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This piece is a collection of thoughts. They have no real common theme, except the fact that all concern swimming, and being a competitive swimmer... and water. Ultimately, it's about water. For many years, I've had a Speedo T-shirt bearing the slogan "Water Is Life." The T-shirt is looking faded and worn, nowadays, but I won't part with it. When I die, I don't know what I'd like done with my body; that's for my survivors to choose. But if I have a tombstone when I die, and if it has an epitaph carved on it, I'd like it to be: "Water is life. He loved both." From time to time, I think about how remarkably our world, our universe is arranged. It's remarkable that the sun and the moon are exactly the right size and distance to match perfectly when a solar eclipse happens. It's remarkable that our eyes, which perceive such an infinitesimal part of the electromagnetic spectrum, are perfectly matched to the colors in a rainbow. And it's remarkable to me that when we look into calm, still water, we see ourselves, our reflections. Water gives us ourselves. Water is life. ----- When I was four years old, I came close to drowning - at least, that's how my mom always told the story. I have no memory of this event, except a vague, blurry recollection of something to do with my mom losing her sunglasses, so the following is my mom's version of events. (I suspect this is one of those stories that got more dramatic as it was told and re-told over the years.) Whether or not I almost drowned, it's still a revealing sort of story, I think - not unlike that airplane story, also from age four. I must have been a handful that year. :) On this occasion, my family was visiting a private club with a pool. At the time, I was learning how to swim. I don't know exactly what happened - my mom never said - but I was in the water by myself, and somehow I got into trouble out in the middle of the pool. My mom and the other adults called out instructions and encouragement to me, but it wasn't working, and after a few seconds, they got worried. I was splashing ineffectively, gasping, gurgling. My mom had to dive in and grab me from behind and pull me to the edge. Mom's version of the story always included the fact that she hadn't planned to get wet that day; hadn't wanted to get her hair wet. Apparently that aggravated her at the time, although recounting the story in later years, she found it humorous. She also lost her sunglasses diving in to rescue me; they fell to the bottom of the pool, and someone else got them for her before we left that day. My mom says that despite being hauled, gasping and coughing, out of the pool, within minutes I wanted to get right back in. I don't find that hard to believe at all. Setbacks just make me more determined. If the horse throws you, get back on, immediately. And more importantly, most simply and elegantly: I loved the water. Nothing was going to keep me from it. ----- Here's a long quote from an email a friend sent me. I liked it, so I saved it. "The swim team usually has the widest variety of team members, being made up of a few out-of-place jocks, there for glory alone in a season where no other sport is being played, kids of lesser skill who are placed there by parents or goaded into it by siblings, and a few kids there just for the letter for their jacket (do they still give those out today?). Also, you always have a few kids in swim team who are deathly skinny, ribs sticking out, hips protruding, ankles, knees and elbows popping out at odd angles. And they're dropped into an ex-small Speedo, and still nothing shows, at all, and you wonder where everything is hiding. Then you notice that the kid has the cutest smile, the brightest face and certainly a lot of balls, to walk out of the locker room in that skimpy little thing in the first place. We had a team tradition that I really liked. No matter how long it took for the slowest kid to finish the race, you always patted him on the back, said "way to go." I loved the kids with heart. ----- A funny little vignette from swim team: We were required to get flu shots at the beginning of every season. And when I saw required, I mean required. Here's how it worked: At the beginning of practice one afternoon (and we never knew ahead of time which afternoon it would be), all the boys were called over to the end of the deck by Coach Livingston and told to line up. Everybody groaned. Everybody knew what that meant, even the new kids - the flu-shot lineup was legendary. There was alot of pushing and moving around, because nobody wanted to be at the beginning of the line. You know how the pecking order is in middle school and high school... so, naturally, the 7th and 8th graders got stuck (pun intended) at the beginning of the line. We got ourselves in a row, and then the door opened and in came the school nurse, carrying a little black leather carrying case, something like a gym bag. She set it down, reached in, and pulled out a syringe with a needle that looked about a foot long, along with some alcohol and some little cotton balls. Without ceremony, she grabbed the first boy's arm, swabbed it off with no gentleness, and then jabbed him. As soon as she pulled the needle out, she'd wipe it off with alcohol, refill the syringe, grab