I wear seasonal clothes, eat seasonal foods and like to write about seasonal topics. During the past few weeks, I’ve written about summer experiences. This week, I’ll continue to celebrate this season of daylight and warmth.
Though some days are warmer than we like.
I’ve done much outdoor work in the summer, including as a food and flower grower, garbageman, roofer, landscaper and camp counselor/swim teacher. I’ve also often played sports outdoors. Being out in so much sun has beaten up my skin. Mistakes were made.
So were memories.
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I still love immersing in either fresh or salt water. Depending on their ages, human bodies are between 60-75% water. It’s unsurprising that people are drawn to it.
I learned to swim in a river a block from my childhood home. As was that river, much freshwater is surrounded by trees. Some such settings have rocks from which you can dive or jump. Some are streams you can sit in. Some you go to with friends. Some you go to with your girlfriend. Immersing in these places is a slice of paradise.
I’ve stepped into liquid in such places as Bear Creek Lake in Southern Indiana, with its rope swing. Copake Falls on the New York/Massachusetts border are beautiful and user-friendly. Ithaca, NY has several nice spots for swimming, diving and jumping off cliffs of various heights. I’ve swum in a farm pond and an abandoned strip coal mine in Central Pennsylvania as well as in the broad Hudson River near Beacon, NY. I’ve slid down and leaped and dived from rocks in Western North Carolina and outside Chattanooga and into Northern California’s Rainbow Pool, just outside of Yosemite. I’ve submerged in the Delaware River and in New York State’s Catskills and Adirondacks, as well as in Washington State’s ice-cold Cascade lakes. I’ve bathed beneath waterfalls in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, in Puerto Rico, on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula and the Pacific Coasts of Choco, Colombia and Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
Among other places. If you tell me about a good swimming hole, maybe we can meet there.
When I see other people in these off-the-books swim settings, they’re smiling, shouting and laughing. The setting induces that reaction. For example, Richmond, Virginia’s James River has several places where one can slide, seated, dozens of yards, riding the current atop and between rocks.
One August 2012 day, a burly, forty-something guy rolled up alongside the James on his Harley.He stepped down the small riverbank and began snorkeling in shallow water. I asked him what he was looking for. He said he often found rings that had slipped from the wet, shrunken fingers of those whose hands scraped the rocks as the water swept them, blissfully distracted, through these gaps.
This treasure hunter told me that he struggled in school because he had a learning disability. He dropped out as soon as he could and started a window-washing business. His work paid all his bills and enabled him to buy a house and his Hog. He said his flexible work schedule allowed him to drop into the river often during the summer. I was impressed that despite adversity he had built a life he loved.
He said that, based on engraved initials and embossed dates and schools on the rings, he had located some of these rings’ owners and returned their rings to them. He told me that he found and saved so many unmarked wedding bands that he eventually filled a bread bag with them. When the price of gold crested, he sold the bag for $43,000 in pre-Scamdemic dollars.
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I like the way natural water looks, feels, sounds, tastes and smells. Some people consider lake or river water spooky and yicky because you can’t see through it and it often has a rocky, slimy or weedy bottom. I’ve put my feet into plenty of river and lake bottom muck and vegetation. Nothing bad ever happened. Some also fear that a fish will bite them. They’ve taken too seriously Jaws and documentaries about Amazonian piranhas. Lake fish, which are mostly sunnies, can’t even break the skin. In El Salvador, dozens of small fish harmlessly nibbled on our feet for a half hour as we sat on rocks in a hillside stream.
Besides swimming in rivers and lakes, I’ve also often swum in the ocean, typically at the Jersey Shore. I like to swim during the twilight hours after the lifeguards have left, and sometimes in the dark. One evening 35 years ago, near sunset, I got pulled out by a rip tide. Based on that experience—five others drowned nearby on that same day—I can understand how some who get caught in such a current drown, as Malcolm Jamal Warner just did. Ocean swimmers should have decent skills, remain calm, avoid taking a big gulp, resolve to stay afloat when swimming parallel to shore doesn’t immediately yield progress and reassure themselves that salt water exerts extra buoyant force.
