It is agreed by all, I think, that the two happiest periods in a man’s life are his boyhood and about ten years from now. We are exactly in the position described in the hymn:
“Lo! On a narrow neck of land
‘Twixt two unbounded seas we stand,
And cast a wishful eye.” *
*[I am told, on good authority, that this last line of the
three belongs to another hymn. As it is just what I want to
say, I’m going to let it stand as it is.]
If I remember right, the hymn went to the tune of “Ariel,” and I can see John Snodgrass, the precentor, sneaking a furtive C from his pitch-pipe, finding E flat and then sol, and standing up to lead the singing, paddling the air gently with: Down, left, sing. Well, no matter about that now. What I am trying to get at, is that we have all a lost Eden in the past and a Paradise Regained in the future. ‘Twixt two unbounded seas of happiness we stand on the narrow and arid sand-spit of the present and cast a wishful eye. In hot weather particularly the wishful eye, when directed toward the lost Eden of boyhood, lights on and lingers near the Old Swimming-hole.
I suppose boys do grow up into a reasonable enjoyment of their faculties in big seaside cities and on inland farms where there is no accessible body of water larger than a wash-tub, but I prefer to believe that the majority of our adult male population in youth went in swimming in the river up above the dam, where the big sycamore spread out its roots a-purpose for them to climb out on without muddying their feet. Some, I suppose, went in at the Copperas Banks below town, where the current had dug a hole that was “over head and hands,” but that was pretty far and almost too handy for the boys from across the tracks.
The wash-tub fellows will have to be left out of it entirely. It was an inferior, low-grade Eden they had anyhow, and if they lost it, why, they ‘re not out very much that I can see. And I rather pity the boys that lived by the sea. They had a good time in their way, I suppose, with sailboats and things, but the ocean is a poor excuse for a swimming-hole. They say salt-water is easier to swim in; kind of bears you up more. Maybe so, but I never could see it; and even so, if it does, that slight advantage is more than made up for by the manifold disadvantages entailed. First place, there’s the tide to figure on. If it was high tide last Wednesday at half-past ten in the morning, what time will it be high tide today? A boy can’t always go when he wants to, and it is no fun to trudge away down to the beach only to find half a mile of soft, gawmy mud between him and the water. And he can’t go in wherever it is deep enough and nobody lives near. People own the beach away out under water, and where he is allowed to go in may be a perfect submarine jungle of eel-grass or bottomed with millions of razor-edged barnacles that rip the soles of his feet into bleeding rags. Then, too, when one swims, more or less water gets into one’s nose and mouth. River-water may not be exactly what a fastidious person would choose to drink habitually, but there is this in its favor as compared with sea-water: it will stay down after it is swallowed; also, it doesn’t gum up your hair; also, if you want to take a cake of soap with you, all you have to look out for is that you don’t lose the soap. Nobody tries to use toilet soap in sea-water more than once.
And surf-bathing! If there is a bigger swindle than surf-bathing, the United States Postal authorities haven’t heard of it yet. It is all very well for the women. They can hang on to the ropes and squeal at the big waves and have a perfectly lovely time. Some of the really daring ones crouch down till they actually get their shoulder-blades wet. You have to see that for yourself to believe it, but it is as true as I am sitting here. They do so—some of them. But good land! There’s no swimming in surf-bathing, no fun for a man. The water is all bouncing up and down. One second it is over head and hands, and the next second it is about to your knees, with a malicious undertow tickling your feet and tugging at your ankles; and growling: “Aw, you think you’re some, don’t you? Yes. Well, for half a cent wouldn’t take you out and drown you.” And I don’t like the looks of that boat patrolling up and down between the ropes and the raft. It is too suggestive, too like the skeleton at the banquet, too blunt a reminder that maybe what the undertow growls is not all a bluff.
Another drawback to the ocean as a swimming-hole is that the distances are all wrong. If you want to go to the other side of the “crick” you must take a steamboat. There is no such thing as bundling up your clothes and holding them out of water with one hand while you swim with the other, perhaps dropping your knife or necktie in transit. I have never been on the other side of the “crick” even on a steamboat, but I am pretty sure that there are no yellow-hammers’ nests over there or watermelon patches. There were above the dam. At the seaside they give you as an objective point a raft, anchored at what seems only a little distance from where it gets deep enough to swim in, but which turns out to be a mighty far ways when the water bounces so. When you get there, blowing like a quarter-horse and weighing nine tons as you lift yourself out, there is nothing to do but let your feet hang over while you get rested enough to swim back. It wasn’t like that above the dam.
