The Life You Save

Maybe it’s old-timer’s syndrome, good old days reverie, or maybe, just maybe, I’m on to something…

A remodel at our house this year unearthed some of the family archives of pictures, home movies, from when I was a kid (no, those are not etched on a cave wall in France) and the videos we made of our own boys growing up. The collected, recorded history of several generations, side-tracked me from the work at hand and gave me a pleasant break while waiting for a sub-contractor to arrive.

One family myth was debunked in the process.

“You were a fish”

“You were born swimming.”

Statements like these had led me to believe that swimming had come easily to me as a child. Of course, I have little memory of my 2 and 3 year old aquatic prowess but I know I have loved the water as long as I can remember.

Yes, I was a good swimmer as far back as I can remember. At my first boy scout camp, when I was 11, I easily swam the mile swim beating all of the older boys in our troop and most of the 60 some swimmers attending the camp.

The next year, about 1967, on vacation, my grandparents rented a sailboat for my brother and me, and we promptly sailed off into the Laguna Madre near the causeway from Port Isabel to Padre Island. We clipped along for a good while in the morning breeze but when we tried to turn around, the 10 minutes of instruction we received from the hippie kid who rented us the sailboat turned out to be inadequate and the boat flipped over spilling us into the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico.

My older brother clung to the side of the boat and even though he was a Life scout, he was not a strong swimmer. I felt like the current was drawing us out into Gulf. It probably wasn’t and we would have probably been fine under any circumstance but it felt like we were in danger.

My brother was determined to try to right the ship as we had been “trained” but I was just a skinny kid with little muscle or coordination, except when I was in the water. It didn’t take me long to decide I needed to swim back to the now distant dock and get help. I remember my brother saying, “No, Wait!” as I pushed off and began swimming.

I remember being full of confidence that this would be easy if I just kept my stroke long and easy, and remembered to blow and breathe. I would raise my head occasionally to sight the direction of the dock and then let my head float and continue my rhythmic reach and pull.  When I got tired, I rolled on my back and floated and breathed and gave myself a pep talk to quell the slight panic that tried to occasionally well up in my chest. I was worried about my brother, not me.

The hippie kid and a buddy, were standing near the dock talking and heard me yell. They were shocked that a little kid who had sailed away 15 minutes ago was swimming up to the dock, without the rented boat and the other passenger. They came running and soon we were all three in a small motor boat heading toward the capsized craft, my brother holding on to the side, still trying to right the boat himself.

By this point, clearly everything was going to be okay, but the adventure of it felt like I was in an episode of “Flipper” and I hoped a dolphin would show up and we would become friends and I could move to Padre Island and become a beach bum…

Romantic, adolescent, flights of fancy aside, one fact remained: I swam a long way for help in an emergency and “saved” my brother. He always contended that if I had just helped him we could have righted the swamped boat but I left him and for the rest of our youth in which he was better at almost everything than I was, I held an ace.

“Yeah, but I swam for help and saved your life when you couldn’t swim very well.” Even if it was a slightly inflated version of the truth, he gave me a wide berth with the story because in his heart he knew he was not as comfortable in the water, and, though, almost 6 years younger, I was a better swimmer. He knew, if the situation was reversed and I was a weak swimmer, and scared, we would have been in a pickle because he surely could not have made the swim for help.

So yes, I was a really strong swimmer by the time I was an adolescent, but the home movies reveal it was not always so. The pictures flickering on the old screen from my grandfather’s Keystone 8 projector reveal a hyper-active smiling kid who loved the water but who was not water safe.

I leaped into a “bottomless pit” in Missouri, a gravel pit filled with water, and my grandfather had to jump in, fully clothed and save me. There was another time, when I dove into three feet of water and hit my head on the bottom of the pool and came up bloody and missing a small patch of hair. There was another time when my Mom, I was about 3, trying to teach me to swim, sent me up the ladder onto a dock, and I jumped off the other side before she could even get out of the water. Again, I was saved.

All of these incidents are recorded in part – the camera operator usually had to stop shooting to participate in the rescue – on home movies and it becomes clear that my Mom early on grasped an important fact about me and water. First, I loved it and second, I was a serious danger to myself. She understood clearly, that I needed to learn to swim or my lack of respect for the water would take me away.

So, despite my hyper-activity she patiently set out to teach me to swim. She relentlessly wrestled with me to teach the proper body position and get me to blow bubbles. A life jacket was only used for a brief break in the lessons, giving her a chance to swim some laps.

