Summer Swimming
What death has to teach
I mark the start of family vacation days by jumping in the cool, clear waters of Lake Chelan. The morning air is acrid as the afternoon winds have yet to clear the wildfire smoke from the valley. The high desert air is cool. It has no memory of yesterday’s hundred-degree heat. The cool water envelopes me as I begin my half-mile swim.
Chelan is a Salish word, “Tsi-Laan” meaning deep water. Lake Chelan is the third deepest lake in the US. Most of the water in the lake comes from the Stehekin River, at the north end of the lake fifty miles away, fed by melting glaciers and snowpack from the North Cascades. It’s like swimming in mineral water.
The north end of the lake gets more than three times more rain than the south. But the summers are dry. The smoke that burns my eyes drifted from a wildfire burning near the town of Stehekin, located 50 miles to the north and only accessible by boat, foot, or plane. The winds are unpredictable. Residents were ordered to evacuate, but many refused to leave.
In the water at the south end of the lake, far from shore, I raise my effort and heart rate, and my body remembers the heart attack. Six years ago, in a different lake, my chest tightened and then seized. I couldn’t breathe. It took effort to stay afloat, which forced my heart to work harder and demand blood that could not arrive. Two of my coronary arteries were 100% blocked. If I didn’t find a way to slow my heart, I was going to drown and die. I closed my eyes, floated on my back, and meditated. My heart gradually calmed, and I moved slowly and carefully back to shore. I didn’t know the damage had been done. Scars no one could see.
Every swim tempts the destiny written by an astrologer when I was born that I would die in the water. I love to swim. I’m drawn to the water. I love swimming in freezing winter water, rough seas, clear lakes, and my neighborhood stream. Every swim reminds me I’m alive. I swim to live.
My chest tightens with exertion, but my heart doesn’t shut down. The five bypass grafts attached by my cardiac surgeon six years ago allow blood to flow into my heart when my muscles call for more energy. The tightness is a reminder of a time when I didn’t know about heart attacks, stress tests, surgeries, rehabs, or injections. I feel qualities of tightness and pressure against my sternum. Maybe it’s compression from the steel wires left behind after surgery. So much was severed when they sawed me open and broke my sternum to access my blocked heart.
The doctors and nurses told me it would take a year to get back to normal, but after a year, my body had become something new. I don’t remember normal. Before surgery, I was dead. Before that, I was dying. Now, I’m alive in a new body that’s found its way back from the edge. Normal is now aware of its impermanence.
Swimming reminds me I’m alive. It’s sweet and thrilling to return to my grave. Diving under the water, my chest compresses. I count the strokes: 1, 2, 3, glorious, 4, 5, more pressure, 6, 7, need air, 8, edge of panic, gasp. I rise above the water and fill my lungs with air, and the pressure in my chest releases with my desperate exhale.
I alternate between freestyle and breaststroke, no longer driven by a desire to improve. It’s enough to swim. It’s enough to breathe and feel my heartbeat pulse through my body. I’m reminded of muscles I haven’t used in a while. When I emerge from the water, I walk past families gathering for their day at the beach. The wet, foot-long scars on my arm and chest glisten in the morning sun, and I wonder what story they see. I sit on the grass looking out at the lake before I return to the room to take my family’s orders for tea, coffee, and breakfast.