Letter 9: On Swimming

Swimmers in Toronto, 1973. (Toronto Star Photograph Archive)

The pool is located in an elementary school building, and on a first visit, its grotty hallways might bring a visitor back to their own school days: walls constructed of cinder blocks slathered in a mint green paint, speckled composite floors, windowless classroom doors bearing nameplates.

Unlike so much of the modern world in which we are atomized, focussing inward and shielding ourselves from others, the experience at the pool is a reversion to the communal. In the women’s changing room, the artifices of modern life are withdrawn to reveal a much more primitive meeting space that permits a vulnerability rare elsewhere, naked bodies of all shapes and sizes and stages of the aging process preparing themselves for a swim.

The process is one of ritual and water is its medium. Before we swim, we must perform our ablutions at the showers, water before water, washing the outside world from ourselves, and once again after we’ve swum, washing before we can go back out into the world, framing the experience within these boundaries.

Walking from the changing room to the pool deck you might recoil when you meet the thick humidity, but you will come to appreciate it as it dissolves the barrier between water and air and keeps you warm. The water is an antiseptic blue, an industrial mimicking of the ocean. The chemical smell of chlorine permeates everything, diffusing throughout the building, remaining on your skin, hair, and clothing and trailing you long after you’ve left.

The pool and the experience within it could be from another time and place. Unlike gyms with their modern fitness equipment, the pool has not changed much over the decades; it remains an open, echoing space in which the human form propels itself through one of nature’s most basic elements. A collective of citizens improving their physical fitness within this utilitarian space forms an image that could have emerged from a socialist realist painting.

The water is both friend and foe. It holds you as you float, your body buoyant, elegant in its movements that could never be achieved on solid ground. But it also forces you to ration your breath as you hold your face beneath its surface. The possibility of drowning hovers. You time your strokes and breaths for efficiency, for survival, and as you come up for each sip of air, you recognize the luxury of oxygen.

This fluidity of movement is broken by an assault of water going up your nose and down your throat. You cough but nothing takes away the sting of feeling like a cattle prod has been plunged up into your brain.

Panicked, you quicken the movement of your limbs, you forget to take breaths, your lungs begin to burn. You are tired, your muscles are crying, you are desperate to grab for the edge of the deck but are too far away.  

Then you remember your buoyancy, there is no need to fight against the water, let it hold you once more. You slow your strokes until they feel almost comically exaggerated, you regain your breath and your muscles calm. There is a metaphor in this, you think to yourself.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.