The movies show her long beautiful, effortless stroke. She could have easily been a champion, at 6’4“, the former Miss Tall Oklahoma from a small town in the very rural eastern part of the state, she never swam in an indoor pool until she was in her twenties, didn’t know anything about swimming other than Esther Williams and Johnny Weismuller from the movies.  But she had a love of the water and her mother, had somehow, also been a strong swimmer.

There is one 4 second clip in the movies of my grandmother swimming and it takes my breath away. My only memory of my grandmother in the water was of her moving around the pool on vacation but not really swimming, just laughing and playing with me and telling me not to splash her because she didn’t want to mess up her hair.

Clearly the teaching of swimming was a strong family value. (I don’t know how my brother got left of that, but he was a much better reader than I was, so I guess Mom figured he was smart enough not to drown, while I on the other…)  In a time and place when there were few pools and most swimming was done in lakes and rivers, swimming was a life skill you learned well or you didn’t go in the water. Respect for water was taught early and reinforced over and over.

But even my mom couldn’t completely conquer my wild, out of control, love of the water. When I got older she put me in lessons with an older fellow she had heard about. He was nice but a no funny business kind of guy and I was finally ready to settle down and learn to swim beyond thrashing 10 yards to save my life. swimming lessons changed my life but probably would not have been possible without the foundation my mother laid for me.

Balance and feel for the water are formed most easily at a young age in a trusting environment with patient practice and repetition. When I say trusting, I mean parents should be their child’s first swimming instructor and, ideally, use life jackets as little as possible. Sure, there will be times when it is appropriate or safety requires but the water, early on, should be a place where parent and child are together, working on skills, not a place where a 3 year old is bobbing in a life jacket for an hour while Mom or Dad work on their tan and have a beer. As a reward to swimmer and parent, for doing 20-30 minutes of work before play, a life jacket or water wings can be used after to let everyone have some fun. Those devices teach the wrong body position in the water and the idea that being vertical in the water is a position of safety is a fallacy that must be unlearned once a child starts serious lessons.

After parent and child have worked together for as much as a season, maybe less, a teacher can be introduced, who at some point, may guide the parent and child in lessons. When the child trusts the teacher enough to willingly (with minimal fussing) separate from the parent to the teacher, it is time for the parent to let go and let the swimming instructor help the child learn to swim. But parents need to stay close to the learning to swim process.

The shift to highly trained and experienced instructor might happen the first few days of lessons or it might take longer. To me the best lesson programs integrate parents as long as necessary in the process. The days of “Mommy needs to leave the pool” are gone. If instructors want parents to help their child learn to swim, the lessons need to be as inclusive as possible. Typically, once a child can glide, balance and blow bubbles or shows an enthusiasm for lessons away from the parent, they are willing and enthusiastic to be taught by someone other than a parent..

As a swimming instructor, I am unsympathetic about the busy lives of modern parents and all of the demands of managing multiple kids and activities. I hear it over and over and, yeah, I was one, once.  I have to wonder, how can you skip over one of the most important life skills? I say, “Tough Cookie”, to those parents. Seat belts, car seats, bike helmets, none of those are optional and neither are early age swimming lessons. Convenience of the parent never takes precedence over the safety of the child, does it?   You chose to have your kids, I know how much you love them, so teach them everything they need to know to survive. Don’t schedule swimming lessons around other activities. Swimming lessons are the priority age 2-6 and possibly beyond and other stuff gets scheduled around them. Teach kids something that could save their life or someone else’s life.

The “Regret” that you didn’t get signed up for the hot new camp everyone is going to this summer is not the same as the “regret” you feel for not giving your child a great swimming foundation when there is a near accident, a water injury or, God forbid, the unthinkable.

First though, parents need to learn the skills of floating, balancing in the water, blowing and breathing, so they can transfer this skill, almost through osmosis, if you will, to the child. I remember gliding from one side of the pool to the other, straight body, eyes down, gently kicking, blowing bubbles with one of my sons hanging on to my shoulder mimicking me. The time with a parent in the water is precious to a child. They love to share fun and games in the water and these are teachable moments. Holding the child in a horizontal position in the water discourages a false sense of security or poor body position.

I was not born a fish, I had to learn to swim. Someone had to teach me. First, my mom, then other teachers and coaches. Build a foundation of the basic skills as early as possible in an atmosphere of fun and play, then, encourage the child to swim with trusted teachers. This will help build a safe, strong, lifetime swimmer. It isn’t easy but it is one of the most gratifying moments of parenthood, when, as happened to me last night, your 24 year-old son, says, “Thank you for the gift of swimming. It is one of the best things you could have ever given me.”