zimatravels

     Through the crook of my arm wondrous things happen.  Although I learned to swim as a young camper, it was in adulthood that I became an avid swimmer.  To some, swimming is a form of exercise.  To me, it is the gentlest, cheapest form of therapy.  I have found beauty, peace, inspiration, and emotional healing while swimming around the world over the years.  I, like the seal and the dolphin, am heavy and ungainly out of the water.  It is only in the water that I can feel graceful and the true lightness of being.

     A sense of joy in the water follows me in creeks, lakes, oceans, and pools.  I have swum in a lake in California, which was said to be a bottomless, extinct volanic crater.  I once swam three hours in a Washington state lake to celebrate my birthday.  And I can recall the tingle of swimming in an ice-cold lake where the glacier that fed it could be seen at its edge.

     Through the crook of my arm I have seen beautiful sights.  In Israel, I splashed happily in fresh, cool water under tall date palms and a deep blue sky.  When I lived in the picturesque city of Santa Barbara, California, which is sandwiched between mountains and the Pacific Ocean, I often swam in an outdoor pool where each stroke that brought my head out of the water revealed the mountains framed by the crook of my arm.  On the other side of the world, an outdoor pool on the island of Coloane belonging to Macau gave me a similar vignette of the nearby high hills I often enjoyed walking through.

     Swimming clears my brain.  Without the normal distractions of daily life, my mind feels freer to wander, to meditate, and to create.  It was in the water of the pool at my university where I studied for my Master’s degree that I wrote my papers and prepared for exams.  While swimming around a pool in odd patterns that puzzled my colleagues and students in Taiwan, I created an absolutely wonderful poem and came up with just the right name for my first Chinese grandchild.

     However, it was in a pool in Macau that I found the spiritual “first aid” that I needed to help me get through an emotionally wrenching experience.  I went to the pool in mental agony.  As I stroked through the water, I imagined that my mental pain was leaving me and going out into the pool.  Somehow, the thought of the water drawing the pain out of me did release some of my mental anguish.  I have felt grateful ever after for the comfort the water offered me in my time of distress.

     Some of my most magnificent views of China appeared through the crook of my arm.  It was a cold November day when I first saw Thousand Islands Lake in Zhejiang Province.  My first thought from the boat was how clean it was and how wonderful it would be to swim in.  The second time I saw the lake was during the summer months, but, alas, it was unseasonably cool and rainy.  The third time — aahh — it was just right.  The soothing waters of this man-made lake offered views of mountaintops, now made into islands.  Lake swimming is my favorite, and China’s cleanest gem was my happy playground.

     I have often been caught up by the wondrous cloud formations that one flies in and around in a plane, but I never expected to swim in a cloud.  In Turkey, I did.  Unlike other hot springs I’ve visited, the water at Pamukkale is a very comfortable body temperature and has no foul smelling sulphur.  When I sank down into those silken waters, a total sense of well-being suffused my body.  I have never felt anything quite like it before or since.

     I didn’t speak or read Korean, but how different could a swimming pool in Korea be?  The first time I went swimming there, I did everything wrong.  In the dressing room, I changed into my bathing suit and prepared to lightly shower before entering the pool.  Wrong!  A woman looked at me with concern and pantomimed to me to take off my suit.  Not understanding, I continued to the showers.  Before I reached them, another woman took my bathing suit straps off my shoulder.  Then, an attendant working there pulled down my suit.

     When I got to the showers, I understood.  A naked scrubdown was required before putting on one’s suit.  In the shower room, women were gaily chatting, scrubbing each other’s backs, sitting and even laying on the floor under the spray of the shower.  What was expected here was to scrub off at least one layer of skin — and then to put on one’s bathing suit.

     It is difficult to pull on a wet bathing suit over a dripping body, especially my quite large dripping body.  As I was inadequately tugging to pull the top of my suit up and the bottom part down, I felt another pair of hands helping me in a motherly fashion.  Middle-aged Korean women were always doing such helpful things for me.

     Since the pool was a place for socialization, very loud noise called music by some blared from the omnipresent speakers one finds everywhere in Korea.  But the pool was cool and wide and I was grateful for the water that covered my ears and blocked out the music.  Several swimming women smiled warmly and curiously at me, but lack of a common language limited communication to simple smiles and nods.

     Koreans have very definite ideas about what stays clean an dry.  Showers are wet; dressing rooms stay dry.  But I had on my dripping suit while my locker in the dressing room held my towel and showering supplies.  I had not put together the need to leave all my showering paraphernalia on a rack in the shower room.  With an apologetic look at the attendant, I walked and dripped to my locker.  She, with a look of disbelief at how uncultured I was, followed after me wiping up my every wet footprint.  I tried to put on my face an expression that communicated, “I’ll do better next time.”

     When I swim, I am never sure who will accompany me.  For it is in my dreamlike state that people from my past will appear.  And so that is the time when my former mother-in-law sometimes comes to mind.  Our relationship spanned many years.  After my divorce, she no longer wanted contact with me.  However, she was a regular, avid swimmer.  When I swim, I know that somewhere she is also still swimming.  It somehow fills in the gap between us.

     It is in some of the most alive oceans where I have felt the most awed, and the least comfortable.  In Hawaii, Key West, Jamaica, Tobago, the Indian Ocean, “down under” in Australia, and the blue-green waters of Fiji, I swam among the fish.  It was truly fantastic to join a small part of an underwater society for a short time.  The fish arrayed in outrageous colors and designs, the sea creatures, and the coral were truly another world.  Although I was fascinated and amazed by the beauty, I sincerely regret that I could not shake off the feeling of being an unwanted intruder in a strange world.  But I am forever grateful that I have at least peeked into this wondrous other world.

     Swimming has given me countless hours of discovery and joy, and will, I hope, continue to be an adventure.  Besides wading in memories of places I’ve swum, I can also look forward to exploring new depths I’ll reach in other places and spaces I’ll swim.  Water, water, everywhere — and I’m very glad of it.

This is an excerpt from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.

Tags: California; swimming in Israel, China; Coloane, Macau; swimming in Korea; Tobago; Fiji; Santa Barbara, swimming as therapy; swimming in Pamukkale, Travel, Turkey; Thousand Islands Lake, Zhejiang Province

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