I tell you the ocean is altogether too big. Some profess to admire it on that account, but it is my belief that they do it to be in style. I admit that on a bright, blowy day, when you can sit and watch the shining sails far out on the horizon’s rim, it does look right nice, but I account for it in this way: it puts you in mind of some of these expensive oil paintings, and that makes you think it is kind of high class. And another thing: It recalls the picture in the joggerfy that proved the earth was round because the hull of a ship disappears before the sails, as it would if the ship was going over a hill. You sweep your eye along where the sky and water meet, and it seems you can note the curvature of the earth. Maybe it is that, and maybe it is all in your own eye. I am not saying.
There are good points, too, about the sea on a clear night when the moon is full; or when there is no moon, and the phosphorescence in the water shows, as if mermaids’ children were playing with blue-tipped matches. I like to see it when a gale is blowing, and the white caps race. Yes, and when it is a flat calm, with here and there a tiny cat’s-paw crinkling the water into gray-green crepe. And also when—but there! it is no use cataloguing all kinds of weather and all hours of the day and night. What I don’t approve of in the ocean is its everlasting bigness. It is so discouraging. It makes a body seem so no-account and insignificant. You come away feeling meaner than a sheep-killing dog. “Oh, what’s the use?” you say to yourself. “What’s the use of my breaking my neck to do anything or be anybody? Before I was born—before History began—before any foot of being that could be called a man trod these sands, the waves beat thus the pulse of time. When I am gone—when all that man has made, that seems so firm and everlasting, shall have crumbled into the earth, whence it sprang, this wave, so momentary and so eternal, shall still surge up the slanting beach, and trail its lacy mantle in retreat.... O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence, and be no more seen.”
And that’s no way for a man to feel. He ought to be confident and sure of himself. If he hasn’t yet done all that he laid out to do, he should feel that it is in him to do it, and that he will before the time comes for him to go, and that when it is done it shall be orth while.
It is the ocean’s everlasting bigness that makes it so cold to swim in. At the seaside bathing pavilions they have a blackboard whereon they chalk up “70” or “72” or whatever they think folks will like. They never say in so many words that a man went down into the water and held a thermometer in it long enough to get the true temperature, but they lead you to believe it. All I have to say is that they must have very optimistic thermometers. I just wish some of these poor little seashore boys could have a chance to try the Old Swimming-hole up above the dam. Certainly along about early going-barefoot time the water is a little cool, but you take it in the middle of August—ah, I tell you! When you come out of the water then you don’t have to run up and down to get your blood in circulation or pile the warm sand on yourself or hunt for the steam-room. Only thing is, if you stay in all day, as you want to, it thins your blood, and you get the “fever ‘n’ ager.” But you can stay in as long as you want to, that ‘s the point, without your lips turning the color of a chicken’s gizzard.
And there’s this about the Old Swimming-hole, or there was in my day: There were no women and girls fussing around aid squalling: “Now, you stop splashin’ water on me! Quit it now! Quee-yut!” I don’t think t looks right for women folks to have anything to do with water in large quantities. On a sail-boat, now, they are the very—but perhaps we had better not go into that. At a picnic, indeed, trey used to take off their shoes and stockings and paddle their feet in the water, but that was as much as ever they did. They never thought of going in swimming. Even at the seashore, now when Woman is so emancipated, they go bathing not swimming. I don’t like to see a woman swim any more than I like to see a woman smoke a cigar. And for the same reason. It is more fun than she is entitled to. A woman’s place is home minding the baby, and cooking the meals. Nothing would do her but she had to be born a woman, she had the same liberty of choice that we men had. Very well, I say, let her take the consequencies.
It is only natural, then, that she should refuse to let her boys go swimming. She pays off her grudge that way. Just because she can’t go herself she is bound the they shan’t either. She says they will get drowned, but we know about that. It is only an excuse to keep them from having a little fun. She has to say something. They won’t get drowned. Why, the idea! They haven’t the least intention of any such thing.
“Well, but Robbie, supposing you couldn’t help yourself?”
“How couldn’t help myself?”
“Why, get the cramps. Suppose you got the cramps, then what?”
“Aw, pshaw! Cramps nothin’! They hain’t no sich of a thing. And, anyhow, if I did get ‘em, wouldn’t jist kick ‘em right out. This way.”
“Now, Robbie, you know you did have a terrible cramp in your foot just only the other night. Don’t you remember?”
“Aw, that! That ain’t nothin’. That ain’t the cramps that drownds people. Didn’t I tell you wouldn’t fist kick it right out? That’s what they all do when they git the cramps. But they don’t nobody git ‘em now no more.”
“I don’t want you to go in the water and get drowned. You know you can’t swim.”
