Come Hither

Early Morning Barton Springs Swim Report, 4/18/2024

Seasonal milestone: in the 70s before sunrise, so I stepped out of my house in the dark and thought ugh. Texas has been surprisingly chilly in the AM lately, so I shouldn’t complain. I shouldn’t complain: I’m complaining. This blog (I am old; it’s how I think of it) is my complaint box.

I have swum over the past few weeks, though weather and other circumstances have interfered: I’ve generally been three times a week, not five or six. One day I heard two denizens of the natural world have some kind of screeching fight across the way: bat or bird or frog or raccoon or some combination, I have no idea. One dark morning I came inside the gate to see three young people—maybe about 20—walk from the dressing rooms in band t-shirts and dyed hair, a couple holding hands, one young man who said to me, in an ironic voice that suggested he assumed I disapproved of him, “Excuse me.” I approved of all three of them entirely, and said, in my most genial voice, “Good morning!” and then all three of them said, cheerfully, surprised, “Good morning!”

There seems to be a higher number of snorkelers zig-zagging in the early AM these days. I have often pondered whether I am somehow magnetic north to them, or simultaneously siren and rock, singing them in to dash themselves upon my noggin. I’ve stopped bellowing at them. They can’t hear me and it only raises my blood pressure. I try to correct my angle and then they angle more; I am, I tell myself, irresistible. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s my profound misunderstandings of physics or etiquette that gets me into so much natatorial trouble.

This morning, I waded in. A snorkeler went past, then stopped for a breath and surveyed the pool, and then dove in as I stood there—and angled straight for me. I had to hot foot it to miss him, though I’m not capable of hot-footing it even under the best of circumstances.

Later, in the early light, a snorkeler—same person? different? they all look alike!—punched my flank from behind. They did not stop. Then they aimed at a fellow about my age or older, magnificent pompadour, who was swimming head above the water. I had never seen the maneuver happen to somebody else. I watched him have to suddenly swim sideways to get out of the way, which he just about managed.

“They never look!” I said, and he said, “They never do.”

I have never felt so simpatico with another human being in all my life.