In the weeks after my daughter was born, I wasn’t allowed to
swim. I missed it desperately though and those eight swimless postpartum weeks
felt like months. BUT, one Saturday, I was hauling children and car seats and
emptied boxes of raisins out of the car and a woman showed up on my front lawn
– a friend of swimmer/writer Jessica J. Lee, who had a book for me – Lee's
swim memoir Turning: A Year in the Water,
sent all the way from Berlin.
I e-met Lee months ago through Twitter (thanks Shawn!) and
have been inspired by her swim-ventures ever since. I was fascinated and
dumbstruck by her tweets about swimming in the coldest days of winter, packing
a hammer and a toque (and I interviewed her here!)
"I'm at home in the water, and I'm not scared to be
alone here," she writes.
In a single year, Lee decided to swim in 52 lakes around
Berlin, in part to heal her broken heart, in part to reclaim the geography as
her own. There is something so healing about submerging yourself in a different element – I can't count the number of times I have swam through deep
grief, my goggles filling with tears I would have to empty in the shallow end. It is the closest thing to meditation as I have ever known and has saved me on too many occasions to count – broken hearts, lost loved ones, a failed dance
career, debilitating injuries, postpartum chaos…
"There's a kind of offering in the generosity of water
holding you afloat. In the way water holds feeling, how the body is most alive
submerged and enveloped, there's the fullness of grace given freely,” Lee
writes. Yes yes yes, I nodded while reading. Yes yes.
The rules for the project were: no swimming pools, no wetsuits. All the lakes had to be reachable by public transport, bike, or on foot. All had to be reasonable distances (i.e. day trips) from central Berlin.
Lee writes with depth and eloquence, weaving together her
personal relationship to swimming and lakes, to the complications relationships
of the geography of the lakes she swims in (swimming in lakes near former Nazi
bunkers, and a lake that was once divided into East and West Germany by a line
through its centre). It is a beautiful meditation on swimming and water and
what it is to heal and find your strength once again
I am a fair-weather swimmer when it comes to outdoor
swimming. I'm a summer swimmer, and even then it can take me forever to get in the water. I’ve never once even considered doing a polar bear dip, but Lee talks about the
endorphin rush of swimming in the winter lakes, literally hammering her way
through the ice, toque on, counting out her strokes, and I would find myself
reading these winter passages faster, wanting to get the same rush vicariously
through her winter swimming. I didn’t ever think that swimming in a frozen lake
could be romanticized, but I caught myself dreaming of a trip to Germany next
winter – toque, suit and hammer packed…
In reading Turning, I learned more about water than I have
all my life – the physiology of lakes, the biology of lakes, how the
temperature changes, how wind and depth and algae determine the quality of the
water.
Until we three swimmers were swimming in the Gatineau River last summer, I hadn’t thought much about the different textures of water, but
Rhya was fascinated by how silky the dark river water felt (turns out it comes
from the many, many sunken and decomposing logs at the bottom of the river).
And of course Lee explores the different textures of the water she swims in. “The water
I grew up with was hard, cutting...the lake a whetted blade,” she writes
of the Canadian lakes of her childhood. “The water in Berlin has a softness to
it. Maybe it's the sands buffing the edges of the water like splinters from a
beam. It slips over you like a blanket.”
“There's a safety in this feeling. In the lakes here,
there's a feeling of enclosure and security that Canada can't replicate.”
(This is where it took all of my will power not to buy a
plane ticket to Berlin…)
After swimming through heartbreak, three seasons in, Lee develops
a friendship with another wild swimmer, Anne. Their connection is deep and
generous in a way that swimming friendships are. I’m not exactly sure why, but
swimming friendships are special, different somehow than other types of
friendships. And as the two of them sought out the last few lakes in the
52-lake year, their friendship deepening and widening, the lakes: "became
points of light in the landscape, generous, steady and incalculably beautiful.”
Jessica’s coming to Toronto this summer and we’re going to
go swimming. I truly can’t wait.
You can buy the book here, or at your fav indie book shop!
P.S., she’s hosting a Turning launch party at Ben McNallyBooks:
Tuesday, July 11 from 6-8pm
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