Floating

I learned to float in Watts Bar Lake, one of several bodies of water in East Tennessee created by TVA’s hydroelectric power system. During the summers, my family drove up to a town called Ten Mile that has only slightly outgrown its name, where a group of summer residents gathered lawn chairs on the shore of the lake outside the Ewings’ hundred-year-old barn to say morning prayer on Sunday mornings. Sermons weren’t allowed, nor was communion unless the Ewings’ son Ward (an Episcopal priest and then dean of General Theological Seminary) was in town. The mosquitoes weren’t too bad in the morning, but the services still clocked in at well under twenty minutes. 

Then the adults mingled around and ate whatever baked goods folks had placed on the wooden tables in the barn, and my sister and I changed into bathing suits and headed straight down to the lake, joined by our family friend Grimes. We’d met Grimes and his girlfriend Ruth – they’d been dating then for about thirty years – at our regular non-summer church, and over the years they’d introduced us to the best local hiking trails, eaten Sunday dinners with us weekly, and attended all of our piano recitals. “Pookie” and “Grimey,” as we soon started calling them, were surrogate grandparents to us, especially because our actual grandparents lived way across the country. Like most of the other participants in the summer lakeside church, they were retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where they had unwittingly helped build the nuclear bomb – Ruth as a chemist; Grimes as a nuclear physicist. Now that I’m into middle age, I appreciate how rare it was for a man in his late 60s to volunteer so willingly as swimming chaperone, but Grimes loved the water – he was an avid scuba diver – and he loved us. 

My sister and I were mostly there to splash and avoid boring adult small talk, but Grimey also wanted us to be comfortable in the water. We’d been subjected to several rounds of torturous swimming lessons at YMCA pools when we were young, but Grimey made swimming fun. Geared up in his prescription scuba mask and snorkel, he demonstrated all the different strokes and then gave us tips as we tried them ourselves. In between, we were playing “Twenty Questions” or “I Spy” or chatting about what had happened on the playground that week, games and conversations into which Grimey entered as enthusiastically as the muddy and possibly radioactive lake. 

He taught me to dive off the edge of the dock and how to plunge through the dark, murky water to the soggy bottom of the lake. And he taught me to float. He believed that floating was an even more important skill than swimming, because if I was ever stranded in a large body of water, I would need to conserve energy. I’ve never been a very naturally buoyant person, but Grimey showed me that the key to floating was to keep my lungs full of air. I spread out my arms like a T and took gulping breaths and floated and floated while he timed how long I could stay adrift and gently placed a hand under my back if I started to sink.

To beat the heat last weekend, we drove an hour to meet up with friends who recently moved to a neighborhood with a fancy pool. For a few minutes in the afternoon when almost everyone else had headed indoors, I had a corner of the pool to myself. I naturally rolled over onto my back and took a big breath and stared at the vast blue sky, observing a hawk swooping back and forth high above. My thoughts drifted of course to Grimes, who died three years ago this week but whose nephews didn’t think or know to contact us when he passed because we weren't real relatives. I grieved again that I hadn’t been able to go to his funeral. I reflected that this water was too blue, too transparent, too far away from the landscapes I know best, with their warm, brown, turbid lakes and nuclear towers silhouetted against green hills. Everything since I’ve moved West over a decade ago has been a struggle, everything has been effort. I was grateful for a moment to rest, to conserve my energy, to be held up. And mostly I was grateful for having had someone in my life who taught me how to do that.