One of my earliest and most vivid memories as a child is swimming in a cool rock-bound pool in the middle of a river in the Bulgarian mountains, the afternoon sun bringing komorebi out of the water with rustling leaves. I can still feel the tone of feeling in my body, at once strange and lovely of complete presence and complete peace. I didn't know the word for skipping.
Not long after that, I began swimming competitively in a chlorinated Olympic pool, investing countless hours in improving my stroke and improving my leg times. Those four years were a rough start to a culture that prizes productivity over presence. At eleven, I began to see how when we tend to action for success, we destroy the work of happiness; that whatever we deal with commercially will never produce a transgression. I stopped swimming suddenly, I was distracted and worn out. It would take me a quarter of a century to return to the water – it was only when I was immersed in the 800-page manuscript of my first book that I began to swim every day in the open sea to think about planning, to feel in the womb of the world while trying to give birth to something bigger than myself.
This spiritual aspect of swimming in the wild comes to life in Roger Deakin's wonderful book. Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Across Britain (public library).
“Such indelible swimming is like dreams, and has the same profound effect on the mind and spirit,” he writes of the transcendence he experienced when, filled with sadness at the end of a long love, he began to swim in rivers, writing in his notebook:
Every water, river, sea, pond, lake, holds a memory and a space for thinking.
Our deep reaction to water seems to be our evolutionary heritage – we came out of the sea, of course, but we didn't fully succeed. It uses Sir Alister Hardy's aquatic theory of biology, which was later elaborated by evolutionary historian Elaine Morgan in her classic book. The Descent of WomanDeakin writes:
We spent the 10 million years of the Pliocene era of drought evolving into integrity as swimmers and swimmers in the shallow waters of the oceans and beaches of Africa. We passed through the changing sea to become who we are, and our subsequent life on dry land is a recent, temporary thing. Apart from the Borneo monkey, we are the only aquatic animals to enjoy their pleasure. We are also hairless like dolphins and, alone among apes, have a layer of subcutaneous fat similar to whale blubber, which helps keep them warm in the water.
Hardy had arrived as his opinion in the form of a single, surprising insight – that the bare hairs on our bodies are arranged in a completely different way among monkeys; that when a person swims in a water tunnel, the hydrodynamic lines that represent the route of the water flow map are lines drawn by the body hair pattern. In line with Rachel Carson's observation that because “our origins are in the earth… there is in us a deep response to the natural universe, which is part of our being,” Swimming seems to be our direct way of connecting with our fellow creatures of the earth. Deakin writes:
When you swim, you feel your body as it really is—the water—and you begin to move with the water next to it… The swimmer experiences the fear and joy of being born. So swimming is a practice of passing, of crossing boundaries: the shoreline, the river bank, the edge of the lake, the place itself. When you go into the water, something like a metamorphosis happens. When you leave the world, you pass through the looking glass and enter a new world, where survival, not ambition or desire, is the main goal… You are in nature, part and parcel, in a much fuller and stronger way than on dry land, and your sense of the present moment is so amazing.
That confusing sense of life comes to the fore in the last pages of the book as Deakin reflects on the lengths he goes to to swim extremes that may seem silly from the outside, yet how to him it is “always a very difficult job, if sometimes a surrealist,” and always leaves him “rich.”
I went down a sandy lane of timeless oaks, infested with rabbits, to a remote farmhouse on high ground that juts into the broad marshes of Blyth… I cycled by the woods where George Orwell made love to Eleanor Jaques, his neighbor when he lived in Southwold, and through the village past the ruined church where he used to live and study. I passed by Freddy the fisherman's house (“The Sole Plaice for Some Fin Special”). It was about six o'clock, and the sun had left the sky and the moon was clear, and it was starting to set. I hurried out across the small wooden bridge where they hold their annual summer crab competition, and I tire-printed the last yards of cracked saltpan desert mud in the Walberswick marsh. Climbing up the sand dunes, I ran down the deserted beach, threw off my clothes and entered the beach. I felt the pleasure of the tiring limbs and fell to the ground with the waves, beating towards the horizon that slowly appeared beyond the breakers. I had left my rucksack and clothes next to a beautiful desert starfish on the beach, another Scilly Maze song. Maybe I was finally swimming through it. When I reached the calm of the undulating swell, I looked back along the shore. A red mist lay over the sea as the red sun burned on the roof behind the sand dunes. The sea-fret was shaded deep purple in the bend of the harbor where Dunwich should have been, and it obscured the great puffball of Sizewell B. One of the beauties of this flat Suffolk country is that if you swim from the shore and the tide rises, it drops in sight and you may be miles out into the North Sea. The orange crescent of the new moon hung above the chimney in the deep black sky. Autumn fires glowed in the mist and floated rings of white smoke above them. The sea was bright at dusk as the tide receded and the sea became less turbulent. I turned and swam in the calm waves.
Such festivals in existence are also an act of resistance, of restoration, of revolutionary rapture against our current tyranny:
Most of us live in a world where places and things are written, labeled, and officially “translated.” There is something about all of this that turns reality into reality. It is the reason why walking, cycling and swimming are always revolutionary activities. They allow us to re-experience what is old and wild… by getting off the beaten track and breaking away from the official version of things… [to access] that part of our world, like the darkness, the fog, the woods or the high mountains, still retains a great mystery.
He is a completer Waterlog and Bill Hayes on swimming as body poetry and artist Lisa Congdon's illustrated celebration of the joy of swimming, then revisit Robert Macfarlane's beautiful account of river life.
