Swimming Studies Read online

  When I received this book in 1997, the Dutch pools, shot in the cool, sharp style of the Bernd and Hilla Becher school, gave me a missing perspective on my identity as a swimmer; they provided some romance and distance, and addressed my artistic-mindedness more than cotton sweatshirts had. The inscription reads: “Leanne, you spoke about this book once. I hope it’s the right one or I’m a fool. The other half of the gift is unlimited use of a swimming pool in Ajax. A pool where you would swim as gracefully as I hope to be on the dance floor. Merry Christmas ’97. Love Brendan.”

  • • •

  In his book Gold in the Water: The True Story of Ordinary Men and Their Dream of Olympic Glory, P. H. Mullen follows a team of Southern California swimmers preparing for the 2000 Olympics. One of them, Tate Blahnik, is a moody lone wolf of a swimmer whom Mullen describes as a self-loathing questioner of authority. He is described as possessing the most natural talent on the team, but is a reluctant champion, the athlete who hates practice. I think he’s the most fascinating character in the book. The others, the ones who say and feel all the right things, are predictable. But they do win. Blahnik misses the Olympic team by a margin and is relieved to end his swimming career. Perhaps my sympathy for the might-have-been is a sour grapevine, but my admiration for and curiosity about athletes who are not goodwill motivational ambassadors is eternal.

  In The Fast and the Furious, Alex Baumann, sidelined by a shoulder injury, explains that he hates missing practice:

  “It’s really hard watching a workout when you can’t be in the pool,” he monotones.

  The narrator explains that Baumann wants to be a career diplomat.

  Victor Davis, on the other hand, charismatically delivers a picture of discomfort and sacrifice:

  “You get very tired and depressed, and you wish you had the social life that a lot of your friends have, you wish you could go out with this girl, but it’s so hard to have that. You’re too tired. . . . You wake up and your alarm goes off at five, and you just, you just hear the snow blowing outside, and you’re in a nice warm waterbed and you say, I don’t wanna go out there. Who wants to dive into water at five o’clock in the morning?”

  Davis, the narrator explains, wants to be a policeman.

  Later in the documentary, Davis finishes a disappointing second to Steve Lundquist in the 100m breaststroke at the 1982 World Championships. The camera watches Davis talk to his coach, Cliff, on deck. They go over the race, shaking their heads. Cliff sighs and says, “What can you do?” Davis mumbles almost inaudibly, “Go back and destroy the room.” Cliff shakes his head. “You can’t do that.”

  It reminds me of when Serena Williams’s sweetie-pie demeanor falls away to reveal extreme aggression, reveals what anyone under that much pressure, pulling that much focus, determination, and desire, is concealing: a mind-boggling amount of coiled energy, gnashing. Why do we expect world-class athletes to always be polite and genial?

  Characters like John Cheever’s swimmer Neddy Merrill, Don DeLillo’s blocker Gary Harkness, and David Foster Wallace’s tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza illuminate a wider, more complicated swath of culture by not winning. Their swims, games, matches aren’t redemptive. Their trajectories don’t set up victory.

  I watch YouTube footage of races, documentaries like The Fast and the Furious, Michael Phelps: Inside Story of the Beijing Games, and Unfiltered: Michael Phelps & Ian Crocker—The Story Behind the Rivalry, and while I could replay Jason Lezak’s 2008 4x100m freestyle relay finish for hours, the parts I find most touching are the interiors, the kitchens, the glasses of milk, a swimmer eating dinner from a plate set atop a television set, lamplight, parents, teal duvets, socks on staircases, and carpeted hallways.

  I’m a poorly drawn jock. I suspect, these days, I am more suited to bathing.

  • • •

  Bathing implies having some contact with the ground while in the water—propulsion and speed are secondary. Bathing. Bathing: the word itself feels like a balm, a cleanse, rather than the wavy struggle of swimming. I wonder why swimming in North America feels different from swimming in Europe.

