How Tough Are You

Early morning Barton Springs Pool Report, 11/1/2023

Reasons I have left the pool early:

lightning (more than once)

goose attack (two geese, one instance)

fog so thick I couldn’t see a foot in front of me (after one lap)

two men in a screaming match, pacing on either side of the pool, threatening to meet at the far end

raccoons

It’s cold and clear, my favorite swimming weather, the water’s surface casting off veils of mist. I like the cold because it reminds me of New England, and because it elicits more admiration—or what passes for admiration; it might be irritation—when I brag about my swimming in daylight. A fellow swimmer arrives at the same time I do; we do not say hello; he walks to the water. Some animal zips across the lawn in the dark. Rat? Squirrel? Too fleet of feet to be a raccoon.

Then I hear it zip directly to me and I say, aloud, “Whoa!” and it no doubt thinks to itself, Whoa! and zips away.

All right, McCracken, I say to myself. You’re tougher than that.

I head to the ramp I habitually take in—which my fellow swimmer recently went down—and see a raccoon where ramp meets water. Did the other swimmer walk right past it? Did the raccoon swim up?

All right, McCracken, I say to myself again, but less convincingly. I will not walk past a raccoon but I am not giving up. I go in by a nearby set of stairs.

The water and the mist animates the plastic ducks that float near the diving board. They make me nervous, the plastic ducks, but they’re also my pals.

Already in my head I was writing this entry, about how I have abandoned my swim early a handful of times, but rarely.

Then I see a rather large raccoon, bumbling by the edge of the pool, very close to me, and I say aloud, “That’s it for me.”

And it was.