Chlorine

My roommates and I recently started swimming laps at the local university pool. One would think little could be accomplished from swimming back and forth in a narrow lane crowded with pear shaped women. But such a seemingly pointless activity has served as a great escape from life. It becomes a sort of chlorinated baptism that, however exhausting, revitalizes my spirits.

Time moves in slow motion underwater. When I'm immersed all I hear is the occasional effervescent leak of air. Then I rotate my body and take a breath of oxygen. The moment my ear breaks the surface, my hearing is flooded with splashing and whistles and children shouting. Then my head is underwater again and I evade the chaos.

With my amazing put-together-by-me Swede goggles, my vision is quite clear underwater. I see the monotonous blue mosaic of the floor tiles and the infrequent, but occasional, band-aid. Every once in a while I note the choppy waves created by the floundering beaver swimming in the lane next to me -- his miniature whirlpools and bubbles breaking the smoothness of the water.

No visit to the pool is ever complete for us without a few jumps off the diving platforms. I'm not talking about the wimpy high dive springboards. I'm talking about the super high skyscraper platforms that give you altitude sickness just from climbing the spiral staircase. Rather than just walk off the edge like lemmings, we sprint from the back end to the edge and leap as far as we can, temporarily flying through the air, trying to control the involuntary flailing of our arms. Less like swans and more like Japanese macaques, we hurl ourselves into air and crash into the pool. Once we've mastered the technique it becomes a competition for distance, until we've sufficiently tuckered ourselves out.

We crawl out of the pool and stumble into the locker room, then take a few minutes in the sauna. We note that we can no longer tell if we are wet from the pool or our own chlorinated sweat, and decide it's time to leave. But we'll be back tomorrow.