Only to Find Gideon's Bible

Early Morning Barton Springs Swim Report, 8/17/23

I suppose I feel most like wildlife myself when I swim under a clear predawn sky, under the stars and early morning airplanes. Tuesday when I swam, I turned for my second lap and saw two odd shadows bumbling at the side of the pool. A man stood up and shooed them. They bumbled down some rocks to the water’s edge: raccoons, almost certainly, and I turned around and got out. Later, I googled Can raccoons swim and was alarmed at the answer. Swimming with the raccoons has never been a dream of mine. Yesterday I went to the Y.

This morning I was back at Barton Springs, my radar turned raccoonward, looking for human elbows to emerge from every dark creature that swam toward me. I can’t hear much when I swim, mostly the slosh of my own sloppy strokes, but today I thought I heard a kind of odd and distant hooting . When I stopped to put my head up above water and let my ears clear, the noise stopped, too. Was it raccoon-related? Some underwater animal? A fish in distress? The mating call of the Barton Springs salamander?

Not till I got to the end of the pool did I realize the noise was not distant, but extremely local: through some combination of goggle fit and heretofore unnoticeable congestion, it was my own damn nose as I exhaled that was sounding the alarm. Once I realized this, the noise was no longer a hoot but the pathetic squeak of an overplayed dog toy.

There’s a metaphor here but it would depress me to tease it out.

I’d wondered whether the extreme heat and the New York Times article would change the early morning crowds. Tuesday for the first time in nearly three years somebody had put their towel in my accustomed spot before I got there at 5:30, and there was a couple canoodling ahead of me as I got in. (Canoodling may not be accurate: they stood in the water with their arms around each other.) Today one guy snorkeling nearly crashed into me as he swam widthwise, and I had to dodge a backstroker. (All of humanity is my kin, of course, but I cannot fathom people who backstroke in an open swimming pool in the dark.) In general there are more people “enjoying” the pool in the predawn hour and a half, jumping off the diving board, dog-paddling abreast or in tandem, standing still and gabbing. As long as the raccoons stay ashore I can live in harmony with all of them.