Displace

Deep Eddy Morning Swim Report, 9/1/2024

Listen, I have nothing against Deep Eddy. It’s a beaut of a pool. Like Barton Springs it’s spring-fed, though traditionally rectilinear. It’s right on the river, or lake, or what have you: after nearly fifteen years in Austin, I’m not clear the right name for the dammed portion of the Colorado River that runs through the city, nor am I clear on the difference between Town Lake and Lady Bird Lake. We took our kids to Deep Eddy to swim there when they were little. A little warmer than Barton Springs: they are siblings, one wild and one more buttoned-up if kinder.

Barton Springs is closed for maintenance, and will be for at least for a few more days. Poor old Deep Eddy is picking up the slack. By which I mean me, though not only me. I headed there early this morning—I thought they opened up at eight, and I wanted to be first in line, but it turned out they’d been accepting swimmers since six because of Barton Springs’s closure. When I arrived, the lanes had been temporarily closed while they put more water in. There were quite a few swimmers waiting.

I often say that I don’t like people and I don’t like fun, but really I think I’m just unusually sensitive to proximity. I don’t mean personal space. These days everyone on the internet is fond of analyzing the entrails of their own neurology (how’s that for a mixed metaphor), and a quirk of my brain is that I am very aware of where people are in relation to me. When somebody is outside my campus office door, it puts me off, even when they’re silent. I can’t imagine working in a coffee shop full of strangers and their elbows. This is why I’m so flummoxed at Barton Springs when people don’t seem to see me: I’ve clocked them, there they are, here they come, I’m just too slow to get out of the way. Perhaps I am unconsciously echolocating, like a bat.

Proximity! I’ve been looking for a place to write this semester while I’m on leave. I left it too late, because I kept thinking I could work at home or in my campus office. Then I tried both. At home I was too relaxed; on campus, too tense. The search was a peculiar look at Austin real estate: an expensive but rather delightful but rather ramshackle one-person house in West Campus; half a duplex in Mueller; a windowless but cheap tiny office in a co-working space at 38th and Lamar. Via NextDoor I was offered some nice places as well as some peculiar possibilities (including, I think, a closet beneath somebody’s stairs). Two nice friends suggested that I take a look at their garage apartments, but if I know somebody I might like to talk to is nearby, it throws me off entirely. I visited a studio in a tumble down complex, and it was clear that the building manager, a very nice woman, thought I’d be nuts to take it. That was the antepenultimate place I looked at. The penultimate house was a beautiful under-the-eaves-of-a-bungalow apartment in North Loop, with a nice landlady in the downstairs, and with the apartment’s bathroom also downstairs. It was a really lovely space, and I liked the woman very much, and I thought, I can make this work. (I think that with even pretty bad places, but this was genuinely nice.) I knew that I would be aware of her all the time and that whenever I needed to use the bathroom (not shared with her, just downstairs) I would be even more aware.

Then I found a place that was just right, a separate structure, and I took it.

This morning at Deep Eddy I ended up sharing a lane with a backstroking gentleman with an impressive wingspan. He kept knuckling me in the flank. I was always aware of him. All the lanes were full of people. Thought I am constitutionally a breast stroker, I tried doing the crawl to minimize my profile, though I’m never exactly a jack knife cutting through the water. It turned out that I could only do the crawl when the beaded land marker was to my right. The other direction, I just couldn’t manage a straight line. Staying in my little portion of pool made me anxious. The backstroker kept lapping me, and so did the three guys sharing the nearest lane. I missed the size of Barton Springs, the expansiveness, the mystery. The flora and fauna.

Despite my wretched penmanship, I don’t like lines in my notebooks, either. I managed forty minutes before getting out (bobbing under lane markers till I got to a ladder; I cannot haul myself onto the deck from the water). When I turned around somebody had taken my place.

At the top of the stairs I turned around and looked down at the pool. It was gorgeous. You’re not my real swimming pool, I thought, stamping my foot in my head, but grateful. I’ll be back tomorrow.