When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is - water - and it begins to move with the water around you. No wonder we feel such sympathy for beached whales; we are beached ourselves at birth. To swim is to experience how it was before you were born. Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb. These amniotic waters are both utterly safe and yet terrifying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kinds of unknown forces over which you have no control. This may account for the anxieties every swimmer experiences from time to time in deep water. A swallow dive off the high board into the void is an image that brings together all the contradictions of birth. The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born."
I am quoting from "Waterlog" which is, at its most basic, what the title suggests — an assiduous "log" of each of Roger Deakin’s encounters with water. He was an environmentalist and writer who conceived the idea to swim through the waterways of Britain which resulted in this beautiful ode to the act of swimming outdoors that morphs into a rousing reminder of the importance of caring for the environment.
The ensuing "wild swimming", as it became known, owes its popularity to the seductiveness of Deakin's writing. In his book, Deakin re-creates the sensuousness and sublimity of his swims so well that at times you find yourself holding your breath. "From water level, I observed the mating dragonflies joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the dandelion clocks that drifted on the thermals over the moat", Deakin observes. "I kept meeting a solitary whirligig beetle making its way from one end to the other in a series of loops and circles like calligraphy". An eel is "so mottled and green and varnished in mucus it could be an uprooted plant, a mandrake root come to life".
This is travel at its most intimate, among invisible denizens one would normally ignore. After reading this book, you'd be hard-pressed to waste time enduring the boredom of swimming laps in a sterile pool.
Which is, of course, what we have been doing ever since we took out membership at the Bay's Aquatic Centre where the only 'beached whales' we encounter are other geriatrics, and the only things 'intensely private' are some of the talks with other swimmers who seem to shed their inhibitions together with their clothes. As for terror, Jake the lifeguard strikes terror in my heart every time he starts on one of his sick jokes.
When it comes to the healing power of being immersed in water, Roger Deakin has the last word: "I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression, and come out a whistling idiot."
