WATER AND ME


I have always seemed to have a love/hate relationship with water. Not in the bathing sense and I should drink a lot more of it but this issue boils down to the fact that water seems out to get me.

The love part of it started when I was about four. Maybe as young as three. There was a creek behind our house in Flint and I spent many hours down there, broad-jumping across the creek, of course always landing in the middle. Oh bother. Fishing with a stick, string, safety pin, and worm was one of my favorite pastimes. Catching polliwogs. Watching the water skimmers skate across the surface. Examining a dead muskrat trapped in the ice where I was sliding around in the large bowl my mother loaned me. Loved, loved, loved that water, and ice.

Then there was the ditch we kids swam in when we moved temporarily to the scrawny sandy treeless suburbs of Detroit. Dirty ditch water and dirty kids having a great time.
Then back to my creek in Flint for a couple more years of fun and frolic.

Summers were also spent at Buell Lake where my mother, brother, sisters, and I lived for 2 or three months every summer from my age of 3 thru 9. Dad worked during the week and spent weekends with us. I loved and lived in the water from morning to night, only coming out for meals (after which I was forced to wait a grueling one hour) before returning to my blessed water.

I spent my time in the lake mostly alone. On weekends the crowds arrived and it was very congested then. I preferred the solitude and spent hours sitting under an overturned rowboat that was tied to the dock. No one ever came to check on me that I know of. The water and I were friends.

At about age 5 my dad taught me to row a boat. I was so proud. On the Fourth of July weekend I decided to use my new skills. The beach was packed with families. It was not hard to herd a group of small children into my rowboat. As I remember they were all younger than I, probably between 2 and 4. I loaded them up and started rowing for the middle of the lake. It was a tour and an adventure for them, I thought.

Suddenly when we were about 30/40 feet from the shore, I heard screaming and crying. Surprised, I turned my head toward the beach and there was a great number of women and men all making un-Godly noises. It about scared the bejeebers out of me. I could not imagine what the problem was. Thankfully my crew was sitting nicely on the seats and the floor of the rowboat, behaving beautifully.

When I saw my mom frantically waving me back to the shore, then, and only then did I get a clue that all was not well. I slowly and reluctantly used my giant oars to turn the boat around and head back to the mommies and daddies, and my own very upset mommy. Tears and panic and anger and chaos met me on the shore. I don't even remember getting a spanking but it would have been a miracle to escape that.

When we moved north to Boyne City, there was a river running through it. Right into Lake Charlevoix. I was thrilled. More wonderful water. Swimming in the lake and river was great fun but for the first time in my life, I found water to be a tiny bit dangerous. I could swim fine. I had spent too much time in the water for that not to be. But the unthinkable happened when at age 10, I accidentally stepped off the drop off from shallow warm water into very deep cold water.

One step behind me were about 5 friends but I went straight down out of sight and they just stood there, up their waists in safety. I came back up and though I was only a few feet away from them, I forgot how to swim. I sank again. I came up and reached out my hand but they just looked at me with big round eyes. Somehow I managed to save myself and reached the ledge again and got my footing back. It was a shock I would not soon forget.

We also spent hours swimming in the river. We swam with slippery eels skimming along our bodies and bloodsucking leeches that we had to pick off periodically. The summers were spent in the cool confines of lots of water. Sometimes we would leave the city limits and walk upriver to more secluded river swimming. There would be groups of 5 to 10 kids. So why was I alone in the middle of the river late one afternoon when the S.O.B.s opened the dam further up river? Why was I, alone, struggling in a giant wave of water that washed over me, raising the water level from five feet to ten feet deep in seconds. Wild and furious rushing water trying to sweep me away to parts unknown.

Again I am crying out for help and again I simply have an audience and I am the show. Yelling HELP! HELP! did not help at all. They say one usually goes down about 3 times before drowning. I must be a real fighter then. I don't know how it occurred to me but I finally stopped fighting and let the water carry me downriver as I struggled closer and closer to the bank. Dirt never felt so good as it did that day.

I made it for many more years, in Florida, swimming in 40 foot deep rock pits, (even in the dark of night), the deep blue ocean, pools, and anywhere else I could find the blessed blue stuff. No more problem with water trying to do me in. (Well, a few, but I will pass over those for now.)

Until many years later in North Carolina in a place I think is called Deep Creek. My second hubby, my 8 year old granddaughter, and I went camping and tubing. It was not the first time doing this but it was certainly my last time. The water was very cold, the sun very hot, and tubing was great. The tubes were large, truck or tractor tubes, not skinny little automobile tubes. Yes, automobile tires used to have inner-tubes.  Pop-pop held to Granddaughter's tube as they floated gently along. I was right behind them. There were lots of other people tubing at the same time. The water was shallow in places and very deep swirling holes in others. There were small rapids where one would float recklessly over and hope one could keep one's balance and not tip over. This particular one was not successful.

Hubby and GD were a ways ahead of me when I went over my very last small rapids. My big tube flipped over and landed on top of me in very deep water. The current was churning and I was trying desperately to get my head out of the water. Every time I tried to come up, the tube bonked me down again. I was taking on water for the last time, kicking and fighting to survive but finding no way out. I remembered a woman about my age had drowned there a week or so earlier. I suddenly realized my fate and actually began to accept it.

Suddenly someone grabbed my hair and pulled me out. It was a man that was standing in shallow water and had simply reached over to the deep water, moved the inner-tube, and yanked me out. I looked downstream and saw my hubby and GD hanging onto the bank and watching helplessly. My legs were badly bruised and bleeding from the rocks that I had been kicking against. However, it did not take me long to pull my tube out of that damned killer water. Then I limped all the way back to the campsite dragging my tube behind me, while Hubby and GD finished their tubing adventure in peace and quiet.