Now I know, sort of, how to swim, I want to do the swimming the cool kids do: open water. It’s a hipster-signifier of sorts, since anyone over 40 takes one look at a river and thinks, “Weil’s disease” and everyone under 40 thinks, “That looks much more enticing than a swimming pool, romantic, unknowable, and also I have never heard of this disease.”
I went to the River Exe. As you approach from a high and reedy bank, it is more beautiful than a swimming pool by about the same magnitude as the Col d’Aspin is than the inside of a Virgin Active. Weeping willows lower themselves into its waters; some people see otters, though not me. Then you get in, and you can’t see the bottom, which is wildly spooky. You can’t see anything. Goggles on, I pushed off, practising my underwater breathing; all I could see was the shocking whiteness of my own hands, the only remnants left of the world my wedding ring and a bracelet, AKA a piece of string from Accessorize, that my son gave me for my birthday. It filled up my senses: underwater so silent the world could have ended, above the water alive with birdsong and attention-seeking insects; underwater so black you could be swimming in ink, above the water, everything sun-dappled like the bit in a Radclyffe Hall novel just before someone has a sexual awakening.
It’s scary, but I never figured out what I was scared of. Eels? Fugitives? My swimmer friend said, “If you carry on going, you’ll get to a weir”, and I hared off, not remembering completely what a weir was. Then when I was right in front of it, I couldn’t remember how they worked; maybe they sucked you in. Maybe they just made a gushing noise. Who knew? I trod water for a bit, lost in epic solitude, a bit too cowardly to get any closer.
I’m sorry, I have got you this far down the river on a false pretext: this is not a fitness pursuit. If you did it every day, you might sometimes get your head down and aim for speed, but it is far too poetic the first time. I didn’t want to miss anything, not a water boatman or a tree stump that looked like a goblin, not the peculiar softness of fresh water on your skin, like putting on cashmere. It’s a feeling of being constantly vigilant, on the brink of a realisation: but there’s nothing to realise, except that the moment existed, and I was in it. On the other hand, I could have kept going all day; and had I, would have ended up quite tired which is, apart from self-improvement, what fitness is supposed to be all about.
People move counties to live near rivers; then they talk incessantly about the proximity of the river, which if you think of it as an amenity, sounds strange, like someone telling you how close they are to an off-licence. But it’s not an amenity; it feels, straight up, like the artery between this world and the next.
Heaven, I’m talking about – not the other one.
What I learned
If you’re crossing a wide body of water, a reservoir, say, swim in a straight line. Pick a visual cue in the direction you want to go in and look up regularly to make sure it’s in the same place.
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