GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA
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Christmas Eve three years ago, my husband and I attended a dinner party with my brother and four other gregarious marine biologists. The dinner was at a house not far from the Virginia coast. The house was big and new and airy and smelled faintly of sawdust and paint. Fish and shellfish were served. We brought a perfect pavlova that my brother had made from scratch, and a plate of poorly decorated gingerbread cookies for the young children of two of the marine biologists. Everyone who wasn’t from New Zealand was polite about the pavlova. “The fruit on top really helps to cut through the sweet,” they said. The two young boys absolutely destroyed the gingerbread. By the time we were ready to leave I was drunk. So was my husband. My brother, who drew the designated-driver short straw, reassured us he had sobered up. I had no reason not to believe him. This is not a story about drunk driving.
The route home was along a narrow winding road beside the York River. We’d seen US Navy submarines milling about in the river earlier in the day, and maybe they were still there, their backs exposed to the frigid December air, but it was impossible to see them for the dark and the fog. I’ve had run-ins with fog before, but never like this. We couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of the car. There was nowhere to stop to wait till it lifted, and no room to attempt a three-point turn to head back, so my brother kept driving at a crawl. It was the kind of road we’d grown up with––no streetlights, only a scattering of weak road markers––but every country road has its quirks. This one had a lot of sharp turns and single-lane bridges. The bridges weren’t any easier to see than the rest of the road. At any point we could have driven into the river and none of us would have known till we’d hit the water. “You’re doing so well,” I said to my brother, over and over again, while I sat in the middle back seat, fiercely gripping both headrests, my heart pounding, thinking about whether we could survive such an accident, whether I could break a window to escape (what would I use?), how cold the water would be (it would snow that week), how dark it would be (would I know which way to swim?), whether I could remember how to do CPR. I don’t know who suggested we use a cellphone map to read the turns, because I don’t remember anyone speaking above my repeated reassurances, and maybe I wasn’t even speaking, maybe I was just repeating that line in my head, but my husband took out his phone and started doing just that. “Easy left coming up in 3, 2, 1 … sharp right coming up in 3, 2, 1”––that’s how we made it home. The world’s slowest, most afraid rally drivers.
This pool is primarily for competitive training and competition. I only swim here when it’s too cold to swim outdoors. Olympic-length, it can be divided into two pools twenty-five metres or twenty-five yards long. When it’s the shorter twenty-five yards, there’s a narrow canal of extra pool between the bulkheads, which is useful for treading water and little else. My primary interaction with it has been when trying to clamber around the starting blocks to reach a middle lane, and simply trying not to fall in (directly opposite this narrow stream of surplus water is where the student lifeguards sit). There are diving boards but they don’t have their own pool––they have to remove the middle lane ropes to clear entry space in the water. And there is stadium seating––the kind that rolls away when not in use into a wall of wood and metal slats. Although the tiles around the pool have been designed to be non-slip when wet, they are lacking in traction, so when moving around this pool deck you have to adopt a special casual, but careful, walk––almost a creep. Fortunately, I’ve had years of practise walking on this kind of surface. I can creep without even having to think about it.
Despite the many times I have swum here, I’m still not confident about how to get from outside the pool complex to the pool deck. It’s not straightforward. There are many corridors and doors and different levels. I’ve entered the complex from three different angles and have often found myself in a corridor that’s not familiar, and that doesn’t lead to the pool deck. More than once I’ve kept walking, and then found myself in the exact same place I’d been three minutes before, as if I’d just walked around an Escher drawing. Other times, after acknowledging I’m lost, I’ve turned around, gone back to where I entered the building, and started again, like a Choose Your Own Adventure.
Often I can actually see the pool––over a balcony, through a window––or I can hear it, smell it––I just can’t get to it. While circling the bowels of this building, I’ve seen unoccupied massage tables, gymnasts pirouetting on a balance beam, a long white table laid with a hundred bottles of water, men in hard-hats carrying what looked like a large vacuum cleaner, gymnasts stretching on a mat, a dark windowless room filled with flippers, a dark windowless room filled with kegs of Gatorade, a man bouncing a basketball against a corridor wall, a breakfast buffet. Trying to navigate the corridors of this complex is a different kind of blindness to what we experienced that Christmas Eve in Virginia, but I could do with a map. I wouldn’t even need someone to dictate the turns for me, just a plain old fold-out paper number would do––one that starts with “You are here” and ends with me dressed in my swimsuit on the pool deck. “Life is a journey, not a destination” does not apply to driving through horrifyingly dense fog, or trying to access an indoor swimming pool.