Stuck on the shore and feeling abruptly adrift, it occurred to me that while swimming in the river, I had willed myself into incorporation. Late in July, it finally rained, and the river came up and the current turned quick. This experience, of being absorbed into the body of the river without drowning, satisfied the part of me that wants to be swept up in something greater than my self and my body, and it answered for me why the yearning pull of the current carries pleasure as well as peril. For a sublime minutes-long sweep, I was the Potomac.
#WASHINGTON DC TIDAL POOL SKIN#
I laid back with the water around my ears, feeling the current drag my legs, my core relaxing into an easy assimilation, my senses adapting into the river realm: all sounds dampened, all smells went brackish, my skin was fluid. One afternoon, my partner tied an old rope swing around my waist so that I could float in the Potomac without being pulled downstream.
#WASHINGTON DC TIDAL POOL FULL#
The ambient threat of the current on the Maryland side always kept me from the full brain-thud of underwater submersion, though I confess the risk inherent to Potomac swimming seemed to magnify the pleasure of the river’s stroke against my body whenever I waded in. On the riverbed, pocked with cracks, canyons, and sieves, the river can run almost thirty-five knots, quick enough to pull you under, smash you against underwater outcroppings, and hold you down against jagged rocks. The closer we moved toward the center of the river, the quicker the current flowed against our legs.Īround us, potholes and kettles, drilled into the rocks by millennia of churning waters, betrayed the covert violence of the river surging just below its surface. On other evenings and weekend afternoons, we left the pools at Dead Run to cross the river and slip into the water at the far edge of the Maryland islands, rock-hopping and wading our way to a depth we could sink our bodies into.
I learned during that heat wave to interpret the river’s current as the instrument of its more dangerous desires. A covalent bond formed between myself, my partner, and the river, three molecules distinct but together, connected by a fluid exchange of desire for one another. It was obvious, wringing my hair out and toweling off, that I had also absorbed some part of it. When I pulled my body out of the pool, a piece of me felt missing, as though the river had absorbed some part of me. Water slipped in, seeped out, and it began to feel easy to imagine myself as a literal part of the Potomac River, as real and embodied as a molecule of water. Fingertips wrinkled like waves, and our hair swirled into eddies. Though we were not necessarily touching, sharing our own bodies with a body of water joined me to my partner, and my partner and me to the river. Swimming is about touching the surface of the water and drawing yourself across it, it is about remove and submersion and sometimes it is also about submitting to the strength and current and direction of the water.” “It is not only in the way that water caresses your skin,” Akiko Busch writes in Nine Ways to Cross a River, “but also in the way it is all about reaching as far as you can. Surely there is no other act besides sex itself that is more naturally sensual than swimming. During these evening swims, the only feeling I could keep hold of in the water was pleasure. With the weight of your body altered under the water, the weight of everything else lessens. Any emotion-hope or fear or anger-is diffused or drowned. You slip beneath the surface and arrive in a different realm, aware of a loosening of the mind and a lightening of the body. To enter a body of water is to cross a boundary. Our bodies dissolved into the deepest pool and we floated, together, in the quiet.
My attention drifted, and words wandered away. The silky chill shocked my broiling body, then obliterated the memory of heat. Edging around lolling watersnakes, we settled onto the sunbaked rocks and slid into the cool water. In the early evenings, with our brains scrambled and limbs listless, my partner and I perspired down the trail headed for the waterfalls and pools of Dead Run. When every day seems to die by noon, there is only one recourse for salvation: water. Summer chanterelles never flushed, and blackberries pruned into dark nubs on their canes. Down on the silty bank, purple coneflowers withered to white and yarrow dried into brown feathers. in over a month, and from up on the Virginia bluffs across the water, the mud-caked rocks riding the surface of the Potomac River looked like firm, dingy icebergs.
Sweat pooled in any cavity it could find.
#WASHINGTON DC TIDAL POOL WINDOWS#
Air conditioners hummed outside apartment windows like swarms of bees. July smothered the city, suffocating the prospect of any outdoor activity conducted between sunrise and sunset.
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