When I was five, my mother enrolled me in summer swim lessons at the pool in Papillion, where we were living at the time. I don’t recall anything about them because, for some reason I don’t recall much about the Papillion years. I think’s it’s because we moved away from there when I was six, and I spent the rest of my formative years in Norfolk, so my memories solidified there.
For whatever reason, I don’t recall taking swimming lessons. The only memory I have is of the final day when I had to swim across the deep end to pass the class. Seems like a pretty stupid thing to ask a beginner swimmer, doesn’t it? Needless to say, I did NOT swim across the deep end, so I did not pass the class. I was upset about it, and my mother was angry about it because she, too, thought it was ludicrous to ask a beginner swimmer to swim across the deep end.
By the following summer, we were living in Norfolk, and there was a large pool called Memorial pool that my mother took me to. I think she may have asked if I wanted to take lessons, but I didn’t, and she didn’t push me. We were both still angry about the disastrous ending to my lessons the summer before. Failing the lessons hadn’t soured me to swimming, though, as it might have for others. On the contrary — I just wanted to swim.
Two years later, Norfolk built another swimming pool, and both were about equidistant from our house. (Both those pools have since been demolished, and Norfolk now has a large outdoor swim park, but I have very fond memories of Memorial and Liberty Bell pools.) Eventually, my parents allowed me, and probably encouraged me, to ride my bike to the pool with my friends because I always wanted to go to the pool. Every summer, Mom bought me a pool pass, and I spent the bulk of my time at the pools. I learned to do the crawl stroke simply by observing the lifeguards and other accomplished swimmers, and eventually I became very good at. Even today, in my 50’s, I get complimented on my crawl stroke.
In high school, I became a cashier at both pools, switching back and forth according to my schedule. Since I’d never taken more swim lessons, I wasn’t qualified to be a lifeguard, and I didn’t press it. I enjoyed being the cashier where, on really hot days, I could sit inside the building’s shade with a fan on me, but I enjoyed the swimming perks that came with working at the pool. I would come early and swim laps while the guards gave individual lessons, and I would stay after closing for our impromptu staff swim parties. The guards often asked me to help with many of the lessons when they had more kids than they could handle because they knew I was a good swimmer, and I was good with kids.
During those cashier years, I learned how much I enjoyed swimming laps. I was often told that I should go out for the high school swim team, but I wasn’t interested in doing that for many reasons. First and foremost, I am NOT an early morning person, and the swim team met at the YMCA every morning before school before the sun even came up. Second, while I had a solid crawl stroke, it was the only one I could do. I’d never learned the others. Third, I loved swimming laps at my own pace; I have tons of endurance, but I am not speedy. This was the same for my jogging years when I could easily jog two miles and end with a burst of energy, but if you’d ask me to sprint one hundred yards, I would always come in dead last with a huge gap between me and the winning runner. Thus, I was not interested in trying to swim fast.
If there had been a swim team based on the ability to tread water, though, I would have signed up in a heartbeat.
I can tread water indefinitely because I am incredibly buoyant. It’s because I’m chubby, and fat floats easily, but it’s also because I have a relaxed approach to treading water. Being able to tread water served me well at the end of my second year in college when I finally decided to take another swim class.
I was planning to go home for the summer, but my parents no longer lived in Norfolk. They had moved to Neligh, and Neligh was in need of a summer pool manager. With my three years of pool cashier experience, my mother thought it would be a good summer job for me. The catch, however, was that I needed to become a lifeguard, too, and to do that, I needed to pass a lifeguarding class, and in a lifeguarding class, you have to be able to swim a variety of strokes and show that you can save a swimmer.
I signed up for a class that met at the pool in Lincoln East High School because I was attending college at UNL. Once a week for a few months, I would drive across town to attend that class.
I’m pretty sure that the instructor had either been a drill sergeant in his younger years or he’d always secretly wanted to be one. He took an immediate dislike to me and even told me that I was too fat to be an effective lifeguard. Now, if you know me now, you clearly know that I am chubby. It’s okay. I own it. However, at the end of my sophomore year of college, I was about forty or fifty pounds lighter than I am now, so calling me fat then was not only a bit of a push, it was a completely asshole comment.
Granted, I was chubbier than the other girls in the class, but I do believe he was attempting to push away those of us who really weren’t cut out for the intense lessons he later thrust upon us. However, he basically just pissed me off and kicked in my “I’ll show him” gear. He had us go into the pool and demonstrate our abilities in the basic strokes. We started with the crawl stroke, and his dislike temporarily turned to admiration because he complimented my stroke and even told others to watch how I did it.
Then he asked us to do the breaststroke, and we were right back to contempt and dislike. Now, he was having others watch me to show them how NOT to do the stroke. He made me get out of the pool, and then he demonstrated the arm and leg movements in a standing position. I had to then do those while standing on the side of the pool until I’d correctly done fifty “strokes.” Then, I had to get back in the pool and swim the length of it repeatedly as he walked alongside yelling at me.
Finally, exhausted, I climbed out of the pool and told him where he could stick it and left.
