A Sighting Stroke

Barton Springs Early Morning Swim Report 6/21/2025

Thought I saw a zombie as I left Barton Springs this morning, but it was just a young woman in a bikini who’d deadened herself with zinc sunscreen.

I thought today was the summer solstice, but I have just learned that it occurred yesterday, in the evening; that a solstice lasts only for moments; and that the summer solstice can fall anywhere between June 20th and 22nd. How did I get to such an age so uneducated?

More daylight plus less parking because of construction plus summertime itself means the parking lot fills up early these days. Twice this week I’ve shown up too late to get a space and have retreated to the also nice Big Stacy pool. This morning, at 6:15, the Barton Springs lot was full, mostly with runners looking to beat the heat, but I found a spot and told myself that for the next of the week I’d arise earlier.

At Barton Springs, I am a breaststroker. During my childhood YMCA swim lessons, an instructor told us to imagine we were scraping cake batter with our hands all around an enormous mixing bowl, then lifting our heads to lick our fingers. I recall this advice quite often. In a pool with lane markers, I might crawl—is it still called the crawl?—but in the expanse of Barton Springs I like to keep my wits about me. Sometimes if I’m approaching another breaststroker (a word that now sounds naughty to my ear, if decidedly not sexy), I might not see them for a while: they’re down while I’m up and vice versa. My favorite effect is when somebody runs off the diving board as I approach, and I cut the run into pieces as I come up for air and put my head down, and the run has something of the zoetrope to it.

Today the pool was rife with backstrokers, my opposite number. I was struck on the foot by one coming up behind me. Later I saw a breaststroker and a front-crawler who wasn’t taking sighting strokes collide bald noggin to bald noggin. If it had been a cartoon, there would have been a struck coconut shell sound effect. They both clutched their heads and stopped to talk. I couldn’t gather the tenor of this conversation, irritated or hail-fellow-well-met.

The water has been turbid lately—a word I only know because of swimming at Barton Springs—but today it was clear. I saw a guy in a wet suit nearly smash into a turtle. The turtle was canny and at the last minute dove to the depths. The human swam on.

Monday I go to record the audio book of A Long Game, my book about writing fiction that comes out in December. (Please do preorder, if you feel so inclined.) I like recording audiobooks and have been told that I am good at it, in this sense: I am efficient. I make few mistakes and have to do few pickups. This may be because I obsessively read my work aloud while revising, so I’ve been practicing for a while, but I have never been accused of efficiency in any other realm of my life, so I’ve decided to be vain about it. I’m a little worried that I’ll read this book and decide that I disagree with every bit of it, a problem I don’t have with fiction.

These days when I swim I sometimes think about addressing politicians, just raising my hand at a press conference and asking, “I’m just wondering: do you care about human suffering?” Similar little fantasies have visited me for decades. They’re useless, just something my brain does from time to time. Often I picture myself shaking a villain’s hand, leaning in close, and whispering, You’re going to hell.

Here is a goose. I didn’t tell it to go to hell, because it is an Egyptian goose, and I have a peace treaty with Egyptian geese.