Swimming in July

Attersee, Gustav Klimt, 1900

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The feeling when you jump from a high place and fall through warm air and then hit the water. The way the bubbles explode white around you as you shoot into the dark. The light tickling as the air escapes back up across your skin.

Just the pure physical joy of thrashing your arms around in water. To fill the kid’s buckets and throw it at the sun—the way the water falls apart into drops, and then into mist, the way a rainbow appears for a second and is gone.

To swim by the cliffs where sharpbills nest. To swim in the harbor with Maud. To swim in the tiny lagoons that form between the rocks on the beach. To swim in rivers.

There is something so frivolous about water. It makes you float like you are in outer space! And no matter what you do—whatever shape you make of yourself—it will instantly fit itself around you! 

Water didn’t have to be this good.

You forgot it for years while you lived in the city. But here it is: that one day in July when it storms but the water is lukewarm and you tumble inside the waves. You lose yourself in the sensation of being a body submerged in another body. Your back against the concrete pillar under the pier; the waves cresting, crashing over you—you can do this for hours. 

Imagine living in a world without water. One day you read about a massive new installation of tactile art at MOMA. People are so psyched about it that you fly out across the Atlantic desert and queue for hours to see it for yourself.

“Yes,” you would say, “the way it stretches as far as I can see, making a perfectly straight line at the horizon—it has something of the monumentality of an Anselm Kiefer installation. Quite nice. Made by a skilled craftsman, no doubt.”

There are creases on the surface, repeating, yet subtly varied—wait, the creases move. The creases, chasing each other, suddenly change color at their tips when they approach you: they become white, like the water is showing its teeth. 

“You can touch it,” the museum guard would say. 

“I can?”

“Yes, you can even walk into the creases.”

Unsure, you would take off your shoes and walk out into the surf, the water making your trousers heavy. Letting it run through your fingers, the texture of it would make you laugh.

“Try jumping from the cliff over there,” the guard would say. “And then you shape yourself like a cannonball before you hit the surface.”

You would try it.

It would feel so good, the water, you would cry that stuff from your eyes.