No Swimming

My apartment complex sent out an email reminding us to take advantage of the indoor pool across the street. Let me explain my philosophy on swimming. There are two rules of Swim Club.

#1 First rule of swim club... You do not go swimming in 16 degree wind chill. Even if the pool is inside, you still have to come OUTSIDE to get back to your apartment.

#2 If you're me, you stay the hell away from swimming pools.

Number one is self explanatory. Number two requires a little background.

My first experience with swimming came at the ripe old age of three. My Head Start class went to the indoor pool and I'll never forget the man giving us all the basic preliminary information about how fun swimming was. He convinced us to get on the little board and kick across the pool. If you slip off, it's okay. I'll catch you. I put my faith in this man. I haven't trusted anyone sense. I made it about two feet from the wall before I slipped off the board. I expected the man to catch me. He wasn't paying attention because he was talking to some woman walking by. All I remember is waking up on the side of the pool. I'm not going to say I got CPR. I don't know what happened. I think my subconscious blacked that part out. I just remember the man telling my grandmother, I'm so sorry ma'am. You really should make him get back in the water. If you let her leave now, he'll be afraid of water for the rest of his life.

He was right.

Flash forward to 1990. I was eight. I'd been to a few swimming pools since my near drowning, but I limited myself to bouncing up and down in the shallow end and putting my head underwater for five seconds when I really wanted to be daring. My father took me to Wild World, a water park in Maryland. My father shelled out ten bucks for one of those big yellow tubes. I didn't want to let him down. We didn't live together so he didn't know that I was terrified of water. I decided to get in the pool called The Wild Wave.

Keep in mind: This was my first time at a water park. I had no idea what a wave pool was. I sat on the tube near the shallow end and I floated around for a while. In my head I'm thinking, This isn't so bad. Why was I afraid of water for so long? While I enjoyed the float around the pool, I noticed that I was moving further toward the deep end. There were life guards on a little tower in the center of the pool but they probably assumed I could swim. Rather than risk embarrassment, I decided to just paddle with my had until I made it to the back of the pool by the big picture of the wave. My plan was to kick off of that and make my way back to the shallow end. That's when it happened.

A bell started ringing and people started getting excited, bouncing up and down, while other people were swimming away from the very direction I was going. I was about a foot away from the back wall when the water started rising. My little ass was perplexed. What's going on? Then the water started getting higher and higher. The idea finally popped into my head, Are these waves in a swimming pool? How are there waves in a swimming pool??? That's when I put two and two together: Wild Wave, picture of a wave, people running away. Oh shit! I started paddling with my hands like there was no tomorrow. Everytime I moved a foot, a wave would come and pull me right back to the same spot. I panicked and that's when my tube flipped over.

If you thought I was panicking before on the raft, imagine what happened in the water. I tried my best to swim and everytime I made it up to the surface of the water, a wave would come and knock me right back under. I screamed for the lifeguards but they miraculously disappeared from their perch. My survival instincts kicked in and I realized that all I had to do was just hold on to the tube. I came back up, saw my tube and kicked and flapped my arms until I got to the tube. I was like an inch away and I used my last bit of energy to fling myself onto the tube. Thank God! I'm safe. Nope.

This was PG County, Maryland where broke ass people flocked to Wild World for recreation and apparently the sight of a seemingly-unoccupied tube was like finding a free ten dollars on the ground. Some little bastard grabbed my tube and snatched it right out of my arms. I screamed, Give it back!!!! At least I tried. I went right back under the water and with no more energy and no lifeguards coming my way, I gave up. I stopped trying to swim, I stopped trying to get the raft and I just let my body go limp. I opened my eyes--something I never did out of fear that the chlorine would burn my eyes from their sockets or something--and I exhaled what little air I had left in my lungs. In all seriousness, I made the decision to inhale and just give up. In that same moment, something yanked me out of the water.

I felt myself lift up out of the water and I looked back to see a middle aged Hispanic woman looking at me like only a worried parent would when they see someone else's kid in trouble. She held me in one arm and grabbed the raft from the little bastard who had it and she pulled me all the way back to the shallow end. She didn't speak much English, but she managed to kind of tell me in sign language what I already knew...Get out of the water, you can't swim.

For the next four years, I stayed away. Part two tomorrow...