The Deep End

There was no wind that sunny blue morning as I walked across the bridge toward the city. The waterway was mirror calm and reflected puffy white clouds that connected the sky to the upper harbour.  On one shore a stack of flattened cars waited to be shipped out by barge, and on the other, tugboats in drydock stood shrouded in ghostly plastic with masts that could be steeples.  When I peered over the railing at the green water below, I could make out the shadow of the bridge but I was so high up I could barely see myself standing on it.  There were flashes of moving light under the surface and for a moment I thought it could be the white marks on a killer whale but we were too far into fresh water for the seals they preyed on. Every time these underwater shafts of light appeared, the bridge shook and when I turned round, I realized the lights were reflections from the high windows of double decker buses that passed over the bridge.  The focused rays pierced the green water, turned yellow, and were reflected back to the underside of the bridge.  I didn’t want drivers to get nervous if they saw me looking over the railing for too long so I carried on walking toward mid-span.    

Expanses of water show us an upside down version of ourselves, or they wind-scramble us until we are lost in a turbulent universe.  We look into a swimming pool and see playful rhomboids dancing on the bottom, into green lakes where dancing sunbeams stream into the depths like a yellow borealis, or at the ruffled blue one waters of a Van Gogh impasto, and finally into black water where there is nothing but mystery and shivers.  Water is a necessity of life so it is not a surprise it exerts an attraction.  Lying on a beach in the aftermath of a storm, it is impossible not to be seduced by the eternal beat of the waves breaking.    

I had an early relationship with water.  My grandparents had retired to a house beside a lake where my family spent every August.  August was the hottest month, a time of peaches, corn on the cob, hot dogs, roasting marshmallows, and my birthday.  My first experience with lake water was when my mother sat me down on the pebble beach with my feet in the water, where I was unexpectedly knocked over by a wave from a motorboat.  I got water up my nose and probably screamed bloody murder but it wasn’t enough to make me afraid of the stuff.  If somebody held me from behind I could dip into the lake and blow amusing bubbles, making all the slobbery sounds I wanted, and be pleasantly shocked when my flailing arms splashed water in my face. When I learned to walk without help, I could wade into the water without anyone holding hands with me as long as I kept my feet wide apart because our beach was rocky.  Every so often I would step on a sharp stone, lose my balance, and plop down on my backside.  If I fell down while I was wading, the secret to avoiding pain was to keep my nose above water.  One summer when my parents came back from a weekend away to Grand Coulee Dam, they brought my brother and I white rubber diving masks with yellow lenses.  We spent the next two summers peering into the underwater world with no danger of water getting into our eyes or noses.  

The first steps toward real swimming meant putting aside the face masks and learning to exhale through our noses underwater.  We called this bobbing, like it was a sport on its own, learning to duck our heads under and breathe out our noses while we were still submerged.   For the first while I kept my eyes closed because the fresh water stung, but vision wasn’t necessary for the exercise.  I’d worry about the eyes later. My swimming goals at that stage were about not getting a noseful. 

The next hurdle was treading water.  I was a kid who panicked if I was over my depth.  At first I tried the technique in shallow water so my feet could reach the bottom when I started to sink, but once I mastered the art of staying afloat, it was a small step to stretching out, kicking frantically with my feet, and paddling my arms underwater like a dog digging a hole.  I was surprised to get from A to B on the first try.  

The dog paddle is not a very dignified way to swim, and this was put into focus by my aunt, who did a graceful forward crawl.  She could glide through the water like a swan, careful to make minimal splashes with her feet, as one after the other her arms rose like a graceful wing.  Her gently cupped hands pointed straight ahead before they dived underwater ahead of her like dolphins that have barely broken the surface.  I had already learned the breast and sidestroke from my genteel English grandmother in her heavy ruched bathing suit, but the way her daughter, my aunt, did the crawl, was the right way to swim, much more elegant than the childish dog-paddle.  I tried my aunt’s Australian crawl but struggled to time the breathing correctly.  I could only do two strokes with my face submerged before I got confused, so I gave up trying to be as good as her, and settled for an easier version of the stroke that kept my head above water and allowed me to see where I was going. 

