American Letters 5: Swim To Shore

An old lesson from his father returns.

This series is an exercise in notes towards a third person diary or memoir of these times. The first letter, from the London series, is here and the first in the American Letters series is here.

Two Swimmers, undated, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Yale Center For British Art

The first pool he tries to return to isn’t like a pool he knows at all: a tiled trench, shaped like an arrowhead or the inside of a boat, with engines under the tub that generate a current of water at different speeds to create something like a treadmill for swimming. He reserves one of three along the back of his gym’s pool area where once there was an 8 lane competition length pool. He’s mourned the loss for some time, not because he used it so often but he wanted to. Now the day is here when he wants at last to swim regularly and so as he tries out this tub he mourns the loss again. The controls for the current’s speed are located at the front, above the head of the hidden current, so that to adjust it or turn it off, he has to fight the current. He doesn’t so much as stop swimming as let go of trying, drifting back to the end and then walking back to the front to turn off the jets. He knocks into the floor with his feet at times, and the walls, and then at last gives up out of a frustrated boredom, something he isn’t used to feeling in a pool at all.

The mostly empty shallow pool nearby, designed for water aerobics and swim lessons, is empty, so he heads there feeling lost and a little defeated. As a last resort at reaching for some serenity, he floats on his back, letting his breathing slow down until he feels calm, like he is just a breath moving in and out of his body, rising and sinking gently.

He has returned to the pool at last because his blood pressure got so high that he is a afraid of his own body. He’s afraid, his husband is afraid, his doctor, everyone he tells the numbers to is shocked. His mother calls to check in to tell him that his brother is worried also, which is her traditional way of saying she is worried. Then she offers concern in the untraditional way and says plainly that she is worried.

He never had high blood pressure until November of 2016. His doctors have other patients like him, as does his therapist, as does his acupuncturist, who manages to get his blood pressure down past where the meds had gotten him. A week later, he is back to where his blood pressure was in November 2016. But he must still go lower. So he gives up alcohol, cuts salt, red meat, morning news and evening news also, putting a blocker on his phone for social media. But he gets text messages from politicians asking for money and bringing bad news, as if his donation is meant to solve the problem. He cannot do this for the entire House and Senate.

The next day he sees his trainer and gets a lesson on how to use that special tub. He manages and even learns exercises that use water but are not swimming. But he wants to swim down a lane like he used to as a boy, flip-turn and head back. He wants to follow the long line under the water. He feels like he is on a space colony ship, like the one in Mickey 17, training to swim on some other planet. And the swapping out of the pool with lanes for the high tech tub feels like something they would do to Mickey 17. A trick to play on the clone to see how far he could go before he dies.

*

When his husband tells him he is going to physical therapy at the aquatic center, he makes a plan to go as well. They are not otherwise gays who exercise together, and tend to act as if exercise is something private like their respective libraries, which they once connected and then separated without discussion.

The aquatic center’s first room cheers him up. It is a paradise for children, with cathedral height ceilings, brightly colored curving water slides and pools with fountains and toys. As he passes by he knows that he would have tried to live there as a child, at least for a while. He makes his way through the door in the wall between this and the lap pool, the blue crystal heart of the building, and it is like passing through a strange mirror to a world where 15 or so seniors play with inflatable beach balls in the first three lanes, blocked off just for them.

The water is just cold enough for him to shiver as he jumps into his lap lane and as he does, he passes through another mirror wall and into another world he has wanted to live in since he was a child. He looks around himself in the mostly empty competition pool and sees the color of blue he never sees elsewhere except with swim goggles on. The chill of the water. The beautiful quiet, a hush, deeper than that of a library or a winter day during snow. He feels alive in an old way again, powerful too, as his body floats in the water and the people in the lanes nearby bat their balls in the air, laughing.

Each pool to him is like a portal to this place below and each is imperfect for the way it never offers him a way to stay. He refrained earlier from making the jokes he might make when asked if he wanted a membership. A membership? He wants more than that. Gills, a way to stay underwater, the ocean, too, for that matter. He typically suppresses how abandoned he feels, abandoned by himself for living so far from the ocean. As a child in Maine in the 1970s, people would stare at him sometimes as if he was uncanny, seeing the mixed Korean and Scottish features on his face, stares that eventually led to people asking him “what are you?” If only there had been some way to go further, to have the gills inserted in his neck, to have webbed hands and feet, a fin along his back. Well, yes, I’m not from here at all.

But these fantasies are not visible today when he takes a break to use the restroom and catches a sight of himself in his trunks and swim shirt in the mirror, his hair wet from the pool, his swim shirt tight against his body. He looks like the gay husbear he is, frosted with silver and white in his hair and beard. He likes it, it cheers him up. And bears swim too. He gets back in the pool and as he does so he passes a sign he couldn’t quite read from the water, declaring a mile to be 32 laps of the pool. He’s done 16. He decides to try for 16 more.

Gradually, he swims the mile. As he touches the wall after the last lap, he feels a kind of peace in the accomplishment that last even after he gets out of the water and resumes contact with the surface world. The swimmer teen he was who swam a mile to warm up would scoff at him, but he has won a little more peace.

*

Later that day, back home, he thinks of when he was very young and learning to swim from his father, learning to body surf, to protect himself from riptides and sharks. His father said often that he had to be a strong swimmer, so that in case the boat he was in was sinking, he could swim to shore. So he become that swimmer. He swam competitively, the breast stroke, the IM. He was strongest at breast stroke, and in high school he won medals he can no longer find, still most likely in his mother’s basement.

His father used to regularly compete with him in the water. How far could he swim with a held breath, he would ask his son. The first time he made it to 25 yards he was impressed with himself. The first time he made 50, he was amazed. He had entered the pools in Maine as an asthmatic boy with a hay fever problem and an allergy to coral dust too. He loved making his father proud like he did then. Soon his younger brother and sister were competing to do the same.

When he was in his 20s, the extremity of the warning from his father made him laugh to remember it. Sometime in his 30s he considered it Korean overachiever stuff from his dad, his dad asking him to train to survive a sinking boat in suburban Maine. But the year he turned 50, he learned his father had nearly died escaping to South Korea from the North when the boat taking his family from Sinuiju to Seoul almost sank. It was now many years after his father’s death. He at last knew his father had spoken from experience, from the fear he had as a child of 6, roughly the age he was when his father said this. He has often thought without direct proof that the famous Korean overachiever syndrome is not just about being an immigrant but about surviving first the Japanese and then the American occupation and the prejudice of the occupiers, surviving war, poverty, corruption, surviving the world really. But somehow today, 50 years later, this is the day he understands the fear and love in those swim lessons. How his father wanted his son to survive. And to do that he had to be the person who can swim to shore. And that means keeping yourself healthy enough to do so.

How he wishes he could be swept into his arms again, to tell him what he knows now. To ask if he’s right. But it will be enough to survive as long as he can with what he was taught.

He leaves soon for Los Angeles, for AWP¹. He will find a pool while he is there.

1. My AWP schedule letter goes out tomorrow