I Was The Rock (Updated)

(A truncated, partial first draft of this got posted by mistake while I was writing it a few minutes ago. I apologize if you got a funky, messed up version in your email. This is the correct version. I guess next time I’ll know better than to try to write long posts on my iPad while watching the ball game.)

When I was a pre-teen in the late 1960’s I was active in the Boy Scouts in the Chicago suburbs. We did the usual activities – hiking, camping, merit badges, and so on. When summer came around we had the opportunity to go off to summer camp in Wisconsin for a week or two weeks. I think I was 12 when I first went.

On the first morning I was introduced to an aspect of Boy Scout summer camp which threatened to turn my two weeks there into a living hell.

We had several great activities planned for later in our stay, including a couple of canoe trips and daily swimming opportunities. In order to make sure we could participate safely, we had a swimming test.

As Bill Cosby so eloquently points out in his classic “Niagara Falls” routine, the water in our lake had just melted that morning and was at 33F. (That’s how my 12-year-old brain remembers it and I’m sticking to that story.) We weren’t given any warning, just herded into the water among the ice floes and told to see if we could swim out past the dock, past the rope, to the raft, and back.

I had never had any formal swimming lessons of any kind. When we had lived in Kansas City in grade school we had always gone to “the pool” a lot during the summer, but I had always just puttered around in the shallow end. If I was occasionally brave enough to go off of the diving board (by which I mean timidly falling off the end six feet from the edge, no actual diving involved) I would furiously paddle and flail back to the safety of the wall. Not to mention that the water was about 75F, crystal clear, and heavily chlorinated.

Finding myself in freezing lake water with mud and plants between my toes and snapping turtles and walleyes and muskies and barracuda ready to attack, I did not do well. I flailed and paddled as best I could, but when I thought I would go into hypothermia and shock and drown at any second, I was told by the lifeguard to just stand up and walk to the beach. I had made it about thirty feet and was in about three feet of water.

When everyone had taken their tests, we were sorted out into our different classifications. Those who had made it out to the raft and back (a hundred yards or so each way) were deemed to be “Sharks”. Those who could make it out to the rope and back were “Trout”. Those who could only go out to the dock were “Perch”. I was in my very own special group. I was a “Rock”.

I resigned myself to not going into the water other than wading a bit when we would have daily swims, and I would probably have to wear two life vests when we went on canoe trips. It was humiliating, but I could live with that.

The reality was far worse. The Boy Scouts of America could not allow any of their scouts to not know how to swim, and swim well. The Perch and I were told that we would have daily swimming lessons until we were Sharks. At six freakin’ AM every single morning. In that water with rime ice on the beach.

I have never been so miserable in my life. But they made it quite clear that they were serious. They wanted to teach me the crawl, the back stroke, the breast stroke, and the side stroke. I was not going to be able to get out of those classes until I could do all four strokes, float for five minutes, and make it all the way out to the raft and back using some combination of strokes. Paddling and flailing were not allowed.

Since they were going to be sadistic and cruel about it, I realized (to quote Frost) that “the only way out is through”, so I learned to swim. It took about four days, but I was actually one of the first in the remedial group to pass their test and get out of that 6AM class.

This did in fact serve me well later in life, particularly when I was a midshipman at Annapolis. (The Navy is almost as gung ho about swimming as the Boy Scouts are.) But I have never, ever liked swimming since then and I hate being in cold water.

Give me a nice Jacuzzi any day!