A WEEDY SWIM

Yesterday I went swimming at the little beach beyond the tunnel in Point Richmond—the first time I’ve swum in seven months. And I have to say, it felt like a fool’s errand when I set out. The day before, cars had been parked bumper to bumper alongside Miller-Knox Park for as far as I could see, so where was I going to plant my car? Besides that, the water was liable to be freezing in October, I fretted. Under my clothes, I wore an ugly swimsuit that after seven months of disuse still smelled of chlorine. Why would I wear something ugly? you ask. Well, here’s the thing: it’s indestructible. I bought it online—and though I was dismayed when I took it out of the package that it didn’t look anything like the picture, I felt obliged to wear it to get my money’s worth. Now, I’m accustomed to my swimsuits lasting about six months before they become baggy and faded to colorlessness. But four years have come and gone since then, and I’m finally resigned to the fact that this ugly suit of mine is never going to succumb to the ravages of chlorine —and I’ll be wearing it into my advanced old age.

Anyway, miracle of miracles, I did find a parking place near the path to the beach—but noticed, as I descended the steep embankment, an unpleasant stench wafting up from below. It was low tide, I saw—a great expanse of wet sand, littered with piles of seaweed, stretching far out into the bay. There were a handful of adults on the small crescent of dry sand and a dozen kids in the water, all of whom I gave a wide berth as I strode out towards the deeps—though I never got there. As far as I went the water never came up higher than my chest. The good news: it wasn’t any colder than Lake Anza or the Russian River; the bad news: the ground felt ickily squishy and spongy under my feet, and I had to fight my way through long tangles of seaweed—all of which made me nostalgic for my swims at Lake Anza, which has remained closed throughout the pandemic:

FREE

I didn’t know till I stepped out on the deck after 3:00 this afternoon whether the heat wave had ebbed. Nope. So I grabbed my swim gear and hustled out. When I got to Anza, I saw there were no lifeguards. Yay! I thought. The season’s officially over!

Sunday, when Ella and I arrived close to 5:00, both parking lots were full, and people were still arriving! “The sun is going to drop behind those eucalyptus trees on the ridge,” I told her, “and the whole left side of the beach will be in shade.” So we settled on our towels on the far right. As I reeled towards shore after my swim—water in my ears throws me off-balance so I can’t help staggering like a drunk—I saw that the sun and trees had neatly divided the beach in half; the dark side was now completely uninhabited, the bright side mobbed because its population had just doubled.

Today I swam under the rope of the first set of buoys, the second, the third—and then I was free. I can’t describe the rush I feel when I pass beyond those flimsy barriers and feel myself loosed into wildness. Two years ago, with no lifeguard to admonish me with his bullhorn, I promptly swam two lengths of the lake. Today I only swam the width, which was as much as I could manage. On the far side I approached a boulder—cautiously because my one fear is that my legs could get entangled in seaweed—and saw a turtle sunning himself. He let me swim right up to him. I guess a turtle’s reaction time is slow, because it took him maybe five seconds to rouse himself enough to high-dive it into the water. He poked up his head from time to time to see what I was up to, but thankfully chose to stay as clear of me as I did of him.

For a while I swam along the reeds, the cattails still sleek and small. (Oops, we just had a little earthquake…) As I was saying…I swam along the reeds on the far bank, where there were pockets of warm water, hoping to ward off hypothermia before my swim back and feeling deliciously comfortable and—perhaps, foolishly—safe in the water, despite my debility. The other day I noticed that I could actually stay afloat vertically, provided I kept air in my lungs. Well, sort of. Now that my behind has gotten so big, it does tend to rise to the surface and tip me forward, but other than that…

My body looked a greenish gold beneath the water. I know what Igor means about experiencing your body as integrated. Sometimes I float on my back to relax, with my elbows out and my fingers locked behind my head, as though I were lying in grass, looking up at the sky. This releases something in my neck and shoulders, and when I roll over to do the breaststroke, I can feel the water streaming over my body, caressing it like soft veils, as though every nerve cell in my skin just woke up, and for a while swimming feels utterly effortless.

I remember a day I felt so peaceful floating out on the lake that it felt OK to die right then and there, to simply dissolve back into nature—perhaps the way Frost felt when he stopped by the woods on a snowy evening and heard the Mystery calling him to itself.