The Swim

When I was in high school, I vaguely remember a particular Memorial Day weekend at my parents house. There was a party. I’m not sure who or what it was held in honor, or in spite, of. I was there. Some my friends were as well. And another friend came up to the house on a jet ski, with his girlfriend. That seems improbable because as kids in the early 90s we didn’t have the luxury of sit-down waverunners, we had stand up jetski’s, the kinds with 550 and 650 emblazoned on the sides, and big rubber exhaust pipes, but I remember him coming up in a wetsuit. What was unique to this party was that it was early in the year, and yet, as teenage boys inspired by jean-dress-wearing, big-bang-sporting, teenage girls, we went swimming. We dove off the diving board, and flailed back to the ladder as fast as possible. It was cold, the water was cold, it was early in the season, and we were swimming. Since Memorial Day is always at the end of May, it’s safe to say our swimming that day was when May was nearly turned to June. This was the earliest date I can remember swimming, until yesterday that is.

The swimming of my youth was chosen by me, as an event that I willingly participated in, whether it was in the late spring, mid summer, or on the Friday after Thanksgiving as I did once a few years back at the prodding of my brothers. Swimming should be voluntary. Most swimming sessions in Geneva begin with bare feet on a white pier. Then a shirt flung over the back of a plastic chair or wooden bench, and the swimming begins. Yesterday’s swimming began with a boat ride. My boat, the new, very used boat had been safely and snugly tucked away in the Abbey Harbor for the past few weeks, a temporary resting place made possible by one great client who let me moor in his slip until his boat arrived. The day his boat would arrive takes place this week, and so, last night, with calm waters and blue skies, I decided to take a boat ride. It was a little before 5 pm.

I drove to check on the Harvard Club piers (not in yet), and then cut north to glide past George Williams. I wasn’t planning on fishing, but when I rounded Conference Point and found a patch of glass water, I stopped and tied on a few minnows in hopes that they would provide a tasty treat for a bored or hungry bass or trout. I stopped the boat over the cribs of the Congress Club, cast a couple lines out, and positioned my two new boat pillows on the starboard of my bow. The sun was warm, the air still, and my bobbers floated dutifully. My pillows were fine, and I was, as you can imagine, completely and thoroughly content. I had not been swimming yet.

Perhaps just ten minutes into my fishing distraction, I packed the poles, fired the unnecessarily smokey engine, and idled to a pier belonging to one of my father’s neighbors. My boat would be spending the summer on a buoy at my parent’s house, and I was to perform the seemingly simple maneuver of paddling a small (too small) row boat out to the buoy, fasten my buoy line that would tether my boat to the buoy, then row back to my boat, tie the dingy to my boat, idle that boat to the buoy, attach the mooring line from buoy to boat, and then, finally, mercifully, paddle the row boat (the small one) back to shore. I would then drag the dingy on the shore, gaze longingly at my bobbing boat, beam a little more with pride, and go home. This was my plan.

I was part way through the procedure, having secured my boat to the neighbor’s pier, and pushed off from shore in the dingy, when my phone rang. It was one of my very favorite, very important clients. I answered. We chatted. While we discussed things, I cradled the phone in the generous heft of my cheek and shoulder, and paddled the boat with my single oar. I was also standing. Oh, and I was also weighing in at roughly 20 pounds more than the listed capacity of that ridiculously small plastic boat. So as I’m standing, talking, rowing, and generally enjoying my ability to multi-task on nearly super-human levels, I am also nearing the buoy. The buoy, that, by my crude measurement, might be as many as 250′ off shore.

Having arrived at the buoy, phone to ear and oar in hand, I thought it to be a good idea to sit down to continue my aloof conversation. As I sat back in the boat, I hadn’t noticed that I was nearly standing in the back of the boat, not the middle. When I sat back, my prodigious mass pushed the transom of the boat low towards the water, and with one fluid motion of catastrophe, water rushed over the corner of the stern and in a moment, I was as Adele, rolling in the deep. I clutched my phone in one hand, my sunglasses in the other, and pushed to the surface. A glance at the boat showed that it was capsized. Another glance towards shore proved that the 250′ looked more like 250 yards. I struggled to swim for a second, and dropped both phone and sunglasses to what I assume will be their final resting places. My heart raced, both out of fear and the panic that 43 degree water forces. My jeans dragged heavy, my tennis shoes too. My shirt and sweater felt as though they had been applied in layers as a cast to a broken arm. I was swimming, though not well.

I couldn’t front crawl to shore, as the weight of my clothes made it impossible to do so. I feverishly kicked and side stroked my way towards shore, actually considering that I may be consumed by the very lake that I love in some sort of Romeo and Juliet tale wherein Juliet was actually a lake and she killed Romeo by hugging him too tightly, too coldly. But I kicked and I side stroked, and when I thought I had made it close enough to shore to stand, and stretched towards what I hoped would be the sandy bottom. I couldn’t touch. I panicked some more. I kept swimming and swimming and gasping and choking. I felt like the guy in 127 hours, except he had a nice place to sit.

When I finally made it to water where I could stand, the whole thing didn’t seem nearly as serious. I lived. But I almost died. The moral of the story? Don’t talk on your phone while rowing a row boat weight rated for less than you weigh, while the water is 43 degrees. And looking back the water was indeed refreshing, and part of me does enjoy the unavoidable fact that I have now been in swimming in Geneva this year and you, most likely, have not.