This is too much. Oh, this is rank injustice! Worse yet, it is bad logic.
“How ‘m I ever goin’ to learn if you don’t let me go to learn?”
“Well, you can’t go, and that’s the end of it.”
Isn’t that just like a woman? Perfectly unreasonable! Dear! dear!
“Now, Ma, listen here. S’posin’ we was all goin’ some place on a steamboat, me and you and Pa and the baby and all of us, and—”
“That won’t ever happen, I guess.”
“CAN’T YOU LET ME TELL YOU? And s’posin’ the boat was to sink, and I could swim and save you from drown—”
“You’re not going swimming, and that’s all there is about it.”
“Other boys’ mas lets them go. I don’t see why I can’t go.”
No answer.
“Ma, won’t you let me go? I won’t get drowned, hope to die if I do. Ma, won’t you let me go? Ma! Ma-a!—Maw-ah!”
“Stop yelling at me that way. Good land! Do you think I’m deaf?”
“Won’t you let me go? Please, won’t you let—”
“No, I won’t. I told you I wouldn’t, and I mean it. You might as well make up your mind to stay at home, for you’re—not—going. Hush up now. This instant, sir! Robbie, do you hear me? Stop crying. Great baby! wouldn’t be ashamed to cry that way, as big as you are!”
Mean old Ma! Guess she’d cry too’f she could see the other kids that waited for him to go and ask her—if she could see them moving off, tired of waiting. They’re ‘most up to Lincoln Avenue.
“Oooooooooooo-hoo—hoo—hoo—hoohoooooooooo-ah! I wanna gow-ooooo.”
“Did you hoe that corn your father told you to?”
“Oooooooooooo-hoo-hoo-hoo-oooooooo! I wanna gow-ooooooo.”
“Robbie! Did you hoe that corn?”
The last boy, the one with the stone-bruise on his heel, limps around the corner. They have all the fun. His ma won’t let him go barefoot because it spreads his feet.
“Robbie! Answer me.”
“Mam?”
“Did you hoe that corn your father told you to?”
“Yes mam.”
“All of it? Did you hoe all of it?”
“Prett’ near all of it.” Well begun is half done. One hill is a good beginning, and half done is pretty nearly all.
“Go and finish it.”
“I will if you’ll let me go swimmin’.”
It flashes upon him that even now by running he can catch up with the other fellows. He can finishing the hoeing when he gets back.
“You’ll do it anyhow, and you’re not going swimming. Now, that’s the end of it. You march out to that garden this minute, or I’ll take a stick to you. And don’t let me hear another whimper out of you. Robbie! Come back here and shut that door properly. I shall tell your father how you have acted. Wouldn’t be ashamed—I’d be ashamed to show temper that way.”
It says for children to obey their parents, but if more boys minded their mothers there would be fewer able to swim. While I shrink with horror from even seeming to encourage dropping the hoe when the sewing-machine gets to going good, by its thunderous spinning throwing up an impervious wall of sound to conceal retreat into the back alley, across the street, up the alley back of Alexander’s, and so on up to Fountain Avenue in time to catch up with the gang, still I regard swimming as an exercise of the extremest value in the development of the growing boy. It builds up every muscle. It is particularly beneficial to the lungs. To have a good pair of lungs is the same thing as having a good constitution. It is nice to have a healthy boy, and it is nice to have an obedient boy, but if one must choose which he will have—that’s a very difficult question. I think it should be left to the casuists. Nevertheless, now is the boy’s only chance to grow. He will have abundant opportunities to learn obedience.
In the last analysis there are two ways of acquiring the art of swimming, the sudden way and the slow way. I have never personally known anybody that learned in the sudden way, but I have heard enough about it to describe it. It it’s the quickest known method. One day the boy its among the gibbering white monkeys at the river’s edge, content to splash in the water that comes but half way to his crouching knees. The next day he swims with the big boys as bold as any of them. In the meantime his daddy has taken him out in a boat, out where it is deep—Oh! Ain’t it deep there?—and thrown him overboard. The boat is kept far enough away to be out of the boy’s reach and yet near enough to be right there in case anything happens. (I like that “in case anything happens.” It sounds so cheerful.) It being what Aristotle defines as “a ground-hog case,” the boy learns to swim immediately. He has to.
