As part of Sea Cavalcade, doing the Keats Island to Armours Beach Swim has been part of my family lore since the early ’70s. This year will make about a dozen times for me – not for the competition, but for the fun.
Like the rest of my family, I owe my love of swimming, particularly in the ocean, to this place and to my dad who gave us each our first swimming lessons. More about that later.
No matter if there is a slack tide pull, this Sunday morning I shall be diving off the starting float with 40 or so other swimmers. They might include characters from the past like the welder who swam the distance with his dog, or the just-over-70-year-old woman who did the swim as a last-minute lark, and celebrated with a beverage and cigarette. Or the different younger ones, barely 11 or 12, making the distance. Or the varsity competitive swimmer who has won the race so many times, they considered nick-naming the trophy after him.
This Sunday my dad will not be at the beach to greet the returning swimmers; like many of the previous days and weeks recently, he will be lying in his bed. As my mother, his wife of more than 60 years, says, my dad at almost 91 “is very weak now.” Although he still enjoys conversation, and the poetry he learned as a youth and songs and music, he is not long for this world. So he shall be on my mind as I make the crossing.
Like other traditionalists of this historic swim, I shall be bare-skinned/sans wetsuit so I can feel as much of the eddying tentacular touch of the seawater.
Off and on over the years, someone in my family has swum that mile and a bit. I swam it first when I was a teen and working at the Gibsons pool (teaching the son of the current Sea Cavalcade maestro, Conchita). My 13-year-old brother escorted me that year in a Smitty’s Marina putt-putt rental, occupying himself with a few water doughnuts around me along the way. I guess I was taking too long. In the early 2000s, the last organizer made the good decision to have all escort crafts to only be human powered, non-fuming, a cheering partnership.
Swimming can be scary, I suppose, though the water is our natural element. My mom in her ’70s zebra print suit enjoyed gliding kicks off Hopkins, overcoming an early fright when she was a young girl on a beach off Ireland’s Atlantic. Different years; different combinations. There are photos of my siblings lined up in the water, arms outstretched ready to kick and glide as instructed by our dad. I might be wistful about it now, but being at the beach and swimming we were happiest as a family. We grew to be confident swimmers who swam to play and have fun. It’s a complete body workout, and always eases the stresses of life.
I taught my children to swim, and there are standard techniques of blowing bubbles and face in the water, and bobbing and pencil kicks, and floating, but first and last what one teaches is the love and joy of the element. My daughter, then five, was there with other well-wishers at Armours as I arrived a decade ago. I did the swim with a decent time that year and was in one of the top finishing places. Still in her skirt, my daughter waded into the water as others were still making the crossing. One brother must have caught a current that year, which sent him off towards Port Mellon before he finessed his way to the finishing beach. My daughter dipped under, laughing, fully clothed. I mumbled something about her changing into a swimsuit, but my sister said, “I recognize joy when I see it. She has no time to change.”
I fully learned to swim by being thrown into the deep end of a swampy lake past Sechelt. Off the end of a weathered old tree log, small turtles lazed by my flailing fight to tread water and float. As he tossed/pushed me, disturbing the silence of the yellow lilies on their pads, my father must have felt I was ready after so many torpedo kick swims following the shallow shore of Hopkins Landing beach. I would not recommend this method to other fathers. But looking back, I owned that lesson, and I was the author of my swimming moment, because yes, I did swim, and while I was glad to get back to clamber onto the log, I could not wait to jump in again by myself.
One year before a Keats swim, I had injured my elbow in a bike accident and my arm was weak on that side. I was determined to get a good start, but working so fiercely, head down, I had turned myself around back to the starting float with the stronger pull of the other arm, and had a confused sense of direction.
Sometimes the swim is blue crystal calm. Other years, the crossing can be choppy out in the gap between the island and the bluff. I learned to keep my direction, by using a partial head up front crawl every five strokes or so, a sort of hop forward, or the reliable comfort of the breaststroke. I keep an eye on the old athletic shack above Armours, with the target orange tarp.
No matter the conditions, if you are especially lucky as a Keats to Armours swimmer, for a few moments, you can get into a peaceful and purposeful rhythm of sublime movement with the sea. It happens to me out in the deeper spot, the bottom somewhere there darkly below, propelling myself forward with the bent arm pull taught to me at the Gibsons pool, and the loose flutter kick first taught to me by my dad, with the taste of mortal salt, the sound of my pounding heart and the feel of my gulping breaths into the sky above before I turn my face back to breathe out into the home of the water.
I am older now, with fewer years ahead of me on average than behind me. As I think of my father, and my children, the lesson of swimming for the love of swimming endures. Times and places in the Keats to Armours event are not the point for me. Like life, just being there in the moment and staying in the swim is what really matters.
Those who make the crossing know.
