Everyone needs to learn how to swim.  I’m quite sure it is good to learn how to swim, just for the swimming sake of it all, but the benefits beyond that seem to surpass the previous one mentioned by far.

My swimming journey didn’t begin swimmingly.  It began in the humblest of ways and progressed from there.  Of course, we probably all started out in those little plastic wading pools that give you a total of 8 inches of water to try to submerse yourself in.  You can fool yourself into thinking you can swim when you are in that state of your swimming journey, but that ain’t real swimming.  In fact, real swimming doesn’t really involve swimming at all.  But more on that later.

The next stage of swimming for most folks who live in southwest Kansas was/is your typical stock tank.  We thundered with importance when we came in from swimming in these.  All of 10 feet across and a total depth two feet off water.  We swam these ponds for hours at a time.  So much so that the bottom of our toes were worn raw from the repeated contact they made with the rough steel surface on the floor of these tanks.  Of course, we swam.  We regaled anyone who would listen to our tales of daring and exploration.  Consideration also had to be given to when the calves grazing out on the pasture came in to drink.  The water always turned a bit greenish after that and smelled a bit different for a while.

Stock tanks quickly lost their allure when rumors of tail water pits started trickling down to us still wet behind the ears farm boys.  A tail water pit is a pit dug in the earth for the sole purpose of collecting runoff water that had run a half mile or so through the fields, down furrows, and made it to the end of the field.  A shallow trench was constructed across the end of the furrows and diverted the water into the pit.  The water from this pit was sometimes then pumped back up to the top of the field to be used for the next go through the field.  These pits were generally in the 4 to 6 feet deep range, depending on how full they were.  Sure, there had been chemicals applied to the crops, and I’m guessing some of those chemicals made it to the pit that we chose to swim in.  And since the water had run down a half mile or so of furrow, it was rather difficult to see much more than six inches down into it, if even that far.  There was nothing clean about these pits.  The bottom was slick, slimy mud, and the water an incorrigible brown.  Bits and pieces of last year’s crop floated here and there on the top of the water.  It was deep water too.  At least deep compared to what we had been swimming in.  I suppose, if we were to look at it squarely, it was here we learned to swim, and probably also learned to drown somewhat too.  Maybe we learned how to swim properly, such as dog paddling, back stroke, and how to kick your feet just right (at least if you asked at that time, we could have filled you in in great detail) but, in my mind, it still wasn’t swimming.

One of my friends told me, sometime during this time, that they had gone swimming at Paul’s Pond.  Now this was news.  First of all, I didn’t know what or where Paul’s Pond even was.  I tried to act nonchalant as I queried, where or what this was.  Turns out, Paul’s Pond was only 8 miles or so away, had been in existence for close to 15 years already, and had equipment that I had never even tried before. 

It was approximately forty feet across by sixty feet wide.  On one side was a two-inch pvc pipe jutting out of the bank that flowed continuously with water diverted from a well that was pumping water for the nearby center pivot irrigation used to water crops.  If you happened over to that side of the pond, you didn’t stay long; the water was decidedly colder, hanging around the mid 50-degree mark much like it was since it had been pulled up from the dark depths of two hundred some feet down in the earth.  The reason for this pipe was to keep the water level consistent during the hot summer months.  It made for a refreshing swim to dive into chilled water when the outside temperature was in the low 100’s, humidity in the single digits and the wind blowing like a blast furnace out of the southwest.

Paul’s Pond, name thusly because of whose land it was situated on, was a vast improvement over what we had been swimming in up to this point.  It featured a dock that ran out into the water, and wonder of wonders, a real diving board.  Although the diving board was worn smooth of grip in the essential areas, it was a tremendous attraction to someone who had never even been within ten feet of one before.  The pond boasted a sand bottom, well, for about ten feet anyways, the rest being your slippery mud where you landed after a jump from the board.  Deep, sticky, oozy mud that one could easily sink to their knees in.  I’m not sure if any prayers were prayed while one was down on their knees in that situation, but I know that I came close to it a time or two, when the mud refused to yield its hold and I knew that above me was a good 15 feet of water that had to be traversed through if I was going to breathe again.  