The loss of concentration that caused me stop short for a bout of coughs and gasps, not only gave me an inkling of how it must feel to drown, but made me think of a spring morning when I was pre-school age and had just arrived at the lake for the weekend.  As I squatted down at the water’s edge to test the temperature, I had a fleeting thought that it would be easy to tip over into the lake and drown.  I was put off by the pollen from the cottonwood trees that glazed the still waters near the shore, and I wondered if I would suck a minnow up my nose.  My family irritated me at times and I had already run away a few times to the dry pinewoods behind our house, thinking I would die out there and when they found me they would be sorry they had treated me so badly.  In the end I got hungry and missed my brothers and sisters so was back home by dinnertime.  There were more reasons to stay than to leave.  In that moment beside the lake, leaning over my toes and gazing at the wobbly lights that rippled below the shallow water, I understood that I could leave everything behind for good if I wanted. I wasn’t feeling particularly sorry for myself that day, but I already knew about people shooting themselves and jumping off bridges.  I was wide eyed when I heard that my mother’s first cousin took a book and a flashlight and shut herself in a disused chest freezer, and nobody could adequately explain to me why.  Before I knew the reasons, I understood that the means to finish things were always at my feet.   

My bathing-beauty aunt and her handsome pilot husband had been assigned the cottage at the lake every July, so as I waited for our turn in August, the only place to swim was at Riverside Park, in the kiddie’s wading pool or the swift flowing river.  The kids pool was for children under ten, and when it was full on a hot afternoon, the smell of urine drifted over the grassy lawns like a medieval miasma. Thinking I was a competent swimmer from my lessons at the lake, I tried my luck with the river, which was much colder than the lake and had a strong current.  It was late spring and the water level was high, almost up to the park gardens. Out on the river, parallel to the beach, was a protective row of pilings with logs strung between them.  At the middle of this chain of logs, a few planks had been secured on top to make a boat landing.  We called this place The Boom.  Water skiers could take off from there to circle around the wide water at the junction of two rivers.  From the shore, the only way out to the boom was to swim, and the distance depended on the season.  When the water was high in spring the boom was further from the shore.  The first time I made an attempt on the boom was with a couple of boys who had done it before who knew enough to start upstream.  The water was freezing, like it had just come off a glacier,  and I was surprised by the force of the current that swirled around my legs as I edged my way into the water.  Taking the plunge was a shock but the adrenaline boosted me though a first rush of frantic kicking and windmill arms.   As I feared, I had soon run through my repertoire of forward strokes so flipped over on my back as a way to keep my face above water.  I had seen my grandmother do it and it worked.  I relaxed and the momentary panic left me. As I looked up at the hot blue sky and the tops of the cottonwood trees on the shore as I  passed by, I asked myself whether I did these things just to keep up with others or if I really wanted to do them.  If peer pressure was the only reason for putting my life in danger I must be stupid.  As I floated downstream, happy to have caught my breath, I remembered there was a rope that stretched between the shore and the boom.  It was there to designate the swimming area but could serve as a last resort for failing swimmers like me, and I was approaching it all too fast.  In the low water of September, I had seen non-swimmers  pull themselves hand over hand out to the boom, keeping their feet on the ground the whole way, but it was June and the water was high. I would be a pathetic figure if I had to be rescued from the rope, but it would be worse if I lost my grip and was swept further down river.  I knew of kids who had drowned and their bodies had been trapped underneath the wharf at the end of the boom. 

I flipped onto my stomach again and saw I was closer to salvation than I thought, so with a mighty effort I launched into the overhead crawl for a do-or-die splashing finish, and felt a prickle of hot relief in my scalp when my hand touched a log.  I pulled myself up onto the boom like I was a kid who swam out there every day, but only I knew how close I had come to being washed away. 

  Returning to shore was easier, the way back home often is.  In spite of a good push off the logs of the boom, I had reached the end of my strength and was about to flip into my new backstroke when my feet unexpectedly touched the bottom. I didn’t go out to the boom again except in very low water, but sat on the beach watching my friends play tag and jumping off it.  Some of the older boys had the courage to walk barefoot across the splintery creosote timbers of the train bridge, jump off it and float down to the boom, laughing and trading dares.  Not only was I terrified of jumping from that height, but if my parents found out I had done it I would be grounded for life.  I had no intention of jumping off the train bridge, but I wanted to learn to dive.  

