Sunday Night, Tuesday Morning

Early morning Barton Springs Swim Report 6/18/2024 (bonus night swim 6/16/2024 content)

Arrived in Darkness, Left in Light is the title of my imaginary memoir about swimming. In this imaginary book I probably undergo a religious conversion. (Having a religious conversion is not on my to-do list.) It describes my swim today. On my second length, at the very first bit of light, I could see a turtle walking calmly along the bottom of the pool in the shallows.

My dear old pal Marguerite visited this weekend. We’ve known each other since we met in line to get our high school IDs, September 1981, but as it happens she got her MFA in Studio Art at UT, and swam at Barton Springs at nine o’clock at night. So Sunday night we swam. It was a whole other scene—not crowded, but more aimless, nobody in a wetsuit, nobody trying to make good time. Just beyond the pool fence, people played loud music. It was the first time I’d been there in the evening in years, the first time in ages I had to pay admission, which is free before 8AM.

It was sublime.

Yesterday, I put on my bathing suit to take Marguerite to her early morning flight, planning to swim after, but for some reason I decided instead to bail and go back home. Today as I swam I thought about how much I regretted not swimming yesterday. This describes anything I do with discipline: my major motivation is regret avoidance. I could have bragged about swimming twice in nine hours! Even I knew that it was ridiculous to regret not swimming yesterday while swimming today. The best I can hope for is to learn a lesson from it.

(The lesson is: always go swimming.)

Now that days are hotter and longer, the pool is more crowded. There’s a new population to irritate me, groups of at least five people who stand like Stonehenge in the shallow end. What to do with them? Swim through them as though they’re a coral reef? Today there were five young men. Two were wearing backwards baseball caps (my father called this “a thumb in the eye of society”) and then one pulled out a frisbee. I thought about making a citizen’s arrest, so I just skirted the group.

(I am not irritated by the groups of people who dog-paddle together. I swim past them—calm heads above the water, frantic arms and legs underneath—and find them adorable.)

I’ve sworn off barking at swimmers who come very close to me, but today a swimmer in a wetsuit came so close that I had a relapse. Reader, I barked.