By Neil King Jr.
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river.” – Jorge Luis Borges
At the end of any given year, when we tally the moments that slowed time, that made it stand still and sing, my list inevitably hews to a theme. I have traveled to a few far-flung places, often me and my family: a distant fjord in Norway, a pier in Croatia, the outer tip of Nova Scotia, the bottom of Grand Canyon. We have shed shoes, socks, shirts, and stripped to shorts or swimsuits. And we have plunged into water—the colder, the clearer, the more bracing, the better.
Nothing puts a finer point on travel—no bottle of wine, no sunset, no aria, no sweeping view from a hotel window—like a good swim. Nothing consummates an arrival like full immersion. Nothing elongates a few seconds into its own eternity like an arcing dive into water far colder than the air.
When traveling, the dictum should go, take the plunge. No matter the hour or the season or the blusteriness of the morning, just go in.
It would be a stretch to say I travel to swim because I travel to savor the exotic, to eat, walk, and absorb the passing splendor too, like anyone else. But if the hotel abuts a river or the path leads to an inlet of the sea, I take that path and disappear into the water. That act of going in, of diving, is the ultimate communion with the place.
Long after the details of a meal or the wing of a museum have gone murky, one can still feel the toes curled around the gunnel of that boat or that rocky ledge, the uncoiling of the legs, the suspension in air before hitting water, and then the 20 or 30 seconds of submersion looking up at the shimmer of the bright world beyond before the breath runs out.
We travel, of course, to disrupt time, to make an ordinary five days feel like a month. We travel to step off the slippery luge-run of our habitual rounds and to stretch time, like taffy, so that it more closely resembles the days of constant newness when we were young.
Diving into water, especially cold water, performs that feat like nothing else. It stops time. You had to make a willful, conscious act to dive. You had to overcome some element of fear and apprehension. And having made that move, that spring of legs and torso, you are now aloft, in motion, your senses on the highest alert, heading toward a substance you know will slap you in the face and embrace you whole in its vast chill.
Oliver Sacks in his essay The River of Consciousness talks about what he calls “perceptual standstills,” moments his patients described “in which visual flow was arrested—and even the stream of movement, of action, of thought itself.” That is what happens when you are on the way between terra firma and the river, lake or sea that is your destination. This is what happens when you are traveling between elements.
This perceptual standstill mid-dive doesn’t go on for minutes. It is not as if you have gone into a trance and a moment feels like hours. But those seconds when you are stretched out midflight leave a mental imprint far greater than the clock-measured duration of the dive itself.
Then, of course, there is the immersion, the exhausting of your air supply before you resurface, and the joy the swim itself imparts. Even ten hours later you can still feel the tingle that a good swim leaves behind in the brain, fingers and toes.
One could fill a good hour with the stories of such swims. They go back to when I was a kid and span the globe. Diving to free an anchor while sailing the Great Barrier Reef. The tug of the Danube just before it spilled into the Black Sea. The shock of Kachemak Bay when diving off the piers in Homer, Alaska.
There are the hikes—in Yosemite, in the Colorado Rockies, at Smuggler’s Notch in Vermont—where we unexpectedly arrive at the shores of some mountain lake, and where that lake then becomes like a magnet, demanding we go in. At the end of one long hike outside Telluride, Colorado, I broke the crest of a steep hill and literally wept at the sight of Silver Lake, such was the beauty of that opalescent gem in a glacial bowl. My daughters and I crowned that hike with a plunge.
Then there are the trips that intentionally teem with water, and opportunity.
My elder daughter Lilly and I were in Norway early one June, days after her college graduation, driving north up Highway 13 along the shores of the narrow Sorfjorden. Snow still capped the peaks, and its spring thaw spilled in sliver ribbons from the cliffs, gushing by the creekload into the fjord. Around a bend in the road we spotted a weathered pier, reflected in the water like the peaks themselves, ours for the taking.
Two years later, right after my younger daughter Frances graduated from college, we were celebrating with a trip of our own in May to Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast, a different sort of swimmer’s paradise. En route down the coast we imagined the perfect setting for lunch—a fish shack with a pier jutting into the ocean—and it appeared just like that, without digital assistance, but with a bonus: You could swim out to where the oysters and mussels lived before we washed them down with our beer for lunch.
If that swim marked the official start of the summer of 2019, its glorious end-of-season twin came in August off the shores of St. Paul Island, nearly midway between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. We had chartered a fishing boat for 18 friends and family to take a look at the island, an infamous wrecking site known for centuries as the Graveyard of the Gulf. Our captain dropped anchor 100 yards off Trinity Cove, and gave the all clear.
I stepped to the gunwale, wrapped my toes around its edge, took in the warmth of the boat’s metal through my feet and the wonder of that bay through my eyes, and dove. One by one, the more daring souls followed suit, their yelps of pleasure echoing through the cove.
The last great swim of the year—now firmly on the Top Five Lifetime List—came unexpectedly. We had hiked four hours down, and 1.2 billion years back in geological time, to the bottom of Grand Canyon in early November.
There was the great Colorado, cold, muscular, no longer red with the crushed stone of its upper reaches, but with swirls of silt like clouds floating within it. My daughters were already on the other side, at Boat Beach, Lilly with her boots off, up to her ankles in the river. I came down from the trail through the rushes with no intention of swimming. Hadn’t even thought of it. But off came shoes, socks, belt, shirt. I’d been riverside for maybe three minutes before I turned and ran and dove into the river, deep into the emerald, seeing the sun shimmering then from within the river and feeling its strong westward tug.
That cold jolt wasn’t just the reward for the long hike down. It was the river’s embrace, the best possible imprimatur of having made it there. Four, five, maybe six breast strokes underwater as the river pulled me downstream and then back into the day with a gasping exhalation that translated roughly as, “Ahh.” Time again had been stretched into minutes that weren’t like other minutes but elongated, and fluid, like the river itself.
–Neil King Jr. is the editor of Gotham Canoe and a writer who, when not at home in Washington DC, is very happy to be elsewhere.