Spitball Army

Last Sunday’s New York Times travel section featured a little story about what some consider a growing vacation trend: open-water swimming trips.  I’ve been thinking about the article all week.

The story’s author, Bonnie Tsui, chose to focus on four very different travel companies and the experiences they provide.  Swim Art, for instance, leads swimmers to both salt-water (the San Francisco Bay around Alcatraz) and fresh-water (Lake Tahoe) locales in northern California, and the London-based SwimTrek offers a two-day swimming expedition down the Thames River that incorporates frequent rest stops at riverside pubs (for local color, I suppose, and “re-fueling”).  Tsui describes similar trips to Mexico, Chile, the Greek Islands, and a swimming tour of the British Virgin Islands aboard a 65-foot trimaran yacht.

Those really do sound like my idea of a vacation: getting away from it all to a fresh, unfamiliar place that provides a new perspective and the chance to reinvigorate both body and mind.  They are currently, and sadly, a bit out of my financial and physical reach.  But I got to thinking about my experiences with the open-water swim, and the opportunities for that that might exist for me now, on a smaller scale.

Aside from regular trips to the beaches around Oceanside, California, during my youth, my first official open-water swim was the La Jolla Rough Water Swim.  This was in the 1970s.  The event is still held – now in its 78th year – with around 2,000 swimmers dashing into the Pacific Ocean from the sands within the beautiful La Jolla cove.  The year I participated, our entire family went.  I swam the junior course – the short course for kids – while my sister Tricia swam the long route.  Even from the vantage point atop the rocks of the cove, the long course swimmers were reduced to specks on the water’s horizon, until they reached their buoy goal and began re-emerging into view as they raced back to the beach.  For my part, I remember tripping over a low wave as I dashed out of the water.  Another kid passed me on the way to the finish line and tripped, himself, on the sand, allowing me to regain both my position and the bit of composure I had lost at the water’s edge.

In the mid-1980s, I took frequent weekend bike trips from Cambridge out the Mass. Ave. battle road to Concord and Lexington.  It was a great route to ride, flat terrain most of the way, and the Boston drivers – accustomed as they were to bikers on the road – treated you with respect.  One of my favorite end-point destinations was Walden Pond.  I’m not sure what the situation is like now, but in those days, you could ride on asphalt or cement roads right up to the edge of the Walden Pond property and walk your bike along the wooded paths to a secluded spot near the northwest edge of the water, not far from the inlet known as Thoreau’s Cove.  This would take you right past the site of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin, where visitors were encouraged to drop a stone to commemorate the building.  At water’s edge, I would tie my bike to a tree, change into swim trunks and wade into the green waters of the lake – it really is much bigger than any pond I’ve ever seen – then swim to the opposite shore.  No motorboats, ski-doos, or patrol boats to run you down or break the peaceful sound of lapping water, birds, or tree branches rustling in the breeze.  Maybe an occasional person or duo in a canoe or rowboat would drift by, with a wave and a “hello,” obviously with the same urban-escapist intentions as mine.  On the far side of the Pond, with bare feet, I had to step carefully among the rocks and growth along the bank, and had at least one nasty confrontation with a colony of Thoreau’s ants:

One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another.  Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly.  Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black.  The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black.  It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other.  On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely.  I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noonday prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out.  The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary’s front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members.  They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs.  Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat.  It was evident that their battle-cry was “Conquer or die.”

Aside from that encounter, I will testify that a swim in Walden Pond is better than any half-hour spent soaking in the bathtub and, on those leisurely weekend days, it was a terrific energizer for the ride home.

For nine years, I lived so close to the Charles River, which provided me with a great biking route.  It is unfortunate that the River wasn’t – and isn’t – also swim-friendly, but if you know that old Standells song “Dirty Water,” or if you have gotten close enough to stick your toe in it, you know why that is.
[audio:Standells___Dirty_Water.mp3]

Sometime during my first year in Birmingham, I participated in an open-water swim at Oak Mountain State Park, just south of the city.  It has been odd living far from an ocean these past 20 years, but thankfully we have lakes (Oak Mountain’s lake would be considered a pond in New England!).  I remember little about that open-water swim, though I know it was a half-mile swim, as that is what my t-shirt prize says, and that it was coordinated by the local YMCA.  I haven’t swum in open water since then.  That was 1988.

I am writing all of this down, in part, as a reminder memo to myself to ask someone at the Y if there is still an open-water swim at Oak Mountain or anywhere else in the area.  It’s summer, it’s the best season for outdoor swimming, and if there’s any activity that is well-suited to preparing oneself for an eventual swimming vacation off the rocky shoreline of Crete, it is more outdoor swimming.