Let me tell you about the last time I took a dip: It was in one of the largest swimming holes in the world — Lake Michigan — and full submersion ended within a few short seconds. This was last September, with autumn in the Northern air on the Leelanau Peninsula and an amber sun sinking toward its own evening immersion way out there in the deep water. I waded through storm-surge rocks deposited near shore and onto a sand bar, slowly acclimating my legs to the water’s uncompromising chill. This gradual exposure would turn excruciating at a certain (shall we say private?) depth, so I leaned forward, launched my hands toward the surface and plunged. The numbing lake shocked me to attention and froze me in the moment. It was as if, wrapped briefly in its cleansing iciness, I was startled into a new consciousness. I surfaced, refreshed, and let out a Woo! Hoo!
I am a lake swimmer, exclusively. Pools, to me, are confining aquariums for humans, and oceans lose appeal with their saltiness. I take to lakes like some sort of missing link, sometimes begging the question: Did I first crawl into the water or out of it?
I grew up near a lake and learned my strokes at the municipal beach as my mother sunbathed in the sand and chased the younger siblings. One of my best Beaver Cleaver memories of early adolescent summer days has me riding my bicycle, baseball glove hanging from the handlebars and wooden bat propped on top, to the fields on the lakeshore, where we’d play ball in the midday heat and then migrate to the beach for games of underwater tag at the big dock, mounted on thick, algae-covered wooden poles. If you could hold your breath longer and dart from pole to pole faster, you were never caught.
Junior lifesaving class on that lake was memorable for two main reasons: the final test, which involved performing a cross-chest carry on our well-endowed female instructor; and one other requirement for a passing grade — an endurance swim of three-quarters of a mile out to a small island and then three-quarters of a mile back to the beach. We 13-year-olds gazed at the island every day during lessons, sizing up our chances for remaining afloat.
There are major flaws to a few of my strokes, most noticeably freestyle. I start out in presentable form, but within a minute my arms’ reach shortens and my legs sink like they’re set in concrete. If I attempt to go too far, I wind up exhausted and nearly vertical, basically treading water. I’m better slightly submerged than I am skimming along the surface. Butterfly, forget about it — I plug along with a sidestroke, a few breaks on my back, and my favorite position, the breaststroke, where each pull of the arms and frog-kick of the legs propels me along under the surface.
Think of me not as the dolphin, clipping along in my pod with a chattering joie de vivre, but as the whale, breaching from the depths while pausing for air and a moment’s reflection before descending back into a solitary swim. Those who know me have little trouble with this image.
The Kentucky lake swim that I most anticipate each year happens at an annual gathering of friends on the water in NelsonCounty. Larry and Cathy invite a group of us to their family place on a lake surrounded by private homes. During a day of boating, water-skiing and dock-partying, my wife and I traditionally dive in for a trek across a small bay to the impoundment’s levee, and back. We were joined on our last traverse by one of our sons.
The three of us, in various states of gliding or plowing along the surface, were enveloped by August-warm waters, silky as nightclothes, that gradually alleviated the heat of the day. Distant voices bounced to us from across the ripples as we lolled at our journey’s midpoint, surface diving and floating under the open sky. Untethered freedom like this is easy to imagine, but sometimes takes an entire summer to find.
As I write this in early May, I suppose that the NelsonCounty water, still under the grip of chilly temperatures, must be Lake Michigan cold. But if Larry and Kathy invited me to their lake house today, you can bet I’d be there, poised at the /files/storyimages/of the dock.
