Going In Skinny

The Unbearable Goodness of Swimming

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It is possible that at that very moment I feel better, have a more magnificent view, and am surrounded by more natural splendor than anyone else on the planet

The first time we drove up to Temagami, the day was unusually hot.  Or so I thought.  This was fifteen years ago, and I’ve since come to regard the infernal bouts of heat that enwrap Toronto in the summer as routine.  But when I was a younger man, the father of two younger children, the husband of a younger (not that she looks any older) wife, and the owner of a younger black Lab – all of whom, along with a mountain of suitcases, duffel bags, groceries, paddles, life-jackets, and a small library of children’s books were crammed into and on top-of a not-very big Volkswagen for our first trip --  I was naïve enough to be shocked by the temperature.  “Christ, it’s hot,” I said as I loaded up the car in Toronto.  And that’s what I kept saying as we drove, and as, seven awful hours later, I unloaded the car at the dock, and as I loaded the boat, and, half an hour later, unloaded the boat at the island, and then lugged the suitcases and duffel bags through the woods. 

It was only when my haulage duties were complete and I was leaving the sleeping cabin to return to the main cottage that I paused.  I was sweaty and tired and irritable.  And that pause was like glimpsing a shimmering oasis.  I decided to go for a swim.

I knew that swimming at the front of the island would entail walking past the main cottage and thereby entering into a discussion with everyone about whether anyone wanted to join me.  I’d been a father and a husband long enough to know that this would not be quickly resolved.  Bathing suits and towels would not be readily found. There would be air mattresses and noodles and swim goggles nobody could locate.  There would be an argument about sunscreen.  There would be a lecture on water safety.  Were I to go to the front of the island, it could be days before I actually got in the water.  And so I decided to swim on my own.  No fuss.  No discussion.  No bathing suit.  I’d slip into the water at the back of the island, and I would return to the main cottage – cooled and refreshed – before anyone even noticed that I wasn’t still busy huffing and puffing from dock to the cabins and back again like a sherpa.

At the time, it never occurred to me that this would become a tradition.  But that is what it now is – one that I think of often during the non-Temagami portion of the year.  Every summer, when we first arrive, and after the bags are deposited in their cabins and the groceries deposited in the kitchen (the lugging now performed mostly by shockingly tall teenagers) I sneak off to the little dock at the back of the island and go for my swim.

What I envy most in other cultures is insouciance about things that Canadians are anything but insouciant about.  A Parisian can, without  exclamation, have a glass of wine the quality of which would launch entire oenophile societies here.  An Italian can have an ordinary lunch and quietly expect a culinary standard that only the most snobbish of gourmands would insist upon at some fancy downtown restaurant.  And it is in this same strata of unheralded, taken-for-granted excellence that my traditional first swim in Temagami exists.  Without getting very worked-up about it – without in fact doing much more than leaving my shorts and t-shirt crumpled on the little back dock and jumping into the water – I have a swim that is, without exaggeration, about the best swim that anyone has ever had.

At the back of the island no other cottages are visible.  There are rarely boats in sight, and when there are, they are far away.  The lake is deep and cool and clear.  I’m naked which, after wearing a hot crowded car for seven hours, feels improbably terrific.  From the shimmering, dancing surface of the water,  I see the island’s dark, shadowed pine trees rising majestically against the blue sky.  Their boughs move gently in the summer breeze.  I float on my back for a while.  I do the crawl for a while.  I do the breast stroke.  I duck-dive and glide through the weightless silence, pretending, as I have since I was a child, that I’m flying.  I pop back up and shake my head, and bob around.  The air seems so pure, I feel like I’m inhaling undiluted oxygen.  I listen to nothing but my own splashing and the lap of waves against the rocky shore and the wind in the trees.  And always, as I take my first swim of the summer in Temagami,  I think to myself that it is entirely possible that at that very moment I feel better, have a more magnificent view, and am, quite literally, surrounded by more natural splendour than anyone else on the planet.

I have approached the Canadian outdoors in any number of guises.  I have been a stubble-faced canoe-tripper who hasn’t changed his clothes in a week.  I have been a freshly-laundered, clean-shaven cottager.  I have been a boy at summer camp, and a parent watching splashing children.  I’ve been a canoeist, a kayaker, a picnicer, a hiker, a sun-bather, an on-the-dock gin-and-tonic sipper.  I’ve worked at resorts and I’ve taught my children how to paddle.  I’ve fished, and I’ve portaged, and I’ve helped build cribs.  I’ve read for hours in a deck chair, and I’ve tried for hours to start an ancient outboard.  I’ve thrown tennis balls, for entire afternoons for a beloved black Lab.  And as I look back on all these roles, I realize that the one constant in all my exploits in the wilderness, or semi-wilderness, or former-wilderness has been water.  Whatever else I’m doing, I always get undressed and jump in.  There is nothing on earth like a Canadian swim.