The ‘giant stride’ technique for leaving a dive boat.
This week Summer and I learned to scuba dive off the island of Koh Tao, Thailand. This would be worth celebrating under any circumstances, but it’s particularly special for me since nine months ago I did not know how to swim.
Americans are always surprised to meet someone who can’t swim. Australians are shocked. But most Americans have plenty of opportunities to swim when they’re growing up, because the climate is so good. Australians get chucked into a pool at two months, just after they are dangled in front of a crocodile, and just before their first beer.
Though still rare, non-swimmers are more common in Europe, where north of a line drawn from Marseilles to Athens no-one swims in the sea or in rivers without a wetsuit or a psychological problem. Europeans learn to swim in indoor pools at their local school or state-run ‘recreation center.’ The very name suggests that such recreation is forbidden elsewhere.
For various reasons, I still hadn’t learned to swim at ten years old when my family went on a vacation to the Canary Islands. But I was quite happy in the hotel pool, bobbing around in an inflatable life ring. One afternoon I was standing by the edge of the pool wondering how to get back my ring, which had drifted to the middle, when another kid ran up and pushed me in.
I remember the feeling of water rushing into my mouth; I remember the feeling of falling towards the bottom of the pool; and then I remember my dad’s arms around me, pulling me out.
For 25 years after that, every time I felt water in my mouth, I could remember nothing else. I couldn’t remember what the instructor had told me, I couldn’t remember that I was in waist-deep water, or that there was a lifeguard standing next to me. I just had to get out.
The odd thing was, I loved being in the water. A lot of people dislike opening their eyes underwater; I never had a problem with that. But water in my mouth triggered a panic attack.
I worked with multiple trainers, in Dublin, London, and New York. Two of the women I dated were lifeguards. Nothing worked. Either I gave up or they did. Several people suggested therapy. But while I may have an irrational fear of water, I have a perfectly rational dislike of shrinks.
The man who finally got me past my fears was Adrian Ginju, a former member of the Romanian Olympic swimming team and now a private coach in New York. No one had more tricks than Adrian. He kept throwing new exercises at me, new strokes, new challenges: now jump into the deep end, now do a somersault underwater, now pick up your goggles from the bottom of the pool. One day I swam a single stroke, took a breath, and swam another. I was so surprised that I nearly drowned.
After that I tried to swim every day until we left for our trip. It was summer in New York, the outdoor pools were open, and I went to the Asser Levy Pool near my home in the East Village, a clean, pretty, free pool where I was the only white guy under sixty.
It was sheer joy, even though I still couldn’t swim a length. My stroke is not very efficient, and scares small children. Like a man who learns to speak English late in life, I will always swim with an accent.
When we arrived last week in Koh Tao, a little island in the Gulf of Thailand, I had never in my life been in the sea without a lifejacket. I was planning to sit on a beach while Summer learned to dive, but I went out on the boat for a day and watching her learn convinced me to try.
Swimming is hard; scuba diving is easy. At the surface you inflate your jacket from your tank, after which you could fall asleep and still not drown. Underwater you breathe normally, fold your arms and kick very slowly, letting your fins do the work. Scuba divers are not athletes.
The tricky part is adjusting your depth by using your breathing: deep breath to go up, exhale to go down, shallow breaths to stay level. But even this is just yoga without the moving and stretching and downward-facing-dog stuff that makes yoga hard.
However, jumping into the ocean with a steel tank on your back and lead weights strapped around your waist is, for someone who only recently learned to swim, counter-intuitive. And for this reason, and because a small but very agitated part of my brain continued to report all through each of my dives that in case I hadn’t noticed, I was sixty feet underwater and wearing a weight belt, I am not a very graceful diver.
It is beautiful down there. Because we are recent arrivals and come only as tourists, the animals have no particular fear of humans. On land you can walk through a forest without ever seeing an animal; they all hide. But dive anywhere in South-East Asia - or just snorkel - and you can see and sometimes interact with dozens of species as you glide, erratically in my case, over coral landscapes.
For me, the strangest moment comes at the end of each dive. You don’t inflate your jacket and float upwards; you swim up very slowly, so that the air in your lungs doesn’t expand too fast and burst them. Again, it takes very little effort and you breathe normally throughout. But it feels as if you’re falling in slow motion out of the water and into the air. I will never forget this sensation.
***
When my father died three years ago, I took a few things back to New York to remember him by, including some home movies that he had shot on 8mm and transferred to videotape. Just before our wedding last year, I finally got round to transferring the movies again, this time to NSTC-format DVDs, so that I could watch them for the first time.
There was very little footage, an hour’s worth in total, and most of it was weddings and vacations. Film was expensive and we were not rich; going to the Canary Islands was really extravagant for us. I was hoping to see my parents when they were my age, but most of the time my dad was panning over some vista, filming his new car, or following a duck.
And then, completely unexpectedly, my dad appears, swimming alongside me in my life ring. We are in the Canary Islands; it’s the day I was pushed into the pool. I’d gotten back into the pool with him later on. And here’s me again, shaking hands with the boy who had pushed me in. His parents had made him apologize; my parents had made me accept.
Now, 25 years later, having finally learned to swim, having achieved what some Americans call ‘closure’, and with the wisdom that comes with maturity, I no longer wish to accept your apology, you little jerk.
