I. Swimming as holy communion
In a memoir, Italian author Marina Jarre describes being “the last of all to learn” how to ride a bicycle and the only child who couldn’t swim. “I always remain inside myself,” she says, “all I know is how to walk.” When Jarre finally learns to swim as an adult, it is a “baptism into the life of the body.”
I have always been a swimmer. Not a very good one, but I have always loved to swim. But, like Jarre, I was usually “inside myself” as a child. I didn’t trust my body; in fact, I was hardly convinced it belonged to me at all. I didn’t climb trees or go ice skating or do cartwheels. I first learned to ride a bike at 17. Instead of relaxing into a descent, I’d slow to a crawl, hands clenched on the brakes. Every time I heard someone approach, I’d pull over and wait on the shoulder of the trail in fear.
Swimming returns me to my body. I feel every muscle pushing through the water — I am every muscle. I am every breath, a set of lungs, a beating heart, cold feet, tense shoulders, thighs, knuckles, hair — everything I trust to keep me warm and moving forward. It’s my holy communion, the brief union of my flesh and blood with my spirit, which has been so determined to keep itself separate.
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II. Swimming as meditation
Swimming cuts me off. For the first minute, there is simply nothing. It is difficult to think at all when I’m so focused on breathing through the cold. And then, as I acclimatise, there are only the four cardinal directions.
North: my city; the butter-yellow Victorian terraces. East: the crumbling remains of a burnt pier. South: wind turbines standing at attention along the horizon. West: a low-hanging moon at sunrise.
At first, I was only swimming in the English Channel because I was miserable and it was getting hard to ignore the stream of articles telling me that being frozen half to death was a cheap cure for depression. I’m too much of a skeptic to be swept up in Wim Hof-like motivational fervor and I’ve read too much Foucault not to be reminded of ice baths in nineteenth century asylums. And yet, swimming helped.
Swimming is meditation; it’s a comfortable, happy seclusion, even amongst the other swimmers — scores of women in neoprene gloves and woolly hats. Swimming binds me to the present and all other thoughts simply float by.
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III. Swimming as a cure for homesickness
When I swim alone, I can reach a longing hand into all the bodies of water I’ve swum before. The world is one giant liquid expanse, connected by memory. With the sun on my face, I can drift into the Bay of Kotor — a great bowl in the Adriatic with a chapel rising up in the centre. I can stand with my feet in the freezing Neretva river, watching young men jump from the old bridge, their arms held aloft like a crucifix.
Or, if I focus on my fingers as they carve out the path in front of me, I’m transported to Nova Scotia in the peak of a humid July. Kearney Lake was always the warmest lake in summer, which made everyone uneasy — like comfort spelled out some hidden danger. Bodily fluids or worse, eels. Mosquitos lingered in the fir trees along the shoreline, and the churned up clay bed made our hair go soft and kept our limbs hidden below the surface.
Swimming keeps me in this limbo, on the threshold between places. Bound to the present, but so close to the past. No home, no away; only water and my hands running through it.