How I discovered the joy of swimming
Itook a selfie in front of the locker room mirror before getting in the pool. I was wearing a snazzy new black and red “shortie” wet suit. “Steve Zissou going to work,” I texted my son, referring to the Bill Murray character in a favourite film of ours, Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic. I’m 59. I hadn’t swum since my spinal cord injury seven years earlier. Even though I knew other paraplegics found ways to swim, I kept putting it off. “I’m not sure what my relationship is toward water,” I told my neighbour when I declined his invitation a couple of summers ago to paddle on a local pond.
I grew up in Cape Ann, a New England coastal community renowned for its beaches and spring-fed freshwater quarries. I should’ve had a head start to aquatic competency in such an environment, but I preferred land to sea. In the quarries as a young boy, I was hit on the head playing on a partially submerged log and nearly drowned. And I didn’t like the tumult of body surfing the North Atlantic (and was never good at it).
Before I was paralysed in a complex spine cancer surgery, my wife and I bought a house less than a mile from a lovely bay-protected beach, but I rarely went for a dip and never for a swim. Now here I was, partially paralysed and using double forearm crutches and a brace to get around but dreaming of stringing together laps. I had been doing dry-land exercises to prepare, lengthening my torso against a blank bedroom wall, a forearm crutch on one side and the opposite arm sliding upward to grab imaginary handfuls of water. In another YouTube-recommended exercise I lowered myself to my knees and stretched out fully on a blue gym mat, sliding my sockcovered hands back and forward to simulate the crawl. I watched a friend’s training video as he swam in a Massachusetts lake. His stroke seemed effortless — gorgeous, actually. He told me he taught himself to swim after being paralysed. I ordered Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim.
Perhaps the sudden desire to swim was pandemic-induced, an instinct to open doors to pastimes shut by the virus; or perhaps it was the appealing idea of not ceding 70 per cent of the earth’s surface to my disability.
Now here I was standing in the shallow end of the pool. Spaulding Rehab had one of the only pools open in December and I had been scheduled for the last lesson of the day. A blazing sunset lit up the deck-to-ceiling windows as I took last instructions from Mollie, my physical therapist. Ready? We both had reason to be unsure of what would happen when I let go of the side, but I lunged my trunk forward anyway and hoped my legs would weightlessly rise. They did.
I began a freestyle stroke, my arms lengthening, my lower torso surprisingly stable beneath me. After the crawl, I tried the backstroke, then the breaststroke. My better right leg couldn’t crack the surface with a propulsive kick as I had hoped, but I felt the two of them, right and left, gently twisting, synching with the rocking movement of my upper body. I went the length of the pool and then some. I was overjoyed, happily breathless. Swimming had always felt purely transactional to me, the price you paid for being in a dangerous place. This was different. In the ensuing winter weeks, I swam for distance, and even time. I had always assumed you were either born for the water or not. My infant daughter adored the feel of bath water as it flowed over her tiny head. My son, at the same age and in the same tub, screamed bloody hell. But maybe the relationship is less fixed, alterable by episode and circumstance and need.