A Lake Geneva Dive

If today were 1989 instead of 2011, and we were swimming together on the Loch Vista Club pier, I would have been able to put on the most anemic display of diving prowess you have ever imagined. My repertoire of dives included the popular jacknife, to be sure. It also included the racing dive from a pier, a dive that I usually dug too deep on and lost whatever race I entered or was challenged to. I could also do regular dives, high dives, little dives, and sideways dives. When friends would line up at the Loch Vista diving board, each waiting their turn in the spotlight, where eyes from piers and shore and boats would land on them just as they bounced one final triumphant bounce and launched into a flip or a gainer or some other somersaulty display, I would wait there too. Patiently. For I knew, when the time was mine and the eyes were on me, I would have to do a dive. Maybe a regular dive this time- with special consideration paid to the size of my splash- or perhaps a jacknife next. Or maybe even the daunting inward dive, a dive that ended up being more angled than it should have been.

While friends flipped and soared, I dove. I admit this now with deep regret and heaps and heaps of shame: I, David Curry, could never do a flip. Not then, and not now. Not a backward flip or a front flip. When my Uncle Kevin stood on an outward post of my fathers pier and launched into a reverse flip from a standstill, I could watch in disbelief, but I could not replicate the feat. My younger brother, now he was a flipper. He could flip with twists and flip with force. He was a sight to behold. I would wait, dripping and huffing, waiting for my turn as if I had something unique to show. I’d close my eyes and visualize, much in the way an Olympic diver would, and I’d mentally prepare for what it was I was about to do. And then, when the turn was mine, I’d sheepishly run down the plank and reach my arms out towards the sky, and dive.

I was watching television last night, when something so sinister that it must be relegated to airing after 9 pm came on my screen. It was Tim, and he was back. Perhaps Michigan ticketed a few more Illinois plates over the winter, scoured couch cushions and reached deep into the coffers, and after a winter of relative silence, found a way to sneak one more superfluous tourism ad onto my TV. This ad, ladened with syrupy prose and images of water from such a distance that you cannot see what’s in it, had something to do with swimming. Swim here and swim there. Swim in the water discharge of our Nuclear power plants and you can swim all winter long! I made that one up.

The swimming talk didn’t bother me that much, even if swimming in Lake Michigan is best left to salmon, it was the way Tim ended the PR spot that grated at my water loving soul. Tim talked about clear water, pure streams (click here to view one of those Berrien County “pure” streams), and then he issued a decree- he told me, and you, to “dive in”. It’s the diving reference that bothers me, and it bothers me because I have the aforementioned lifetime of diving experience under my belt, and there’s an overtly integral component of diving that the ad’s writers appear to have overlooked.

All of my childhood, and now adulthood, diving has taken place off of something that Lake Michigan sorely lacks. Piers. If there has ever been a structure built almost exclusively for diving, it is the humble pier. Pier’s needn’t have diving boards, though they are a blessed addition, in order to afford diving, they just need to be. Every single lakefront home, and every single lake access association, and every single lakefront condominium on Geneva boasts at least one pier. These piers are for mooring boats, sure, and for fishing, obviously. But they are also platforms for rag tag and for diving, and their very existence has Lake Michigan beat by miles.

Michigan, for all that shoreline on that great big green lake, isn’t a lover of piers. Sure they build piers. They build groaning concrete and steel structures, built more as erosion controllers than dive platforms. But private lakefront homes, those homes with those beautiful views, typically will not have even a single pier to sit on, or dive from, or tie a boat to. If you’re on Lake Michigan, your children will swim pools, your boat will bob in a marina that you will have to drive to, and any references to diving will be made my adults in hushed tones long after the children have gone to sleep. Lake Geneva? We’ll not only sell you a pier to dive off of, but we’ll let you put a diving board on it as well. Perhaps you can work on your flips. Perhaps I’ll come over and show you one of my fanciful, if utilitarian, dives. Perhaps while Michigan talks about diving, we’ll actually be doing it. From our piers and our diving boards, into our clear waters that are as sparkling as they are deep.