the next boy's arm, and repeat. Meanwhile, the kid she'd just injected was supposed to hustle off to the bench and sit calmly till the shots were done. Of course, most of us waited around at least long enough to see our friends get jabbed, and to make faces and laugh while they flinched. The whole thing was over in maybe ten minutes. But the memory lasts a lifetime. :) ----- "So," you may be wondering. "So, what about swimming and boys?" Twenty-four boys in Speedos, every afternoon at practice - for a boy who likes boys, it sounds like heaven. But, like everything in life, it's not quite the way you would imagine. As I've said elsewhere, I was a competitor. Particularly at dual meets, sexual matters were far from my mind. I wanted to win - myself, and our team - and the other boys were there to stop us, and we had to stay focused. I didn't think of my teammates as anything except teammates in those moments, and I didn't think of the other team's swimmers as anything but obstacles. That wasn't universally true - I can recall clear instances, especially when I was in 7th-8th grade and my hormones were at redline, when seeing some cute boy's butt in a Speedo, or noticing his genitals outlined in clingy, slick wet fabric, became more than a little distracting. That happened more often at practice, where the pressure was less, and where I knew the kids and had already fooled around with some of them. But it wasn't the norm. I was too focused on the competition itself, in practice and particularly in competition. I'm sure some of those kids on opposing teams were cute, but it just didn't register. I recall seeing one boy at a tourney in 10th grade who was unusually well-endowed - and my immediate thought was: "Good! Hope it slows him down!!!" :) There's another aspect to my inattention. Like anything, you get desensitized to seeing boys wearing nothing but skimpy, contour-revealing nylon. When it's every day, and when it's your friends, people you know, and where you're there for a specific set of reasons - you basically quit noticing what they're wearing or what they look like, after a while. It's just the old cliché about familiarity breeding... well, not contempt, but inattention. Even after I'd experimented with a boy, seeing him in his Speedo wouldn't bring anything sexual to mind, unless I consciously thought about it - and usually I didn't. Even in the locker room, or in the shower. (Okay, maybe I never quite got that desensitized... but it still wasn't as erotic as you might think.) A side-note about boy-butts in Speedos, since I mentioned it: Flip turns were a great way to see my friends' butts in their Speedos, on the occasions when I wasn't too single-minded about winning. I sometimes followed Scott in the 200 medley relay that year (he was breaststroke, I was freestyle), and I have this vivid memory of being up on the block, seeing his Speedo-clad butt heading away, down to the far end, flip-turning, then headed back towards me, and knowing I should concentrate on the practice but getting a little distracted... It was over in a few seconds - before he tagged me, I was back on focus - but it was there. I showed off my butt in my Speedo, too. :) That was the year I was with Kenny, and it was for his sake. Kenny came to swim practice a number of times to hang out and wait for me to finish, usually on Saturday mornings when we were going to sleep over that night. After one such practice, he said, "Danny, your butt looks good in your Speedo." I said, trying to be funny, "Your face and my butt, what a pair." (That was a typical comment for boys back then. Usually it was in the context of a dialog between two cigarette smokers: "You got a match?" "Yeah. Your face and my butt." Maybe you had to be there... :)) But I could tell Kenny was serious, even though he was laughing. I told him his butt looked great in his wrestling outfit, too. (This conversation sounds completely sappy in written form - can't you almost hear the violins in the background, as I turn to gaze into his eyes? - but it wasn't. We were laughing like we were totally joking and being sarcastic; but we both knew that underneath, we were both serious. Our emotions weren't jokes, although we would've chomped down on broken glass before admitting it to each other, or ourselves.) At any rate, whenever Kenny was at practice from that point on, I made a point to go up to him and stick my butt in his face. I was always tempted to pull my Speedo down and moon him, from about three feet away, but I never did, for three reasons: (a) by age 15, I had developed a degree of awareness that stuff like that wasn't always especially appropriate; (b) Coach Livingston would've had my bare butt on a platter before I knew what was happening, if he'd spotted me; and (c) Kenny would've promptly goosed me with his foot, and I knew it. :) ----- I know everyone is dying to see young Danny in his Speedo. So here ya go. :) This pic is from our 8th-grade yearbook. The reason there's a solo picture of me is an interesting story. I was absent on the day in March that they took the formal picture of the whole team, along with 4-5 other kids. Bummer. Except that our school wanted everybody on all the athletic teams in the yearbook. (They took no great pains to do that for the non-athletes who missed their picture days - how's that for double standard? Your basic middle/high-school jock-ocracy. :))
