Labor Day: A Joyful Eulogy for the End of Swim Season
Labor Day has passed and, with it, comes the unofficial end of summer. Thank God for small favors. Of course I’m not all that excited about the onset of colder weather. There’s something about having a perpetual chill in my hands and feet during the winter that reminds me that this is probably how I’ll feel for the rest of my life until I finally pass away. Old people always seem to be cold and I’m fairly certain that I’ll be no exception. On the upside, at least when I’m an octogenarian, I’ll finally be able to wear a shawl in July and not look like some kind of freak.
So no. I’m not a fan of winter but I’m really that much of a fan of summer either.
The heat is part of it which, in the Midwest, tends to be fairly revolting. There’s nothing like sitting outside on a hot summer day and stewing in one’s sweat to wonder why in the hell we haven’t evolved past the need to perspire from a mating perspective. Sweating cools the body down but it sure doesn’t do much for sex appeal. I’ve never had a woman come on to me because I’ve soaked my way through two shirts simply by being outside in 80 degrees. I’m sure that the kink exists and that, somewhere, there’s a group of people who like to sniff each other’s sweaty armpits and but I haven’t found them yet. Then again I’m happily married so I haven’t been looking all that hard.
What I really don’t understand when it comes to summer is swimming. I get the logistics of the act. By kicking your legs and moving your arms around in a somewhat coordinated manner your body is propelled yourself through the water. I just don’t understand it as a form of recreation. I swam competitively for over ten years which sounds impressive but it really only means that I “competed” against other people. It doesn’t mean that I was any good.
So I get swimming in that sense. What I don’t get are people who like to swim.
As a kid who had to swim countless laps at ungodly hours in the morning and then swim laps, again, for another few hours in the afternoon I somehow managed to lose my enthusiasm for the activity. I realize that others who haven’t had the benefit of my experience feel differently but I don’t understand them either. Instead of staying inside in the air conditioning the way God intended I’ve never felt that there was a good reason to go outside in one-hundred-degree weather just to “cool off in the pool”. After all, if everyone just stayed indoors with decent AC then it wouldn’t be necessary to cool off in the first place.
Whether it’s in a pool or out in nature swimming is a hazardous pursuit. Pools of any type are rife with Code Browns and dubious urine contents but those issues pale in comparison to the outright horrors that come from swimming in oceans and ponds and rivers.
Sure, a brief dip in the ocean can be invigorating but the activity can quickly turn from an exercise that’s somewhat pointless into one that puts life and limb at risk. When was the last time you heard about someone losing an arm to a Great White shark while he’s sitting on a couch? I’m also willing to bet that no one watching TV in bed has ever been pulled out to sea by a riptide or drowned in an undertow but I could be wrong.
As nasty as the ocean can be though it’s not like freshwater is all that safer. There’s a fish in the Amazon basin that will cheerfully swim up your urethra if given half a chance. Take the urethra fish and combine it with the threat of crocodiles and piranha and it’s a wonder why anyone in South America even thinks about going into the water for pleasure.
North American ponds and lakes and rivers have their dangers too. Where I’m from in the Midwest most of them are murky and brown and hide all kinds of unpleasantness. Snakes and eels abound in these places as well as a lot of other dangers that someone, particularly me, wouldn’t want to encounter. Recently a brain-eating amoeba that lives in various waterways around the US has been making the news. For the record, this amoeba doesn’t really want to eat your brain. Apparently, it just gets confused and follows a nerve through your nose which mimics a nerve in another creature before noshing a bit on your brain. This is, of course, a bummer for the amoeba but even more so for the unfortunate people who simply wanted to go swimming in a local watering hole.
This is all assuming that you’re actually swimming in freshwater. In addition to brain-eating amoebas and the threat of fish that want to swim up your urethra there’s the possibility that any river or creek or pond could be filled with some sort of toxic mess. It could be pesticides. It could be herbicides. Then again the river you’re tubing in might just, very well, also be downstream from a tailing pond or a nuclear plant.
It’s almost as if some higher power is telling us to stay out of the water. Call it God or evolution or whatever but, as a species, we’ve spent hundreds of millions of years in an attempt to get out of the water. After all that time and hard work it just seems counterintuitive to want to go back into a pool or a pond given what our ancestors have been through.
About the Author
derekbremer Prior to his life as a stay at home father Derek spent more than a decade performing public relations and marketing functions for financial consulting firms and found the job to be precisely as exciting as it sounds. When not tending to his wife or daughter Derek enjoys subjecting the public to his unique take on fatherhood, travel and animal husbandry. He has been published in Scary Mommy, Sammiches and Psych Meds, The Good Men Project, HowToBeADad, Red Tricycle, RAZED, HPP and the Anthology "It's Really Ten Months Special Delivery: A Collection of Stories from Girth to Birth.
