The Water We Swim In

This story has references to SA. Reader caution advised.

This is a story about collective joy. It’s about interconnectedness, ferality, learning to survive over and over again. It’s about blurred edges, the lines between us and nature, ourselves and strangers, free land and owned land. It’s about a pond I used to swim in that showed me all this. But that’s not where this story starts. 

It starts on the 2nd of January 2022, when I took the train with two huge suitcases and moved to Kentish Town, in London, to cat-and-flat-sit a beautiful Georgian townhouse for 4 months while the woman whose home it was went to establish a permaculture farm in Senegal. When this woman (“moringa flower is the future of herbal medicine, darling”) showed me around two weeks prior, she had pointed out of the bedroom window to a line of skeletal trees on the horizon, poking out above buildings, telling me it was the Heath.

I’d never been, but of course, I knew Hampstead Heath. I’d grown up reading dozens of books set around that area, where swims in the ladies’ pond were commonplace. I felt I knew the whole area, aware that this part of London is the centre of its own cultural universe. My move was guided by hundreds of stories I’d absorbed growing up, and even those I hadn’t - how many women before me had also worked as nannies in Belsize Park? To live somewhere with so many layers of cultural history gave me a profound feeling that I was in The Right Place.

Still, I’d spent the past three years living on the edge of the Peak District, a national park near Sheffield, and so by the time the weekend would come, the pull to get up on the Heath -  to scratch some kind of relief in the trees and the sunlight - was near religious. I became one of the regulars on the Heath, with the celebrities and the Old Money of London going on their Sunday strolls. I came to love it. God, I loved it so much, because I needed it so much. I loved the trees, the bridges, the shafts of sunlight and murders of crows, the pergola, the ponds with their lily pads. Yet, unsurprisingly, as a park in a capital city, it didn’t give me the intense shot of nature I craved and had become accustomed to. I was left with a familiar feeling of dissatisfaction. Familiar from my childhood playing in rubber-floored playgrounds, and similar to how I imagined the dogs I saw being walked on leads also felt: this… ain’t quite it. 

Everything felt too plotted, planned, unwild. I’d hear people talk about going up to the ponds for ‘wild swimming.’ Something felt too clunky and constructed about this nature/city binary - nature is here, the city is there - that begged me to unpick it.

When does the ancient human urge to strip off and cool down at a watering hole qualify as ‘wild swimming’? I thought of all the places I had swum growing up, the places not written about in books. We didn’t call it wild swimming when I was eleven, back in Bradford when a group of kids from my year stripped off and swam in my local river, the Aire. A man charismatically named the Crossbow Cannibal had recently been arrested for a series of murders targeting vulnerable women, and there were rumours he’d dumped their bodies in the river. Those in the water joked that every stray log was a body part. Thankfully, my mum had sternly warned me against swimming in there. The bodies were indeed later found in the river. Everyone who swam there got gastroenteritis. Probably unrelated to the bodies, but still disturbing. 

We didn’t call it wild swimming when I was fifteen, and my friends and I would take the train up river to the more picturesque Ilkley, in search of a cleaner patch of water to drink beers on the edge of. That summer there were travellers in town, and so one dip was accompanied by a man: topless, blonde, rippling muscles, charging into the water on the back of a huge shire horse. Self-conscious of our teenage bodies, my best friend turned to me, blank-faced, and said “I’ve never been so emasculated in my life,” and I had to get out of the water because I was laughing so hard. They definitely don’t call it wild swimming when residents of Bradford, - needing some respite from their hard work; wanting  to give their children some joy - gather around a huge water feature built in the centre of town, affectionately named ‘Bradford Beach.’ 

It felt to me that ‘wild swimming’ connotes some kind of sanctimonious separateness.  As though it is something untouched, pure; the water of certain spots that only those with a car and Pukka tea collection can access. Or, in Hampstead, behind a paywall in an oasis of privilege. What does “wild” even mean? In a world where national parks are managed, and even in the most remote parts of the Amazon jungle, humans have affected the way rain falls, I'm not sure this idea of a kind of separate wilderness exists. This idea of wilderness keeps nature vaguely ‘out there’, separate to us humans, beyond a boundary inaccessible for some. 

