’s anything redeeming about the net, it’s the site swimmingholes.org. It’s a user-generated site that lists good spots for a dip all over the country. I look at the site with the fevered secrecy of a fifteen-year-old watching porn.
In the late nineteenth century, British scholar Sir James George Frazer wrote the urtext on the subject of myth, The Golden Bough, an exhaustive comparison of myths from across the globe. Fancy-pants British guy has this to say about water spirits:
In many of the tales the monster, who is sometimes described as a serpent, inhabits the water of a sea, a lake, or a fountain.
The Oyampi Indians of French Guiana imagine that each waterfall has a guardian in the shape of a monstrous snake, who lies hidden under the eddy of the cascade, but has sometimes been seen to lift up its huge head. To see it is fatal.
The perils of the sea, of floods, of rapid rivers, of deep pools and lakes, naturally account for the belief that water-spirits are fickle and dangerous beings, who need to be appeased by sacrifices. Sometimes these sacrifices consist of animals, such as horses and bulls, but often the victims are human beings.
There is a draw toward water in all of us. Whether the beach or a buggy, shady pool deep in a woodsy grove, we’re inescapably drawn toward the wet places in the world. There must be some elemental urge to be near these places, a hardwired connection to these watery spots.
There are plenty of things about a proper swimming hole that can deter visitation. There’s often trash, cast aside by inebriated revelers: a single flip-flop, shattered Corona bottles, cigarette butts, and Dorito bags. The detritus of the proletariat, eager to taste the respite and freedom that relaxation provides the one percenters, who scooch lower in their deck chairs at Club Med while some local inhabitant shackled by neocolonial economies whisks away their empty mimosa glasses.
A decent swimming hole is, by definition, hard to get to. Bushwhacking through the woods is often a prerequisite. Water is the breeding ground for the larval flukes of mosquitoes and other buzzing, biting insects, and it is not unusual to leave a good river spot with goiter-sized lumps all over, courtesy of vampiric flies.
The footing sucks. Slippery, ankle-spraining jumbles of inappropriately sized and placed rocks give way to slick, wet ledges of sharp-edged rock. The safety of rocky banks is, at best, a mirage; the mossy slickness is about as easy to navigate as a hockey rink on roller skates.
And the water. Dear reader, I do not know, fully and completely, what masochistic personality flaw compels me to swim in these rivers. The water at a good, hidden swimming hole is testicle-shatteringly frigid, birthed from the dark icy heart of the mountains. When leaping off the rocks to plunge into the darkness, breath is slammed out of the lungs by the sheer shock of freezing temperatures. Swimmers at a gorge in the woods jump into pools only to resurface instantly with a wide-eyed look of animal panic. Even the most graceful Olympic synchronized swimmer is reduced to a sputtering, gasping, flailing mess, arms and legs thrashing wildly as they desperately look for the closest place to escape the glacially frosty nightmare they’ve willingly entered. Moments after hitting the water, cold knifes its way in so deeply the body seems to lock up, limbs, torso, and internal organs succumbing rapidly to a frosty rigor mortis. Deliberate thought is replaced by an impenetrable wall of sheer numbing fear.
Then, as quickly as possible, an escape is enacted from the water. Clambering out, slicing knees and feet on sharp-edged rocks, the jumper considers doing it again, purple-lipped and shrieking.
There’s never a comfortable place to sit—no sugar-sand beaches here—and inevitably I drop my towel and backpack stumbling across the river, and end up hunched, shivering amid the rocks, eating water-swollen Cheezits with numbed fingers.
One of my favorite swimming holes is Bingham Falls. Located in a small, woodsy, steep-sided gorge in the shadow of Mount Mansfield, Vermont’s tallest peak, Bingham is the exemplar of the swimming hole aesthetic. A round, greenish pool is fed by a forty-foot cascade, the waterfall tumbling down mossy rocks and ledges.
In the film Japanese Story from 2003, starring Australian actress Toni Collette and Japanese heartthrob Gotaro Tsunashima, there’s a scene in which Tsunashima’s character, Hiromitsu, a Japanese businessman who is having an illicit affair with Collette’s character, dives into a rocky pool of water deep in the Australian outback. He hits his head and dies. The movie is beautiful and tragic and evokes questions of longing and love, truth and consequences, but all I could think after watching was, Who dives headfirst into a swimming hole without checking for rocks first?
