The Blue Mind

Standing in line at the El Cerrito Community Pool, I prep for my 45-minute reserved lane swim. Sunscreen, shirt, pants, cap. I put all this on beforehand, while carrying on an amiable chat with a swimmer 4 spots down from me. He tells me how he’s been swimming at Lake Anza, his son is a lifeguard there. “I’ve had it with bay swimming,” he proclaims. And I have to agree. While I’m happy to be in the water again, the bay is just too damn cold for me. I can only stay in for 15-20 minutes before I start turning blue, my fingers an icy white as I stroke back to the shore.

            “I’ve just been reading the most marvelous book about swimming!” I hear the proclamation drift through the air, landing somewhere down the line from me. “It’s called, Why We Swim….”  “Oh! I read that book! I loved it!”  “Bonnie Tsui is the author….”  calls out Had it with Bay Swimming Man. And I grin. Swimmers! Not only are they fit, but they’re literate too!

            Having read Bonnie’s book myself, I could have participated in the conversation, but am too anxious about the swim ahead of me. I have paid $12 for the privilege of this 45-minute swim, reserving a lane in the Pandemic Pool situation. It’s intense as the blondie lifeguard saunters out and begins to ask all the swimmers the requisite questions about the Coronavirus before being allowed into the pool area: “Have you had any symptoms of coughing, a fever, etc.? Have you been around anyone who has?” I answer a firm NO to all of her questions, trying not to worry about how everyone here is a stranger. Who knows where they’ve all been. Would they lie about their symptoms for a swim?

            Part of me would. I’m so desperate to get in a Real Pool! But a bigger part knows that I’d just stay home if I’d had any symptoms. We don’t need any more cases of the virus, esp. among swimmers!

            I’m in the square marked Lane 1, stairs. I don’t know what this means other than I’m at the front of the line and so am let in first. Walking briskly out onto the deck, lugging my heavy bag full of all my junk (no locker room access, no bathrooms except for emergencies---whatever that means! Whenever I have to pee, it’s an emergency!), I scan the big blue empty! Pool! Well, this is one advantage of the pandemic, empty pools. I don’t miss the screaming kids or fighting for a lane or circle swimming. I’ll have my own lane! How delicious will that be!

            Except….as I walk to the lane marked 1 Stairs, I see that it’s only half a lane!? What! There are kids’ floaty lane lines going horizontally across my lane so that I can’t swim to the wall. I’m blocked from it by about 10 or 15 yards?

            The lifeguard sits on his throne. I call up to him, “Do those lane lines mean that I only have part of a lane?”
            “Yup,” he nods, not even giving me the courtesy of eye contact.

            “For this I paid 12 dollars!!! I can’t believe IT! This is outrageous!”  I’m talking loudly, not exactly to him since he seems to be ignoring me, but into the air.

            A kid jumps into the square water that should be my lane. Shit, I think. This really sucks! Here I was looking so forward to my swim in an actual pool and now this.

            “You can move to another lane if the swimmer who reserved it doesn’t show up after 10 minutes,” he calls down to me, still not making eye contact.

            “Will you let me know?” I ask, thinking how my precious 45 minutes is being eaten up by all this lane haggling.

            “Yes,” he turns away from me.

            Nothing I can do except get in the water and make the best of it, I think, walking down the stairs and then…..WOW!!! The water is SO warm! Immediately I’m in heaven! Despite the wrong lane. I dive under and take my first stroke in a pool after 4 months. It’s is so easy! I feel so at home. That moment of euphoria hits me almost immediately and I think of Bonnie Tsui’s book. How she wrote about the ‘Blue Mind’, a term coined by marine biologist and author, Wallace J. Nichols “which emphasizes the importance of drifting to discovery….water as a way to enable that process.  ‘Being around water provides a sensory-rich environment with enough ‘soft fascination’ to let our focused attention rest…’”(pp. 221-222) And, while he is writing about that idea that our best ideas come when we’re in this state, which happens, of course, in the water,  I take it another way. My ‘blue mind’ is when I’m floating in the aqua water, warm and weightless, my body out of the gravity of walking—I’m me!

            After the 10 minutes are up, the lifeguard hollers at me that lane number 2 is free. I can move! Yippee! I dive under the lane line and continue with my Blue Mind. Nothing is better than being in the pool, esp. when I’ve been out of it for so long. There’s an exquisite preciousness to this swim because of this pool drought.  I’ve been out of the pool for longer than anytime in my life. Even when I’ve had various surgeries and had been instructed to not go in the water for weeks, I always cheated and was back in the pool after 10 days.

            And I’d thought that was a long time!

            Grinning underwater, I swim on and on for what seems forever. The bay swimming has been so short because of the temperature. Part of me still can’t believe I’m swimming again. There’s a surreal quality to it. Like a dream. And isn’t this part of the Blue Mind too? That dream-like mist that inspires?

            The lifeguard yells through her bullhorn. “10 MINUTE WARNING!!!!” And then, what seems like a long time has suddenly become so short. I want to stay in the pool all afternoon, despite the blazing sun and anxiety over my melanoma history. I just don’t ever want to get out.

            “5 MINUTE WARNING!” She hollers again, and I start to warm down, knowing full well that there was no way I was going to be able to stay in even 5 extra minutes, let alone all afternoon.

            The whistle blows, its shrill hellishness a familiar pool dynamic.  I stop at the wall, reaching for my fins, pull buoy and sunglasses, then dive under the lane line back into the odious Lane 1. Well, at least I know not to reserve that lane again!

            An elderly swimmer lady is behind me, grinning as she pushes her cane along the deck. I rush to move my stuff to make room for her. “Oh, thank you,” she murmurs, the Blue Mind evident on her wizened brown face.

            I climb out of the water’s warm embrace, the cold wind whipping round me, then start shivering.

            It’s just like the bay when you get out, I muse. Can’t escape the Bay Area winds.

            Yanking off my swim shirt and pants, I do a futile dry off as Cane Woman limps by me, smiling.

            I give her a little wave as I wrap my towel round me, don my mask, and then hurry out after her, my Blue Mind sated, my pool body home.....