The result was that all 4-5 of us who missed picture day got our individual selves snapped and displayed. This particular pic was taken near the beginning of practice. I'd done my warmup laps and was waiting (not so patiently) for the workout to begin, talking to some friends. The photographer and our coach came up, and Coach said, "Danny, we have to get your picture for the yearbook. Let's look like we're talking about something. Umm... what do you think about the Braves this year?" Coach was a big Atlanta Braves fan. If you're at all familiar with the Atlanta Braves and their record during the 1970s, you'll know why I have that bemused look on my face for this picture. :) If you aren't familiar with the 1970s Graves (that's not a typo), maybe this will give you a clue: In summer 1977, if I recall the date correctly, Sports Illustrated ran a big feature article on Atlanta's pro sports teams. The opening photo was a big double-page spread of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium from the air, and in huge letters across the top of both pages was the article's stark, inflammatory title: "LOSERSVILLE". I remember that article very well, to this day. But let's not go off on S.I. That's a book all by itself. And besides, I'd have to use bad language. :) Anyway: They took two pictures of me, chatting with Coach about the Gravediggers, and then the photographer and Coach went over to take Trent's picture, and I went back to talking to my friends, and thought no more about it - until the yearbook came out a couple months later. And the picture you see here was displayed, in all its glory, taking up a full quarter-page. (You're seeing it greatly reduced, naturally.) I underwent a rather significant level of commentary about that photo, and all of it centered on one of my features in particular; and I'm sure you don't need me to explain which feature. :) As you're aware by now, my weenie and balls aren't really all that big. But in 8th grade, I had this big growth spurt in height, muscle, hands and feet... and other appendages. By some trick of fate, that was also the year when they managed to get the above close-up picture of me in my Speedo in the yearbook, looking like a very well-endowed 13-year-old boy. In fact, I was a very well-endowed 13-year-old boy. The difference is that all the other 13-y/o boys grew bigger dicks, while I was the same size at 15, and 17, and 25, and 30-something... I genuinely don't care. Penis size is irrelevant to me, and actually I think it's an advantage to have small testicles. But it was entertaining to have that moment recorded for posterity. :) By the way, to some extent the bulge you see here is an illusion. Back in the 70s, as I've mentioned, Speedos were made out of all nylon, no spandex. For that reason (and also because my practice suit was pretty worn-out by March), the thing was pretty loose on me, even allowing for the growth spurt. What you see in the photo is the phenomenon that occurs when a boy's penis gets trapped in the halfway position in a loose nylon Speedo. No matter whether you like to point it up or point it down (my preference is always down), by the time you've been in the water for more than five minutes, you're pointing out. All you pre-spandex competitive swimmers out there know what I mean. :) Only the truly well-hung avoid this fate, because their weenies get tucked down under, but I wasn't in that class - a well-endowed 13-year-old is still a 13-year-old. :) One other thing that strikes me about this photo today, although I didn't even notice it back then: See the tan line on my thigh, right below the Speedo? You won't see that on many 13 year-old boys today. Kids don't wear Speedos to just splash around in the pool nowadays - competitive swimmers or not. That's their choice and I don't really blame them - being body-shy at that age is normal and understandable. (I think it's dysfunctional when kids take it to the extreme of not showering after gym class or practice, though. There's nothing wrong with shyness and modesty, but when it makes a boy stink, he's got an issue to deal with.) Speedos just aren't the fashion these days, too. I liked nice clothes and wearing what my friends wore when I was a kid, so I understand. Boys don't want to break fashion rules and be different from their friends, any more than girls do, and that's perfectly cool. I just think it's unfortunate when it interferes with practicality. Actually, this whole body-shy/fashion thing is a big reason why swim teams have trouble recruiting and keeping boys nowadays - more about that below. At any rate, it's curious to see that tan line on my thigh, and muse on how trends change. And it also reminds me of something I really, really liked about living down South: Outdoor swimming, nine months of the year! :) I think I'd only been in the outside pool a few times by March, when this pic was taken; but basically, your tan lines never went away over the winter. I now live where it gets plenty cold and the snow flies. I like where I am now, too; and I don't miss some Southern environmental features, like year-round bugs. But swimming under the warm sun in March, or October... ahhhhh. :) ----- While