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At some lakes, rivers and streams, immersion is allowed. But other places have “No Swimming” signs. Police or ranger efforts to prevent plunges into these places vary, depending on the location and the day.
My wife, Ellen, is a rule follower. In contrast, I think some rules should be broken. Not in a way that endangers or annoys others. And not for its own sake. Instead, just to do something that you enjoy. Swimming during hot weather, for example.
Inverting Adam and Eve, I’ve often talked Ellen into entering forbidden water. I convinced her that we wouldn’t get caught. And that if we did, we wouldn’t get arrested. And that we wouldn’t get fined. And that if we did, paying the fine would be worth the fun we would have had.
As were those who said “two weeks to stop the spread” and “vaccines are safe and effective,” I was making all this up. It was Salesmanship 101: you convince other people to go along and leave them to deal with any unfavorable consequences.
While this is plainly unethical, much of the world operates in this way, including in much higher-stakes matters than the misdemeanor I proposed. Back in the day, many human lives were created via such short-sighted persuasion. It’s part of my heritage.
Ellen hates the heat. When it was above 95 degrees, she was more amenable to suggestion. She put on a bathing suit under summer clothes, grabbed a towel and came along with me, never agreeing aloud that we should do this. Accomplices often exhibit silent, tentative affirmation.
I told her that if something went wrong, she could blame me. Ellen is nicer than I am. I could imagine a municipal court judge fining and scolding me and letting her go. When we want to, we can imagine many implausible things. During Coronamania, many adults imagined that healthy people would die from a respiratory virus. It was as if they thought there was a monster under their bed.
After my sales pitch, I drove Ellen 20 miles to the vicinity of swimming spots I knew near the edge of the New York City Metro area. During droughts, officials locked the gates to the gravel parking lots in these water-containing, semi-wild areas. We parked a half-mile away and walked to the gate, wiggled past it and, in order to avoid being seen, ran down and/or up paths where, once around a bend and behind trees and boulders, we became invisible to the police or rangers.
Having sneaked in, we soaked for hours, some afternoons in a lake and others in a river with water in the mid-70s. On one of these occasions, as we sat in the river wedged between boulders, we saw a boy and a girl in their late teens also defying the park closure. Each gripped a towel as they sprinted across a bridge 75 yards away, toward the lake atop a long hill that Ellen and I went to on days when the park was open. Their mischief was a beautiful sight. In the same way that one roots for a movie hero to avoid capture, we silently rooted, from our river niche hideaway, for the sprinting teens to evade detection, as we had. As in REM’s Nightswimming, the fear of getting caught was part of the fun for them and us.
Because I had been there many times, I knew there was an un-treed area up ahead of the scofflaws and that a ranger might have been waiting there to nab them. That’s why we opted for the river that day, instead of the lake, which I calculated was A Bridge Too Far.
Nowadays, security cameras would capture all of our furtive movings about.
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Some days we brought along my parents’ golden retriever. He swam well and followed me into the water after I dove off a ten-foot boulder and into the lake, in which swimming was prohibited, even when the park was open. As many times as I dove in and swam out and back again, he leaped in and chased me. Because he tried to climb on me in the water, when he got near, I soon learned to dive below the surface and swim underwater, beneath him and back toward the lake’s edge. When I surfaced, I saw the confused, paddling dog wondering where I had gone. I called for him and he turned around and chased me. By then, I had a big enough lead that I could get back to the lakeshore, unscathed by his paws. When he got near the shore, I again dove off the rock and over his head and swam back out toward the lake’s center as he resumed his chase. Rinse. Repeat. Multiple times. He went home tired but happy.
So did we. After each of these long water sessions, Ellen and I remained cool for hours. On hot days, we still talk about how we used to chillax in water surrounded by trees and the delightfully refreshed aftermath. Since we’ve moved away from North Jersey, we go the Shore instead. It’s good. But I miss the woodsy water.
