This morning I got to Deep Eddy at 5:50AM, ten minutes before their temporary early opening. I sat in my car, then realized that a pool employee seemed to be reading something to the four early morning swimmers already waiting. I got out to listen. It was a list of rules for swimming laps which suggested that in the past days, some swimmers had come to fisticuffs over lane sharing. When he was done, he folded up the paper and said, “The city requires we read that every day.”
I said, “I missed most of it, but I promise I’m very well-behaved.”
These new rules are no doubt aimed at people like me, displaced from the wild undelineated Barton Springs.
Deep Eddy has twelve dedicated lap lanes. Alas, ten are not ready at 6AM; they’re behind bulwark in a separate deep end, and always being filled up first thing. By the time I got down, there were already people in the other two lanes, and a grand expanse of the rest of the pool. I tried to guess the local mores, based on what I’d seen on the two other mornings I’ve been there, and was instructed to do otherwise twice by lifeguards. One of them ma’amed me while my head was underwater. I was left doing laps in which I was expected to swim back and forth in a straight line but with no visual aids except a tree at one side and a traffic cone at the other. This isn’t a habitat where the Austin blind salamander could possibly thrive! I thought bitterly. And me, neither.
Oh, it won’t do for me, I’m afraid. The pool is spotlit in the dark, and what I like when I exercise is to be invisible, or to pretend I am, and to pretend that everyone else is invisible, too. Perhaps I mean, beneath notice. There’s a great deal of mystery at Barton Springs, but at Deep Eddy I can see everyone all the time, even a pair of women who swim back and forth in float belts, heads always above water, chatting, abreast at varying distances from each other, wider than narrower. At Barton Springs I sometimes swim between such swimmers (sometimes there are several pairs, even trios). In the bright light at Deep Eddy, I tried it. It felt transgressive, but not in a way that I liked.
(I don’t mind a bit of transgression.)
Barton Springs may be closed for weeks, according to the city.
I rejoined the YMCA this morning (despite not being Y, M, or C).
This last line is my favorite: feels like soft melancholy laced with humor, or the other way around.
Deep Eddy is my favorite body of water. When my mom was pregnant with me in 1976, she used to sit in the shallow end and splash the cold water on her belly. I have happy memories of being naked with my mother and other sunbathing women in the open-air bathhouse. My dad and I both took ourselves for a swim in Deep Eddy after taking the Texas Bar Exam. I tried to get married there in 2005, but apparently weddings are against their policy--which is probably for the best. (The steep stone steps would have been tricky for our older guests.) These days I live on the other side of town so I rarely get down to Deep Eddy, but I aspire to be an early morning swimmer there someday.