we're talking swimwear, here's a silly note. Can you think of anything more redundant than wearing a jockstrap under your Speedo? Well, back in the 1970s and earlier, it wasn't uncommon. No swimmer wears a jock under his Speedo today, as far as I know (although I haven't made a habit of checking. :)) I can't think of any reason why a guy would want to wear one, because the spandex in Speedos nowadays make them just as supportive as any jockstrap. (I have taken several aerobic classes in recent years, and I find that a Speedo, one size smaller than my usual, is the best support I can get. Incidentally, I highly recommend step or cross- training aerobics for a great workout. Try it; you'll thank me. :)) But back in the 60s and 70s, Speedos were made of regular non-stretchy nylon, as noted. And maybe some boys and men felt the need for more support. At that time, you could buy something called a "swimmer's jock." They were made of 100 percent nylon (as opposed to regular jocks made of cotton/nylon), and had smaller waistbands and legs, I assume so you could wear them under your Speedo without them showing as much. Of course, under a Speedo anything else shows inside that tight nylon, so I always found the look peculiar. And the swimmer's jocks had this annoying habit of creeping out from under your Speedo. That made the wearer look and feel like a Grade-A dorkwad, to say the least. I bought one at around age 10 for rec-league swim, for some reason I've now forgotten (probably because the coach suggested we do it), and wore it a few times. I definitely didn't need it for support at age 10, and it made me feel like a dweeb to wear it, so I was indifferent about remembering to wear it, and abandoned it completely before the season was over. The day I quit wearing it is fixed in my mind. It was one of the city meets my mom attended (she didn't always go.) Here's 10 year-old Danny, doing my dryland warmup for the 50 breaststroke, stretching and talking to some friends, and in the middle of that she calls me over to the stands. I get about halfway there, and she announces: "Danny, your jock is showing - let me fix it for you." I had some sense of self-dignity, so I declined: "Aw Mom, I'll do it" - as I pulled up the waist of my Speedo and adjusted the legs seams. Meanwhile, everyone who heard this exchange was chuckling, including all my friends. Now, as you know, I'm not self-conscious, so it didn't embarrass me as such. But the whole thing was definitely uncool. :) On our school swim team, Coach Livingston told us before the first practice every season that jocks were optional, but he recommended we wear them. (Why did my swim coaches make a big deal out of it, anyway? Maybe the jockstrap manufacturers had a kickback racket going? That's the only sense I can make out of it.) About half the boys wore them, as I recall; maybe less. I bought one again, but I only wore it to practice a handful of times, and I never wore it to meets. Aside from feeling it was superfluous and dorky, I didn't want to give the other kids at practice more of a target. I've talked about Speedo wedgies elsewhere in the narratives. I also witnessed a few "Speedo-plus-swimmer's-jock wedgies," and I can tell you it's not pretty. :) ----- There's another reason why boys (or men) would want to wear jocks under their Speedos: modesty. Even with the liners, you can easily scope out a boy's equipment (or, if you're gay, his "package" - I hate that term.) The swimmer's jocks did tend to turn everything into an undefined generic bulge - you couldn't tell if the boy was circumcised or not, at any rate. :) And that leads me to comment on one more thing about Speedos, before we (*ahem*) drop the subject: Swim teams are having trouble nowadays keeping boys in the water from age 12-13 or so onward, and a major reason seems to be that the boys don't want to wear racing suits. Speedos are too revealing, in other words, and the kids get embarrassed. Now, I can understand that. Kids in early adolescence are intensely self- conscious to begin with. And, unless you're a kid like little Danny, you're probably body-shy in general, and mortified that you'll get a boner in public, specifically. There's also the fact that many gay men (and few straight men except swimmers) like to wear Speedos; and kids nowadays are going to avoid like the plague anything that might make their friends think they're fags (excluding the kids who are fags, I guess. :)) In 1999, an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer was reposted on a Usenet newsgroup I read, rec.sport.swimming, concerning this issue. I'll include the article here. The post inspired a fair amount of comment on the newsgroup, on both sides; you can check it out on Deja News if you're interested. [Note: I'm copying the article in this narrative only because I failed to find it on the Philadelphia Inquirer's website. I respect copyrights, and my preference would be to link directly to the article itself. I quote it here only because I can't find the original. Please respect copyrights, you guys. And if the Inquirer objects, I'll remove the article from my narrative.]
