WATER BABIES

“We were all water babies, my three brothers and I . Our father, who was a swimming champ (he won the fifteen mile race off the Isle of Wight three years in succession)?and loved swimming more than anything else, introduced each of us to the water when we were scarcely a week old. Swimming is instinctive at this age , so, for better or worse, we never ‘learned’ to swim. “I was reminded of that in the Caroline Islands, in Micronesia, where I even saw toddlers diving fearlessly into the lagoons and swimming, typically, with a sort of dog paddle. Everyone there swims, one is ‘unable’ swim, and the islanders’ swimming skills are superb . Magellan and other navigators reaching Micronesia in the sixteenth century were astounded at such skills and, seeing the islanders swim and dive, bounding from wave to wave, could not help comparing them to dolphins. The children, in particular, were so at home in the water that they appeared, in the words of one explorer, ‘more fish than human beings.’ It was from Pacific Islanders that, early in the twentieth century , we Westerners learned the crawl, the beautiful, powerful ocean stroke that they had perfected—so much better, so much more fitted to the human form than the frog like breaststroke chiefly used until that time.) “For myself, I have no memory of being taught to swim and; I learned my strokes, I think , by swimming with my father—though the slow, measured, mile-eating stroke he had (he was a powerful man who weighed nearly eighteen stone )was not entirely suited to a little boy. But I could see how my old man, huge and cumbersome on land, became transformed—graceful like a porpoise —in the water; and I, self-conscious , nervous , and also rather clumsy, found the same delicious transformation in myself, found a new being, a new mode of living, in the water. I have a vivid memory of a summer holiday at the seaside in England the month after my fifth birthday, when I ran into my parents’ room and tugged at the great whale like bulk of my father . ‘Come on Dad!’ I said. ‘Let’s come for a swim!’ He turned over slowly and opened one eye. ‘What do you mean, waking an old man of forty-three like this at six in the morning?’ Now that my father is dead, and I am almost twice the age that he was then, this memory of so long ago tugs at me, makes me equally want to laugh and cry.” P.3-4, “Water Babies,” EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE (2019) by Oliver Sacks