By Scott Graber
It is Saturday, and we’re in North Adams, Mass.. It is overcast this morning; the temperature is 62; there is the possibility of rain later today. This morning I’ll write; but later today I’ll swim.
For most of my life I’ve owned a Speedo and a pair of plastic goggles. When I travel I rarely pass a river, inlet or beach without slipping into my suit for a quick swim. Once, in the Central African Republic, I did pause when I was told there were small worms in the Ubangi River that could cause blindness.
“But I wear goggles,” I protested to the attendant who came racing down the hotel’s dock. “They will come in through your gums,” he replied.
Here in Massachusetts, I usually swim at the Northern Berkshires YMCA. But that large, white-tiled, well-heated indoor pool is currently closed because of a leaking roof. In my effort to circumnavigate this problem, I’ve looked for nearby lakes, rivers and even scouted a few waterfalls that come with water deep enough for a few laps.
This summer my friends Don and Donna Altman are spending a month atop a nearby mountain in Vermont — and Donna is a swimmer who needs a pool in order to function properly. I know this for a fact because Donna and I (along with John Harris) have been doing laps for about 30 years.
Donna, John and I started off as members of the Parris Island Masters Swim Team under the tutelage of Richard Fetters who, in 1990, had just retired from coaching the men’s team at Michigan State University.
Coach Fetters was a taciturn, demanding coach who put together a team of civilians and active duty Marines that first practiced in the utilitarian, bare-bones swimming pool at Weapons Battalion on Parris Island. He took young Marines, and non-military adults who had raced in their youth, creating a mixed bag that repeatedly won the South Carolina Masters Championship.
Coach Fetters had one requirement if you wanted his swimming expertise and coaching.
Fetters would coach you for free. He would keep track of your weight, the efficiency of your stroke and your 100-yard butterfly times — but four times a year, you had to compete. Four times a year you had to climb into a Speedo and climb up on a stainless steel starting block and compare your fast-twitch musculature with other South Carolinians in your age group.
At one point in the early 2000s, we had 50 swimmers on our team — the largest in South Carolina — and all of those swimmers would drive to Greenville, Columbia or Myrtle Beach and compete for blue, red, yellow or white ribbons. For about 10 years, Parris Island Masters (or Beaufort Masters) brought home the championship trophy.
But after swimming with the team for 20 years or so, Donna, John and I decided that we had lost our appetite for these ribbons and, parenthetically, Coach Fetters had also retired from the pool deck. After discussion on the topic the three of us “retired” from the team but decided we would continue to practice together.
I am now 78 years old and in the past year have run into some existential problems involving my flexibility, lung capacity and twitched-out deltoids. These days I’m slower, much slower than Donna and John. Which means they finish their “sets” of 500 yards sooner than I do — and they have had to wait on me.
Right at the moment, I know that Donna is sitting on a mountain top — about 40 miles away — without a pool. I am slightly familiar with that mountain and have encouraged her to use a nearby lake; but apparently that lake comes with leeches.
I’ve explained to Donna the credit card-assisted way to detach a leech’s mouth from one’s stomach, and how to stop the flow of blood, and that these leeches do not carry any pathogen that would affect her eyesight. But, so far, she refuses to swim with the leeches.
So yesterday, Susan and I drove up into Vermont searching for a leech-free place for Donna to swim. We found that recent floods had fouled Buttermilk Falls in Ludlow, Vt., but Pike’s Falls was swimmable.
At Pike’s Falls I swam into the 15-foot-tall torrent of white water while keeping one eye on the kids who were jumping off nearby rocks. It was bracing, but not so cold as to cause hypothermia-triggered paralysis.
And there were no leeches.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
