Memory Laps
What is it about the rituals of swimming in a pool that transforms adults into children again?
We arrive with our toys piled into bulging canvas bags. Some of the playthings -- the hand paddles, the webbed gloves, the pull buoys -- have the same crayon coloring as the tractors and tea sets and xylophones you might find half-submerged in your local sandbox.
And then, after we strip down to our nylon skimpies and stuff our dry hair into tight caps, we begin to look like strangely elongated infants. The skin on our faces has been pulled back and up, the wrinkles magically erased; our skulls are now hairless and round, like the heads of little boys with crew cuts. Vestiges of early youth have been restored with the help of Lycra, or silicone, or latex -- each of us has his or her own favorite type of cap.
At last we stand on the precipice, casting our bugged-out eyes across the lanes, about to attach our goggles and our nose plugs. The recess bell has rung, and we are anxiously casing the large rectangular playground, staking out the jungle gym and the swing set, picking the precise vicinity in which we will be able to play and throw our arms about freely.
Swimming, I have long thought, is a kind of group regression. It's chlorinated kindergarten. Every day at indoor pools around the world, almost naked adults submerge themselves together, most of them doing the crawl, as each one journeys back into the fantasies and unfinished business of his or her childhood. En masse, asserting our bodies forward from one end of the pool to the other, we revert. And on good days, when the body leads the mind into one of its unconscious corners, some of us make even more primitive journeys, falling into a womblike state as we pull the water back and back and back in rhythm.
Doing our laps, we lapse. Mr. Rich in Gear becomes a deep-sea adventurer, living out an episode of Flipper as he scoots underneath the surface, his snorkel firmly in place. He's rushing to disentangle an endangered sea creature -- or is he trying to stop evil villains from stealing a boat? His fins mean business, and you best not get in his way. Sure, we're all good buddies in the locker rooms and in the parking lot, but down in the lanes, it's every man for himself.
Meanwhile, Ms. Glare Forlorni appears to have been commanded to the tub against her wishes. You can see her pout each time she turns her head to the sky to breathe, and she's plotting revenge with each cutting stroke of her sharp hand paddles. She was the girl who got off the seesaw and let you fall hard to the ground -- or else she was the girl who fell hard. Tearing the surface with her plastic claws, she'll find no dreamy peace today, if ever she did.
And right next door to her, scissor-kicking along the slow lane in a sidestroke, Grace Fully takes her sweet time. She looks like everyone's kindly grandmother, in a cap with a neat strap under her chin and a floral-print suit. But she glides ahead with the innocent focus of a 5-year-old princess. She's swimming through a very proper upbringing, and she may get a star if she maintains good form.
The culture of the laps pool is an intriguing mixture of being together and alone, of being inches apart and yet in different worlds. Once we've made the plunge, we cannot speak and interact, as a flock of joggers might. With our fogged-up goggles, many of us can't see. And those who wear ear plugs cannot hear. We have no chance of making conversation; our only choice is to submit to the lull of our individual consciousnesses. We become alien to one another, headlong in our own fundamental joys and sorrows, and when body accidentally grazes body, there is often a spark of tension despite all the water.
Unexpectedly, I have found swimming in the ocean to be less regressive, less of an interior voyage to the bottom of the "me." It's more invigorating than pool laps, and it certainly takes more effort as you pull against the current. But the slap of the waves, the wind, the potential for fish traffic -- they don't promote a psychic spiral down into the early self. They keep ocean swimmers wide awake, on top of the moment, ebullient, adult, and a part of nature.
Pool swimming, with its repetitions and predictable weather, is more hypnotic. The regularity of the laps becomes metronomic and seductive. And since we swimmers are sharing a confined space, each of us falls further into his or her own unique, formless warp, a sort of refuge against our proximity.
Later, of course, we dry off, become bipeds again, grow up. We leave the pool a bit more levelheaded, if slightly less buoyant.
