Relative Something

I don’t understand why this memory is lingering in my present day awareness, but trying to analyze it has revealed to me how fractured my recollection is. I’m guessing I was about 9, or possibly 10, years old. It was the first time in my life that I believed I was facing my own death. Up to that time, I had experienced only limited exposure to lakes or pools and did not know how to swim. I was playing on a floating raft at a swimming beach on Red Rock Lake, jumping from the raft into the neck-deep water. I didn’t realize the raft had moved to deeper water because I had become mesmerized with the experience of jumping into that water.

I know that I was with others, but I have no recollection who it specifically was. I have a sense that they contributed to my feeling blissfully free of apprehension. I don’t believe anyone noticed the time I jumped into water that was deeper than I was tall. It was a moment of 1, or maybe 2, seconds in which I mentally processed a lot more thought than that amount of time could allow.

Of all the bits and pieces of memory from this event, this is the most vivid of all: the combined feeling of shock and calm. I hadn’t sensed any hint of this possibility. I was in total oblivion of the fun I was having when all at once, I was faced with this potentially fatal reality. I surmised that I had reached the end of my life. I remember the instant of surprise, but in that same split second, the significant, calm insight that this would be it.

Pretty much as a reflex, I pushed off the bottom and sputtered as my face broke the surface. I went down again and without even thinking about it, pushed off like before. Keep in mind that the depth was probably just barely over my head, but to a kid who can’t swim, there is no range of depth; it’s either over your head, or not, and over your head may as well be the deep sea. Since it was not a long distance from where I had previously been playing, my 2 or 3 bounces had landed me back in my neck-deep zone, and that quick, I had overcome the expected demise.

Embarrassment kept me from addressing what had just transpired. Since no one appeared to have noticed, I figured it best to just keep it to myself, lest the fact of my not having learned to swim yet become something to talk about. I liked it better, left unsaid. I seem to have permanently logged the sensation of the lake bottom on my feet, the impression of a mother or sister (not necessarily mine) on shore under a tree, a variety of ages of kids playing in the water, and a day of hazy sunshine or more gray than blue sky. I have no real image of what the raft was like. I have a sense that my interest in jumping off the raft anymore was dashed, and I was left with the mixture of wanting to disavow any knowledge of what just happened, and yet still explore the drama I had just been through.

In addition to being fascinated by the different fragments of memory associated with this incident, I am also curious as to why it seems to be residing in the area of my conscious awareness of late. It strikes me now as I capture all this in writing, that I can’t wrangle a recollection of the point in which I finally achieved mastery of skills in the art of swimming. I bet it wasn’t too long after that. Maybe it served as a personal motivation. My teen years involved a pretty significant amount of time on and in Lake Riley at the Daly’s. There are quite a few memory fragments associated with that, but unlike my perceived brush with death, those remain ensconced deep in the catacombs of rarely disturbed files of the memory bank.