The Swimming Hole

It’s hot, hot, HOT! My English sensibilities haven’t quite come to terms with the summer heat in Connecticut. I just want to dive into some water. The tide is out at the shore though, and I’m not into wading halfway to Long Island before my knees get wet. The wife, dog, and I decide in favor of the cool, deep water of my newly discovered American institution. The swimming hole. My local friend Dan introduced it to me. I’m totally charmed.

I hadn’t thought about swimming holes much before. English weather is never as hot as here and, anyway, we British tend to admire water rather than use it. My Yankee wife and I lived in the Lake District of northwest England. She never failed to comment on the loneliness of lakes that didn’t have houses built on them and weren’t used much for swimming except by tourists. The Lake District is also close to the Irish Sea on the Atlantic side, and deeply cut into by the wide Morecambe Bay. People run their dogs along the shores, but the nearby nuclear power plants also have a history of polluting both bay and sea, which works well to deter swimming and even boating. And the best views over both those waters are, inexplicably, given over to cows and sheep, not to people. A certain island indifference to water and its wetness probably contributes to the sense that the English are ‘dirty poms,’ a tag the Australians give us (they are put off by our preference for baths  -- sitting in dirty water -- over showers).

The swimming hole – it’s not as though I hadn’t heard of these things at all. I’d come across them through American literature such as Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain and various situations in William Faulkner stories. And then I can see the wonderful American stories built into Norman Rockwell’s summer works, and also Thomas Eakins’ painting “Swimming.” And if my memory serves me, aren’t there countless Westerns where the swimming hole provides respite from a blazing sun?

To me, the beach is a different kettle of fish. First off, the beach is big, usually, and sandy, and full of kids with buckets and shovels, who endeavor to empty the sea into the hole they’ve dug in the sand. It’s a great place to top up a tan, play volleyball, and have fun with family and friends. The swimming hole is smaller in scale and grassy, both on the shore and in the water. It’s a place where locals gather and can seem to be one of those spots where everyone chats with everyone and it goes kind of like this:  

“Great day, eh?” the 50-something newcomer says to no one in particular.

“Say aren’t you Betsy Burnett’s ma?” He has zeroed in on a woman sitting on a rock near the water. “I was in high school with her.”

“You went to school with my Betsy? How about that! She has two grandkids now, you know.”

“Really!!! Boy time flies! Seem to have missed some of those years. Wasted my life with booze, but I’m straight now.”

I’m always amazed at the very personal things Americans say to one another, loudly, in public.

“Happens to us all in some way or other,” Burnett mom says.

“Could have been a rich man if I’d set my mind to it, but here I am 54 years old and still hitting my ma for some dollars.”

The unabashed honesty of the man is a revelation. I’m inclined to cringe, owing to my trusty English reserve. But the openness of Americans also floors me every time. Like the swimming hole, it’s really charming.

Further down a young woman throws a stick into the water for her dog, which charges in for a retrieval. It’s a shock to me. That dog is a Corgi – a Corgi, of all breeds! It’s the same kind of dog that the Queen of England loves, low to the ground, tiny little legs. In America Corgis apparently swim. Blimey! In England only hunting dogs and retrievers swim. Bet those royal Corgis don’t do much in the way of water sports around Buckingham Palace…

The self-pronounced 54-year old man turns to me.

“You from round here?”

“No. I’m from England.”

Now he doesn’t know what to say. No one at the swimming hole is from England. Everyone’s from Ledyard. “Right…” he says in a vague tone. Saved by a couple of guys sitting by their truck in the shade of the hole, he makes his way toward them. “Hey Johnny, how you doing?”

Meanwhile, my wife chats merrily away with the Corgi owner, who says her dog taught itself to swim after a few rough starts. It’s now obsessed.

I take a dip and stop some thirty yards out to watch the shoreline activity. My wife and the young woman are still in conversation as the dog jumps for the umpteenth time after its stick. A group of young kids on the shore shout out their disappointment at reeling in their empty lines for the umpteenth time. The man leaves. A biker stops, straddles his machine, and stares out across the lake as he pulls contemplatively on a cigarette. I lean back and float, taking it all in with the gurgling water in my ears. Heaven.