"I don't want to be alone,
I want to be left alone."
-- Audrey Hepburn
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| Self portrait 1-23-14 |
"I ache to swim again. Walking's for mammals."
-- Shaun Hick, The Ghost and Its Shadow
During the non-tourist season, a hotel/resort near my home offers off-season swim passes to its swimming pool. From October to May, lots of people take advantage of the swim club membership, mostly older folks who like to float on pool noodles and socialize.
I go there to swim. I swim hard. I swim fast.
Sometimes it's tricky, because the old folks like to do this side-to-side walk thing, back and forth across the shallow end of the pool, right across my swim lane. It's like playing Frogger.
When there are a lot of them lolling around, it's like swimming through a tangled sea of arms and legs and pool noodles and underwater exercise floaty "weights." I feel like I'm in a scene out of that movie Cocoon.
The worst is when actual hotel guests show up with their children, who have every right to use the pool, but who somehow feel like intruders. We regulars get pretty possessive. What are they doing here? Trespassing on our pool? Disrupting our routine?
I have the usual crowd trained pretty well by now. I swim at the same time every day, so they know when I'm coming and they know that when I show up I want the far lane, and I'm going to be there for a while, and I don't stop until I'm good and done, which is usually anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes.
Nobody talks to me, which is just how I like it. (Maybe it's the tattoos) But having other bodies in the pool is always a distraction. You just never know when somebody in the cross traffic is going to misjudge their timing and crash right into you.
But when I'm alone without interruptions, I can slip easily into my rhythm. The mechanical regularity of stroke, breathe, turn, becomes meditative, Zen-like. I lose track of time and an hour is gone before I know it. Sometimes I get the whole pool for a few minutes, and other times the Gods smile and the planets align just so, and I get it for my whole swim.
Which is exactly what happened yesterday.
It was one of those mornings where the air was just cool enough and the water just warm enough that a low lying mist floated just above the pool's undisturbed surface. The atmosphere felt mystical and magical -- like there was some kind of spell cast over the place. And there was nobody else, N-O-B-O-D-Y else in the pool but me for a whole hour. A couple of floaters came in eventually, but for that one hour, it was all mine.
I've been a swimmer my whole life. And I've pined and dreamed of having my own swimming pool since I was a little kid, so I can swim whenever I want to. I used to beg my Dad for a backyard pool so I didn't have to stand in my friends' driveways looking longingly at theirs, just waiting to be invited in -- so I didn't have to ride my bike 12 miles to the Y and back.
My dad always shot me down with the whole "Yeah? Well who's gonna clean it?" defense.
Now I get different arguments. But still ...
We have neighbors with pools that I can see over their fences. Perfectly lovely swimming pools that sit unused 90 percent of the summer. What a waste. And they never invite us in. I feel like that little kid in the driveway again.
So I do the best I can with what's available, which means I swim from October to May, in a shared pool, dodging noodles. Which is fine. It works out.
But every once in a while I get a taste of what it would be like to have a private pool all my own. And just like I always knew it would, it tastes really good.
