Deep Water

The narrator decides to learn swimming at the Y.M.C.A. pool in Yakima because it was considered safe. The pool was only two or three feet deep at the shallow end and nine feet deep at the other, sloping gradually. He chose it partly because he had developed an aversion to water early in life, and his mother had warned him against the treacherous Yakima River. The safe, shallow Y.M.C.A. pool seemed the ideal place to overcome his fear and learn to swim.

The author traces the origin of his fear back to two early experiences. When he was three or four years old, his father took him to a California beach. There, the powerful waves knocked him down and swept over him, burying him in water. He felt suffocated and terrified, though his father, who knew the waves were harmless, only laughed. From that moment a residual fear of water was born in the child's heart, even though he resented his father's laughter.

The deeper, more terrifying experience came when the narrator was about ten or eleven and had begun to gain a little confidence at the Y.M.C.A. pool. One day, while waiting alone for others to arrive, a big, muscular boy of about eighteen, as a joke, picked him up and tossed him into the deep end of the pool. The author sank straight to the bottom, frightened but not yet panic-stricken. He planned that when his feet touched the bottom he would make a big jump and come to the surface, lie flat and paddle to the edge.

But reality did not match his plan. The nine feet of water seemed like ninety. When his feet finally touched the bottom, he sprang upward with all his strength, but rose far too slowly. He came up slowly, opened his eyes and saw only water, with a yellow surface far above. He grew panicky. He reached out for something to hold, but grasped only water. He tried to scream but no sound came. Down he went again, his lungs aching, his head throbbing, terror complete.

He rose to the surface a second time and again tried desperately to grab something, but there was nothing to hold. He went down once more. This time, strangely, a great fear gripped him only at first; then a blackness swept over his brain and the terror left. He felt drowsy, relaxed, and ready to sleep. He had no more fear. Then he crossed into oblivion and remembered nothing more. When he revived, he found himself lying on his stomach beside the pool, vomiting. The muscular boy who had thrown him in stood by, saying it was only a joke and that he had carried it too far.

This near-drowning left a deep and lasting impact. For days afterwards the boy was haunted by a haunting fear and felt weak and trembling. He could not eat. The experience produced in him a persistent fear that ruined his life for years. Whenever he went near water — whether the warm waters of a lake, the icy streams of the Cascades, or the Tieton or Bumping rivers — this fear gripped his heart. He could not enjoy canoeing, boating, swimming, fishing or any water sport, and the fear followed him wherever he went.

Years later, the author was determined to get rid of this fear once and for all. He decided to use deliberate, systematic effort and engaged a swimming instructor to teach him. The instructor worked methodically. He put a belt around the author, attached to a rope that ran through a pulley fixed to an overhead cable. Holding the rope, the instructor let the author go back and forth across the pool, week after week, gradually building his confidence and removing the panic that arose whenever he was underwater.

The instructor taught him each skill piece by piece. He taught him to put his face under water and exhale, and to raise his nose and inhale — repeating the exercise hundreds of times until the fear of putting his head under water was gone. Then he taught him to kick with his legs, practising for weeks at the side of the pool until his legs worked properly. Finally, the instructor combined all the parts into an integrated whole, making the author a swimmer. After three months the tension began to slack, but the old terror would still return in bits.

Even after the instructor had trained him, the author was not fully convinced that all the fear was gone. So he undertook his own tests of courage. He went alone to Lake Wentworth in New Hampshire and swam two miles across to Stamp Act Island. Only once did the terror return — in the middle of the lake — but he challenged it, telling it to flee, and swam on. To make his conquest complete, he went to the Tieton to Conrad Meadows, up to Conrad Creek and Meade Glacier, and dived into Warm Lake, swimming across it and back. There, at last, he was certain his fear of water had truly died. He had conquered it.

From this prolonged ordeal the author drew a profound lesson about life and fear. In death there is peace, but it is the fear of death and the fear of fear itself that is terrible. Having experienced both the sensation of dying and the terror that fear of dying can produce, he had become free. His experience had a deeper meaning for him, echoing the words he had read in Roosevelt's saying — 'All we have to fear is fear itself.' He understood that the will to live somehow grows in intensity only after one has known the worst.