Footnote: More recently someone brought up this article again on rec.sport.swimming, and another mini-debate ensued. One swim coach commented that one dad told him that the boys' swimsuits were too revealing, and asked him (the coach) to require the boys to wear jockstraps with cups under their Speedos! Just when you think you've heard everything... :) And, another footnote: Speedos for boys on swim teams will be a thing of the past before too long, I predict. The Speedo company (and others too, I assume) are marketing a suit made of fabric that's faster through water than bare skin. As you'd expect, these are full-body suits, not unlike wetsuits - only the hands, feet, and head are exposed. They're expensive right now, but prices will undoubtedly drop as demand and therefore production increase. I doubt the classic Speedos will quit being made, even when competitive swimmers are all wearing the new-fabric suits. Not all schools can afford them right away, even if the price drops, and state athletic associations will be sensitive to that and won't allow them until they're universally available. (There's a definite un-level playing field that results if some schools can afford them and others can't.) And besides, I doubt gay guys will quit wearing Speedos, even when everyone else does. :) As a competitive swimmer, I think the new suits are a great development. As a guy who's into nostalgia these days about his past... well... I'll just say I'm glad I grew up in the Speedo era. :) ----- I had sexual encounters of one type or another with five or six boys from the swim team, as I recall. It's hard to state an exact number, because there were some boys I fooled around with before or after they were on swim with me, so I don't know whether to count them as "swim team" related or not. I won't recount all of those encounters in detail, since I have other swim-team stories in the narratives. Maybe I'll just mention my friend Scott - that's a reasonably good example of the typical boy-sex encounter I had with my fellow swimmers. I'll count my experience with Scott as definitely swim-team-related, since it was during swim season when we did it. I met him in 7th grade; in fact, Scott was one of the first friends I made at the military school after we got there, so I knew him before we were on swim together a few months later. We used to study together for algebra (which I hated and he liked for some unknown warped reason.) Scott was also a day (commuter) boy like me, but he lived in a distant part of town, so I rarely saw him outside of school. He was a good friend and a pretty cool kid, though. The essence of the tale is that next year in 8th grade, I helped Scott to discover jacking off. He knew about it but had never tried masturbating, till I showed him how I did it, then did it to him. The fateful event happened on the one and only occasion when I went to Scott's house with him. This was after Saturday a.m. practice, and we were both riding the bus home that day. As I mentioned elsewhere, our school ran a bus on Saturdays for the kids who had sports practice; it was a pain in the butt because it was a single bus that covered the whole city, so it was always a long ride. Anyway, we hooked up at practice and decided to spend the day together. I was curious about Scott sexually for all the usual reasons, and for a rather silly reason in particular: it was obvious in his Speedo that he was smaller than average, like me, and I was curious about whether he got bigger when he was hard. To cut to the chase, after the usual random let's-find-something-to-do series of events, like TV and playing different games and whatever, we ran out of ideas. This was in Scott's bedroom, and the rest of his family were all in another part of the house, so we were pretty private back there. (Scott was a rich kid, incidentally; his family had a gigantic house, with six or seven bedrooms and about the same number of bathrooms.) At that point in my life, I didn't mind getting directly to the point about things, sexual and otherwise. So, after a few minutes of talking about what to do next, I said, "Well... we could play with ourselves. You ever do that?" It took Scott by surprise, of course, and he blushed and looked down and didn't reply. By this time, I knew enough to expect that reaction, and I knew how to handle it. So I pressed on: "It's cool! You'll like it. If you don't know how, I'll show you. It's awesome. Want me to go first?" He still didn't reply, but he was interested. You could always tell. Again making a long story short, I got him to lie down on his bed next to me (he made me lock his door first), and I pulled my pants and boxers down and did it. The whole time I was beating off, I was telling him about screwing my girlfriend - utterly bogus, but I knew it would get him hot. When I felt the first jolt approaching, I said, "The white stuff's gonna spurt out now... watch what happens... it's awesome." And it was awesome, as usual. :) To catch my sperm, I had to roll over on my side facing Scott and shoot into my cupped hand. That was a little awkward, because I usually jerked off left- handed, but this time I had to finish with my right; finishing with my left would have meant rolling away from Scott, and that wouldn't have been cool. He watched the whole process, fascinated. After calming down for a few seconds, I said, "Well, you wanna go for it now?" He said, "Um... I don't know...." Scott clearly was a novice