The poet Kate Camp learned to swim afternoon in life. It is now a defining component of your identity. But why don’t she write about it?
I I learned to swim in a 15 -meter pool in the backyard of Mandi in Paraparaumu. This is not true. I learned to swim in a 15 -meter pool at Cashmere Avenue primary school, with its pool rules hanging from the diamond wire gate and under the official No running without diving without dodging without bombing said, in dark wax chalk, TichbornesThe name, I think, of an ex -director. That’s when I learned to swim for the first time and received my 15 -meter certificate, the cheapest of the smallest, where I learned the wind and blow bubbles, where I wore protective glasses with a white and flat rubber strip and the hard foam eyes, where I was a long time because of my lazy eyes. Or maybe just because, before being a metaphor, I was not great in Stay on my track.
But when I really learned to swim, I learned in the covered pool in the yard of Mandi House in Paraparaumu. I was 48 years old. Before my private lesson was a preschool class, so when I arrived, there would be a handful of grandparents sitting in chairs while the children were finishing.
Whenever I adopt a new activity, I secretly believe that I will be brilliant in it. I hope I get it right on my first attempt and be, even in half -times, something like a prodigy. It never happens. I am always very good, and the learning process is difficult, but okay, because I remember that I actively like to be bad in things, being a beginner.
It was so with swimming. I entered that pool, in which my hands touched the background when swimming at the shallow end. And Mandi said something like: “Nade a little for me and let’s see how you go ”And honestly I could barely come to an end and I came panting, although pretending not to do it. Despite being someone who loved the water, and the body surfing, floating and swinging, looking at the island of Kāpiti or watching planes taking off by Hataitai, despite all this, I literally could not swim to save my life.
And then that’s the story of how I couldn’t swim to be someone who allowed swimming to become a defining feature of my personality. I became a swim hole. It’s not a great swimmer. It is not a competitive swimmer. But a swim swimmer all year round every day. A connoisseur of the coastal locker rooms of Wellington. A premium subscriber of Windy.com.
YDo you know how there are things you want to get around your life for? Learning to swim was one of those for me. I had said goodbye to work to write my memories, and for Christmas mother, I had given me a handwritten voucher saying that when I wanted to learn to swim, she would pay for classes. So I enrolled for a kāpiti term learning to swim. Every week I was to the pool and learned to breathe on both sides on the third blow, and pull my hand back through the water with a folded elbow and kick eight times every two rotations of my arms. It was difficult and surprisingly tiring, and being 45 years older than my compatriots would have been humiliating if I had any shit to give. But it was fun, and I gradually learned to be a very slow swimmer and a lot of attempt from the 21st century.
I remember the first 25 meter length that I swam in the coastlands Aquatic Center, under its bubbling roof of light plastic, the fear I felt when I arrived halfway, soaked equidistant between the ends of the pool and as I got aside when I got there, my elbow on the edge of tiles, cardiac, running, proud of myself.
You know how it is going – insert the training assembly – I did two lengths and then four. The first time I made ten lengths, I thought – shit. I came slowly to learn all things about swimming in the pool that pool swimmers know about how vile it is to share a track, about the smell of chlorine in their bathroom, the horrors of school holidays, the constant martyrdom of the sparkling glasses.
I was always a ritual sucker, so I should not have been surprised at how much I liked the gadgets and swim habits – the perfectly packed bag with the small towel for my hair and the plastic bag for my wet options, the pool entrance card tied to the doorknob with a ribbon. I saw other women standing in the potatoes and thought – how ridiculous. Within a week I had mine, the presumption towel is like I think about it, the absolute luxury of never having your feet touching the exchange floor.
In December 2021, after eight months as a dedicated swimmer of the pool, I decided to try the swimming of the sea. My plan was to make 10 lengths at Freyberg’s pool, right on Wellington’s edge, then cross the parking lot to Freyberg beach. I hoped that in late summer I could swim to the ferry that is anchored there. I left the pool, put my mask, took my covid laminate pass and a towel and went to the beach.
Of course I swam to the ferry the first time: it’s only 50 meters from the coast and I was swimming swimming regularly or more in the pool. But the triumph was amazing. Throughout my life, I was in my depth. Suddenly, here was in Wellington Harbor, the background not even visible. It was amazing, both the feeling of conquest and the physical feeling of swimming in the water that was not in a box, which had no clues, lines or limits. And so the next phase of my swim life began and I became, like all those of midlife Guardian-The women’s reading before me, a sea swimmer.
I love to change parking and on the side of the road. It has to be a very rainy day to take me to the changing rooms, especially those of Freyberg, dark and dripping, as somewhere where you wage the count of Monte Cristo (sidebar, there is an incredible dive from Chateau d’Hf to Marseille every year.)
In fact, change of exchange has become one of my favorite swimming aspects, especially changing in winter, with all the hacks of life I implement – the rubber rug I keep in the car to stand, the water bottle that I wash with my feet – and the special clothes, the mohair of mechanics that trimmed me and the perfectly loose sunny socks. Between his icebreaker from head to toe: trackies, t-shirt and hood, all becoming very sassy now after four years of daily wear. I dispense with the underwear; It’s exactly a Faff and when you are wrapped in a towel in a Wellington Southerly, pulling a wet pair of your body is a sufficient feat, without having to make your narcotic fingers make a bra or unfold the complications of a pair of mess.
SThe first, swim alone and sometimes with my swimming friends. A woman came to us once in Scorching Bay and asked: “You are a group of people who swim together or a group of friends who are swimming? “The answer was yes. I compare you to the children you used to play on your street, a loose affiliation of people who are having fun. We say things to each other, like:“It really is not so cold ” and “I don’t want to leave and no one can do me”. We sat in the sun in the middle of winter in Princess Bay taking a hot drink, looking at the snow in the kaikouras and being 100% sure that we are making the right life.
In short, I don’t think it’s surprising that my new collection has a cover image called “Woman on Beach”. But I am a little surprised to find that I write about the edges of swimming much more than about swimming itself.
There are the boats that I swim in island bay… First light and the unnamed / All dull metal competence as it goes to the horizon…, the Feiozly Zooey Reek of the locker rooms and the dive clothes that Hanging in the shower / Like a folded shadow.
And even when I think of swimming, it’s not really the swim in which I think. I think of how, on a stop morning in Freyberg, I can take the smell of sawdust from packed trunks on the other side of the port and the smell of people’s shampoo while swimming. Or as, when you see the source, the first explosion, you can’t help but laugh. They are always the margins of the swimming experience that come to mind. I am like one of those people in an art gallery, continuing on the paintings instead of the photos.
Because swimming itself, the real is on the water, putting one arm in front of the other, getting these half view of the world on each side for just a fraction of the second, is wonderfully, meditatively, transcendently tedious. There is almost nothing to see, nothing to hear, not even gravity. Even when you are swimming with friends, you are swimming alone.
And then I never think about it or talk about it or write about it. The swimming itself, this is only between the sea and me. I am invisible and – for the first time in my life – in silence. Dry of information, society, reality, climate, time – hell, cut from the air itself. I am like a daily and temporary monk. Yes, it’s a religious experience, and all I’m loving is the moment. The moment when I turn my head to breathe and glimpse my own arm, silhouette against the sky like a dark and fleeting arc. The moment I turn my face in the water, as blank and familiar as closing my eyes.
And that’s why I don’t write about swimming. I prefer to keep this miracle in particular for me.
The makeshift seasons of Kate Camp ($ 25, Te Herenga Waka University Press) are available at Unity Books.
