Give me a swim. An ocean, a river, a cold murky pond. I would swim every day if I could, I love the buoyancy, the push and pull, the absenteeism of gravity. One reason I like hotel pools so much, it’s the way adults barely move in them, like we’re all acknowledging it’s simply nice to dip into water. The novelist Iris Murdoch, who won the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea, used to swim in the Thames above Oxford. “The art is to draw no attention to oneself but to cruise quietly by the reeds like a water rat,” she said.
I know I swim out of desire, but also some odd compulsion. Is it addiction? Something ingrained? My mother’s parents had a swimming pool, in Illinois, my grandmother would side-stroke back and forth, and we weren’t allowed to bother her, we’d just sit and watch as she not once dropped her head. These days, I keep trunks and a towel in the car just in case. Friends who have pools will sometimes say to Rachel, if we’re leaving and my hair is still dry, “Didn’t he want to swim?”
Yesterday morning, we went to the beach, northern Malibu. California’s beaches are preserved for public use by law, though homeowners like to discourage with fake signs, locked gates. Thankfully, there’s an app that gives you instructions on how to circumvent. So, we stole around a fence, trekked a bit, spread our blanket on an easement. Aside from a fisherman and a few walkers, we had the beach to ourselves. (Jason Statham’s house was next door, but we didn’t see him.) I waded out into the ocean, floated on my back. There were the mountains, the palm trees, the curling coastline. I remembered how, in sixth grade, I met a kid whose family had a pool, I was flabbergasted the first time I went over and learned he rarely used it.
Though I fucking hate baths.
The photo is the pool at hotel Casa Mãe in Lagos, Portugal
The app is Our Malibu Beaches
A favorite swimming book is Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies
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