confronting the depth.

on swimming, books about swimming, and moving forward.

I swam last week with a heavy weight in my stomach, my legs felt like lead. I couldn’t swim as many laps as I normally do and kept having to take breaks—I couldn’t catch a full breath and hung onto the edge of the pool gasping. Whenever I stopped, I felt the overwhelming urge to cry and mingle my tears with the chlorinated pool water.   

Today, I swam again. This time, I propelled my arms forward like windmills cutting through the water and outpaced myself, swimming more laps than I have since I began doing so in late February. Some part of me longed to feel powerful again.

There’s a healing quality in swimming that has been explored again and again in writing. The narrator in Swimming in Paris by Colombe Schneck declares, “At fifty years old, while taking swimming lessons, I finally realized that my body was not actually as incompetent as I’d thought.” Or the collective chorus in The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka who says, “When we are finished with our laps we hoist ourselves up out of the pool, dripping and refreshed, our equilibrium restored, ready to face another day on land.” I, too, return to myself in the water. I fully inhabit my body and count my strokes, my laps, remind myself to straighten my legs, to extend the reach of my arms, and I don’t think of anything else at all. Or if I do, it’s about the pool, the clarity of the water, the warmth, the coolness—I am singularly focused.

Like running, people exalt in swimming, especially open water swimming. I do not often swim in the open water here, ocean or otherwise, despite having spent much of my time on the Gulf Coast doing so, and open water swimming is absolutely my romantic ideal. Then, I remember the pull of the undertow or a disorienting moment away from shore and head back to my gym’s lap pool.

Over the last year, I’ve read multiple books about swimming (including the above) and two in particular about open water swimming: At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond, a collection of essays from women who swim in the London pond, and Turning by Jessica Lee, a memoir about a year spent swimming the lakes near Berlin. Both books follow a similar structure of open water swimming through all seasons, though Lee’s book begins in the sun-drenched summer and At the Pond begins in the icy winter. Both books focus on the hearty determination needed for open water swimming, the healing nature of water coupled with time outdoors, and finding one’s community.

“Here, my sense of myself was altered, the cold too shocking to focus on sorrow and confusion when the useful thing was courage, and when my heart steadied, and I realised I was not going to die, the exhilaration hit me and I felt dizzyingly grateful to be alive.” – Esther Freud, At the Pond

At the Pond collects the memories of fourteen open water swimmers who tramp through Hampstead Heath in the middle of London to immerse themselves in the murky water of the pond, the pond meant just for them. These essays were all expressly written for this collection and combine a variety of perspectives, from seasoned veterans to those who have only swam at the pond once or twice. No matter who is speaking, there’s a sense of solidarity and community, even in the silence.

“I like the look of the other women who swim there – free spirits, all of them – though I never talk to anybody.” – Deborah Moggach, At the Pond

The connection with the natural world that our own day to day life is often sorely lacking also pervades the collection. The women describe crayfish and perch and birds and water lilies that join them in the water, each essay contributes a rich description of the natural surroundings and the physicality of one’s body sliding through a living biome.

“The heron stands sentinel on a buoy at the far end of the Pond. We swim toward it. The water feels clean, glassy.” – Ava Wong Davies, At the Pond

Turning picks up where At the Pond leaves off, extrapolating a longer story, extending an entire year into a book rather than a single seasonal vignette. Lee is in Berlin working on her dissertation in environmental history and sets a goal to swim in 52 local lakes, enough for a year, no matter the weather, and without driving in a car—bikes, trains, and walking paths only. I also learned, after reading the book, that she blogged about her “52 Lakes Project” for Slow Travel Berlin, which makes more sense of these seemingly arbitrary self-imposed rules.

Lee’s swimming is a way of reconnecting to her physical body after a traffic accident and to her emotional body after recent heartbreak. Still, there is something borderline masochistic in the way she slices her way through the ice, the way she swims multiple times despite being ill, the way she pushes herself through potentially unsafe situations.

“Tiny fragments of ice gather around my legs, thin as flakes of glass, and I push them aside, under the water, under the frozen cap of the lake. I know that later, when I dry off, these thin flakes will have left tiny cuts all over me, as deft as paper, miniscule slices in my skin. It’s a small price.”

She describes the transgressions of a past adolescence and her youthful fear of natural water. Now, her life more or less devoted to it, Lee turns over and floats on her back when she remembers the murky depths she cannot see, rather than run from them entirely. Similarly, she has decided to settle in Berlin after several years of moving around and her companionship with the lakes and other swimmers further reaffirm that decision.

Ultimately, Turning is part memoir, part nature writing, and I found myself most drawn to the latter part. I could read all day about someone cutting a path along a winding trail only to find themselves alone at the most beautiful clear lake; I will read them describe what they are eating at their picnic and the banal conversations they have with passersby.

Lee, who also contributed an essay to At the Pond, shares her reminiscences of living in London and encountering the Ladies’ Pond in Turning.

“I began to swim there alone, surrounded by women who seemed stronger than me.  I wanted to be like them: sturdy, no-nonsense, unsentimental.  The pond was opaque and slipped around my body thickly, the water a felted brown.  It was cold and open: a bright circle of relief in the middle of the trees.  I swam out into its centre again and again, out towards the willow and then back towards the dock.  I swam to the lane rope at its farthest edge, watching the cormorants glide through the deep.  The movement was an anesthetic.”

I’ve been thinking again about my own swims. I want to feel strong, to perceive beauty, to preserve and appreciate nature, to bask in the sun, to write about it all, and feel joy in these small acts. I also know I have to face the murky depths and be able to roll over and appreciate the sunlight if I am to survive at all in this world.