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probably at my most appealing when viewed through eight feet of murky pool water.
Nevertheless, my parents wanted me to learn to swim near the surface where I could
occasionally take a breath of air. They enrolled me and my sister, Cindy (who couldn’t
stand to stick her face in a basin of wash water, much less a giant pool), in a swim
class. I vaguely remember the instructor, who looked like Jack LaLanne. I remember
having to stand on the pool steps with my nose sticking out of the water, under
explicit instructions never to let go of the side of the pool. I was the youngest kid
in the class, disturbed by the great progress the older kids were making. Even my
sister was getting her face wet without crying. I never got to leave the steps.
One night, when Cindy was feeling aquatically victorious, she told me it
was easy to swim. All I had to do was jump in the deep end and move my arms and legs.
That was swimming. So the next day at class, I marched right past the steps, out
onto the diving board and jumped. I was still moving my arms and legs like an
upturned roach when Mr. LaLanne fished me out of the bottom of the pool and deposited
me in my frantic mother’s arms.
The rest of the summer, I took ceramics. Then we moved from a tract home
in Houston to a house right on Galveston Bay. After I drank about 500 gallons of
polluted bay water, I taught myself to swim, not well, but well enough to say that water
and I were no longer an instantly fatal combination. For the first time, I could
say I loved the water.
As luck would have it, the horse I received as a gift when I was 11 loved
the water, too. In the summer, I would jump on his bare back, flip open the latch
to his stall with my foot, and ride him to the water without a bridle or even a
halter.
He always headed straight for the bay and as soon as his feet hit the
surf, would start trotting deeper and deeper into the sea until he was swimming. I would
hang onto his neck, with my body floating parallel to his back while he churned
around in the bay. It was an image Fellini would have loved — mythic, earthy,
magical, like a peacock in the snow. I didn’t realize until much later what freedom we
enjoyed.
Swimming in the bay without a horse beneath me was a little frightening,
like swimming in a living seafood stew. But the fear of the unexpected was as
pleasurable as digging my toes into the dense grey mud and rocking with the waves like an
elkhorn fern. Crabs, jellyfish, driftwood, and chunks of Styrofoam floated by. When
the tide went out, the eel holes were evidence of the sea snakes swimming nearby. And
we knew giant garfish were stalking us, seeking revenge on those of us who made
necklaces from their scales that washed ashore — and especially on those who shot them
and ate them.
Twice when we lived at the bay, the water was filled with a fluorescent
kind of bacteria. Every disturbance in the water — a crashing wave, my flailing arms
and legs, a fish dashing by — created a neon green light show. The aquatic
fireworks faded in a day or two, but we kept jars of this enhanced bay water in our
closets up to a week afterwards, shaking the jars in the dark each night until
finally we shook the glowing bacteria to death.
After heavy rains, something was washed into the bay from the Houston Ship
Channel that was much less delightful than the well-lit bacteria. The pollution from
the refineries killed wavefuls of fish that floated onto shore by the thousands.
Neighbors were walking around gagging, with handkerchiefs dipped in Scope mouthwash
held to their noses, while big piles of decaying fish burned. My sister and I
developed chronic tonsillitis and our doctor told Mom we shouldn’t swim in the bay anymore.
When we cut open the mullet and croakers we once fed our cats, they were filled with
green slime. The crabs that my mother caught with chicken necks tied to string and
dangled off the sides of our pier became equally unctuous.
Finally, the pollution and flotillas of dead fish chased our family inland
to the little town of Bellville. The countryside around our house was dotted
with stock tanks which my horse and I made great use of, despite the tepid water
temperature and the threat of cottonmouths and giant snapping turtles. Water was
plentiful here, but not concentrated and certainly lacking the mystery and surprise of the
sea. Dad missed the bay. To try to compensate for his loss, he built a swimming pool
in the middle of a pecan grove on our land. The plaster on the pool dried on
February 5, we filled it with freezing well water, and threw our first pool party
February 8. Lips were thin and blue, we shook uncontrollably, and our goose bumps had
goose bumps, but the mid-winter swim was still a coup for Cindy’s and my popularity, which
until then had never advanced beyond the status of rock-bottom-newcomers.
We won our friends over, at least for a few seasons, with 17,000 gallons
of chlorinated water. These new best friends realized summer directly follows winter in
Texas. They knew the days spent poolside broiling our tender skin under a reflective
coating of Johnson’s Baby Oil weren’t far off, and swimming pools were few and far
between in Bellville during that era.
It turned out there were a lot of things few and far between in Bellville:
English teachers, racial equality, tolerance, opportunities — everything except
barbecue and high school football. The world in Bellville was constricted and limited,
man-made and artificial like their muddy stock tanks and our tiny pool.
It wasn’t until I visited Cindy after she came to college in Austin and
she took me out to Hippie Hollow (which was actually frequented by hippies back then)
for my first dip in Lake Travis, that I began to have some understanding of what
poor substitutes swimming pools and moccasin-filled ponds are for real bodies of
water, bodies expansive enough to swallow the sunsets, bend to the weather, and
mutate into multiple personalities: mellow and as still as a sheet of glass; whipped to a
frenzy by the wind until there are “sheep in the valleys”; shy from
drought or low tide; or swollen and destructive during floods or hurricanes.
My swim in Lake Travis that day was like a baptism. I dove down through
the blue-green silence until my ears hurt, then churned back to the surface and burst into
the sunlight.
I crawled, backstroked, and butterflied without limits. I pulled myself up
onto a limestone rock and looked out across the water. It extended as far as the
horizon.
This article appears in July 11 • 1997 and July 11 • 1997 (Cover).