Apparitions

Early Morning Barton Springs Swim Report 8/14/2023

In early June I left Austin for the summer and have been swimless ever since. This morning, it was back to it: my wristwatch buzzing me awake at 4:45, into my swim togs, out to the car. Muscle memory, I thought, as I piloted the car through my dark neighborhood. Once you’ve developed a practice you’re never really starting from scratch when you pick it back up after an absence.

On 38th Street, headed toward Mopac, I saw a man ahead at the side of the road. He was about to cross at a pedestrian sign where a crosswalk had long ago rubbed away. I stopped for him. No telling what made him unsteady on his feet, though he looked like he might have been walking for some time. He wore a peach-colored sweatshirt with cut-off arms, the only detail I’m sure of, though no, I’m not sure of that.

He looked up at me. Then he gave me the middle finger. Then turned, and began walking to my car.

I was afraid of two things: whatever was propelling him towards me, and hurting him with my car. I don’t mean that I was filled with human tenderness towards the guy, a poor soul in the dark, only that I had the advantage over him and that it wouldn’t be good for me, to hurt a poor soul in the dark with my car: I might never get over it. I suppose this means I knew that I would if I had to.

He picked up speed and was inches from me. I said aloud, “No!” and accelerated away from him and as he passed the car or as the car passed him, he spit. That was all: he spit at my closed window, and we parted. No other contact at all. In a moment of terrified optimism, I thought, “Well, that could have been a lot worse.” I drove on.

The parking lot at the pool was already full, mostly people there to run in the dark before the heat of the day. Once I was in the water again—more than two months since my last swim!—I thought about how the pool sharpens and dampens my senses: the cold of the water, the vegetable smell that I can also taste (in no other part of my life are taste and smell so twined), the thunking sound of swimmers I can’t see yet, then their appearances in ripples and shadows. Two men walked onto the diving board as I swam under it. There’s no rule against using the diving board in the dark but I’ve never seen it happen before. Fools, I thought. Good: my sixth sense, psychic irritation, was also operational.

Only halfway through my first lap did I think, That guy could have had a gun. But by then somehow I was past it. He was always only going to spit at me. What was I to him in the dark? I couldn’t know.

I swam two laps. When I got out the sky was flush with sunrise just at its hem, and I thought about swimming another, but it was crowded by then, genuinely crowded, a low murmur of conversation like an audience before a curtain. In a few months this won’t be the case. It was dark enough that it took me a moment to identify the leggy avian shadow by my towel as a heron. I’ve said before that I write about my early morning swims as a way to broadcast my hardiness. Somebody else might call this accountability. I am more comfortable with the word braggadocio. My semester starts next week, and I know that people will say to me, “Do you still swim at Barton Springs in the morning?”

Yes, I am still swimming.