How It Was (Summer): The Swimming Test

The Boy lived a mere two blocks from a great and beautiful body of water known to insiders as, simply, “the river.”

You could go down to the river on a hot summer afternoon, clamber down to the bank from the concrete wall erected (legend had it) by laborers during the period known as The Great Depression in order to hold back the mighty flood tides that they had had back then, when the Ice Age was ending and there was suddenly more water than the world could cope with. You could find flat stones, slimy mollusk shells, and (if you were willing to dare having your fingers slashed) shards of green Rolling Rock bottles to skip across the surface in the direction of the mansion on the far side, whose white pillars and especially whose windows gleamed invitingly a mere half-mile distant.

Yet perhaps it was the river itself that was the source of the discomfort The Boy had always had with the notion of buoyancy.

The Boy had many years ago been warned away from the river by his parents. His father had threatened him, as was his wont, with a sentence beginning, “If I ever, ever catch you down there…” and ending with a phrase the exact contents of which did not matter, since all such phrases always promised total annihilation. “A dragon lives there,” said his mother, more fancifully.

This dragon, The Boy imagined, was long and undulant, its silver skin scaly and iridescent; its head looked like an automobile hood ornament, steely and unforgiving. There would be a splash as it surfaced when adults (but never their children) were present, and it would glare at them with its red, hungry eyes, projecting telepathic thoughts at them like Bring me your children. It would look at The Boy’s own parents and add, Yours first.

Jeez, and what was it with this stupid fascination with immersing your body in water, anyhow? Talk about unnatural! The Boy had once read a fantasy story, set in the distant future, in which the human race were “returning to the sea” to live. The author noted the way the hair grew on people’s backs in convergent tufts, clearly indicating (like waving fields of seaweed) the flow of the water which (so he said) we had left for land centuries ago.

The Boy laughed at the idea when he wasn’t worrying about it. He tried to imagine his forebears — his grandparents, say, graceless on land, hobbling about on pale thin legs and bunions the size of cupcakes — leaping up-river like salmon or crawling out of the bay and balancing beachballs on their noses. Ridiculous.

And now this summer he was to spend a week at Boy Scout camp.

It was called Camp Lenape, after a tribe of Indians who had lacked the basic amenities of civilization and so did not, as The Boy did, spend their summer nights in the woods wide awake, listening to the cries of roving carnivores and their slaughtered victims.

Here The Boy would confront the first of Camp Lenape’s many terrors: the swimming qualification test.

From the bank of the lake which was located in the chilly heart of Camp Lenape stretched a long wooden walkway. Its far end was anchored out there in the distance, a bump on the horizon which on foggy nights, The Boy imagined, threatened passing freighters with disaster. The swimming qualification test would take place here, on the very first day of camp. The Scouts’ tremulous parents and siblings would watch from the shore.

“Okay, listen up men!” The speaker was the chief swimming counselor, a young man with dark, very short hair. He looked like Frankie Avalon; he had the physique of an otter. His skin gleamed wet and tan in the Sunday afternoon light. “Listen up, now! Shh, shh! Quiet! Thank you. Okay now. Is there anyone here who cannot swim at all?”

The Boy looked around him.

In front of him, behind him, to his left and right, were the sneering visages of a host of strangers. Boys, true, and roughly his age. But none of his friends had yet made the passage from Cub Scouts, Webelos Class, to Boy Scouts, Tenderfoot. He was alone, surrounded by amphibians whose trunks were threadbare — worn thin from exposure to hours of friction against watery currents — and whose fingers, hidden for warmth in their shivering armpits, were webbed. Clearly, in his campmates’ eyes the counselor’s question was a joke.

“Nobody?” said the counselor. “Everybody here can swim, right?”

From deep inside The Boy’s brain seemed to come a whirring sound. The motor that had come with his Erector Set made a noise like this when you wired it to a battery. If you set the motor on a table top, it skittered about in a deranged figure-8 until coming to the table edge, where, lemming-like and stupid, it leapt into the void.

“Okay, good!” the counselor exulted, and The Boy knew that he had made the correct choice or, more accurately, that he had correctly failed to make the incorrect choice. During the week he would probably depend on this counselor for one favor or another; best not to alienate him.

Now the counselor was explaining the details of the swimming test. The dock, he said, pointing, was shaped like a large L. (The Boy shaded his eyes and looked out across the water. Ah, yes. There it was way out there, a ninety-degree dogleg to the left which probably served as a breakwater in hurricanes, blocking the storm surge. Patrolling the dogleg, apparently armed with spears, were a half-dozen other counselors in swimming trunks.) Each boy, continued the counselor, would go out there to the very end of the dock, the end of the dogleg, and… jump off. The number of laps he could swim back and forth along the length of the dogleg would determine his ranking: up to three laps for a beginner, five laps for intermediate, so on and so on.

The Boy listened with half his mind. (Laps. LapS? Well, heck. How hard could it be to swim one lap?) With the other half of his mind he was fighting off the deadly ESP-blasts from his mother, somewhere behind him. He wanted to turn and look behind him, to gaze for one more time upon his family clustered on the shoreline, but did not dare. Perhaps they had already left.

