In Water

Barton Springs Early Morning Swim Report, Various Days in January, 2025

I’m not sure I’ve ever posted about swimming on a day I haven’t swum, though I’m composing this on a train and outside my window is the Hudson, full of ice. I’ve been back from England for two weeks, and swam most days, and then I went to Bennington, Vermont, to deliver the commencement speech for the Bennington Writing Seminars commencement. For me, good swimming weather is the same thing as good sleeping weather: chilly, with a chance of coziness, dark, quiet.

I never made it back to the very cold pools of Hampstead Heath, though two mornings I put on my bathing suit before balking. On New Year’s Day, I got all the way to the big intersection before the Heath, where it was colossally windy, and the road was closed to cars with police tape and a police car. I took myself right back to bed. In some arenas I am proud of my endurance, but I am not so fond of experiences in which I am thinking I am enduring this. I think I could get to love very cold short-term swimming, but never as much as longer merely chilly swims.

Probably I haven’t posted here because I was working on my commencement speech, a task I found confoundingly hard at our historical moment. Dear Graduates, Welcome to the future! I kept typing the same sentences over and over again. Finally I pulled it together, and included this line:

In November of 2020, I started swimming every morning before sunrise, sometimes through sunrise, at the vast swimming outdoor pool in the middle of Austin, Barton Springs, which is a spring-fed 68 degrees year round. I still swim there most mornings, if I’m in Austin. I mention this because ever since I started, it has been my policy to brag about it to the most people I can whenever the opportunity presents itself.

I was polite enough not to make my swimming the entire topic of my speech, which was at least partly about the inner life, our most important territory, and how at least one of the things I love about the pool is that it is where I can always find my inner life. Even if some annoyance tries to come muscling in, I can dismiss it. Despite all my occasional complaints about the other actual people in the pool when I’m there, I also love them: they are, for those 50 minutes, my colleagues and beloveds, the people I want to think about.

I have seen little skirtling raccons in the dark at Barton Springs lately. Last week two hardy swimmers came at me in diagonally, in tandem, and I couldn’t figure out how to evade them. Catastrophe, catastrophe! I thought. Then somehow, out of luck or surprise nimbleness on my part or divine intervention (probably not divine intervention; God has other worries) I managed to thread the needle and angle myself and swim between them. I felt exhilarated, grateful.

May we all thread as many such needles as possible in the coming days, months, and years; may we be mindful of our beloved strangers swimming around us.