It seems reasonable that he should. But still and all, I don’t just fancy it. Once when a badly scared man grabbed me by the arms in deep water I had the fear of drowning take hold of my soul, and it isn’t a nice feeling at all. Somehow when I hear folks praising up this method of teaching a child to swim, I seem to hear the little fellow’s screams that he doesn’t want to be thrown into the water. I can see him clinging to his father for protection, and finding that heart hard and unpitying. I can see his fingernails whiten with his clutch on anything that gives a hand-hold. His father strips off his grip, at first with boisterous laughter, and then with hot anger at the little fool. He calls him a cry-baby, and slaps his mouth for him, to stop his noise. The little body sprawls in the air and strikes with a loud splash, and the child’s gargling cry is strangled by the water whitened by his mad clawings. I can see his head come up, his eyes bulging, and his face distorted with the awful fear that is ours by the inheritance of ages. He will sink and come up again, not three times, but a hundred times. Eventually he will win safe to shore, panting and trembling, his little heart knocking against his ribs, it is true, but lord of the water from that time forth. It is a very fine method, yes... but... well, if it was my boy I had just as lief he tarried with the little white monkeys at the river’s edge. Let him squeal and crouch and splash and learn how to half drown the other fellow by shooting water at him with the heel of his hand. Let him alone. He will be watching the others swim. He will edge out a little farther and kick up his heels while with his hands he holds on the ground. He will edge out a little farther still and try to keep his feet on the bottom and swim with his hands. Be patient in his attempt to combine the two methods of travel. He is not the only one that fears to be one thing or the other, and regards a mixture of both as the safest way to get along.
No, I cannot say that I wholly approve of the sudden method of learning to swim. It has the advantange of lumping all the scares of a lifetime into one and having it over with, and yet I don’t suppose the scare of being thrown into the water by one’s daddy is really greater than being ducked in mid-stream by some hulking, cackle-voiced big boy. It seems greater though, I suppose, because a fellow cannot very well relieve his feelings by throwing stones at his daddy and bawling: “Goldarn you anyhow, you—you big stuff! I’ll get hunk with you, now you see if I don’t!” Here would be just the place to make the little boy tie knots in the big boy’s shirt-sleeves, soak the knots in water, and pound them between stones. But that is kind of common, I think. They told about it at the swimming-hole above the dam, but nobody was mean enough to do it. Maybe they did it down at the Copperas Banks below town. The boys from across the tracks went there, a race apart, whom we feared, and who hated us, if the legend chalked up on the fences “DAMB THE PRODESTANCE,” meant anything.
Under the slow method of learning to swim one had leisure to observe the different fashions—dog-fashion and cow-fashion, steamboat-fashion, and such. The little kids and beginners swam dog-fashion, which on that account was considered contemptible. The fellow was sneered at that screwed up his face as if in a cloud of suffocating dust, and fought the water with noise and fury, putting forth enough energy to carry him a mile, and actually going about two feet if he were headed down stream. Scientific men say that the use of the limbs, first on one side and then on the other, is instinctive to all creatures of the monkey tribe. That is the way they do in an emergency, since that is the way to scramble up among the tree limbs. I know that it is the easiest way to swim, and the least effective. When the arms are extended together in the breast stroke, it is as much superior to dogfashion as man is superior to the ape. I have always thought that to swim thus with steady and deliberate arm action, the water parting at the chin and rising just to the root of the underlip, was the most dignified and manly attitude the human being could put himself in. Cow-fashion was a burlesque of this, and the swimmer reared out of water with each stroke, creating tidal waves. It was thought to be vastly comic. Steamboat-fashion was where a fellow swam on his back, keeping his body up by a gentle, secret paddling motion with his hands, while with his feet he lashed the water into foam, like some river stern-wheeler. If he could cry: “Hoo! hoo! hoo!” in hoarse falsetto to mimic the whistle, it was an added charm.
It was a red-headed boy from across the tracks on his good behavior at the swimming-hole above the dam that I first saw swim hand-over-hand, or “sailor-fashion” as we called it, rightly or wrongly, I know not. I can hear now the crisp, staccato little smack his hand gave the water as he reached forward.
It has ever since been my envy and despair. It is so knowing, so “sporty.” I class it with being able to wear a pink-barred shirt front with a diamond-cluster pin in it; with having my clothes so nobby and stylish that one thread more of modishness would be beyond the human power to endure; with being genuinely fond of horseracing; with being a first-class poker player, I mean a really first-class one; with being able to swallow a drink of whisky as if I liked it instead of having to choke it down with a shudder; with knowing truly great men like Fitzsimmons, or whoever it is that is great now, so as to be able to slap him on the back and say: “Why, hello! Bob, old boy, how are you?” with being delighted with the company of actors, instead of finding them as thin as tissue-paper—what wouldn’t I give if I could be like that? My life has been a sad one. But I might find some comfort in it yet if I coin only get that natty little spat on the water when I lunge forward swimming overhand.
