Prairie spies are land-based

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, March 18, 2008

A long time ago, I took swimming lessons. Well, not long, long ago. I was nearly half a century old when I signed up for lessons every night of that week, that summer.

I brought several different definitions to the dictionary’s attempt to define swimming. My versions of swimming lined up with none of Webster’s. Judging from what I did the first two nights, I seemed instead to be taking drinking lessons. At best, one stroke — swallow — one stroke — swallow. Then the burping. One, it turned out, can only swallow so much water. Burping comes next.

I didn’t achieve much efficiency in my swimming lessons, therefore. What with all the stopping to swallow, stopping to burp, stopping to knock the water out of my ears, stopping to wipe my streaming eyes, I was paying somewhere around a hundred bucks an hour for the lesson.

It’s harder to float, which is what they also try to teach you, when you’re full of pool water. In the deep end, I treaded water and tried to burp. It turns out that one cannot burp while moving ones legs. What happened was I had to stop treading. Then, as I sank, I could belch several good ones. Probably the surface of the water over my head looked like there was a gas leak in the bottom of the pool. They were world-quality belches. When they tested me, I hoped there was a burp qualification.

Perhaps, if Webster’s editors could have seen me carry on each time I realized my toes could no longer touch the bottom of the pool, they would redefine swimming lessons, and instead call them swallowing lessons, or sinking lessons, or even drowning lessons.

One of the young instructors (they’re all so young) watched me that first night for several minutes while I was demonstrating my level of swimming proficiency; then she asked me where I had learned that stroke.

That was no stroke. That was a terrified man attempting to walk on water. It may have looked like I was having a stroke, or had already had a stroke, but a swimming stroke, it was not. That she thought it might be led me to wonder about her training. In fact, softball players from the field next to the pool had gathered around the cyclone fencing that surrounds the pool. They watched in awe as I tried to run across the pool surface for the ladder out of there.

I worried during that first lesson about the lifesavers’ credentials. I wondered if anyone had ever drowned and allowed them to demonstrate their proficiency at whatever they did in such a circumstance. And if not, would their credentials even float, much less them. Oh sure, they can drag people pretending to drown in by the dozens. I’ve reached an age where I know the real thing is always different.

Here’s an idea I was having that first night: Let’s let 16-year-olds pretend to learn to drive a car, and then give them your car for their first trip out there in traffic. How good would that make you feel? Right. Me too.

So while I was doing my walk on water attempt, I was worrying if these sag-free, wrinkle-less kids could cut it when the chips — and me — were down. While I burped and watched them, they appeared to be into what teenagers the world around are into—the reproduction cycle. From what I saw, one could drown and they with their suntanned, cancer-free, bodies would be so intent on strutting and socially interacting and hitting on life in general that I might spend some time on the bottom before they’d notice.

So I wasn’t completely against all those big swallows of pool water I was taking. With practice, assuming one can swallow more with practice, in an emergency, I could drink my way out of the deep end, get the water level down to five feet, nine inches.

“Relax,” said the pretty young lifeguard female to me, when I was trying to float face down in the dead man’s float, and not swallow. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

No? Nothing? If I could breathe under water, then that might not be true, but I cannot. It would have relieved me no end to have known right then that most drownings don’t happen in water, but they do.

Most of all, I’d have worried a lot less if they hadn’t named the dead man’s float the dead man’s float. Mostly, I thought to myself as, against the young lady’s best exhortations, I did sink. Maybe dead men floated. They didn’t have mortgage payments and car payments and stuff to worry about, heavy stuff. Gets you down — Prairie Spies are land based creatures, maybe.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.