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IN YOUR PRIME
Swim Hole
The neighborhood “swimming hole” is as all-American as a Fourth of July backyard barbecue. It speaks, at once, of summertime, of energized kids doing cannonball leaps while yelling, “Watch this!”
It’s also about swimming, the sport for the ages.
“The longer I live,” writes therapist and author Mary Pipher, “the more I respect swimming.”
“We are made of water,” she continues in “Letters to a Young Therapist” (Basic Books; 2003). “Once, long ago we lived in water, and with swimming we return to water.”
The author John Jerome, who readily confessed to a lifelong swimming obsession, liked to say “a calm, quiet ocean of peace” followed his strenuous water workouts. “Swimming is between me and the water, nothing else,” he wrote. “The moment the water encloses me, I am, gratefully, alone.”
On a recent morning, I finished swimming my laps and, alone at our community pool, sipped my coffee and made pencil-notes for this column. Towering oak, maple and pine trees muted suburban street sounds and, at this early hour, filtered the sun’s soft rays. Peace was mine…
My every vacation, and all business trips as well, are programmed around a nearby beach or pool. (Aside: I’ve yet to speak with a front desk employee who knows the length of the hotel pool.) Am I obsessed with swimming? I plead “no contest” as I reach for a file with published pieces describing a love of swimming by like-minded individuals.
“Time in the water is a time of renewal and rejuvenation,” explains swimmer Leonard E. Goodman, of Baltimore. He writes of achieving a Zen-like high.
Another swimmer, Virginian Walter Nicklin, writes: “I cannot resist water. While other travelers revel in meals or museums, I cherish the lakes and oceans. They keep me young…or the impulse they inspire seems youthful: the urge to leap into unknown waters, to say you’d done it. A destination without water to swim in is no vacation.”
Jerome, a friend whose writing talents I long have celebrated, wrote “Blue Rooms” (Sub-title: “Ripples, Rivers, Pools and Other Waters.”) for Henry Holt & Co. in 1997. It wasn’t a big seller, yet critic William H. MacLeish calls it: “a stunning love story by a writer who knows what it means to be an Aquarian.”
As he neared a 50th birthday, Jerome announced he was becoming an adult athlete to better his winning high school swim records. The book chronicling this uncommon quest is “Staying With It,” first published in 1982 and reissued in 1998 by Breakaway Books.
Here is Jerome, who in February 2002 lost his battle with cancer, describing his personal triumph: “A little over two years after I started training, and about six months shy of my birthday (No. 50), I swam a 100-yard freestyle race in 0.55.99. This was two full seconds faster than my best time for that same race when I was 18.”
He concludes, “It would be hard to overstate the significance of that comparison to me.”
Competitive swimming at any age presents a stern test. My principal aim, as the card-carrying grandfather, is to use pool time bonding with our family’s youngest members. Swimming alongside a teen-aged granddaughter, and keeping pace, I cannot feel old, nor do I accept that I’m from another time.
“Kids bliss out by water,” says therapist Piper, while absent-friend Jerome remembered: “Water was one of the best parts of our growing up, and the best water we could get into…remains in our minds forever as a very precious place.”
Indeed, in every swimmer’s heart, and mind, the “swim hole” occupies a fond and most special preserve.
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Outrageous Associations
