The only way remotely possible to avoid drowning is to never go near water, unless you happen to join the Marine Corps. Marines do things mere humans can’t, or so I was told by my drill instructor at Parris Island, South Carolina in the spring of 1967. Part of my training to prepare for jungle warfare in Vietnam was a program called “drown-proofing” optimistically by the Marines. It was as if the technique learned would give you a superhuman skill rather than the chance for survival when stranded in deep water without a life jacket.
The training itself proved simple and cruel. My platoon members and I watched a demonstration by our instructor. He maneuvered into various positions as examples in which we could float and effectively conserve our energy. This allowed us, hypothetically, to swim and rest and swim in a slow crawl for great distances. After the brief instruction we were tossed into an Olympic-sized pool by overzealous aides strangely called “safety” swimmers.
At first, the water seemed relaxing. The familiar smell of chlorine and suntan oil lulled me into a somnambulant state, and the warm water reminded me of joyous days spent during childhood at the local municipal pool. Ah! Home, a place that had become nothing more than distant memory, returned to my consciousness as the water buoyed me with a gentle rocking. Thirty minutes in the pool without touching the sides or the bottom was our goal. Failure in the Marine Corps is not an option.
After ten minutes, I began a struggle to master techniques I didn’t fully understand. My arms beat the water faster and faster. My breath came in rapid pants as if I were a dog laboring to cool myself on a hot day. My motion became more erratic, which made staying afloat even more difficult. As I began to take in mouthfuls of chlorinated water, panic set in. I reached for the side of the pool and safety along with most of my sputtering, drowning, idiotic-looking comrades. The “safety-swimmers” rushed us with long poles and pushed us back into deep water. Every second after that initial collapse of reason followed by a wave of terror seemed like an hour. Under and up, up and under, like a fishing bobber, I flailed the water.
Just as I thought my life was ending, an instructor hooked me with a pole, grabbed my collar, and hauled me onto the concrete. I was saved and a failure, as was most of my platoon. After the drill sergeant finished calling the failures every name in his limited vocabulary and we felt sufficiently shamed, I reflected on the event and realized that I’d been too frightened to give myself over to the one technique that required no energy or skill. All I, all any of us, had to do was roll over on our backs, extend our arms like a snow angel occasionally and float. We could propel ourselves forward with our heads above water indefinitely. Then, why the panic? Was it an inability to surrender myself to the quiet of doing nothing, or extraordinarily little, in a situation that should have required great effort—survival? It wasn’t the first time I had encountered this human flaw.
Most healthy young men can swim a half mile in fifteen minutes. The only caveat to that is some aptitude for swimming. Unfortunately, my form in the water could only be compared to a turkey’s form in the air. Couple that ability with a strange notion that every challenge, no matter how stupid, was issued by fate as a test for my worthiness as a special man with a special destiny.
When I was a senior in high school, my friends and I had the habit of trespassing on land owned by a local coal company just east of town. This company strip-mined for its coal on the surface of the earth, raping the land till what was left looked more like an alien world than Indiana geography. To reclaim the pristine forests and fields, the federal government forced the company and others like it to reseed with indigenous plant life. Consequently, within a few years the undergrowth and the trees began to return. The huge holes left by the monster draglines and shovels filled with spring water and theoretically, a recreational area was born. This was one of those unfinished places we called a strip pit. Off the main roads and a pain-in-the-butt to find, adults left it alone. We snuck out there as often as possible to drink, swim, impress the girls who followed us, and goof-off in general.
One day, a group of friends unaware of my aquatic limitations, kept ragging me till I agreed to risk my life for a stupid dare that meant nothing, except that up to this point life had been a Pat Boone melody. Bored, I wanted life to be a Rolling Stones song, dangerous and full of visceral noise. Also, a girl named Denise happened to be there and I had been trying for four years to impress her enough that she might consider sharing her cornucopia of goodness with me. If not going all the way, this daring escapade of a picturesque hero might induce a kiss at least.