I have a friend who has a daughter who has to poop every time she goes swimming. The kid jumps into the water—river, pool, lake, or sea—and within moments looks back at her mother with an expression of impending shame, humorous aw-shucks vexation, and mild impatience. And it’s off to the nearest bushes or porta-potty. It’s not unusual if you think about it. The water buoys us up, allowing the muscles and bones that prop us against gravity’s pull to relax, and the gentle weight of water pressure massages us from all sides. It’s a miracle, really, that every public pool isn’t a toxic biohazard with schools of floating fecal Snickers bars bobbing in the surf.
A good swimming hole, with a waterfall and encircled by ferns, is a portal to another world. It’s no wonder that waterfalls figure heavily in the imagination as thresholds to mystery. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner discover the emerald El Corazon behind a thundering cascade in 1984’s Romancing the Stone Mikey finds the treasures of the town wishing well behind a sheet of water in Goonies Frodo and Sam palaver with Faramir at Henneth Annun, the respite hidden behind water falling into the Forbidden Pool in Tolkien’s classic The Lord of the Rings Grendel issues forth from some boggy sump, and Anglo-Saxon stud Beowulf dives deep into the same watery fen to kill the mead hall wrecker’s lumpy mother.
The swimming hole, glade-encircled forest pool, contains mysteries unknown. Even in literature, the presence of the woodsy swimming hole elevates the narrative to the celestial and wondrous. In “The Forest Path to the Spring,” Malcolm Lowry traces the wonder and magic, the geographic draw, of the hidden water source deep in the trees. I think. I’ve never been able to finish that essay.
But often bad things happen in secluded pools. When Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewie slosh around waist deep in grimy sludge while hiding in the trash compactor aboard the Death Star, what lurks in the water? An alien beastie known to Star Wars nerds as a dianoga, of course. But despite their reputation for harboring hungry monsters, we seek these places out. Because they are portals—gateways—to other worlds, we are drawn to them to escape the banality of the daily grind. Salvation and terror, bound up in one. Water is associated with purity and cleanliness as well as filth; there’s no rat worse than a bilge rat.
I had taken a motley group of kids on an adventure to Bingham Falls. We’d hiked through the woods, kids slinging about lunch boxes and towels. Laughter scattered squirrels and birds as the crew made its way down a sloping, rocky trail. We could hear the falls before we even got there, catch glimpses of the white torrent through the trees.
The trail became steep and led us down a muddy incline to the base of the falls, where Volkswagen-sized boulders ringed a large pool at the base of the waterfall, and the water streamed and whirled downriver through a narrow, chute-like ravine. It was crowded with people eager to swim on a hot afternoon. I positioned myself where I could keep an eye on the kids, and they began exploring and jumping, shouting and shrieking and dunking in the cold water.
After a while, Nyah came swimming over to me. Her expression was tinged with panic.
“Erik, I have to go to the bathroom.”
This wasn’t unusual. Often, when taking kids on adventures in the woodsy parts of the world, I’d run into a young soul (or, frankly, older ones too) who’d never availed themselves of the magical opportunity afforded by swimming in lakes and rivers and oceans. The world becomes your toilet. Pee is basically water anyway.
“Just go in the water,” I said.
“It’s not pee.”
Some internal mechanism in my chest ratcheted up a notch. This was not good. I’d been here before.
Bingham Falls had a healthy occupancy that day. Day-tripping locals looking to cool off, vacationing families taking the plunge amid the splendor of the overhanging hemlocks and maples. Folks were spread downriver a fair distance. The falls were in a narrow, steep-sided gorge.
“I have to poop,” Nyah said.
“Okay, give me a min.”
“Now.”
There are those of us who can anticipate when the train may be arriving at the station. We check the schedule and determine the next likely arrival and make plans. But some—kids—don’t want the exigencies of digestive machinations to interrupt a good time. Therefore, they ignore nature’s gentle reminders until it’s too late.
