Learning to Swim

He was probably in his mid-fifties, ramrod thin, with a flash of gray in his dark hair.  His mouth sometimes pulled down to one side, as if caught between a smile and a frown.  He wore the same black bathing suit every time I saw him come to the pool.  I never learned his name.

He told me a little bit of his story one day.  He’d had an accident in the water when he was a boy, about the same age as my kids, who were at the pool that summer to take swimming lessons of their own.  “I almost drowned,” he said, with that pulled-down grimace of a smile.  “And since then I’ve been terrified of the water.”  Now, as an adult, he’d signed up for a summer of private lessons.

We watched him, trying not to stare.  His body froze underwater, muscles clenching & straining & grabbing at nothing.  He wore a full set of water wings & floaties, and his arms and legs churned aimlessly.

He got better, slowly.  At the end of the summer —  during which time Olivia learned to put her face in the water & Ian learned rotary breathing for his crawl stroke — he could support himself w/o floaties.  Eventually he swam, by himself, across the deep end of the pool, maybe 15 feet or so, in 12′ deep water.  I’ve seldom seem anyone so triumphant, or so scared.

I think of this story a lot at the end of the semester.  Learning is painful,  risky, and dangerous — sometimes we teachers forget that.  You have to put yourself in an untenable position — in the destructive element immerse, to borrow Conrad’s language — to make real education possible.