It was here, at Paul’s Pond, that the proper swimming technique was learned.  This involved all manner of new and improved inventions on how to swim, dive and generally have a good time.  I never got my nerve up enough to dive through the inner tube that usually floated around the pond, having lost my courage when I saw guys who had dived through it come up with a bright red welt, sometimes as long as two feet, etched on their torso from the inward facing valve stem on that inner tube. 

Neither have I ever learned how to dive flat footed off a static surface.  For some reason, I skipped that entirely and went straight to learning how to spring dive.  I do believe I knocked all manner of crud loose, such as cholesterol deposits in my veins and pieces of muck from the surface of the pond, when I smacked into the water flat out in what some scornfully called a bellyflop.  It took quite a number of those bellyflops before I was able to hang, sometimes for long milliseconds, in sheer ecstasy, at the apex of my spring dive before arcing gracefully into the water with nary a splash.  I suppose there would be some, who swam with me in those days, who may debate the splash part, but I’m guessing their memory of such has faded somewhat.

You need to know what a spring dive is, so the next part makes sense.  For me, it involved starting at the back end of the board, jogging several paces until I was about four feet from the end, making a flying leap to the end of the board, landing with both feet right at the end, and with the accumulated momentum launch up and out into the deep.  Of course, all manner of failures were encountered, and others laughed uproariously at them, such as the belly flop, getting one’s jump miscalculated so that the end of the board with just barely ticked instead of landed on as one went in a sort of bumpy slide down, etc., etc.

Now it happened on a certain day, when there were 4 or 5 of us young dudes out there at Paul’s Pond, that inspiration struck.  We got to discussing how a person could “bounce” someone a on a trampoline by timing your jump just milliseconds before they came down to land from their jump, thus giving a double jump, if the one coming down had his legs braced and ready for it.

We figured there was a chance we could pull this off on this diving board, doing the spring dive.  So, a trial run was initiated.  We lined up at the back of the board, two of us, in step with each other, and ran in step and jumped in unison.

It didn’t work. 

Because the board was made of hard material, whereas trampolines were softer and more forgiving.  The lead fellow came down to a diving board coming up, and the result was heel pain that lasted well into the next week. 

But we were determined, and for several weeks you could spot those who had been trying this new diving method by the way they sort of hobbled around in church on Sunday morning.  

And then we found our step.  It worked and we started launching tremendous dives that seemed to have us hanging well up in the stratosphere and slinging past the sun going down in the west. 

Now it happened upon a certain time a few days later, that an idea was proposed.  If two guys ran out behind the one wishing to dive, and “bounced” him using the same technique, how good could it get? 

We got set up and made several practice runs, just the two bouncers at this point, and then made for the final push into unknown territory. 

All three of us made a perfect, in unison sprint.  The two bouncers made a perfect in unison launch just a wee bit after the diver.  And the one being bounced came down to a board deeply sunken and coiled with excessive energy. 

And upon my word, he was off, flying high and far. 

Except. 

The excess energy had all be transferred to him.  And the excess energy didn’t care which way it or direction it pushed him.

Our heroic diver went flipping and turning, spinning and windmilling, running and crawling all at once, and all at a high rate of speed through the air.  It all ended in a loud smack when his motions were slowed down somewhat by contact with the water, although I’m quite certain the motions did continue under the water.

They didn’t stop with us anyway.  For some reason we lost all our perfect in sync after the jump and the two of us bouncing went spilling off into the water.  The last I saw as I went below was one of my friends new Nike shoes go bouncing along the board and splash down some feet away from me.

It was on this day that we really learned how to swim, and everything that went with it.

But then, I’m guessing you all have done the same and know how to swim, and everything that goes with it by this time.