The picture above was taken by an amateur photographer (okay, me) on the campus of a prestigious small college in a New England state (okay, Massachusetts) in recent weeks. The college is a great place, and for all I know this sign is there to protect students against terrors beyond the college’s control: piranhas, Loch Ness monsters, bacteria, industrial-sludge run-off. But I suspect what’s going on here is more sinister: I suspect that some lawyer or bureaucrat simply decided that any swimming in open water was some theoretical lawsuit waiting to happen, and since he could see no upside to allowing swimming in this beautiful, cold water, he decided to ban it.
I have been fairly obsessed with what is retronymically called “open swimming,” which used to be just “swimming,” back when all, or most, swimming was in oceans, lakes, waterholes, etc. Then we enclosed swimming, domesticated it, regulated it, and now it’s seen as somehow aberrant to swim in a river running through a town or city, or even a college campus. We’re only supposed to swim in chlorinated, heated pools.
As a result, I make it a point to try to swim where I’m not supposed to swim: in nature. Whenever I am out of town for a day or more, I try to find a lake or a river and swim in it, if only for a couple minutes. I lasted only about five seconds in the Erie Canal, where it passes through Rochester, N.Y., here:
My interest in swimming outdoors began when I chanced upon the book Waterlog, by the very handsome English naturalist Roger Deakin. (Really, he was handsome. See:
Right?)
Deakin was well known in the U.K., not least because he refurbished an old house with a moat and wrote about swimming in his very own moat, which has given me something new to aspire to (Me: When can I get a moat? Wife: Never. Me: I will be moatless forever? Wife: Forever ever.). It’s one of my favorite books ever, even if it has a scene that I find rather unfortunate with regard to its depiction of Jewish women. (I wrote about that here.)
Inspired by Deakin, and then doubly-inspired by COVID, which left swimming as one of the safest of pastimes, I began wondering why swimming is prohibited in so many places—why not allowing swimming seems to be the default. Take Maltby Lakes, near me in New Haven. Lots of NO SWIMMING signs. Why? I spent about a month calling bureaucrats, trying to get to the bottom of why. The typical answer had something to do with the lake being a reservoir (except it no longer is). But even if it were, why would a dozen swimmers a day in it pollute the water more than, say, fish fucking in it? Or beavers fucking in it?
I was finally led to this Connecticut law, which apparently applies even to no-longer-active reservoirs, and which could land me in jail for the crime of swimming:
2011 Connecticut Code
Sec. 25-43. Bathing in and pollution of reservoirs. Aircraft on reservoirs. Penalties.(a) Any person who bathes or swims in any reservoir from which the inhabitants of any town, city or borough are supplied with water, or in any lake, pond or stream tributary to any distribution reservoir, or in any part of any lake, pond or stream tributary to any storage reservoir, which part is distant less than two miles measured along the flow of water from any part of such storage reservoir, and any person who causes or allows any pollutant or harmful substance to enter any such public water supply reservoir, whether distribution or storage, or any of its tributaries, or commits any nuisance in any public water supply reservoir or its watershed, shall be fined not more than five hundred dollars or imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.
Anyway, it’s a dumb law, and there are more like it all around us.
For more good reading on the swimming life, check out your Deakin, as well as the works of Bonnie Tsui, like this gem:
Meanwhile, I have been swimming outdoors, from about May to October, at Cedar Lake, in Chester, Conn.
Join me sometime.