The Herculean task chosen by my comrades was to swim the width of the pit, less than half of a mile and not too great a distance for even a mediocre swimmer. Too bad that a mediocre classification in the water escaped me. The sun warmed the green water’s surface to a tepid nothingness, a purgatory somewhere between heaven and hell. I remember it clearly. Except on this day and in this place heaven and hell had been reversed, the fire was above me and the cool relief could be found the deeper I dove. However, the springs that fed the cold water to this strip pit were at a depth far below my capacity for holding my breath and after several tries, I gave up the struggle content to stroke toward the opposite shore and prove my challengers wrong. Light and free, my body was buoyed by the almost syrup-like quality of the warm water and the immortality of youth.
For the first hundred yards breathing came easy and regular. Throwing my right arm out in front of my body and pulling it back, reaching out with my left arm and hauling it back, I developed a cadence that suited my short arms and legs, a mechanical rhythm propelled easily by my broad chest. Everything seemed to be going well until the monotony of it all—the limitless blue sky, the distance between shores that didn’t appear to be closing, the wide expanse of white sand, and the unintelligible hum of voices behind me—caused my mind to drift to Denise. Her rejection of my last advance stung me enough to miss what had been offered through the experience, a lesson in humility. Of course, I didn’t recognize this epiphany as a teenager. It felt more like a muscle cramp, or what my dad used to call “a charley horse” in the lower leg. Pain stabbed the calf, radiated upwards to the thigh, and folded my left leg into a useless V. A little beyond halfway to my goal, I had traveled past the point of no return. The only thing left was to quit or limp forward.
My breathing unraveled into a chaotic series of chugs and groans. The leg pain crept upward even more and settled into both shoulders as a dull ache. I began to see the headline in the Princeton Daily Clarion—Local Youth Drowns Tragically While Professing Unrequited Love. I stopped swimming and attempted to massage my leg. My mother cried green tears as I sank beneath the water’s surface. My father quit drinking martinis and burned his gin with my corpse on a funeral pyre. Cousin Mike, in his new role as university scientist, bent over a Bunsen burner searching for a virus to reanimate my lifeless corpse. My sister Sandy and her boyfriend peered into my casket. He winked and said, “Better you than me.” Jim Bagby smiled and waved goodbye asking, “Can I have your baseball card collection?”
The deeper I sank, the darker day became. Had I misjudged my destiny? Life was absurd and meaningless. Did that dictate my death? Should I make a leap of faith and fabricate some meaning where none seemed to exist? I could force myself upward, a shell of a man, and scream for help. Once rescued, I would join a church and erase the absurdness of reality through my faith by following a man who walked on water, raised the dead, floated off to heaven, and wore a golden crown twenty-four hours a day. My other choice was suicide. Either way, life would lose its ridiculousness soon, replaced by an unintentional loss of consciousness. Even though both possibilities loomed, primal instinct chose another way.
Still four years before I first heard Pink Floyd and came to know Camus, I chose the path of Sisyphus—torment and pain—rolling the stone down the hill of life to the bottom and pushing it back to the crest, over and over. Breaking the water’s surface with a huge sigh, I clawed my way to the far shore in physical agony, rested awhile, and then did the back stroke to return, floating every so often to catch my breath. It was the exact same lesson my drill instructor tried to teach me, and in my fear of something inevitable, I had forgotten it. All the kids cheered my effort, gave me another can of Falls City beer, and admitted that guys from Princeton were tough. I agreed, left the strip pit, and joined the Marine Corps in the middle of the Vietnam War to emphasize the illusion of that point.
Something changed in my attitude after this incident during basic training, something that allowed me to get through some of the most horrific experiences humans can go through, something that gave me the strength to keep moving forward against the whir of bullets, the rumble of mortar shells, the stench of burning flesh, and the cries of children, not as hero but rather as an ordinary man who learned a lesson in a swimming pool. No one is drown-proof. It is only a matter of when that final wave will close over your head. Isn’t it better to go out looking up at the sky?
Jim McGarrah, Author 