Terror as an antithesis to boredom | Ammi Midstokke
I grew up in a house where you never admitted to being bored. Saying you were bored was a blatant invitation for a list of chores longer than the White Pages. I can remember no single time in which I confessed boredom, though it must have happened on a car ride. Or perhaps car rides were such a coveted break from chores, staring out the window was satisfying enough.
Someone told me bored people just lack imagination, and no one has ever accused me of that. So imagine my dismay when I recently found myself undeniably and undesirably bored.
I was on lap 7,938 in a swimming pool. Or maybe it was lap 12. They all look and feel the same.
A person, who is obviously a liar, told me that lap swimming would be meditative and zen. Others talked about “getting into the rhythm” and all the physiological benefits of hydrostatic pressure, which as far as I can tell just makes me need to pee. This is true of the toddler swimmers as well, who invariably have a class next to the lane I’m treading. This knowledge does nothing to help me inhale less pool water.
In nature, there are so many things to distract a person and promote a kind of wondrous contemplation. What are these strange fungi? Is that a cougar behind that rock? What is eating away at this tree? In the pool, the distractions are most likely swimming past some phlegm matter or a dead spider. Even these interruptions to the mundaneness of back-and-forth are almost welcome.
Twenty-five meters is not far enough to have any useful thoughts. Just about the time one threatens to emerge from a flicker to a decipherable bit of intelligence, you are faced with negotiating the end of the pool. That means deciding to stop breathing and suffocate through a turn, or adopt a haphazard T-rex swim stroke for a body-length, drawing concerned looks from the lifeguards. Then there’s the “turn” – the most exciting thing about doing a lap – that generally turns into an over-eager shove off the wall and a calf cramp. It takes half a pool length to resolve said cramp, while trying to swim in a straight line and only scream under water.
Right about the time I regain my stroke, and a thought gurgles from the primordial ooze of my gray matter in an attempt at evolution, the other end of the pool becomes visible again. I do this for somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes, covering the same amount of ground as most varieties of garden snails can in a similar amount of time. I don’t even so much as conceive a grocery list.
In that ripe imagination of mine (though it appears to have a 30-second delay), I have wondered if swimming in open water is different. While there is no pool wall to contend with, there are obviously sea monsters. They are particularly fond of middle-aged women, because our fat-to-muscle ratio mimics that of a baby seal, only we’re lathered with Hormone Replacement Therapy. Eating us is sort of like taking an anti-aging vitamin.
Lake Pend Oreille has long known about its sea creature, the Pend Oreille Paddler. She’s a cousin to Nellie from the Loch Ness, who I imagine she’ll invite over for our trans-lake swim this summer. “Yeah, yeah, there’s two of ’em, just paddling across the open water. One for each of us,” she’ll say.
Thankfully, history tells us that sea monsters eat people, and ships, whole. I’d hate for one half of me to still be trying to swim, while the other is being digested.
Seeing as we humans also came from water, I thought perhaps some part of me would find my inner mermaid, the ancestral fish that felt at home in the liquid embrace of the seas. The Viking genes must have superseded: I am far more comfortable rowing a boat.
At least while I’m swimming across the lake, I won’t be bored. My mind will take to task all the possible things lurking in the deep, dark water: Shadows of Nelly, the Pacific Northwest Giant Man Eating Lake Shark, those top secret Navy submarines, and worst of all, the Eurasian Watermilfoil.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com