at masturbating - masturbating with another boy, at any rate. I said, "It's fun. You just pull your pants down and do what I did... Here, I'll help you." And I started pulling on his belt. (I was an aggressive kid, as is obvious by now.) We got his pants down. He was helping me get him stripped, and in his briefs you could see he was stiff, so I knew I was right about his interest. He wiggled his underwear down by himself. I was interested to see that he did have a small weenie, like mine: "Hey, yours is little too," I said. Scott quickly replied, "It'll get bigger. I'm not finished growing." He felt embarrassed by my remark, so I reassured him that little cocks were cool, that I liked mine just fine. :) Well, poor Scott either genuinely didn't know what to do, or else he was shy about getting started. He grabbed his dick and was pulling on it, half- heartedly. So I said, "Here, let me show ya." And I wrapped my fingers around his penis and started stroking him. It turned out that Scott had a hair-trigger, or was super-excited, or both. Within a few seconds, literally, he started coming. He got this shocked look on his face, and then he arched his back and his cock erupted. I had been looking at his face, talking to him about sex; but when he got that expression, I knew. I looked down. I realized what was going to happen, but nevertheless I wasn't prepared (hey, I wasn't always on top of things. :)) The result was that I got a nice faceful of boy-come. And Scott had alot of boy-come stored up in there. Semen on the face is not much of a thrill for me. Semen in the hair is worse. Luckily, none got in my eyes - semen in your eyes hurts like fire. I had enough presence of mind to avoid yelling "Oh, GROSS!!, although that's what I was thinking. :) Instead, I let Scott finish, and then said, "You came! Well, that's how you do it. But next time, I won't get so close." We both laughed. I'm lucky, in that often something inside me tells me the right thing to say in a given situation. That could've gone wrong, easily, if I had reacted badly. I'll skip the post-sex details, except to say that I ended up taking three showers that day - one at my house in the morning (scheduled), another after swim practice, (scheduled), and a third at Scott's house in the afternoon (unscheduled.) It was a very wet day, all around. :) That's as far as it ever went with Scott. We didn't repeat the experience. This single-experience phenomenon wasn't uncommon. Many of my boy-sex experiences were one-shot (pun intended) deals. I managed to remain friends afterwards with most boys, too, whether or not we remained sexually involved - which I felt good about. Scott and I stayed friends - good friends, really. I tried to get him interested in sex a few more times, dropping hints, but he made it clear that once was plenty. I think the whole memory embarrassed him; he'd get quiet and/or change the subject every time. It was okay. I was just glad to have him as a friend. We didn't hang out much outside of school, as I said, but we remained friends until graduation. ----- Why do I like swimming? The greater question is: Why do I like water? I've pondered that, often. And I don't have an answer. Swimming - competitive swimming - is a funny kind of sport. In an odd way, swimming is contrary to my nature. I'm definitely a people person. But you're always alone, during actual competition - always. I can't think of any other athletic event that's so isolating. That's especially true of freestyle stroke (or Australian crawl, if you prefer), because the stroke itself demands that you rhythmically, repetitively cut yourself off from the air and sound and sight, every half-second or so. Backstroke is easier on the eyes, but in backstroke you have no clue where you are in relation to your opponents, or even the wall, until you see the flags overhead. Breast and fly are less isolating, especially breast. But all strokes are ultimately separate worlds. You're by yourself, from the moment you enter the water until the moment you touch the wall (or your relay-partner's hand) at the end. In the water, you're cut off from ordinary human life. Hearing is muted. You can hear the yelling of the crowd - louder if it's a dual meet or tourney, less volume at practice - but it's always muffled. Your vision is peculiar. Wearing swim goggles helps, but back when I was on swim team in the 70s, swim goggles weren't especially common and certainly weren't mandatory. Without goggles, your eyesight is blurry and unfocused. The world is a shifting pattern of colors and shapes and undefined movement. Vision and hearing are, I think, the two primary senses for humans. Most of our environmental information comes to us through our eyes and ears - the information we pay attention to, at any rate. Swimming is all about the negation of those two senses. The other three - touch, smell, and taste - come alive in the water, as if to fill the void. And all three of those senses convey unique information to the swimmer. It's impossible to describe the feel, the texture of water. Like describing the color of a daydream, it can't be done. There's no smell in the spectrum remotely close to the smell of chlorine, or its chemical cousin, bromine; and it's a smell you remember into eternity. Taste, since it's closely