YOLO Journal Issue 12 - Flipbook - Page 47
dark-water lake north of Lisbon. I love
that our days are shaped by these shared
destinations, shared accomplishments
and unforgettable memories. I also love
how wild swimming brings out the
wild parts in each of us. After a sunny
afternoon swim in Somerset, my eldest
daughter, a relatively composed young
person, ran onto an old footbridge and
broke into a Charlie Chaplin-esque
pantomime.
Wild swimming also has a way of
revealing the contours of daily life in a
foreign place. In the English countryside,
where we walked through endless fields
and swam in little rivers and dams with
small ponds, we saw elderly women who
swim every day, no matter the weather,
with their little dogs barking down the
banks beside them. We met a man who
walked barefoot in his swimsuit for
miles, knowing the way to his swimming hole with his eyes closed. Outside
of Avignon, where we struggled to find
any activity without a line of tourists,
we discovered a local swimming haunt
where French families relaxed on a hot
pebble beach or waded into the wide,
shallow river. They were so shocked to
see us there; we felt like we had touched
down on a new planet.
Wild swimming also has given us
a shared sense of camaraderie, as if we
belong to some unspoken community.
I’ll never forget the farmer in Sicily who
helped us find our way to a small river
hidden among a barren landscape of
boulders and dirt, or the woman outside
of Maratea who had just returned from
her morning swim to find us lost and
turning around in her driveway. When
she saw us in our bathing suits, she got
back in her car and gestured for us to
follow her down a clandestine dirt road
that ended at a grotto with deep black
ponds, still as mirrors. Last summer in
Puglia, we learned from friends we met
in Positano of a place outside of Lecce
where a cold, freshwater river meets
the warm and salty Adriatic. When
we arrived, we found a group of Italian
teenagers jumping into the water and
thought we might be intruding, but as
we walked on, we were welcomed by a
crowd of all ages wading through the
cool water and taking turns jumping
off the sandy riverbank. The suntanned
older Italian women in their colorful
bathing suits smiled as we found the
courage to take the first plunge.
Sometimes, the most poignant
impressions have nothing to do with
swimming. I can recall many times
where we drove or hiked for hours to
a destination that we couldn’t access
because it was used to capture agricultural runoff, or blocked off because
of angry neighbors, or just dried up
because of drought. Somehow, these
failed outings have only increased our
gratitude for the successful ones. Other
times, we learned that acceptance
can open hearts. In the mountains of
Corsica, shortly after one of the best
natural swimming experiences we’ve
ever had, we got a flat tire and spent the •
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