The places I grew up in are feral spaces. They are what poets Farley and Roberts call ‘edgelands,’ in their book by the same name: spaces that once served a capitalist function, but have since been abandoned. Like a once domesticated animal, unwatched, they return to their wild roots as much as they can. They are spaces of collective joy, where - unwatched - humans can return to something beyond human. One feral space I thought of in particular was a pond that, one summer, kept me alive. Or rather, through its ferality, helped me relearn how to survive. And I thought of how much we can all learn from these feral spaces, how much we need them, and how much they need us. 

This pond in particular lives in Crookes Valley Park, in Sheffield. The park is one of many seams of green that run through the city, where streams trickle alongside streets. The pond itself is not really a pond but an old reservoir. I lived there in the endless days of lockdown, with eight friends, during our third year of university. Our garden backed onto the park. 

Edgeless days found shape around a small ritual of swimming in the pond. On hot days, the pond became an oasis for hundreds of claustrophobic students and locals. It became the centre of stories. The time when, during a sunrise swim after an all-nighter, Jackson pulled out a dead fish and held it above his head like a trophy. When Tia cut her foot on something and was so scared that she texted her Mum to tell her she loved her. There were fresh mornings with just Maddy and me reading, and afternoons of friends plaiting each others’ wet hair. People behaved as hungry, horny, tender humans have done for thousands of years. A man I’d been sleeping with came over dripping to ask if I’d seen his dive. We ate lunches and drank white russians in sundresses as the sun set; we shuffled in towels embarrassed of our bodies in front of big groups of lads, examined new body hairs in small groups of friends; rough kids from the flats nearby played in the shallows with the life preserver as a rubber ring. Once someone rode a bike down the hill into the water to the cheers of onlookers. 

The water was relatively clean and on still days, you could see the floor of the pond and (alarmingly large) fish swimming by. Here, I found myself learning how to survive again, because on those still days, a memory had risen up through my body like a deep green fish, timeless, ageless. It started in a conversation with a friend about their experience of sexual assault as a teenager, to which I recounted a memory to her and said, ‘‘wait, does that count as sexual assault?’ and she gently told me yes, someone could call it that. So that summer I was 21, I was 17, I was 13 all at once, re-examining every interaction where a man had crossed a line with me. 

But I didn’t feel like I was supposed to feel; I didn't fit into some separate box of ‘victim.’ I hadn’t been dragged down an alley and attacked. The only cultural reference I found fitted the way I felt  was the episode of Spongebob Squarepants when Mr. Krabs is without a shell. I felt extremely fragile, but also lonely, and still craved touch. In fact, the more I tried to manufacture positive experiences of sex, the more memories of the opposite - of coercion and discomfort - appeared in like clay on a wheel spinning into shape. Speaking to my friends, everyone had their own horribly normal story. They always involved an ex-boyfriend, a friend, a family member. There is a speech by David Foster Wallace where he tells the story of two young fish swimming along. They happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”. Wallace says that “the point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” It appeared to me that to women a state of violation is the water we swim in; we are so alienated from our bodies from such a young age that it takes us years to discern sex from violence. Rage upon rage, I then felt anger at myself for having to labour over this. Even in the act of caring for myself I was cleaning up a man’s mess, reinforcing a bullshit gendered binary I wanted to wrench myself from. 

I wanted to flush out every imprint a man had ever made on me, to free myself of how embarrassingly vulnerable my permeable body was to the gaze and touch of others, and the hyper-awareness to my own image this gave me. “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself,” as John Berger writes. I only found peace swimming out to the centre of the pond, floating on my back, and looking at the sky. On cold days, I learned that the shock of the water could flush out the gnawing depression I had started to feel again. I would first scream, then swear, then breathe breathe breathe hard until I could taste iron in my throat. I thought I would never get warm, until I did, my lungs and heart pumping blood back into my numb limbs. I found a new faith in my body. The water did not cleanse me. It just held me. Beneath me were fish, plants, trolleys, and beer bottles. Above me, blossom floated slowly along, making even the air seem liquid. The water soaked into my skin, wrinkling it.

