Fragment #4
Eight Places I Have Been in the Water
“Are you going to jump in the fjord?” The man in the café at the sauna across from the opera house posed this question as he poured out thimblefuls of aquavit for us. This had not occurred to me as something that was possible until the words took shape across the counter. It was my fiftieth birthday and the plan extended no further than a schvitz and a shot to warm us against the January snow. But once he said it I had to jump. So I did. On my fiftieth birthday I jumped into the Oslo Fjord and screamed, the icy cold slicing through my lungs, a baptism for the rest of my life. I found out later that this was probably illegal.
A few days later, in Reykjavik, Andrea and I trundled out into the windy Sunday street, still dark at 10 am, to the oldest of the city’s multitude of public geothermal pools, the bathhouse a modernist beauty of straight yellow lines and glass. The four-lane swimming pool was warmer than the frigid air, but the waters of the mineral pool that runs in a long thin strip alongside were as hot as they should be. Steam drifted off the surface, the smell more than a little sulfuric. It was early enough that there were few others there, though in the tub with us a grown man played with a toy boat and tried to flirt. We soaked in the healing water and watched the sun come up over Iceland.
I first discovered hot water on Orcas Island, in Washington’s San Juan Islands, where my cousins had a cabin in the 70s. Their house had no electricity and no running indoor water, just an outdoor sink for washing dishes, but it had acres of land and an apple and pear orchard. The hippies from the nearby camp, then called “the Polarity Institute,” would come up and pick fruit from time to time, and in exchange my aunt brokered us free access to the camp’s swimsuit-optional hot tubs and sauna. We would wander down there in the afternoons, picking up the kids from down the road, and soak our preadolescent bodies in the outdoor pools, feeling very sophisticated—or at least I did. It’s still there, and much cleaner now. My aunt and uncle divorced in the 80s and sold the house, but I’ve been back to the hot tubs several times. I still think it is one of the perfect places on earth.
In Mexico City last year I waded in the fountain in Chapultepec Park after visiting the Diego Rivera installation at the Lerma Waterworks, a celebration of both the indigenous aqueducts that first brought water to the high plain of Tenochitlan and the twentieth-century miracle of hydroengineering that brought water to the city’s 20,000,000 citizens, even as it underlines the inadequacy of that supply, in all its erratic unpotability. It was hot that day and we had been walking for a while so we stopped to catch a breath and eat some tostilocos before trekking back to the house. I took off my sandals and stepped into the fountain and let the water wash over my bare feet. Shutting my eyes, I could hear music and little kids and the bells of vendors and the quiet chatter of my friends. In that moment I was at peace and I remember it with technicolor clarity now, so light with love and calm possibility.
The first time I waded into the water in a Spanish-speaking country was in Cabo de Gata, at the tip of Andalucia, on a hidden beach down a winding path that I’d taken with the two Brits I was sharing an apartment with for a few days. We met on the bus and I could not today tell you their names, but they were excellent companions. We ate tinned sardines on crusty bread and drank light and fizzy Spanish beers and basked in the Mediterranean sun. The beach was empty and framed by bristly eucalyptus and palm trees, gnarled and defiant against the ocean winds, and I remember swimming in the shallows in my orange one-piece and wishing I had the courage for my companion’s string bikini. Lacking anything better to do, we returned the next day with more fish and bread and cheese, maybe a tomato this time. My boyfriend had left me in Switzerland, to go back to the States, and soon I would head back on the bus to my friends in Marseille, but for these few days in Spain I was utterly alone with my nameless new best friends, suspended in my own history, floating in the salty sea.
I want to say I at least ran my hand in the Neva or dandled my feet in the Gulf of Finland when I went to Russia in 2000, but that would I think be untrue. I don’t think I touched the water at all save for the shower in the banya where we ate pickled garlic and sipped chilled vodka, as one does. But I remember the light on the Neva at midnight as we walked the city. It was the White Nights, when the sun set for only a few hours, nature’s miracle cure for jet lag. I had no idea what day or time it was and I felt no fatigue. We walked and walked, drinking #3 beers from kiosks and talking in a mashup of language, for Sasha spoke no English and I spoke no Russian, but Steve and Lena and I all spoke French so we fumbled along. The yellow city, the fairytale European city of Russia, glowed on the banks of the river. I’d never seen anything like it, and I probably never will again.
In Puerto Rico I have swum in so much water—in the Atlantic surf of San Juan’s Ocean Park for sure, countless days, and once at night, on the anniversary of Hurricane Maria, when we danced a grapevine fully clothed into the sea. But also in that city’s protected Playa Escambron, and in the rocky, poky shallows below the capitolio building, under the stern statue of San Juan himself. I’ve paddled in the quiet water of a little Vieques beach next to a shipwrecked barge, struggled on the slick rocks at Mar Chiquita outside Manatí, waded in the pastel-pink Caribbean sunset in Mayagüez, and clung to the neck of a man in the water just west of Loiza, as we drifted discreetly away from the family that had arrived to commit the ashes of a loved one to the waters. The salt water of Puerto Rico has unique properties, I am convinced, to cleanse my skin and unkink the muscles of my neck, to carry my body weightless up and over the waves like I’m flying even as sand weighs down the lining of my swimsuit to a laughable degree.
In Los Angeles, after my father’s first hospitalization, my friend and I decamped one afternoon to Will Rogers State Beach. It was March and not anything that you would call “warm” but my sister had fainted and hit her head in the hospital, requiring three staples in her scalp, and she didn’t want to travel home alone, so I went with her for a few days, to make sure she was OK on her own, with the bonus of getting to see my bestest West Coast friends. Aandrea was unemployed and my father was dying, so we sat on the sand and talked the talk of people who were reckless young people together, and I think I borrowed a big floppy hat from her when the sun finally popped back out from the clouds. I was at the ocean so I had to go in the water, but while I dipped a couple times, trying to get in touch with the vast magic of the Pacific, I was just so exhausted from the horrible week that had passed. I wanted to go home, I wanted to run away, I wanted my mother, I wanted something else. And then Aandrea pointed at the horizon: “Look! Dolphins!” And we sat there on our inadequate towels, in our 40s, wondering what next, and marveled.
I have been thinking a lot this week about these trips I have taken; places I have been. It’s a voluptuous indulgence. I remember them like long-lost lovers, some magic that may never happen again.
The thing keeping me going right now is the possibility that it might.
***
I was going to write about bread today, but instead I wound up in the water. Next week! In the meantime, here one other item of interest.
Early in April I answered some questions posed by PEN America about how local community journalism is responding to the covid-19 crisis on behalf of South Side Weekly. The interview is up now on the PEN America website along with interviews with a bunch of other journalists from around the country, as part of a celebration of World Press Freedom Day. Check it out here! The interview was done before the Weekly published its April 15 issue, which included powerful audio from detainees at Cook County Jail, site of the largest single-site outbreak of COVID-19 in the country, as well as a phenomenal live tracker of the geographic distribution of deaths from COVID-19 in Chicago. I feel a little weird about the framing of the PEN features as “local heroes,” but I’m really proud of the work everyone at the Weekly has been doing in the past six weeks, and grateful that I had the chance to tell the world about some of it.
Hang in there friends! We will swim together again.
xo