This year I am not even going to make the promise to myself that I have broken many times in the past.
I am not a great swimmer. I blame Lake Michigan partially for that. I learned to take my first strokes in Lake Michigan off the beach of my Wisconsin birthplace. I am no expert on the currents of Lake Michigan, but I gather the lake’s water moves in several circular flows. As a result, the water temperature near the 1,600 miles of shorelines varies considerably. I know there are many places along the Lake where people swim comfortably and happily. However, while many people used the soft sand Lake Michigan beach of my hometown for games and sunbathing, not many people ventured into the water, or at least not for long. The water was almost always cold. At least in my memory, even in the hottest summers, the lake’s waters did not get above the low sixties.
It did not much matter that Lake Michigan was not a swimmer’s paradise. Wisconsin is filled with lakes of all sorts—big ones, small ones, ones with mucky bottoms, ones with rocky bottoms, ones with sandy bottoms, and like that. A half dozen or more “inland” lakes are within a thirty- or forty-minute drive from my boyhood home. There were plenty of places to go summer swimming.
Perhaps because there were many nearby opportunities to swim, my town did not have a municipal swimming pool, although the “Y” and the country club had pools. The family finances meant I was not a member of either. The parents, however, thought that I should learn to swim. They signed me up for lessons given by the Parks Department. And those lessons were in those Lake Michigan waters, which in my memory were in the fifties early in the summer when I learned to put my head in the water and take a few strokes. It was not much fun.
If family funds were not enough for a “Y” membership, you can be rest assured that we did not have a second home on a lake. I did little swimming as a boy. When I did, I found out that my strokes were marginally adequate but that I had not learned to breathe properly while swimming. I could swim 25 yards, sometimes fifty, while holding my breath. I had learned to take breaths by turning my head and gulping in air, but I somehow never got the knack of letting it out properly. I was really just holding my breath. And that is still my swimming technique, although I am no longer fit enough to swim 25 yards holding my breath. Our Pennsylvania community has a beautiful pool. For many years, I have told myself that I will go regularly to the pool and learn how to breathe while swimming. And in each of those years, I have lied to myself.
Even if I had been a better swimmer, I would still have been uncomfortable in the water because of my eyes. I was terribly nearsighted. I was told back then my eyesight was 20/400 or 20/500, but a cataract doctor recently laughed at that and said it was much worse. I was told as a kid that I was functionally blind, which meant that without my glasses I could not function. But I did have glasses, and my disability seldom impeded me. In some ways, it stood me in good stead. I learned to navigate rooms without my glasses, which was a bit like being in the dark. Even now, at least in familiar places, I often don’t need to turn on lights to get around a darkened room. However, sometimes when I had to operate without glasses it was a problem. I tried playing high school football glassless. That was impossible. When I did go swimming, my “blindness” made things difficult.
I was about 14 when I first went water skiing. My sister’s college roommate had a home near the Wisconsin Dells, which our family visited. The roommate’s father wanted me to water ski. I couldn’t chicken out, but my fear was not of falling but whether I would know where to let go of the rope in front of their cottage. I thought that I might not be able to distinguish it from the giant blur of other ones, and I was embarrassed to tell them how bad my eyesight was. Since I was not a strong swimmer, having to swim a long distance to the starting dock — even if I could find it — was scary. However, I could see blobs of color, and luckily the cottages were differently hued. I memorized the colors of their cottage and the two next to theirs, and I let go of the tow rope somewhat in the vicinity of where I was supposed to. Later I would go water skiing on Elkhart Lake, where the grandparents of my high school friend had a cottage. I learned the color schemes of the houses there, too, and did not have the same fear of having to swim halfway across the lake to get back to the right cottage. However, often when we did get back, Steve and his brothers would talk about all the good-looking girls they had seen on the lake while towing me. Sadly, I saw none of them.
