Chlorine

We went to Idaho to see my grandmother die. I had never really spent any time with her, just in passing, but the most time I ever did spend with her was on her deathbed. She was a kind woman, funny, and with a taste for mid-century books about casual magic, like hidden rooms and  bachelor uncles who were also warlocks. She lived very far away from us, and I mainly interacted with her through her reading to me on her deathbed, and her gentle joy made these stories come alive and feel real. 

After she died there became time during the day when no one wanted a five year old around, even one who is pretty good at keeping quiet and sitting by himself, looking over LEGO catalogs and the latest plastic drilling machines, eating orange-flavored chocolate, lost in his own world of subterranean adventure. There were adult things to consider, and my Mom couldn’t handle being a person let alone being a mother during this time. I’m not sure how, exactly, but it was decided that in the day I would learn to swim, and that would not only fill my time but also at the end I would gain a skill. 

I remember a bright room, filled with the light of the setting sun, and diving for these little plastic rings. Anyone who has ever been to a pool with a kid knows the ones. My teacher was a kind, understanding young woman who would hold me in the water and tell me that I could go at my own pace. She would throw these little plastic colored rings and I would go dive for them and bring them back, at first it was tough but after awhile I felt like I was really moving through the water, and I learned to swim under the water pretty well, but I never got to breathing. Breathing is, in my estimation, the most difficult part of swimming. The human body quite rejects the idea of drowning, and the process of breathing while swimming involves no small amount of drowning. 

I was a child, and my memory is all fragmentary, but I remember being held in the water, learning to float, and the beautiful light streaming in through the windows, and this sense of acceptance and calm that I had never found before. It was incredible. I desperately wish I could communicate the calm I felt in these small moments, the stillness and peace. After awhile I stopped panicking and started to learn. To this day I can swim underwater pretty well, and float okay. but we went back to Alaska before I learned how to come up for air. To alternate swimming and gulping and actually swim.

In Alaska, as you might expect, it is much colder than you want. The air is cold, the people are cold, it’s rough. I remember going to this big, grey gymnasium area to continue my studies. It was the opposite of the place in Idaho. Where in Idaho it had been warm, and small, and calm, this was a gigantic, echoey, brutalist nightmare. It smelled bad, and it was so loud. The sound never really died away it just echoed back on itself in this impossible way that defied physics and should be investigated as a way to create infinite energy. 

In my days as an unschooled kid I led the life of a retired bachelor, drinking tea and reading books about Mt. Vesuvius alone. I spent almost all my time playing educational video games or making up friends to have, but my entire life was small, and manageable, and under my control. In this brutal new world of grey concrete I was suddenly surrounded by so many children my own age, half-naked and loud and so desperately strange-looking in a way I cannot express. It was terrifying. 

I saw a man go off the high jump and fall the longest I had ever seen someone drop straight down. I thought for sure he wouldn’t make it, and as he hit the water I knew two things: I had a fear of heights now, and I never wanted to do that. There was a group of us, now, wet and shivering, for although this pool was indoors it was still in Alaska. It was not warm. Far from it. Why would you make a place where people were mostly naked even slightly warmer than the tundra surrounding the building.

Our teacher was this big, square man who I don’t remember much about except for his hands, he had gigantic hands. He reminded me of a mountain, or a glacier, or something else big, and solid, and that shouldn’t be teaching kids swimming. He stood solidly in the shallow end of the pool, while my compatriots and I sat on the edge shivering with our feet sitting in the water. He asked us to demonstrate our knowledge of swimming, so while I waited, cold and uncomfortable, I got to see that there were other kids who were much better at swimming than me and who felt comfortable in the water, and that I was maybe the worst of all. This was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my entire life up to that point, just sitting there in my goofy looking baggy bathing suit in front of people I did not know while they showed me up at the skill we had all come to learn. 

The light was so bad. It was too-bright and not-bright-enough green-blue fluorescent lighting that I’m sure plagues many public pools. It made me uncomfortable to have it touch my skin. The natural light is so inconsistent in Alaska that many places don’t put in windows. You could make one whole wall windows but in the summer the light is so weak and at a such a weird angle that it never really feels like day, and in the winter it’s just dark all the time. So this pool was a big concrete box, lit by this green-blue light, and filled with total strangers who were, at best, marginally clothed. Nothing like growing up in a snow-suit and jeans to give you weird body stuff. 

A large part of swimming, I quickly learned, was integrating breathing into your actions, as human people cannot breathe water. Breathing is broken up into two parts you may be familiar with, breathing out, and breathing in. Now, something that became important and that I had never considered at my young age was that to breathe in, to fill your lungs with life sustaining, horrible smelling, chlorine-filled public pool air, one must first breathe out the stale air that sits in your lungs and slowly poisons you. And to really swim, you must breathe out underwater. But you don’t want to do that, you don’t want to push the useless, stale air into the water that you cannot breathe because while that stale air is literally poisoning you it is all that you have. So before this particular class, and instead of learning to breathe correctly, I had side-stepped this problem by simply learning to hold my breath for just a very long time, trying to hold on desperately to what I had already learned and adapt it to this new reality. I was scared, I didn’t want to learn. 

But this new teacher, this man, did not accept that. To him we had come to him to learn, we had come to be taught. He didn’t really care if we were comfortable, it was his job to turn us into swimmers, or at least people who knew how to swim. It was his job. After we demonstrated for awhile what skill we already had in swimming he decided that we, the small group of kids and me, were going to learn to ‘blow bubbles’. That was his phrase. The idea being that we each would submerge ourselves in the freezing pool and expel the air from our lungs until it felt like we were going to die and then come back up. And if you didn’t blow all the air from your lungs he wouldn’t let your turn pass, he wouldn’t let you go. You had to go underwater and blow bubbles until he was satisfied that there was no air left in your lungs and then you could come back up.

I wasn’t the first and as I watched the kids ahead of me disappear and turn into a miniature patch of roiling sea I couldn’t figure out how to cheat. I am not above cheating, if I know I can’t do something and it doesn’t have dire moral consequences and I can see some easy way to cheat I’ll do it, at least until I figure out how to do it right. But I couldn’t see anything like that here. I was just at the mercy of this big, disinterested, unforgiving man. It came to be my turn and I took a deep breath and slipped into the pool’s icy embrace. I blew some bubbles, keeping some air in reserve, and came back up. I don’t know how he knew but he told me I had done it wrong and to go down and do it again. I don’t know how many times I tried but he wasn’t satisfied until I went below and he held me down under the surface of the pool with his gigantic hands, I struggled but couldn’t escape, and I remember seeing the glittering surface of the pool above me as the air slowly left me and was replaced by nothing. I was trapped, with no escape, beneath the surface of a nightmare I wished to return to so desperately. I would have, in that moment, taken an eternity of the surface world, with its endless sounds and smells and sweet, horrible air. Just when I had accepted that this was how I died, drowned by a swimming teacher without my shirt on in an ice-cold pool I felt myself rising back up, back to the living. 

I don’t remember what happened next, but I remember on the car ride back telling my mom I didn’t want to go back there. Anyway that’s why I can’t swim very well.