My younger brother and I were tinkerers and triers.   We assembled our own bicycles from found parts, built ourselves underground forts, and simple tree houses.  Every summer at the lake we would knock together a driftwood raft to pole up and down the beach like we were pirates.  As we got older our rafts became more sophisticated, but because the lake had a seasonal rise and fall, winter storms and the tug of spring ice usually ripped our rafts loose.  By the time the next summer came around they were gone.  There were rumours that our grandfather pushed the rickety collection of boards and logs off the beach in early spring, hoping the remnants of the raft would wash up in front of someone else’s place.  One year, a proper raft blew in.  My grandfather tied it up thinking the owner would come to claim it, but nobody did.  The lake had 800 miles of shoreline so it could have come from anywhere.  What distinguished this solid well-built raft, was that it had a diving board.  It was not a high board or a sophisticated one, just a long low plank that jutted a body’s length over one end of the raft.  

In summer the raft was anchored out in the shallows of what we called greenwater because of the fine coating of algae on the pebbles at the bottom.  Further out, where the bottom dropped away, was blackwater, a dark unfathomable place where there might be monsters like the Ogopogo.  If a boat or a swimmer had the misfortune to sink in blackwater, we assumed they would go down and down until they disappeared for good.  Bored with hanging over the side of the raft with our swim masks, watching the lazy mudsuckers that drifted under us, we dog-paddled around the raft in our goggles making sure to keep the logs within touching distance so we had support when we popped our heads up for a breath.  Once comfortable with our abilities, we took to jumping off  the raft, quickly turning around in the water and climbing back on again.  No real swimming was involved.  My brother showed me how to cannonball, though it didn’t take much except tucking the knees up at the top of the jump.  The diving board was a convenient place to sit to stay out of any pushing and shoving that might be happening on the main part of the raft.  Sometimes in the chaos of brothers, sisters, and visitors, I would inch my way around the edge of the raft until I could reach the diving board from underneath and stay hidden until somebody realized I was missing.  

The first time I used the diving board for the purpose it was made was not to dive but to play pirate games where someone is forced off the gangplank by Captain Hook.  Our raft was at anchor so the victims weren’t left behind in open seas, and when they were back on the raft they took their turn playing the heartless captain.  We soon took to running up the diving board to launch into a cannonball to see who could make the biggest splash.  There was screeching from our sisters when they got wet and our parents on the beach shouted at us to behave.  The diving board cannonballs were bold moves because they required more swimming strokes to get back to the raft.  

The first time I stood on the diving board and thought about going in head first, was when I was alone on the raft and thought nobody was watching.   I would raise myself on tiptoes and bounce like I was a proper athlete warming up for a dive, but I was as unbalanced as any new colt trying out his legs, and mine were growing long and ungainly.  I reminded myself if I didn’t make the dive now, our time at the lake would end and I wouldn’t have another chance that year.   Nobody knew about my mission, and nobody seemed to be watching, so I tried a striding start, like I was about to do a long distance cannonball but turn it into a dive.  The take-off went well, I had planted my feet near enough to the end of the board to feel the spring, but once I was airborne I forgot what I was supposed to do.  My head and upper body didn’t go down so I hit the water like a dog that has been thrown out of a boat.  I got a noseful of water and came up gasping like a man who has just set a breath-holding record.  I dog paddled back to the raft, feeling the sting on my belly, and knowing it couldn't get worse than that.  On the second dive I tried to straighten out my body and kick my legs back, but I landed in a stretched out belly-flop like a plane landing with no wheels.  There was something I didn’t understand.  

It was my graceful swimming aunt who saved me when she came to visit one weekend.  Besides her flawless swimming abilities, she dived off the raft like it was the most elegant and easy thing like a tuxedoed penguin who was born between the two elements.  She hardly made a splash, and when she eventually surfaced there was a serene expression on her face as the water streamed off the petals on her bathing cap. She was my mother’s younger sister and we had a good rapport because she was more childlike and irresponsible than my serious mother.  As she finished off a long swim on a hot Saturday afternoon, I found the courage to ask her if she would teach me how to dive.  If it was possible to blush underwater I probably did because as we swam out to the raft for our lesson, she not only arrived well before me and was already adjusting blonde strands under her bathing cap while she watched me kick, flail, and dog-paddle out to the raft.  She didn’t start at the diving board but at the other end of the raft, the blunt end, where the planks ended directly over the water.   