At a moment when I wanted to cut away everything that connected me to the world around me, the pond reminded me of something. Self care has been falsely sold to us as a way of cleansing ourselves of some elusive toxin; rather than loving this scummy body that fights constantly and miraculously to keep me alive. The beauty is that I don’t belong entirely to myself. I belong to the world around me, to the people who love me and the food that nourishes me and builds my cells. And I love that world. So I felt compelled to look after myself as a way of caring for the collective. The places in between us - the germs, the spit, the blood, the food, the sharing of pheromones, the vibrations of our voices - are where the magic happens. We would protect ourselves, as people did in that park, sitting at a distance mindful of COVID, because of our love for this connection, not our wish for it to go away. The pond taught me not to numb myself to the pain of connection, but to fight to keep it sacred. After all, despite the pain, so much of my joy in being socialised as a woman came from the vulnerability it granted me: the intimacy of my connections to others who made my experience of womanhood a feast; even on the most painful days of that Summer, Maddy gently dyeing streaks of red in my hair while I watched Princess Diaries. I was reminded not to forget the anger, the danger, the rage that comes with this vulnerability, but not to let this rage poison me to its joys.

The pond itself was dangerous. No one really knew how deep it was. It was vast with nothing to hold onto in the middle. But this danger acted as a call to care. A stranger gently asked if I was okay when I once got particularly out of breath in the middle. Another time I swam past someone freaking out, being calmed by their friends and told to float on their back. If you float on your back, the water cradles you. You start to trust the water. 

Why am I telling you this story about a relatively insignificant pond in Sheffield, and my relatively insignificant life events that played out there? As much as this is a love letter to the personal joy this feral space has brought me, it is also a story that highlights the pragmatic reality of how crucial these spaces are to our survival: of the climate crisis-induced heat waves, the pandemics, the general atomisation of modern life and that leads many to mental health crisis. (Which of course are all connected.) Climate apocalypse is a very real threat, but I worry about the paralysing  sense of finality that comes with this term, when the reality will be a series of crises that we must navigate together. Now more than ever we need to remember that wilderness, nature, is not something ‘out there’. It is all around us. It is not an idea, it is us. It is imperfect, but it wants to live. And it wants us to live. To defend our green spaces and clean water will require doggedness, compassion, and (please don’t wince) - love. 

It’s easy to love the postcard beauty of Yosemite and David Attenbourgh documentary shots. But we also need to love the fox strolling along our street, the abandoned car parks taken back by buddleia bushes. How can I teach you to love something? To live and die for it?  You have to feel it yourself in your body, the same way you feel about the scent of your lover’s skin. But most people are touch-starved. Nature starvation is not an accident either. Over 90% of the land in the UK is privately owned and off-limits to the public. Whether we descend into a negative spiral of alienation from green spaces or a positive spiral of mutual protection depends on access to these spaces. This story is an example of the latter. 

I imagine that this collective joy has sunk into the culture of Sheffield, the city where a few years ago people came together to defend thousands of its trees from being killed. And that in a council meeting somewhere, someone suggested putting a railing up around Crookes Valley Pond, and another person pushed back. They saved our pond from the dead hand of Health and Safety, and kept it as a green space for us all. Feral and beautiful. I think about this person, and I want to thank them. Because that summer when I lived by Crookes Valley Park, they saved my life.

Sources:

Berger, John, (1972) Ways of Seeing. UK: Penguin.

Farley, P. and Roberts, M.S, (2012) Edgelands.  London: Vintage.

Wallace, D. F,  ‘This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)’, Farnam Street, 2012,  https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/