My father is a fly fisherman. I’m not sure why. Fly fishing is, for the uninitiated, the single most frustrating outdoor sport in the history of humanity. Any random Joe would have better luck taking down a mammoth with a slingshot than casting a weightless, hand-tied fly roughly the size of a molecule into a cold, dark pool resembling a teacup without getting their line inextricably tangled in an unhelpful protrusion of riverbank vegetation. What I remember from all the times Dad took me fly fishing is extreme, existential boredom; a persistent notion that I was being offered as some kind of all-inclusive human buffet for the biting insects of the world; and a dissertation-length internal monologue about how fantastically inaccurate the fishing scenes from A River Runs Through It are, Brad Pitt’s rakish good looks notwithstanding.
Every dad wants to share his passions with his children. My dad wanted to give me the gift of fishing. On one occasion, he brought me down to the river behind our home in the mountains of Vermont where I grew up. I was about four. He began casting, which, for those lucky enough to have never fly fished, is akin to tying a few of your eyelashes in a small knot, attaching it to the end of fifty yards of dental floss, and then trying to whip your eyelash bundle across a foaming rapid into a pool of water the size of a toilet by lashing the line over your head. The line, by the way, is attached to a nine-foot length of recalcitrant and disobedient fiberglass that quivers and leaps about at the slightest touch like a cokedup dachshund.
Dad was casting about, pausing every few minutes to disentangle his line from some overhanging branches and provide me, through indirect instruction, with some choice new vocabulary I could show off on the playground. I toddled about flipping over stones, splashing in the water.
An important point here is that at this juncture in my young life I’d never caught a fish. Never tossed in my line, carefully drawing my fly through the water, to feel the powerful strike of a hungry trout, then a quick jerk to set the hook, and the artful play of angler vs. trout as I reeled in a beauty. No. I was just a kid. But my dad wanted to share his love of the sport with me, and so had brought me down to the Neshobe River with him.
As my dad fished and I wandered, whatever I had eaten for breakfast that morning made its way through my digestive system. In with the new, out with the old, as they say. I was caught short. There, on the banks of the Neshobe, I had to poop.
“Dad,” I said.
“Hm,” he replied, not looking at me. He can be laser-focused, my old man, when he’s fishing. He stared hard at the spot in the river where he was casting, almost as though he hoped that the intensity of his gaze would will a sixteen-inch trout to appear, mouth wide and hungry.
“Dad, I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Just go in the bushes,” he said, still casting with metronomic efficiency, eyes locked on the river, hoping against hope that one of these casts would drop the fly in the right spot.
What my dad didn’t realize was that the bathroom situation was a number two, not a number one. However, given my age and the lack of development in my prefrontal cortex, I took him at his word. I trundled over to some bushes next to the river, dropped my pants, and commenced the act of evacuating my bowels.
It was at this moment that a trout hit my dad’s fly with a sudden splash. My dad, eyes wide as a gambler whose horse overtakes the lead in the final stretch, frenetically started alternately reeling in line and feeding out slack as his pole arced and bent wildly.
“Erik!” he shouted, still not looking, eyes on the prize. “Erik! Come on!”
I think in retrospect what he wanted was a sort of Norman Rockwell-esque scene: He’d hand me the rod, steady my young frame in his arms, and patiently guide me in landing the fish. Bonding moment supreme.
However, I was squatted over my freshly dropped turds. But, like many kids, I was a literalist and eager to please my father. Excited, too, at the prospect of a fish! So, without pulling up my pants, or paying heed to where I stepped, I bolted toward my father, anticipation thrumming my body like a plucked string.
My father remembers it thus: He turned, while playing the trout, to see where I was. He saw me scurrying over the rocks toward him, pants around my ankles, naked nethers a-dangle. As I drew close, my dad caught the reek of fresh excrement, and a cursory glance confirmed it. I’d stepped in my own poop, and my shoes were covered. Desperate to take part in this sportsman’s rite of passage, I’d run the gauntlet of my own feces to be there with my dad at our moment of triumph.
Nyah began to scramble out of the water, a panicked seven-year-old in a two-piece swimsuit. She was rapidly swiveling her head back and forth, looking for a suitable spot, I assume, to drop her bottoms and commence the deed. We were surrounded by at least two dozen other swimmers.
“Nyah, not here!”
“I have to go!”
I grabbed her hand and hurriedly began leading her over the awkwardly jumbled boulders of the riverbed. We had at least one hundred yards to go downriver before the steep banks mellowed and would allow us a chance to get into obscuring foliage.
