Is swimming the ultimate introduction to a new place? Take the plunge and find out, says writer Caitlin Walsh Miller.
It was day six of an eight-day road trip through Canada’s East Coast. I was solo with my kids, who were two and four at the time, and tensions, shall we say, were high. But so was the temperature. It was unusually warm for late September. Post-tropical storm Lee had just rolled over Nova Scotia, giving way to summer-like weather along its south shore. Waves, six feet tall, crashed onto Bayswater Beach, a secluded, sandy spot about an hour west of Halifax.
The three of us frolicked, there’s no other word for it, in the surf, until my youngest was fully tuckered. He and I sat on the shore, watching my relentless eldest swim and jump and shriek and run. He let the waves break over him. He dove under them. He even caught a few. Eventually, he collapsed on a towel next ot us and lay like a lizard soaking the sun. He managed to eke out a question before drifting off: “Can we come back tomorrow?”
Ha, I thought. I got him. See, I get in the water whenever I can. It’s a reset, emotional, physical, spiritual. It’s a literal cleanse. And it can be balm for what ever ails you, be it jet lag, tight muscles from a long flight, one too many margaritas the night before or, say, six days in a car with your mother and little brother. And when your sticky and sweat after traipsing, all day, around a brand-new city that feels like it’s mere feet from the sun, it can be rejuvenating, reinvigorating dip that helps you get back out and explore more. (I’m looking at you, Cartagena, Colombia, and thank goodness for the tiny, perfect rooftop pool aat my boutique hotel in the city’s Old Town).
During a summer I spent in London, denied the easy access to freshwater swimming I was so used to in Canada, I was ecstatic to learn you could swim in a lake in Hyde Park. My flatmates were shocked that anyone would want to. Perhaps my blissful ignorance of what exactly might lurk in London water is what allowed me to enjoy it. Though that may be challenging: Inspired by Paris’s Herculean efforts to sanitize the Seine before the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, London mayor Sadiq Khan has vowed to make the Thames clean enough for swimming by 2034. I’m game.
But I’m always game: I’ve swum with whale sharks off the coast of Western Australia, sea turtles near the Great Maya Reef off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, and surfers off the craggy coast of northwest Ireland. In March. The water was cold then, but nothing compared to Falcon Lake, Manitoba, where I jumped into a pitch-black hole in the ice one January. (Talk about a reset, it felt like my brain got restored to factory settings. You know, in a good way).
The point is, I seek out swimming wherever I am. And because I’m a water person, taking the plunge in a new place anchors me to it, on an elemental level. I know what it tastes like. I can feel how it moves.
Not everyone’s like me, I know. My husband’s dream destination is somewhere in the woods, or on the side of a mountain, or trekking across some vast tundra. Proximity to water isn’t even a consideration. But I think I did it. I think I recruited someone else to team “water person”. I’m not sure how, or if, my eldest will remember that September swim in Nova Scotia, but I know it’s the day he fell in love with the water.