In Lujan, I devised a new plan. I tied one end of the rope around the base of the weeping willow on the north end of the pool and tied the other end around my waist. I swam. Although the rope occasionally jerked me back, giving me the uncomfortable sensation of swimming backwards, I was pleased with my solution. My aquatic treadmill, it appeared, was a success. I swam for forty minutes. Afterwards I felt refreshed, revived. Life was good.
Two hours later, I felt an ache in my stomach and back. I thought I must have swallowed bad water. I’d had amoebas four times in Guatemala, and the ache was similar. The next morning, I drove to a pharmacy in Lujan. The pharmacist, a tall, dark-haired woman who had the most sympathetic face I’d ever seen on a pharmacist (granted, her competition was limited), said the water in Argentina is all drinkable, and perhaps I’d eaten bad food.
But no food was at fault. It was my treadmill. By swimming with a rope around my waist, I had induced the symptoms of amebic dysentery.
I’m far from alone in my addiction. I see half a dozen of my kind every morning at the Student Recreation Center pool at West Virginia University, where I teach English and creative writing. Michael Blumenthal, a visiting professor at WVU for the past four years, is one of them. A poet, he devoted an entire book to the subject of swimming. It’s called Laps, and has the same hypnotic quality as a mile-long swim. Blumenthal, now in his sixties, was once married to a French woman, which means he can get away with wearing a Speedo. My swimming suits are like basketball shorts. A friend of mine equated them to wearing a parachute.
This same friend, a physics professor who in college swam at Stanford, occasionally offers me advice about my technique. I try to act on his suggestions. But the truth is I have long ago renounced speed as a chief, or even minor, goal in my daily swim. I swim in pursuit of euphoria. Sometimes I achieve it after 60 lengths in a 25-yard pool. Sometime I reach it only after I’ve swum 80 or even 90 lengths. But when it fills me, I feel a subtle pleasure all over my body. It’s like being kissed everywhere from the inside. Another swimming friend of mine compared the sensation to the effects of a narcotic.
Aquaholics all.
Another of my lies in pursuit of a good swim: In Washington, D.C., in the summer after my freshman year of college, I pretended to be the brother of one of my classmates in order to swim in the pool at the apartment complex where she and her family had been staying. (They had since flown off to Paris.)
My impersonation succeeded twice, but the third time, I was caught. The lifeguard tapped me on the shoulder as I was making a turn. “You’re not a resident here,” the lifeguard scolded. “You’ll need to leave.”
The only thing I could think to say in response was, “I will. But could I please finish my swim?”
He let me.
Swimming isn’t as portable as running, for which all you need is a decent pair of shoes (or not, given the recent trend in barefoot running) and a surface less buoyant than the moon’s. Even so, I have found places to swim, both man-made and natural, as far from home as Bolivia, Botswana, and South Africa. My mother paid $50 once to swim in a pool in Japan. I come by my addiction honestly.
There are some days I wish I could kick my habit. It’s a time-consuming endeavor, and I’m sure I could find dozens of productive alternatives to pulling and kicking myself back and forth over 25 yards of water. I swim for an hour six days a week; therefore, I am in a pool 312 hours a year. Given this amount of time, I could learn Portuguese. I could paint my entire house, inside and out, six-and-a-half times. I could write a book.
But here I am, only five hours removed from my last swim, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow morning, when I won’t, like some swimmers I know, spend minutes gradually emerging myself in the water, acclimating myself to the dampness, the coolness. I know what I must have. I never dawdle; I leap in.
My name is Mark, and I am an aquaholic.
I feared my rope plan was doomed, although it was a toss up as to what was worse, living with the symptoms of amebic dysentery or forgoing swimming for four months.
But I had a new idea. This time, I tied one end of the rope around the concrete base of an outdoor umbrella stand on the south side of the pool. With the other end, I formed a noose. But rather than insert my waist—or head!—into it, I put both of my feet in, with the rope stretched across the bottoms of my toes.
For reasons I have only pseudo-scientific guesses to explain, this solved the problem. There was no violent yo-yo effect. There was no amebic dysentery. My aquatic treadmill worked. My drug of choice was available at all hours of the day.