Swimming and our ancestral protozoa | Ammi Midstokke

One of the most redeeming qualities of being a writer is that one has a well-developed imagination.

While it has often convinced me that sounds outside my tent are bears, coyotes and Sasquatch, it has also spent the last several months telling me I glide through the water with increasing fishlike grace.

Which is to say, my imagination doesn’t just stretch, it lies.

I found myself in Snohomish, recently, with two swimming coaches who donated their time out of the goodness of their hearts – and fear for my life – to teach me how to swim with something they referred to as “effortless endurance.”

The ridiculous swim I’m doing in July is part of our local Pride celebration: a nod to the importance of representation in the outdoors, and recognition that the outdoors are often the common ground of the politically dissonant.

It is a place we can come together and appreciate the values we share and this is an increasingly important act we must engage in within our communities.

We may refer to this era as “effortful endurance.”

While I have been busy imagining a world in which decorum, civil rights and the names of historic buildings are restored, I have also been imagining myself improving as a swimmer by the sheer amount of time I’ve spent paddling back and forth in a chlorinated pool.

So when the coaches said, “Show us what you’ve got,” and took some footage, I was optimistic.

When I emerged from the water, the look of horror on their faces suggested concern and curious fascination.

Like people who can’t look away from an accident, we watched the video in slow motion and silent reverence, all wondering the same thing: What is this woman doing?

First of all, I’ve never seen someone quite so angry at the water, as though it were the only thing standing between a ravenous me and a candy machine, or a tiny dog and an offending ankle.

The attack I launched suggested there was a war to be won on the far side of the pool, each arm slamming down, beating on a watery door, then me screaming silently into my armpit occasionally.

The effort seemed somewhat coordinated, until my legs appeared in the frame.

Whatever they were doing, it was not swimming.

It may well be that an entirely different brain is controlling my legs.

Perhaps they were trying to run away from this activity altogether, churning like a Mississippi river boat in reverse, in the opposite direction of my torso.

One leg would jerk out to the right in a sub-surface karate kick, the other would pretend to be riding a bike underwater.

How I moved forward at all is a mystery, and this confusion was mirrored on the coaches’ faces.

All I could think was, “Good god, have I looked like this for six months?”

No wonder the lifeguards keep trying to direct me to the physical therapy pool.

They probably think I have a spinal injury, or am perhaps possessed like Steve Martin was in “All of Me.”

Even more curious: How does my brain not know what the hell is going on back there?

Whatever I’m draggin’ in my wagon, the wheel is broke and my front end is just carrying on like a parent ignoring their tantrumming toddler.

I spent 7 hours in and out of the water with patient and optimistic coaches.

First, they taught me how to not feel like I’m suffocating, and then they taught me how to balance my body. I watched them swim with easy, long strokes and did my best to emulate the movement.

They encouraged me, and my legs.

My legs refused.

The coaches gave me one of those floaty pillows to pinch between the knees to see if my legs would just take a break. The legs were not having it.

For years, they have been the mechanism of propulsion, the star of the adventure show, collecting scratches and scars, and proudly carrying me through the mountains.

This flapping and flopping about, this aquatic emotional outburst, was a selfish protest on their part.

The concept of proprioception – our body’s ability to sense what it is doing – is not unfamiliar to me, but my lack of it is probably why I don’t dance in public.

I never want to disrupt the illusion of my nimble elegance, which has been threatened several times by those finish-line race photos.

But I must have a talk with my legs, because in a month, I’ll need them to participate in a production in which they are decidedly extras.

As June is upon us, it is time to enter the real water, the actual lake, the 55-to-58 degree body of snow and river runoff that will host these wayward limbs.

To say I am terrified is an understatement.

Yet I am hopeful that being outside will cue my legs to play along, to sense their usefulness once more and move in some fashion that gets me from one shore to another.

People tell me that open water swimming is a Zen experience, as if we return to some prehistoric natural state once submerged.

Having seen how an amoeba shape-shifts its own limbs in no particular order, and the similarities between its haphazard migration across a wet microscope slide, I see the amoeba and I still have much in common beyond our determination.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com