We slipped and scurried over the rocks, the cacophony of happy, shrieking swimmers and the merry splashing thunder of the falls echoing around us.
“It’s coming!”
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a child’s voice so plaintive yet tinged with terror. It almost matched the extreme level of fear I myself was experiencing. The way she said “it’s coming” was with the same tenor and timbre one would announce a tornado or tsunami. Clearly, whatever “it” was, was a thing to be abjectly feared.
Frightened, I desperately looked for a spot for her to relieve herself out of public view. She was trying to drop into a crouch as we stumbled along, me pulling her through people and wet rocks, forced downriver by the vertiginous cliffs on either side like bovines in a cattle chute being led to slaughter.
From the corner of my eye, I saw it. A sparse series of hand-and footholds, more stone-age ladder than path, climbed the wall to my left. After about twelve feet, it looked as though there was a ridiculously narrow goat path etched in the rock, leading upward. It was our only hope.
Nyah had started to emit a high-pitched animal whine. I hauled her behind me as I scaled the wet, pine needle–strewn face. Somehow, most likely by dint of sheer adrenaline-fed survival instinct, we made it up to the goat path. We were now up above the heads of the swimmers, some of whom had by this point turned and watched as our scurrying dash attracted attention.
With a guttural cry Nyah ripped her hand from mine, whipped down her bathing suit bottoms, and within a second was disengaging a turd the size and girth of a midsummer zucchini.
She was clinging to the cliff side, awkwardly squatting on the impossibly narrow ledge-like path that veered sharply upward. I turned back toward the swimming hole and fully realized my folly.
We were perched on display, in full view of the dozens of folks below, like some vulgar Paleolithic cave painting come to life. Fingers pointed, jaws dropped.
To her credit, Nyah discharged her duty with aplomb and efficency. Once she’d dropped her prize, she hitched up her bathing suit bottoms, the look of relief clear on her face. She glanced from me to the poop, then back to me with an open, guileless expression.
“Go rinse off,” I said.
Disaster averted (from her point of view), Nyah gamely climbed back down into the throng of swimmers to wash in the river. I stayed on the narrow shelf of rock, casting furtive glances at all the onlookers who continued to watch my predicament, the way it’d be hard to look away from a slow-motion car crash.
Nyah’s excrement lay in full view. The unspoken demand of those watching, as well as some deep but undeniable moral principle, demanded what must be done. And yet I lacked the courage.
But the poop would have to be moved.
One cannot be responsible for leaving a fresh turd in full view of a beautiful spot like Bingham Falls. It would be an egregious sin, blasphemy in the extreme. And yet, clad in only swim trunks with no equipment, I was at a loss as to how to remove the offending item. I certainly was not going to pick it up with my bare hands.
My eyes skittered about, looking for something. Anything. A solution. I felt, rather than saw, the tension growing in the spectators below. The poop gleamed dully in the sun. I saw, farther up the goat path, a smashed and broken dead pine tree, hanging down the steep-sided wall, its roots still tenuously holding fast to the top of the cliff. Branches stuck out at odd angles. I knew what I had to do.
I scrambled up the rock and snapped off two branches, each as long as my arm. I edged back down to the scene of the crime, noticing in my peripheral vision the upturned faces of the swimming hole revelers now almost universally held in sway by the dramatic scene unfolding above their heads.
With the precision of an atomic physicist handling plutonium, I used my makeshift pinchers to carefully lift up the poop, holding it away from my body. It was impressively turgid and—luckily for me—had enough structural integrity to hold together. With sweat beading my brow, I gingerly made my way up the narrow path. My focus was a thing of steel. I was able to make it up to the zenith of the path where the trees and foliage provided welcome cover, and where I could finally dispose of Nyah’s gift. With a strength and fury that suddenly and inexplicably rose within me, I buried it under a massive pile of dirt, rocks, and organic detritus I ripped barehanded from the earth.
Stepping away, I took some deep breaths. The sounds of kids playing in the river below echoed off the rock walls. I thought of Frazer’s Golden Bough : “The Oyampi Indians of French Guiana imagine that each waterfall has a guardian in the shape of a monstrous snake, who lies hidden under the eddy of the cascade, but has sometimes been seen to lift up its huge head. To see it is fatal.”
Indeed.