Helen Walne just keeps swimming
WHENI agreed to housesit a friend’s home in Riebeek West, my first response was: “Yay! They have an espresso machine and dogs that like to be kissed on the mouth and nut butter in their pantry and a veranda that is so long that, if I wanted to, I could turn it into a cycle track. And a pool! A Paul Newman-blue pool surrounded by black-eyed olive trees!”
Then I panicked. The pool is only a few metres long. Stylish magazines and estate agents call them “plunge pools”; a parched maize farmer would call them heaven.
My mind started clicking as I imagined what Heath Robinson would do: pay a burly farmer to sit next to the pool wearing trouser braces to which I would be attached via a rope; devise a harness out of inner tubes that I could tie to a nearby tree; train the dogs to lie on the Slasto and hold a rope between their teeth and not chase me as I treadmill in the water.
For the past few months, I’ve been swimming addictively – partly to keep sane, partly to avoid dying, and partly because I secretly fancy myself as the next Lewis Pugh. I usually swim in Silvermine Dam or, less enthusiastically, at the gym. Unlike Lewis, my stroke is more drowning ferret than sleek seal, but I’m making slow progress.
I might not have swum in the Antarctic, but I have splashed in a loch in the Outer Hebrides, dipped my toes in the Beagle Channel, plunged into a winter river in the Drakensberg and squealed in the North Sea.
I have my bleary, chlorine-soaked eyes on doing next year’s Freedom Swim: seven kilometres between Robben Island and Bloubergstrand. Where would I train in the middle of the Swartland, in the middle of the worst drought in 20 years?
On my first day here, I calculated that if I swam round and round the pool, I could clock up some distance – and probably become so dizzy and disoriented I might end up staggering naked around the town, burbling about Kreepy Kraulies while wearing weeds in my hair (kind of King Lear goes aquatic).
I then took a drive around the area, casing out the farm dams. All of them looked woefully shallow and green, and I figured any water in the area needed to be spared the inelegant splashing of a chunky city type.
By day three, I was desperate, so I phoned around and, after being told the municipal pool in Malmesbury had been closed because of the drought, I found Jeanne Steyn at the town’s Swartland Swemklub. I signed up.
The indoor pool is just 16m long, the air inside swampy and humid. I arrived for my first session at 7am armed with terrible Afrikaans and broken flip-flops, feeling like an interloper at a secret society. Unlike running, swimming is an intimate affair. There is no banter, no chatting – just a watery rhythm of slapping, splashing and breathing. I slipped into a lane, said “hullo, hoo gaan did?” to the woman next to me, churned through 100 lengths and slipped off home.
The next day, I introduced myself. Five of us swim in the morning: Jeanne, Madeleine, Hanlie and an elderly man whose name I didn’t catch and who power-walks up and down the lanes, talking to himself. He wears a blue swimming cap with “Swartland” printed on it in large white letters. I really want one.
Because after a few weeks of getting up early and driving 20km to swim with strangers in a small pool in the middle of a parched town where treffers belt out of the next-door gym and where the postdawn light turns the surrounding fields into sorbet colours, the swimming no longer feels foreign.
I feel like I belong. I high-five Madeleine when she swims 70 lengths; I get breathing advice from Jeanne. We speak and listen in two different languages, but tackle the water in one.
And when I browse in the SuperSpar afterwards – my face imprinted with goggle marks and my hair a mess – people nod and say “hullo”. One elderly man asked: “Virwatkrapjy?” (What are you looking for?) and it took me a while to work out he wasn’t swearing at me.
A few days ago, while driving back to Riebeek West and feeling slightly Lewis Pughey, I saw two runners approaching. They jogged side by side holding a short stick between them. As I passed, I realised one of the men was blind, his opaque eyes fixed on the middle distance. They weren’t talking, just running up the hill, taking each other where they needed to go.
I watched them in my rear-view mirror, growing smaller and smaller until they disappeared.
And I thought: there they go. There we all go, swimming through our days, with the touch of others.