We used to think the Old Swimming-hole was a bully place, but I know better now. The sycamore leaned well out over the water, and there was a trapeze on the branch that grew parallel with the shore, but the water near it was never deep enough to dive into. And that is another occasion of humiliation. I can’t dive worth a cent. When I go down to the slip behind Fulton Market—they sell fish at Fulton Market; just follow your nose and you can’t miss it—and see the rows of little white monkeys doing nothing but diving, I realize that the Old Swimming-hole with all its beauties, its green leafiness, its clean, long grass to lie upon while drying in the sun, or to pull out and bite off the tender, chrome-yellow ends, was but a provincial, country-fake affair. There were no watermelon rinds there, no broken berry-baskets, no orange peel, no nothing. All the fish in it were just common live ones. And there was no diving. But at the real, proper city swimming-place all the little white monkeys can dive. Each is gibbering and shrieking: “Hey, Chim-meel Chimmee! Hey, Chim-mee! Chimmee! Hey, CHIM-MEEEE! How’ss t ‘iss?” crossing himself and tipping over head first, coming up so as to “lay his hair,” giving a shaking snort to clear his nose and mouth of water, regaining the ladder with three overhand strokes (every one of them with that natty little spat that I can’t get), climbing up to the string-piece and running for Chimmy, red-eyed, shivering, and dripping, to ask: “How wass Cat?” And I can’t dive for a cent—that is, I can’t dive from a great elevation. I set my teeth and vow I just will dive from ten feet above the water, and every time it gets down to a poor, picayune dive off the lowest round of the ladder. I blame my early education for it. I was taught to be careful about pitching myself head foremost on rocks and broken bottles. I used to think it was a fine swimming-hole, and that I was having a grand, good time, well worth any ordinary licking; but now that I have traveled around and seen things, I know that it was a poor, provincial, country-jake affair after all. The first time I swam across and back without “letting down” it was certainly an immense place, but when I went back there a year ago last summer—why, pshaw! it wasn’t anything at all. It was a dry summer, I admit, but not as dry as all that. A poor, pitiful, provincial, two-for-a cent—and yet... and yet... And yet I sat there after I had dressed, and mused upon the former things—the life that was, but never could be again; the Eden before whose gate was a flaming sword turning every way. The night was still and moonless. The Milky Way slanted across the dark dome above. It was far from the street lamps that greened among the leafy maples in the silent streets. Gushes of air stirred the fluttering sycamore, and whispered in the tall larches that marched down the boundary line of the Blymire property. The last group of swimmers had turned into the road from around the clump of willows at the end of the pasture. The boy that is always the last one had nearly caught up with the others, for the velvet pat of his bare feet in the deep dust was slowing. Their eager chatter softened and softened, until it blended with the sounds of night that verge on silence, the fall of a leaf, the up-springing of a trodden tuft of grass, the sleepy twitter of a dreaming bird, and the shrilling of locusts patiently turning a creaking wheel. I heard the thump of hoofs and buggy wheels booming in the covered bridge, and a shudder came upon me that was not all the chill of falling dew. Again I was a little boy, standing in a circle of my fellows and staring at something pale, stretched out upon the ground. Ben Snyder had dived for It and found It and brought It up and laid It on the long, clean grass. Some one had said we ought to get a barrel and roll It on the barrel, but there was none there. And then some one said: “No, it was against the law to touch anything like That before the Coroner came.” So, though we wished that something might be done, we were glad the law stepped in and stringently forbade us touching what our flesh crept to think of touching. No longer existed for us the boy that had the spy-glass and the “Swiss Family Robinson.” Something cold and terrible had taken his place, something that could not see, and yet looked upward with unwinking eyes. The gloom deepened, and the dew began to fall. We could hear the boy that ran for the doctor whimpering a long way off. We wanted to go home, and yet we dared not. Something might get us. And we could not leave That alone in the dark with It’s eyes wide open. The locusts in the grass turned and turned their creaking wheel, and the wind whispered in the tall larches. We heard the thump of hoofs and wheels booming in the covered bridge. It was the doctor, come too late. He put his head down to It’s bosom (the cold trickled down our backs), and then he said it was too late. If we had known enough, he said, we might have saved him. We slunk away. It was very lonesome. We kept together, and spoke low. We stopped to hearken for a moment outside the house where the boy had lived that had the spy-glass and the “Swiss Family Robinson.” Some one had told his mother. And then, with a great and terrible fear within us, we ran each to his own home, swiftly and silently. We knew now why mother did not want us to go swimming.
But the next afternoon when Chuck Grove whistled in our back alley and held up two fingers, I dropped the hoe and went with him. It was bright daylight then, and that is different from the night.