I did go back the next week, and I think that both impressed him and irritated him. He made it very clear to me, though, that if I couldn’t master the strokes, he would fail me. What’s funny is that the only test in my life that I’d ever “failed” was a deep end swim test at the age of five, and now the potential for failing a lifeguard swim class at the age of nineteen; yet, swimming was, and still is, my favorite sport.
I practiced the breast stroke while standing in my dorm room, and I studied the life-saving methods until I knew them cold. I struggled a lot with the butterfly stroke, but I became sufficiently adept at it, and by the end of the course, I was doing the breaststroke so expertly that the instructor begrudgingly complimented me on it.
He still had it out for me, though, because when we had to dive down and retrieve the heavy black bricks from the bottom of the deep end, he always made me get one more than everyone else. When we had to practice rescuing “drowning” swimmers, he would always pair me with the largest guy, and once, when that guy wasn’t struggling enough to please him, the instructor jumped into the water and became my “victim.” He fought me hard and kept trying to turn toward me to push me under, the way a real drowning person might do, but since I’m a very adept water treader, I just kept circling behind him until I finally managed to get an arm around his chest and prop his back on my hip as I side swam to the edge of the pool.
There were other things he made me do repeatedly until I was almost too exhausted to pull myself out of the pool. One was that I had to jump in facing my “victim,” scissor kick as I hit the water and sweep my arms forward in such a way that my head never went under. You have to do this so you don’t lose sight of the “victim,” but despite my natural buoyancy, I had a heck of time with that jump. I finally did master it enough to pass that task, and I learned to single-handedly remove an “unconscious” swimmer from the pool.
I did, in fact, pass that class, and the instructor complimented me when he gave me my certificate. I lasted where others had quit. I’ve since come to see that many lifeguard classes are far less intense than the one I went through, but I’m actually glad I had that asshole for an instructor because I learned a lot of techniques I never would have learned otherwise, and I became extremely adept at the breaststroke.
Now, when I swim laps, I vary my strokes and do one lap with the crawl and one lap with the breaststroke. Sometimes, I do the backstroke and the sidestroke, but my favorites are the crawl and the breaststroke.
I prefer to swim in pools because I can see where I’m going. I don’t swim in lakes because the water is dark, and it creeps me out when something brushes against my legs. Makes me terrified, actually. I’m okay with being in the waters of a deep, dark lake temporarily, like to cool off while boating, but I do not swim in or across lakes.
Seas, however, are different. Especially the Caribbean with its crystal-clear turquoise waters. I love to swim in the Caribbean. The clarity of the water, though, is deceptive, and you might think you are swimming in fairly shallow water only to learn that no matter how hard you try, you cannot touch the bottom.
Once, while swimming off the shore of Cozumel, I swam out a bit far because there were a bunch of interesting statues and such under the water to investigate. I came upon a small pyramid submerged far below me, and as I floated above it with my masked face in the water looking down at the pyramid, my son’s voice came to me. He was quite young at the time, and he was back home in Nebraska, but before I’d left for that particular trip to Mexico, he had looked at me solemnly and said, “Don’t get eaten by a shark, Mom.”
I suddenly popped my head out of the water and looked toward the shore. It was very far away, and my friend and her boyfriend were quite tiny. They were so wrapped up in each other that I don’t think they even knew where I was. I placed my face back in the water for one last look at the small pyramid below me, and that’s when I realized that the water was very deep, so deep that the clarity of the water beyond it wasn’t so clear because there was a drop off.
Attempting to calm myself, I slowly headed for shore, doing the breaststroke to keep my friend in sight as I aimed for her, but my son’s words kept swirling around in my head and by the time I reached an area where I could finally touch the sand below me, my heart was pounding from sheer terror. I was done swimming for the day.
Since I don’t like to swim where I can’t see what’s around me, it might seem odd that I loved swimming with whale sharks in the Gulf of Mexico waters off the Yucatan Peninsula, but whale sharks are docile, and I was always with other people.
Swimming in salt water, though, poses another challenge for me. With my natural buoyancy and the added buoyancy that salt water provides, I can’t dive down very far before popping back to the top like a cork. In fact, I struggle so much to dive down below the surface that I usually end up looking like a duck hunting for food.
It’s quite embarrassing actually because my derriere sticks up out of the water while my legs futilely kick and my arms flail about under the water. So, I usually just stick to what I’m good at and float easily on the surface while gazing downward at whatever there is to see below me.
Someday I would like to learn to scuba dive, but if I’m going to dive far down with the aid of a tank and weights to keep me under the water, then it will have to be in very clear water where I can see far and wide around me as I swim.
Swimming is the very best exercise as it works every muscle, and it teaches you to concentrate on your breathing, much like yoga does. It’s very relaxing, and it’s something I wish I could do on a daily basis. Once I was asked that if I could have a superpower, what would it be? I said that I would want to be able to swim beneath the ocean’s waters like fish do, but I would also want to be able to swim so fast that no shark or giant squid could ever catch me. That way, I would be able to swim to every place I want to travel to in a short amount of time, or I could hang out with my favorite animals, the whale sharks, as they migrate.
The following excerpt of my novel in progress is for my paid subscribers. Please consider becoming one. Thanks.
Tammy Marshall
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tomes and Topics to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
