Notes on the Local Swimming Hole

Swimming is by far the best tonic I’ve found yet for my back. I’m not a good swimmer—I do the breaststroke or elementary backstroke in the slow lane—but when I took a two-week break from swimming, I was surprised how much I missed it. When I returned to the pool, I realized it’s where I get, as Evelyn Ames says in Postcards from the Edge, “my endolphins.” I can hardly bear Sunday, when the pool is closed.

Outside the Green Lake Community Center are the healthy people—the gorgeous rollerbladers and runners and power walkers doing laps around a large lake in the middle of the city, the buff basketball players, the junior high baseball players, the yuppie Ultimate Frisbee players, the latte drinkers checking one another out, the Euro-cool soccer players, the volleyballers, the softball players. The indoor pool is the wetland of the maimed—home to those bearing canes, knee braces, neck braces—for who else would be free or motivated to be here at, say, 1:00 P.M. on Wednesday? I’m joined by people recovering from knee surgery, spinal surgery, car accidents; obese people who weigh themselves daily but never seem to lose a pound; a man in a wheelchair with his faithful dog barking at any potential interference; another wheelchair-bound man whose assistant is an almost cruelly cheerful Nordstrom shoe salesman; the Walrus Splasher (a huge guy with a handlebar moustache whom we’re all trying to build up the courage to approach about the tidal waves he sends our way as he pounds the water); and a pre-op transsexual from New Jersey who, day by day, is wearing more and more feminine attire and is sticking out his butt and chest with greater self-confidence. He’s the one who told me the locker room was closed one day owing to an outbreak of leprosy; it turned out to be just a homeless guy who had shat his pants. Nearly everyone here is trying to come back from something; you can feel it in the men’s locker room, where we don’t talk that much.

The good swimmers while away too much time talking; they’re not desperate, as the rest of us are, to claw their way back into shape by doing their assigned 36 laps (one mile). The good swimmers have an uncanny ability to skid across the top of the water, while the rest of us plunge down, down, down. The falling apart of our bodies; the perfection of youthful bodies; the pool is, for me, about one thing: the tug of time.

Every swimmer seems lost in his or her own water space (accidentally touching someone’s toe or shoulder always feels thrillingly, wrongly intimate). I’m never so aware of the human perplexity as when I’m at Green Lake with my fellow bodies. We’re all just trying to stay alive; we have no greater purpose than glimpsing a shadow of ourselves on the surface as we glide underwater. What is the point of floating? To keep floating. I feel the weightless, gorgeous quality of existence.

Until very recently, my father would swim at least 15 laps every day, diving headfirst rather than sashaying his way in, as I do. Now, though, he can hardly manage a stroke or two across the width of his condo’s pool without his arthritis forcing him to stop and clutch his leg. He’s always been addicted to terrible puns; now, he keeps playing with variations on the word “arthritis.” Arthur, write us. Author, write us. Author, right us. There’s no author, we both know, and there’s no way he can right us. Earlier this year, it was just the two of us alone in the pool. I was doing laps and flip turns—my back was feeling weirdly trouble-free for the moment—while he was tottering in the shallow end. After just a few minutes, he got out, toweled off, and headed over to the sauna, carrying the sports page.