The Sound of a Swim.
Dangling on the edge of the pool at Bolton Swim + Tennis in Baltimore, Maryland. Photo by Callie Neylan, Summer 2011.
Summer is here. Well, almost. Technically, there are seven days of spring left. For me, summer has always meant swimming outdoors, something I’ve loved to do for as long as I can remember. I learned to swim in a huge hot springs pool in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, long before the days of SPF 15. Instead, we slathered ourselves with Coppertone or baby oil, less than useless for our pale Irish skin. I received more than one blistering, second-degree sunburn in my youth. I’ve been admonished for that fact numerous times by various dermatologists. But it’s too late now. I was young, I say. There was no SPF anything. Fair-skinned, red-haired and closer to the sun than most of you, way up on those Colorado mountaintops.
Less than useless for my pale Irish skin. Luckily, no skin cancers yet.
Listening to this NPR segment on swimming pool sounds, I also happened upon this New York Times article on The Sound of a Sentence:
As we mature, our delight in sounds becomes less visceral. We study the couplets of Robert Frost, send the subversive punctuation of E.E. Cummings to paramours and contemplate the “widening gyres” of William Butler Yeats. However, we often lose the child’s love of chaotic vowels and knocking syllables. Even when writing about poetry, we bog down in the language of academia. Our sentences get longer as we pile up clauses and struggle to state a thesis. Then, in our professional lives, we get tangled up in bureaucratese and forget our innate ability to play with sound and sense.
To remember to play takes practice. Using the rhetorical devices mentioned in this article, excuse me while I do a few writing exercises around the sounds of swimming:
Bold black stripe. Turquoise ripples. Silver big sky. I always start with my right arm. My right arm, then my left.
Plop slice, whir whoosh, patter splash. Buh. HUH.
That is the three four rhythm of the freestyle, the crawl, the glide through the water that ends and begins with a floating somersault and powerful kick off the solid warped blue of the chlorine concrete.
Plop slice, whir whoosh, patter splash. Buh. HUH.
So different from the tempo and the cadence of the breastroke which goes a little something like this.
HUH. Phhft! Gurgle glide. HUH. Phhft! Gurgle slide. HUH. Phhft! Gurgle glide. HUH. Phhft! Gurgle slide.
A swim is your body playing the melody while the water hums in harmony.