As the summer slips towards its close with the triumph of our aquatic athletes in Rio, there is a terrible contrast in the fate of six lost souls around the British coast this past weekend. On the one hand, absolute control and exultation in what a human body can achieve in the water; on the other, the appalling tragedy that can result when we lose control – all the more awful because it can happen so quickly – in the act of having fun.
I never learned to swim until I was in my late 20s. Despite being born and brought up in a city by the sea, I feared it, and its power. I know many people share that trauma: pretending you’ve got a cold when everyone else goes to the swimming baths. Yet even Adam Peaty, who proved himself to be one of the fastest swimmers on earth when he won his gold medal, was scared witless of the water as a boy. That tension stays with us, in our relationship to the water.
There are many contradictions at work here. Some people who decline to take part in competitive sport – often because they were put off it for life by experiences at school – look to swimming not for exercise, but for a kind of meditation or release. This certainly lies behind the appeal of “wild swimming”. It speaks to our need for freedom from sedentary lives bound to blue screens – our need to leave them for the real blue world, if only for a while.
Indeed, in some sense, it is the very challenge of mortality that gives swimming its charge. That we are addressing the possibility of disaster, in those moments in which we feel at one with a planet that is mostly water, just as our own bodies are.
We are not always logical beings. I dislike swimming “between the flags” on public beaches. I feel as though I’m under surveillance, even in the wilderness offered by a wide open Cornish strand. But I know I’d thank God for the presence of a lifeguard if anything went wrong.
I swim in the sea, every day. I sometimes swim in the dark, if that’s when the tide falls. People tell me to be careful, to tell others where I’m going, to take a phone with me. What would be the point? Even if I did own a phone, you can’t put it in your trunks (which I don’t wear either). I was once caught in a rip tide off Brighton beach. I remember thinking, as I realised I may not make it back, how banal it would be to drown within sight of a dual carriageway and a row of fish’n’chip shops.
In winter storms we are warned not to go near the sea, for fear it might engulf us, as if its tentacles might reach out and drag us in. A Welsh quarry pond was dyed this summer to deter potential swimmers. School swimming lessons are threatened by the lack of facilities. In the US, even as Michael Phelps was winning yet another medal, a report was released showing that 54% of the population could not pass a swimming test.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=g8bAbEFT_54%3Fwmode%3Dopaque%26feature%3Doembed
Fear of the water is institutionalised, and our sense of the wild and the outdoors has been steadily taken away from us. Contrast this sad cultural shift with a wonderful Pathé newsreel from the 1930s, showing a 13-year-old girl diving off the 69ft high Saddle Rock in Torquay – a feat which would never be allowed in today’s risk-averse climate.
The sea allows us to dream, and the water to aspire. It defines us and connects us. Without it, there would be little poetry to our lives on this planet. TS Eliot wrote, “We cannot think of a time that is oceanless.” “In civilisations without boats,” Michel Foucault observed, ‘“dreams dry up.” The summer may be the one time that we can remake that connection: to realise we do not yet have total control over the world, but at the same time to acknowledge its elemental power.
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