You know how sometimes you go on a little trip, and you find out in advance that there's a swimming hole there (a pool, a pond, a lake, a river hole, a moat, a sea), and you pack your bathing suit and have grand daydreams of what your swims will be like?

And then you get there, and you don't go in.

Maybe it's raining. Maybe it's freezing.

Maybe the water looks gross. Maybe there are jellyfish. Maybe there are leeches (horror).

Maybe it's your time of the month and you are eating EVERYTHING and there is NO WAY IN HELL you are putting on a swimsuit.

Maybe you stand on the second rung of the ladder looking at the water for about 25 minutes and then decide, after all, that you really don't feel like it. Docktail instead. Maybe a hammock ride.

There are a lot of legit reasons to not go in.

I have just returned from England, where I lived in a castle that I waited THREE YEARS to go live in (a bona-fide 16th C castle, the very same one that Lady Jane Grey lived in before she became Queen and they chopped off her head. It's much nicer now, I swear.)

Three years gives you quite a long time to daydream up some pretty elaborate swimming hole plans. Add to that the fact that sometime last fall, we three swimmers found out about the English PHENOM called Wild Swimming, so my imagination went nuts. I was going to be a Full-On British Swim-Venturer.

I packed my favourite black bikini top and the pink paisley bottoms that are a little fancy, because, you know, it was a CASTLE for pete's sake.

And then, at last, I was there. I walked from the castle over the bridge across the moat through the cow pasture and underneath the big umbrella trees, and introduced myself to Astley Pool, a lake that has been around since at least 1501. 


And as soon as I got there, I knew.

No WAY was I going in there.

Astley Pool is picturesque, no doubt about it. It has watercolour & poetry potential in spades.

But the EW factor was way too high. There were lily pads. Like, thousands of them. Which means (in my mind) that there were probably long dangling tendrils tangling up the water underneath, ready and willing to catch your feet and drag you under. There were FOR SURE leeches in there, and probably a few seaweed creatures with dinosaur teeth. Maybe a few unsolved 16th C crimes of passion hidden in the depths, and to be honest, the ducks looked kind of aggressive. 

Anyway, I didn't have to linger long, deciding whether to go in or to not go in. Somewhere up at the castle, Pimm's Cups were being made and a nap was calling my name.



This is Astley Castle. Wonderful place, even without a swimming hole.

 Please see Exhibits A, B, and C.

Exhibit A:


Laura's Georgian Bay swim

Exhibit B:


Rhya's hazy and fresh Wasaga Beach swim.

Exhibit C:

Lindsay's Lake Ontario dip at Sandbanks

Now that it's official... stay tuned for this year's road trip guides... and new docktail reports... and fashion reports... and other meditations from all the swimming holes. We are so excited!

Swimming hole season fast approaches. (Laura has already been in for the year's first dip!) We swimmers have some amazing near-Toronto road trips planned this summer (like this one!) and these days I'm constantly scanning maps for nearby blue.

Swimming in lakes/rivers/quarries is one of my very favourite things to do, and I always forget until I am mid-swim how many things terrify me about swimming in bodies of water that aren't pools.

It began with the shark-shaped driftwood under the floating dock at my grandparent's cottage.

And then my dad told me that pickerel have teeth. (Of course, I imagined piranhas and a National Geographic photograph of a cow's thigh bones picked clean).

I am still afraid of pickerel, all fish, really. And I have to not think about them when I swim, singing this song to myself instead.

And seaweed, because what if it tangles around my feet and holds me under the water.

And leeches. (Shudder!)

And loons. I love loons, their song, their speckled backs, their solid, not hollow bones, their calm, but after they slip under the surface, who knows where they go, with their razor-sharp beaks and red eyes.

And bears. Crazy, I know, but there was a cottage, once, and I had a hunch there'd be a bear on the far side of the lake. It made my daily swims terrifying and fast (and apparently, there were bears spotted exactly where I imagined them!!)

But the murky greenish-blue that filters the light in diagonal beams, the sun-warmed surface and the floating in the middle of a lake, staring at the sky, trump all of the things I'm scared of.

I am off to find a swimming hole or two this weekend, leeches and seaweed be damned...

I keep thinking about my grandmother’s 1980s pool, tucked away in a corner of Rochester, NY.

An above ground beast, with a pool deck badly in need of repair. A pool deck that I fell through, a fall that left my legs skinned and scraped, and found me wedged between pieces of rotted wood, dangling above the pool waters, toes skimming the surface. Waiting to be hauled up while the thick humid summer heated up my injuries.

My grandmother passed away last month. She was a fantastic cook, a woman of great composure and strength, and a staunch Catholic.

I grew up in a very liberal household when it came to religion. My parents felt one should find their own spiritual path, yet also taught us to respect the choices of others. My brother and sister and I were thus not baptized, it was left as an open-ended choice for us to make of our own accord when we were older.

My Eastern European grandmother did not love this idea as much.

To me baptism is such a beautiful and powerful ritual. A ceremony where one is immersed in water that symbolizes purification and or regeneration, concepts that are at the core of why I swim, why I sink into water in search of something healing, hunting for rejuvenation and hope.

I mean yes, also in search of a workout, but I’m sure there are other swimmers out there that would agree with me about this “other” level of enchantment or energy that being in water adds to one’s experience. And though I’m not religious, water is a holy place to me, where I can go to be held up, weightless in a sea that mirrors the sky. It almost sounds like a version of heaven.

So I’ve never worried too much about not being baptized, because in a sense, every swim for me is a baptism.

My grandmother probably would not have agreed… there is of course much more to a proper baptism then just diving into a lake.

But I keep thinking of the chlorine heavy water from her above ground pool, stinging my scraped skin as I slipped into the blue. Thinking about how the cool wet element took away my pain and cleaned my wounds and let the healing begin.