  Until the late seventeenth century, the sea was regarded as a place of danger and death, the aspect of houses was directed inland, sailors were not taught to swim, in order to foster in them a true respect for the sea. The ocean stank, was dangerous, belched up seaweed and flotsam, and was full of marauding pirates and monsters. The value of any coastline was in proportion to how fortified it was. Swimming instruction as military drill for men and horses began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in northern Europe, accompanying developments in toilets and indoor plumbing.

  In The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool, Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen talks about the impression physical activity made on European visitors to the United States in the 1890s: “Americans seem best to express their spiritual energy by moving their bodies, by running, walking fast, and competing in sports.”

  I think of the only time my medals have come in handy, at the U.S. border crossing in Buffalo. As Jason and I pull up at the border after inching through a traffic jam from Toronto, a guard eyes us suspiciously and asks for our passports. We look a mess; the car reeks of B.O. and chicken nuggets. Vintage clothes are strewn across the backseat, moth-eaten blankets lumpily cover Jason’s camera equipment. One of my father’s art-college paintings is jammed between our luggage. I’m certain we’ll be pulled over to the side, as I often am, and interrogated. The guard gets out of his booth and asks me to pop the back. I do. Shuffling sounds, then: “Who’s the swimmer?” I smile at Jason. “I am.” The hatchback shuts quietly. The guard hands us our passports with no further questions, just “Drive safely.” Before I left my parents’ house I heaved a large tote bag into the car; in it were eight years’ worth of gold, silver, and bronze swimming medals.

  • • •

  While visiting Berlin, I meet an artist who swims every morning, so I ask him about the city’s pools. He quickly makes a list of those he likes in my notebook. His daily laps are done at Stadtbad Mitte, in Gartenstrasse.

  I head first to Stadtbad Charlottenburg–Alte Halle, a small, pretty pool nestled in the leafy streets of western Berlin. I borrow a pair of children’s goggles from the lifeguard booth and swim short widths beside a thick red rope bisecting the pool. A labored mural of Hylas and the Nymphs overlooks the deep end. The pool is beautiful but feels heavily furnished, like a parlor. The other swimmers seem to be annoyed by my splashing.

  Stadtbad Mitte, completed in 1930, is a soaring, gridded glass box. It is bright and unusually airy for a pool, thanks to its high mullioned transparent roof. (In 1945 its roof was struck by two Allied bombs—conceivably dropped by my grandfather or some friends of his—that failed to explode.) The deck is tiled in small pale gray squares; there are slurping gutters along the sides, two staircases that lead to a very shallow end, and a three-foot drop from the deck to the water’s surface that makes the pool feel contained, tanklike. There are only eight other swimmers, most doing relaxed but steady laps. In the deep end I sink to the bottom and look around. The swimmers glide calmly overhead, my bubbles rise, glittering. I push off the bottom.

  • • •

  In Bath, England, for a literary festival, I visit the ancient Roman baths. Usually, any ruin filled with algae-greened water thrills me, but as I walk through the boxy displays and past the projected re-creations of “Romans” wearing too much mascara, I am bored. Even the two-thousand-year-old skeleton with cavities from eating honey does nothing for me. The statues the Victorians erected around the terrace overlooking the large outdoor pool upstage the real Roman stonework, the bath’s cruder but authentic roots. What I love, however, are the Roman curse tablets: tiny outrages scratched into pieces of lead and pewter and nailed to the wall, requesting that the gods visit misfortune on the heads of whoever stole their stuff while they were
swimming. One reads:

  To Minerva the goddess of Sulis I have given the thief who has stolen my hooded cloak, whether slave or free, whether man or woman. He is not to buy back this gift unless with his own blood.

  I could relate, remembering the time my coral-pink Club Monaco sweatshirt was stolen from the Clarkson pool women’s locker room when I was thirteen. One minute I belonged to The Club of Monaco. Then suddenly I didn’t. My father was furious at the theft; on the chilly drive home his incredulity at my trust in other children vibrated in the car. I cursed the girl who had taken it.

  Walking along the uneven, original deck of the Great Bath is more interesting; the sky overhead is cloudy, and the murky green water is steaming. At one corner James crouches and sticks his hand into the pool, ignoring the many “Do Not Touch the Water As It Is Untreated” signs.