“Squat down,” she said and got down beside me to show me.  “Put your arms out in front of you like this, tuck your head down between your arms, and fall.”  She went, I didn’t.  When she surfaced she stayed treading water like it was as easy as walking and used her long opalescent fingernails to beckon me. This time I did fall because I knew she would be there to rescue me.  As I went past the point of no return, I had a brief memory of me squatting on the lake shore and thinking black thoughts.  Face the water and fall, that’s all I had to do. When I fell I didn’t stretch out into another belly landing, so went further under the water than I expected.  I wasn’t sure at first which was up and if I did come up, that I might bump my head on a log and it would be the end of me.  I held my breath as I kicked and breast-stroked to what I thought was the surface until a hand grabbed my arm and steered me a different way. I was still flapping my wings when I came up for air and my aunt gave me a shove in the direction of the raft.  It hadn’t been all bad.  We did a few more squat dives off the back of the raft, and then a few from a standing position but bent at the waist until we could almost touch our toes. On these ones I learned how to kick up my legs to help the outstretched arms enter the water at the right angle.  A few times I went too far and came up floundering and disoriented but always made it back to the raft. Although I could not enter the water as smoothly as her, I understood the principle of what I had to do.  

“You’ll be off to the Olympics in no time,” she called back as she swam away in her perfect stroke. 

            I didn’t manage a perfect dive that summer.  It took a while to learn to use the spring in the board to help get my legs in the air, as if I was about to do a handstand.  I went over backward more often than not until I found a balance between momentum and gravity.  

            Around the time I was learning to dive, our town installed an adult-sized swimming pool in Riverside Park.  It was so crowded on hot summer days it looked like a frantic school of fish trapped in a net, the water only visible in splashes. Our church sponsored swimming lessons, perhaps thinking that we might be able to swim for Jesus if we couldn’t manage to pray to him. I already knew the dog paddle and the breaststroke, but when we moved on to the dreaded Australian crawl I again met my match.  With the instructor shouting corrections and encouragement it was humiliating to try and fail constantly, but eventually I could swim the length of the pool, though I was fading by the time I made a desperate grab for concrete end. It was enough to earn me a swimming badge so I stopped the official lessons after that. 

            I could swim to the boom by now no matter how high the river was but the water was still cold. The mayhem in the pool made the swimming lanes impossible to see, so I continued to work on my diving skills.  Poised over the deep corner of the pool was a bouncy fibreglass board about as high as my ten year old head.  It was part of a diving apparatus that included a tower with a much higher board, but I had never gone up there because I knew I couldn’t dive off it.  My dives from the lower springboard were not really dives at all.  With the other shivering boys I waited my turn to jump, swim to the ladder, climb out, and go back to the end of the line.  The lifeguard made sure nobody lingered in the deep end long enough to be landed on by subsequent divers. We took our dives and we got out.  In spite of what I had learned the summer before, this diving board was higher than the one at the lake, and in my small mind I assumed everyone was judging me.  I wasn’t about to engage in show-off antics that would result in injury to me or a chorus of guffaws from the others waiting in line.  In truth, none of us cared about what the other did as long as we were quick so everyone got a few turns. If anyone lingered on the board to summon the courage to jump, they were heckled with freshly-learned wolf whistles from the boys and a tweet from the lifeguard.  Nobody had the patience to wait ten seconds for an inexperienced kid to struggle with his demons. 

Anyone who had tried diving knew what it felt like to hit the water the wrong way, but a smarting belly and water up the nose were risks that had to be taken. I didn’t apply the diving techniques I had learned from my aunt because if I went out to the end of the diving board, squatted down, put my arms in front of me and fell, I would look like a total baby.  It was better to do a messy jump holding my nose than to be sent back to the regular part of the pool like a beginner.  Cannonballs were forbidden in the pool so I would sometimes make a straight-legged jump off the board, and be surprised at how far I went down. It was a long way to the bottom. I had seen divers propel themselves deeper and touch the bottom with their hands, turn around and give themselves a push with their feet to send them rocketing back to the surface.  The bottom of the deep end was too far down for me.  My ears already hurt from jumps that took me only halfway there.  I knew that if I dived, once underwater I should arch my body toward the surface, but I didn’t think I couldn’t bend backwards that far and I would collide with the opposite wall.  The diving corner of the pool was deep but not very wide.   As it was, after one of my big-splash jumps from the blue depths I’d look up and see the shimmering surface above me, and think “That’s where the world is.  I hope I have enough breath to get there,” and I’d start kicking and waving my arms at what I thought was the ladder out of the pool. Surfacing with a gasp was like waking up after a nightmare, relieved to be back in the world of people, where there were  towels for a child to cover his shivering shoulders and the renewed excitement of waiting in line for another jump.  Water fascinated me as much as fire, but I knew it could be dangerous if things went wrong.  I felt sorry for people who had drowned, as if their souls were trapped underwater forever in that blue world of little comfort.

