I had lunch recently with a friend who’s a film director. He asked if I remembered the movie The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster, from 1968. I said I hadn’t seen it. He started to describe the plot and I realized he was talking about the famous John Cheever story “The Swimmer,” or at least the movie based on the story.
The story is about a man in the summer, sort of a suburban tragic hero, who decides to swim home from a party by connecting a river of swimming pools – jumping in and out of other people’s pools like a stone skipping across the water(s). I didn’t remember the story very well but a line had stuck with me since I read it in college: “He had a simple contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools.”
I’ve never had a swimming pool, but always wanted one. The basin in the backyard. The yellow light in the water. To be able to dive in whenever I want and just float, or chop a crawl to the other side. I went back to the Cheever story this afternoon and found this: “Being embraced and sustained by the light-green water seemed not as much a pleasure as the resumption of a natural condition.”
According to Wikipedia, the first swimming pool was dug in the third century in modern-day Pakistan. At a fourth of July party last weekend, the water churning with teenagers, all I really saw, with a slick of sunscreen lotion on the surface, was a giant bath. I grew up in the suburbs, in Connecticut, the kind of town Cheever frequently wrote about, and the idea was familiar: “pool-hopping” was something teenagers did on late summer nights. I remember one time, after a hot day, heat really peaking, we managed three, hopping in and out of the pools in the dark, terrified some house lights would flip on and an angry adult would come out screaming. Of course we were white kids mostly, we were certainly privileged and it’s unlikely we’d be shot, so it was a pretty privileged thrill game, clambering over a fence into another dark yard.
Things don’t go well for Cheever’s swimmer on his odyssey. He’s cadging drinks from people he sees, diving into pools to escape his misfortune – a ruined family, a ruined life, an empty home. The pools are an escape, themselves a giant drink, as good as alcohol to get lost inside, and a thing to chase.
I’ve been swimming a lot lately, and thankfully none of this is much in my thoughts. Instead I’m just grateful for the familiar weightlessness, the dappled surface, a sense that even when I’m swimming alone, somehow the pool is company.
In tomorrow’s Sunday supplement for supporters:
A new app for fire alerts, as recommended by a California Search & Rescue worker (‘tis the season), though useful most places
Treasured books, poems, and films about swimming pools (also ‘tis the season)
New folk music I don’t hate
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with 3+ things to love, along with a monthly longer piece sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust. ⛰️
Books mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored in a Bookshop list.
Whenever I think of Cheever’s The Swimmer, I imagine he lives in the same world as Updike’s A&P, specifically. Maybe he begrudgingly went to pick up a jar of olives, just as the teenage girls walked out in their bikinis.