  “Toasty,” he says.

  I look around, then do the same. He’s right. I wipe my fingers on my pant leg and we exit, heading for tea in the Pump Room. I wash my hands before picking up my finger sandwiches, but James doesn’t bother. I think about ancient Roman germs while he butters his raisin-studded Bath bun.

  The following day we visit the Thermae Bath Spa behind the Roman baths, a modern facility fed by the original hot springs. In its film and image archive, the Thermae website presents black-and-white footage from the 1960s and 1970s of middle-aged men and women floating in the old pools with the aid of rubber doughnut-shaped inflatables. The water is cloudy, surrounded by age-stained stonework and white tiles. A color clip shows a feature film being shot in the great Roman bath: actors in buttercup-yellow tunics enter the green steaming water, as directed by a bearded man with a megaphone. In another, a woman is lowered by a system of ropes and pulleys into a dark pool, where a therapist waits to gently open and close her legs. In the films, the slightly mildewed old pools look beautiful. Traces of amoebic meningitis were found in the waters in the 1970s, necessitating the closing of the baths.

  We buy a ticket for a two-hour session and enter the Thermae spa. After changing we head to the Minerva pool on the lower level. The pool, amoeba-shaped, is vast, bright blue, and filled with middle-aged men and women. I’m surprised by the number of adults clutching blue pool-noodles beneath their armpits. A group of bathers congregate in a submerged whirlpool area at one end, voices raised over the bubbling water. James and I swim around self-consciously. The pool is chlorinated, the room is loud, and I wonder bleakly how many people have peed in the very warm water, relying on the chlorine to absolve and absorb their relief. We kick to the side and go in search of the steam rooms.

  • • •

  A few months later I’m in Switzerland. I float toward and rest my elbows on the third step of a flight of shallow stairs that descend into the deeper water of the pool beneath and behind me. My knees hover above the fifth step. It is eleven-fifteen p.m. The reflection of two tiny orange dock lights breaks and shimmers before me in the water of the Aussenbad, the outdoor pool at Hotel Therme Vals, a Swiss hotel with a spa designed by Peter Zumthor that opened in 1996.

  I resolved to swim in these pools someday, after seeing photographs of the spa on a design blog. While not usually drawn to architecture, I was mesmerized by the pictures of the Vals pools. I bookmarked the page, and kept returning to it to study the dark granite layers of the walls, the clean tectonic structure, the gleaming, dimly lit pools. Externally, the spa is concealed by the slope of the mountainside, the Aussenbad visible only from the air. The interiors have the mysterious appeal of caverns without the cartoon interruption of stalagmite and stalactite.

  A light steam floats up and above the surface of the water. Speaking is forbidden. These silent night swims are offered Sundays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays to hotel guests. The dark quiet and the architecture reduce us to blots on a grid, our bobbing round heads like single musical notes in Zumthor’s composition.

  I get into the water as soon as we arrive, elated. The water is kept at thirty degrees Celsius in the summer, easy to enter without a flinch. I wade down the first set of steps and push off in a glide down a high, narrow corridor and through a low chain curtain in a glass wall that separates indoor and outdoor space. The day is overcast, making the water gray and raising a light fog across the surface. I swim over to three periscoping brass spouts, each pouring a strong stream of water, and stand under one. I let the water pummel my shoulders, then kick around the perimeter of the pool. I sit, shoulders submerged, on each of its three shallow staircases—one leading straight into a wall. After floating, gazing, and kicking around, I swim back inside to try the Eisbad, a tiny pebble-bottomed pool kept at fourteen degrees Celsius. I can stay in only long enough to plunge, then head straight for the Feuerbad, kept at forty-two degrees Celsius. I explore each space and pool: a perfumed pool filled with flower petals; a series of three steam rooms with smooth marble tablets the size of sarcophagi, spotlit by amber light; a warm-water warren that eventually situates you in the bottom of a towering cube, like a conceptual modernist dungeon.