 

When it was our turn to spend a month at the lake again, I was a foot taller and braver, though I still had to hang around with my family.  My parents wouldn’t let me stay in town on my own, nor did I really want to.  My brothers and sisters were my tribe and we were fine together.  With the best half of summer ahead of me and a diving board at my disposal, I was set on mastering a dive I could discreetly show off the next time I was at a pool. 

I had heard of the athletes' technique of thinking his way through an action before performing it, and like a karate brick breaker, to think his way out the other side. There should be no confusion or hesitation mid-stream.  I wouldn’t say I was graceful, and I wouldn’t say I could dive without splashing, but I could get my hands and head into the water before I felt the splash when my big feet followed.  My worry was that I was too close to the board and I would clip it on the way down.  The key was to enter the water further away from the raft and give myself enough time for mid-air maneuvers.   I did a few practice runs, not diving, but stopping just near the edge, then walking back to find the best stride to hit my marks.  When I was ready to make the dive and had thought through the moves in my head, I took a run at the board, did a hop and jump to launch myself, and the board snapped, sending me face first into the water.  The diving board was made of interlocking planks nailed together and had broken off at its fulcrum so the end that I didn’t have under my feet, rose up like Moby Dick and came down on my head before I could swim away.  I was used to being disoriented underwater so things didn’t seem any different this time. It wasn’t worse than being cannonballed by my brother.  The blow on the top of my head didn’t knock me out.  I was young, strong, and full of adrenaline, so with a few swift strokes I headed for the beach.  Once I could stand up, I noticed the water running down my face had a salty taste. When I pushed the wet hair off my forehead I saw my hand come back bloody, my skin went cold.  I wasn’t as grown up as I thought, and before I fainted, ran up the beach to my mother.  

The next summer I was more sure of my abilities but couldn’t dive off the raft anymore because after the board broke it started to lose logs, and then mysteriously disappeared.  That left only the city pool, and though I knew I could jump off the board there, I was determined to try diving now that I had more reliable equipment. Though I was irritated by the smaller kids waiting in line to jump off the board, I patiently waited my turn, hoping to manage a few respectable dives.  My worries about hitting the other side of the pool before I could surface were still present because more than once I touched it with my outstretched arms and had to kick my way straight up the wall.  The dives were nothing to write home about.  I managed to get into the water head first, over-rotated a few times, almost belly-flopped, but there were a few dives I could call successful.  It was enough to say I could dive if anyone asked.

The tempting board that stuck out from the high diving tower frightened me.  I wasn’t too young to be up there.  Smaller kids jumped and came out of the deep end shocked but alive.  I didn’t think I had the courage to jump from so far up let alone do a graceful dive.  Heights were not a problem.  Tree climbing had been one of my favourite childhood pastimes and I had fallen off a few high branches but it hadn’t made me afraid. I had seen spectacular jackknife dives off the high board,  but the fear of hurting myself physically and playing a stupid game of one-upmanship at something that was beyond my capabilities, held me back. I told myself I could do it if I had to, that I only had to think my way through the required actions and send the fear to the back of the room.  If I climbed up to the high board and looked down into the mesmerizing void, the shame of going back would block my retreat.  I would have to jump, to risk judgment or death, and dive.  I would trust what I had learned and take a last deep breath as I surrendered myself to fate, lifted my arms, flexed my knees, and jumped.  

There wasn’t a lot of foot traffic on the bridge that morning, only individuals approaching slowly from either end.  I had already thought my way through the steps and the dive.  If I hesitated, cars would screech to a halt, phones would come out, people would shout and try to stop me.  It had to be done in one clean movement.  I didn’t want to hop over the railing like I was vaulting a neighbour’s garden fence and go down flailing like a movie dummy thrown out of a plane.  The railing was high, but wide and flat enough to stand on.  I wouldn’t have much time to compose myself for the dive.  Once I was committed and started to run, I couldn’t stop.