elemental … d'eau

Beaches, cottages on water, rivers, and swimming pools loomed large in my life, from childhood through adulthood. The warm, fresh waters of Port Franks on Lake Huron seemed like my domain as a child. Port Franks was, still is renowned for its sand dunes as you enter the port and for the number of sand-bars that existed within easy reach of walking and swimming to them from the shoreline. Families could drive onto the broad sand-beach and I could and did spend hours building sand castles, making moats, diving down and swimming through my father’s legs as he stood astride in waist-high water for us. Occasionally, we would go to the Pinery Provincial Park, mostly for picnics in the park areas; the beaches there seemed less inviting to me. I can still taste the fizzies we drank; they were large  tablets that created a carbonated (bubbly) simulated soft drink when added to water. Fizzies  came in flavors like grape, orange, cherry, lemon-lime, strawberry, root beer, and maybe even cola – fruit-flavoured bromo seltzer tablets, I learned later in life. How simply water could be made to taste flavourful.

Swimming was an activity to which I was introduced curiously, at least, as that initiation is indelibly imprinted in my memory. Somehow, I was entered in a backstroke race either when our family was stationed at Centralia Air Force base, or, after we moved to Exeter. And just maybe I asked to be entered. Nevertheless, I did not know how to do the backstroke, had never been in a swimming race. I remember the terror of gulping mouthfulls of water, trying, in vain mostly, to get my body to stay on top of the water and yet, refusing to quit, and likely finishing last. For many years, I couldn’t recall where the pool was located and could not find mention of a pool at the Centralia base until I found the diagram below showing the ‘swim pool’ next to the Rec Centre, lower left:

Much more pleasant are my fond reminiscences of swimming and the lure of the water in Exeter’s Ausable River. In the early 1960s, there was no pool in the town. A park that I remember as Riverview Park in the north end, had a sand-embanked swimming area on the River. An L-shaped, yellow painted raft, perhaps 6 feet wide and 30-40 feet along each length, was anchored offshore with affixed buoy lines demarking the shallow area. The ‘pool’ was lifeguarded in the summer; in fact, one of my best friend’s brothers was often in the lifeguard chair. Tanned and sporting a bright blue, Speedo-like bathing suit, I coveted both his job and the Royal Life Saving Society badge emblazoned on his suit. I took swimming and life-saving lessons there achieving Senior Red Cross or some such distinction. Vividly, I recall coming home one day to tell my family I had learned a new swimming style, the ‘yellow belly sapsucker’ stroke. It was, of course, the elementary back stroke but I was convinced I had heard it as yellow belly. Perhaps it harkened back to the terror of my Centralia backstroke experience and I made up the name to colour it.

I suspect achieving the RLSS badges was my main motivation for learning to swim. And yet, even in Exeter, swimming was not the attraction to the River. On the far side of the yellow raft was the deep-water area and we, my friends and I relished diving from that side of the raft. Cows grazed in the field on the other side of the river and we enjoyed swimming toward that shore. Even more alluring was the long swim adjacent to the shoreline toward the Waterworks dam:

Completing the quarter mile swim was regarded as its own badge of honour among us and I endeavored to do the crawl stroke all the way their as though some private endurance test. However, it was the dam that drew us for two reasons. One, we spent hours sliding down the moss-covered, pebbled-cement dam itself; the water was shallow and slow flowing and yet just steep enough to provide a fairly fast ride to the river-pool at the bottom. Much to my father’s consternation, I wore out many a bathing suit bottom sliding down the dam. The other feature was the cement parapet we could reach by crossing the dam. Just beyond the left edge of the dam image framed above were two, parallel cement walls about 6 feet apart that jutted out into the river. I have no idea now what practical purpose the walls served; for us, they were diving walls. The challenge was that the walls were about 6 or 7 feet above the water and the water was not all that deep, perhaps 5 or 6 feet. Thus, each dive had to be executed such that we had to start to arch upwards just as we entered the water to avoid hitting the bottom and some steel beam that had been left or positioned at the bottom. Very likely, the diving was prohibited, certainly not safe, and yet we did it…because we could. In that same spirit, love of water, doing something just so neat, my cousin, Rick, and I built rafts like the one below and poled them at Port Ryerse on Lake Erie:

My final memory about water, swimming and their malleable impact on me comes from my early teen, high school years living in London, Ontario. At the downtown YMCA – where my parents were married, as I now know – I spent many Saturdays playing basketball, doing stunts on the trampoline, and swimming. For reasons I never questioned, all swimming at that ‘Y’ was done nude, among boys and men. I don’t remember thinking anything of it – it was just the way swmming happened. The best current explanation of the male, nude-swimming tradition comes from a Lutheran pastor, Frank Senn who rationalized its practice as develolping from broad-based physical culture and muscular Christianity movements that extolled physical health at least for men – see Frank Answers about Swimming Naked in the YMCA. For me, it was normal, part of the Y, going to the gym, and being a young man among other young men, boys, and men – just natural, a figurative and literal fluidity about being male.