  Finally I enter the large Innenbad, glimmering beneath a grid of small blue glass skylights. The pool is closing in twenty minutes and emptying out. I am alone but for one other woman, in a striped bikini. Sliding along a submerged bar on one wall I look up just in time to see her floating backward toward a copper handrail. I call out, but her ears are underwater and she bangs her head sharply on the pole.

  • • •

  In water, most of the communication is physical. I like being so close to strangers’ bodies, seeing their clumsiness and vulnerability. In the Feuerbad, one man looks deeply uncomfortable, exposed in his trunks; a woman whose compact body suggests former gymnast chomps on gum. I float behind an older couple who don’t get their heads wet, who trail the scent of dusty perfume and car. Women wear swimsuits that are too big or too small, men’s muscles appear tender and extreme.

  I wake, cranky, from holiday naps, but the hotel’s complex of pools and steam rooms in the hill below its rooms calms me. The design evokes the sensation of flying: once inside the pools, instead of feeling at the surface of things, Zumthor’s towering layers of stone walls make it feel as though I’m moving through the earth-bound spaces, hallways and corners, courtyards and rooms. Most pool architecture surrounds the water in horizontal planes—he’s done the opposite, surrounding his pools with stacked verticals, making the water an element to float atop, rather than sink into. The effect is dreamlike, weightless. As though, in the midst of heavy rocks, jammed beneath mountains, our own corporeal weight is overwhelmed, negated.

  • • •

  During the silent night swim, couples enter the water and look around, gravitating bodily toward each other, exchanging nods and caresses. The affectionate float into each other’s faces, touch each other’s heads, cradling, bumping, and holding each other lightly. The postures are passive, of surrender, chins, necks exposed. As they support each other to float on their backs, the bathers drop into a voluntary, light pietà, a gesture submissive and gorgeous.

  It reminds me of learning mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. How we were taught to tip the neck back and pinch the nose to open the airway, a profile that still fills me with alarm. Half of the class would be sent, shivering, to the pool office or locker room, then summoned a few minutes later to find the other half of the class in simulated emergency situations. One person would be on the bottom of the pool, another flailing by a ladder. There would always be a bleeding cut, a head wound, someone passed out on the tiles, and a couple of panicked swimmers in the deep end screaming that they didn’t know how to swim. We’d rush toward the victims, our lifesaving techniques overseen by instructors, some insisting on a “full seal,” others okay with a few centimeters of space between lips. I can clearly remember two of my classmates, one dripping boy bent purposefully over on his knees, his breath inflating the cheeks of the other flat on his back, their lips rubbery and slick.

 
• • •

  Between my thrice-daily swims, I paint the view from my window twenty-three times. Our room is on the top floor and looks over the valley and the tiny town of Vals. From the room next to ours I hear a couple laughing hysterically, the woman’s laugh high and shrieking, the man’s wobbly and low. The laughter turns into low Swiss-German conversation, then laughter again, and finally the man sighs a loud, trembling sigh that falls as he exhales with a happy wheeze and all goes quiet.

  On our last day I get up to make it to the pool when it opens at seven. A few people are there already: a woman, dry, sitting and staring at the pool, her legs drawn up to her chest; another woman in the Aussenbad, her eyes a picture of suspicion and surprise; a couple swaddled in white robes identical to mine. As I float around, more swimmers arrive. A middle-aged woman with a modern haircut gracefully enters the water: Duchamp’s not-quite-nude descending a staircase. Three old men do steady laps of breaststroke in the longest part of the pool. On my way back to the Innenbad, I pass the dry woman, still sitting with her legs drawn up to her chest, still staring at the water.

  We are all aware of one another. As on a dance floor, I’ll try out someone else’s moves while others imitate mine. I see a couple hook their feet over a bar and float on their backs; I do the same and experience a strange, head-heavy weightlessness, not unpleasant but unsettling, body weight collecting in my neck and shoulders. I lie lengthwise along a shallow shelf, my body just submerged, and a man watches and then does the same. Mid-morning an attendant navigates a Zamboni-like contraption past me. It sucks up the puddles on the shining slate, leaving a dry, matte surface behind. I get out and walk in its wake, making darker gray prints on the stone.