A Brief History of Swimming

            When I was five years old my parents had the good sense to build a cottage.  Now, to me, the actual cottage itself didn’t matter, nor did the view, its size, or its charming lack of plumbing. I didn’t care if the neighbors were clones from Deliverance.  All that mattered was that it was on a lake, an actual body of water.

I am completely, utterly, hopelessly heat intolerant.  When the weather gets hot I take it personally.  I mope, I fret.  Some say I get cranky. I’ve been known to hallucinate.  This is because in all the years of my childhood, I never once had to cope with being too warm.  After all, a blue body of water waited in my front yard, beckoning me to jump into it. 

A typical cottage day consisted of a swim after breakfast, interrupted by a brief break for lunch and supper.  At bed time I would be required to get out of the lake. 

My mother had two rules.  Rule number one: no swimming for one hour after eating.  Rule number two: no avoid eating so as to duck rule number one.  This left me with a one-hour void three times a day, which could be squeezed down intervals of fifty-minutes each if I adjusted the clock.

In order to avoid being parted from the water for too long, I would place my miniature aluminum lawn chair in the lake and sit in it while I waited for the hour to pass.  This satisfied the technical requirement that I not swim, while allowing me to stay wet.  However, sneaking the lawn chair into water higher than my waist was strictly forbidden.  This action invariably netted me fifteen minutes of banishment to the shoreline.  I never really understood any of this, and I still don’t.  I’ve never encountered any cases where gut-wrenching post-lunch cramps caused the demise of a person sitting in a chair.  I suspect my mother hadn’t heard of any cases either, but maybe she needed at least a few waking hours where she didn’t have to watch the back of my head bobbing in the lake.  I was probably more at risk of being struck by lightning attracted to my metal framed chair than I was of being seized by a cramp.  People don’t seem to worry about the swimming/eating thing as much today, but in the sixties it was one of the top ten worries, along with radioactive fallout, Russian spies, and whether or not someone might slip LSD into your Kool-Aid.

            Back at home in town, I still sought water everywhere.  Swimming pools were uncommon during my childhood, but you could cool off under the lawn sprinkler.  We were lucky enough to have rich neighbors who had a pool.  At least I thought they were rich – how else could they afford the extravagance of a plastic wading pool? 

Pools and plastic were both rarities in the early sixties.  The circular wading pool had two inflatable plastic rings for sides, one orange and one yellow, and a thin plastic bottom. It was a whopping four feet in diameter and could be filled to an impressive depth of 4-5 inches. Any deeper than that and you were “wasting water”. The water nicely covered your feet all the way up to the tops of your ankles if you were standing, or to the tops of your thighs if you were sitting.  Maximum capacity: two kids.  Actual capacity: five kids with an additional six standing nearby yelling that it was their turn.  From a parental point of view, it was the best possible swimming experience, as there was zero chance that anyone would drown. A kid was more likely to die of infection brought on by multiple toenail slashings.

Later on, as I went farther afield in the world I made friends with someone who had a real swimming pool – a large rectangular hole in the ground, with concrete squared off nicely around the edges. It had a snappy blue liner and a diving board at one end.  You could even swim in that thing on weekdays – no waiting to get to the cottage!  It didn’t matter that the population density in the pool rivaled that of Singapore, it was water, and it was deep enough to swim in.  And best of all, it wasn’t a public pool! 

My mother disapproved of public pools, and was ultimately proven to be correct in her analysis.  The one and only time I was allowed to go to a public pool I returned home with only one shoe.  To be more accurate, I returned home with no shoes, as the one shoe that was not stolen seemed just too heavy to carry back home after I discovered I’d been the victim of a one-legged thief.  Wearing a single shoe for the long walk home was more painful than scorching my bare soles on the hot pavement. Midway between the pool and home I pitched the useless unpaired sneaker into a shrub. 

Not long ago I walked past that same shrub, which is now a massive clump with stems thicker than a sailor’s arm.  I bent down and looked beneath the leaves but the shoe was not there.  Too bad – it might have made my mother re-think her position on how “irresponsible” I am.

On hot days I still like to take a dip, proving that swimming can be a lifelong pursuit.  You are only briefly too young to swim, and almost never too old.  But you do need to remember a few rules:  no swimming for one hour after eating, trim your toenails when swimming in close quarters, and keep your eyes on your shoes!