“You first!” cried the counselor, and pointed to a boy several feet away from The Boy himself. The eager “volunteer,” a stranger to The Boy, dashed up the dock, his feet like slaps of warning on the bare soggy planks. He reached the end of the dogleg and jumped off. The sound of the splash did not reach The Boy’s ears for several seconds, by which time the swimmer was already on his twelfth lap.

Wow. That was really pretty far out there, wasn’t it? How deep would the water be that far from shore, anyhow? Deep enough for a subma—

“Fifteen laps!” It was the counselor, calling for them to cheer the accomplishment of the first survivor. The traditional Boy Scout cheer, which they were all expected to have memorized, went, “Heeeeeeeeep… how!“, at which point you punched the air with your fist. The Boy did so, listlessly, distractedly — “Heep how, heep how, heep how” — but returned to thinking about, what was it, oh yeah. How deep—

“Now you!” shouted the instructor, pointing at The Boy. “Yes, you. You!”

A silence settled over the pine forest. The sun slipped behind a cloud; from somewhere in the dark distance, a loon called; a hungry snapping turtle slipped from its log into the lake’s black waters, almost certainly to take up a post at the end of the dock. Behind him, The Boy imagined that he heard a strangled sob.

He stepped onto the long wooden walkway. The water, he saw, was brown. “Not dirty,” his mother had told him. “It’s cedar water.” Brown from exposure to the roots of cedar trees, but clean, she insisted. Clean and pure. And clear? No, he couldn’t see anything deeper than a few feet…

Now he neared the counselors posted on the dogleg. What he had thought were spears, he saw now, were actually long metal poles, painted in broad red and white bands. For what purpose, he had no idea. He did not engage the eyes of any of the counselors. He wanted to ask for a black hood.

…But that was silly! Nothing would happen to him! He was going to jump off this crummy dock, and he was going to swim the crummy required one lap, and he didn’t care that he’d barely been able to stay afloat in any crummy swimming pool he’d ever fallen into! This was Boy Scout camp! Nothing evil could happen to a boy at Boy Scout camp!

He turned left onto the dogleg, walked to the end, and turned left again so that he was at last facing the shore. Was that his family there, that huddled little knot of panic-stricken humanity that was the only group not gathered around Mr. Fifteen Laps, clapping him on the back in congratulations? Was it?

“All right, already,” said a gravelly voice behind The Boy. It belonged to a beefy counselor who looked as though he had been tortured by the North Koreans during the Korean War and was now determined to do some dishing out of his own. “Come on, come on, come on. So jump, already.”

The Boy looked at the shoreline again. The Boy jumped.

It was not a particularly graceful jump, as jumps go. It did not even have the virtue of being merely exuberantly careless, like that of boys at the old swimmin’ hole. No. It was, rather, a wild thrashing-about. The Boy was determined, as it were, to hit the lake swimming; he imagined himself, in that infinitely long second before hitting the water, building up enough kinetic energy to skim back and forth across the surface of the lake like a flat rock across the river.

He did not skim like a flat rock. He sank, like a round one.

Later in life, his reason would tell him that what happened next could not really have happened. Which was that he continued to sink, all the way to the lake bottom, cedar water rushing into every nook and cranny of his nose and mouth; he stood, actually stood, on the lake bottom for a couple of seconds, and looked up.

He had been wrong about the cedar water. He could see quite clearly through it, at least when looking up towards the sky. When looking, that is, up towards the surface — the surface through which he now saw stabbing, like trained garfish, the long thin poles painted in red and white; long poles searching, he realized, for him.

What a shame, he thought later, that there were no eyewitnesses to his next act of heroism: the flexing of his little legs, the launching of his little body in the direction of the nearest pole. It was the pole wielded by the beefy counselor, who was now (as he dragged The Boy onto the dock) trembling visibly. “You okay?” said this counselor. “You sure? You scared the crap outta me, you know that?” The Boy realized, vaguely, that he had probably saved this counselor from a lifetime of night terrors.

Unfortunately he still had his own long walk, alone, to endure: the long walk back to the shore. The long walk back before the openly derisive eyes of these strangers with whom he would have to spend the next week…

“…anyone else who can’t swim?” Frankie Avalon was yelling, his face red. “Anyone else?”

And miracle of miracles, a pale thin hand went up. Its owner was a boy that The Boy knew only as Sam — a boy with black-framed glasses that he was wearing even now, as he prepared for his own immersion and drowning. The Boy wouldn’t be alone in the waders’ class, after all!

Onto the gray lakeshore sand he stepped, still coughing a bit, and shivering in the suddenly cool air. Ahead of him, on the far side of this mob of adults which parted at his approach, like the Red Sea before a mortified Moses, was his family. About to embarrass him further, no doubt, to shower him with kisses and hugs and embarrassment of their own, but he trudged manfully ahead.

He had almost reached them when a stranger stepped from the ranks of the adults, a woman. “You’ll be all right,” she said, squeezing his shoulder with a pale thin hand. “Good for you.” Then she smiled at him, and pushed up onto her nose her black-framed glasses, and melted back into the pure, surprisingly clear cedar water of memory.