related to smell, is affected likewise. Laundry bleach contains chlorine, of course, and occasionally you can catch a whiff in your tap water; otherwise, you don't encounter chlorine outside the swimming pool. To this day, whenever I pour Clorox, I'm taken for a moment to the natatorium or the outdoor pool, and I'm eight, or eleven or fifteen years old again. In college, I read a poem by James Dickey titled "The Strength of Fields." I am not ordinarily a poetry kind of person. But that poem has lasted in my memory and emotions. "The Strength of Fields" has too many elements, and they resonate too deeply, for me to explain them in this confined space. But I want to mention one element in particular that struck deep and lodged in my heart and mind: a passage from another literary work that Dickey employed to launch his own piece. The quote is from something called "Rites de Passage" by van Gennep, and (since I can't find the poem at the moment), it's from memory: A separation from the world That's the shaman's journey, of course. And that is swimming. You leave the starter's block, and you're penetrating another realm of existence. It's not an ordinary world at all. And there is power in the water... oh, yes, there's power. Return to earth at race's end, and you know you've been somewhere else. The shaman's journey, in Siberian and Native American belief, often take place underground; it's significant that in swimming, you dive down into the water, and you emerge, dripping and changed, at the finish. Maybe it's not as metaphysical as the shaman's journey. Maybe it could be. Maybe that's what it is. That's the day of the meet, maybe, or the hour, the moment. Yes, that's the way it is. That's the milling mass of kids in Speedos and warm-ups; that's the coaches and the timers and the officials; that's the crowd on the hard wooden bleachers, parents and younger siblings and friends, talking and waiting, anticipating. That's the ordinary stretching and jumping and mounting excitement, waiting for your event, laughing with your teammates, on edge. That's the moment when the event is called, making you tingle; that's the last-minute words from Coach Livingston, and the low, direct "good luck" and slaps on your shoulder or your butt from those who will plunge before or after, but not now; right now it's you, and you alone. That's the moment when you mount the starting block by yourself and you shake the tension out, down from your shoulders through your arms and your hands, and you look at the turbulent water and understand it's your friend and your enemy, your paramour and your barrier, your life. That's when you see, and feel as well as you see, the other boys stepping up with you to their own blocks, the irregular, individual movements coming together, forming a row of tall, straight figures, as if aligned magnetically by the surface below. That's the crowd getting quieter. That's the fluttering arm movements becoming still, down the row; the time for shaking off tension is over, you're gonna need it now. That's the starter's call: "On your marks." That's you and the others instantly assuming the position: bent down at the waist, your arms back, your toes curled. That's the starter's call: "Get set." That's the crowd, quiet now, leaning forward slightly, watching, expectant. That's you, you're fully cocked, loaded, hair-trigger, your heart racing, you're alive and it's fine, it's just so fine. That's the split second between "get set" and the starter's pistol, when you're up on the blocks bent over at a 110-degree angle with your arms up and behind you in a V, straight and true; and your toes are curled over the leading edge of the plastic block in the best possible grip; and the water from your swimsuit is slowly drip-dripping on your ankles; and your face is aimed out, your eyes focused on the distorted, rippled black lane-marker below you; and the crowd has gone dead quiet; and you're so tense that if someone tapped you you'd jump through the roof, and you're wound so tightly that every little tink of noise is magnified; and you're caught for a quarter-second between your low dread that you'll mistake one of those tinks for the pistol and false-start, and your low fear that you'll hesitate at the actual pistol-shot and get off too slow; and the time between "get set" and the pistol stretches out like taffy in the vast silence; and the chlorine-smell is everywhere, filling you up; and the pool stirs restlessly below you now, and you know that a second later it will be churned to desperate fury... That's the way it is. ----- At the opening of this narrative, I wrote: "It's remarkable to me that when we look into calm, still water, we see ourselves, our reflections." Calmness and stillness are rare for people. Traditionally, meditation is how one achieves that state. But humanity is not always calm or still. Do we find ourselves (ourselves), only in quiet? Meditation is like a dream, and dreams are not quiet. A Buddhist saying goes something like this: "How wonderful, how marvelous! I chop wood; I draw water." Life itself is not always calm or still. Life is a stormy sea as well as a frozen pond. Quiet is not the only way. Swimming is not floating.
Water gives us our selves. Water is life.
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