Poet Kate Camp learned to swim late in life. Now it’s a defining component of her identity. But why won’t she write about it?
I learned to swim in a 15 metre pool in the backyard of Mandi’s place in Paraparaumu. That’s not true. I learned to swim in a 15 metre pool at Cashmere Avenue Primary School, with its Pool Rules hanging on the diamond-wire gate, and under the official No Running No Diving No Ducking No Bombing it said, in dark green crayon, No Tichbornes, the name, I think, of a former Headmaster. That’s where I learned to swim the first time around, and got my 15 metre certificate, the barest of bare minimums, where I learned to windmill my arms and blow bubbles, where I wore goggles with a flat, white rubber strap and hard foam eye-bits, that always leaked, where I went wonky all the time because of my lazy eye. Or maybe just because, before it was a metaphor, I wasn’t great at staying in my lane.
But when I really learned to swim, I learned in the covered pool in the backyard of Mandi’s house in Paraparaumu. I was 48. Before my private lesson was a pre-school class so when I arrived, there would be a handful of grandparents sitting in chairs while the little kids were finishing up.
Whenever I take up a new activity, I secretly believe I am going to be brilliant at it. I go in expecting that I will nail it on my first attempt and be, even in middle age, something of a prodigy. This never happens. I am always not very good, and the learning process is hard, but then it’s OK because I remember that I actively enjoy being bad at things, being a beginner.
It was this way with swimming. I got into that pool, in which my hands would touch the bottom when swimming at the shallow end. And Mandi said something like, “swim a bit for me and let’s just see how you go”, and I honestly could barely make it to the end, and came up panting, though pretending not to. Despite being someone who loved the water, and body surfing, and floating and bobbing around, looking out at Kāpiti Island or watching planes take off over Hataitai, despite all that, I literally could not swim to save my life.
And so this is the story of how I went from hardly being able to swim at all to being someone who allowed swimming to become a defining feature of my personality. I have become a swimming bore. Not a great swimmer. Not a competitive swimmer. But a year-round swim-in-the-sea-every-day swimmer. A connoisseur of Wellington coastal changing rooms. A premium subscriber to Windy.com.
You know how there are things you’ve been meaning to get around to for, like, your whole life? Learning to swim was one of those for me. I had taken a leave of absence from work to write my memoir, and for Christmas Mum had given me a handwritten voucher saying when I wanted to learn to swim, she would pay for lessons. So I enrolled myself for a term at Kāpiti Learn to Swim. Every week I went to that pool, and I learned to breathe on both sides on the third stroke, and to draw my hand back through the water with a bent elbow, and to kick eight times for every two rotations of my arms. It was hard and it was surprisingly tiring, and being 45 years older than my compatriots would have been humiliating if I had any fucks to give. But it was fun, and I gradually learned to be a very slow, very tentative 21st-century swimmer.
I remember the first 25-metre length I swam at Coastlands Aquatic Centre, under its clear-plastic bubbly roof, the fear I felt as I got halfway, stranded equidistant between the ends of the pool, and how I hung on the side when I got there, my elbow on the tiled edge, heart racing, so proud of myself.
You know how it goes from here – insert training montage – I did two lengths, then four. The first time I did ten lengths I thought – holy shit. I came slowly to learn all the things about pool swimming that pool swimmers know, about how vile it is to share a lane, about the smell of chlorine in your bathroom, the horrors of school holidays, the constant martyrdom of leaking goggles.
I have always been a sucker for ritual, so I shouldn’t have been surprised at how much I enjoyed the accoutrements and habits of swimming – the perfectly packed swimming bag with the small towel for my hair and plastic bag for my wet togs, the entry card to the pool tied to the handle with a ribbon. I saw other women standing on bathmats and thought – how ridiculous. Within a week I had my own, the towel of smugness is how I think of it, the absolute luxury of never having your feet touch the changing room floor.
In December of 2021, after eight months as a dedicated pool swimmer, I decided to try sea swimming. My plan was to do 10 lengths at Freyberg Pool, right on the Wellington waterfront, then cross the carpark to Freyberg Beach. I hoped that, by the end of the summer, I would be able to swim to the raft that is anchored there. I got out of the pool, put on my mask, took my laminated Covid pass and a towel, and went down to the beach.
Of course I swam out to the raft that first time: it’s only, like, 50 metres off shore and I was regularly swimming a k or more in the pool. But the triumph was incredible. All my life, I had stayed within my depth. Suddenly here I was in Wellington Harbour, the bottom not even visible. It felt amazing, both the sense of achievement, and the physical sensation of swimming in water that wasn’t in a box, that didn’t have any lanes or lines or limits. And so began the next phase of my swimming life and I became, like all those middle-aged Guardian-reading women before me, a sea swimmer.
I love getting changed in carparks, and on the side of the road. It has to be a very rainy day to drive me into the changing rooms, especially the ones at Freyberg, dark and dripping wet, like somewhere you’d lock up the Count of Monte Cristo (sidebar, there’s an amazing looking swim from the Chateau d’If to Marseille each year.)
In fact, getting changed has become one of my favourite aspects of swimming, especially getting changed in winter, with all the life hacks I deploy – the rubber matting I keep in the car to stand on, the squeezy water bottle I wash my feet with – and the special garments, the teal mohair cowl that Cathy knitted me and the perfectly loose sunset stripe socks that Sue knitted me. In between it’s head-to-toe Icebreaker: trackies, T-shirt and hoodie all getting quite tatty now after four years of daily wear. I dispense with underwear; it’s just such a faff and when you’re wrapped in a towel in a Wellington southerly, wrenching a wet pair of togs off your body is enough of a feat, without having to get your numb fingers to do up a bra or unroll the complications of a pair of undies.
Sometimes I swim alone and sometimes with my swimming buddies. A woman came up to us once at Scorching Bay and asked, “are you a group of people who swim together or a group of friends who are having a swim?” The answer was yes. I liken it to the kids you used to play with in your street, a loose affiliation of people meeting up to have fun. We say things to each other like, “it’s really not that cold” and “I don’t want to get out and no one can make me”. We sit in the midwinter sun at Princess Bay having a hot drink, looking out at snow on the Kaikouras and being 100% certain we are doing life right.
All in all, I guess it’s not surprising that my new collection has a cover image called “woman on beach.” But I am a little surprised to find I write about the edges of swimming far more than about the swimming itself.
There’s the boats that I swim amongst at Island Bay … First Light and the nameless one / all dull metal competence as it heads to the horizon…, the faintly zooey reek of the changing rooms, and the wetsuit that hangs in the shower / like a folded shadow.
And even when I think about swimming, it’s not really the swimming I think about. I think about how, on a still morning at Freyberg, I can catch the sawdust smell of logs stacked on the wharf across the harbour, and the smell of people’s shampoo as they swim past. Or how when you see the fountain come on, that first blast, you can’t help but laugh. It’s always the margins of the swimming experience that come to mind. I’m like one of those people in an art gallery, going on about the frames instead of the pictures.
Because the swimming itself, the actual being face down in the water, putting one arm in front of the other, getting those half views of the world on each side for just a split second, it’s just wonderfully, meditatively, transcendently boring. There’s almost nothing to see, nothing to hear, not even gravity. Even when you’re swimming with friends, you’re swimming alone.
And so I never think much about it or talk about it or write about it. The swimming itself, that’s just between the sea and me. I am invisible and – for once in my life – silent. Cut off from information, society, reality, weather, time – hell, cut off from the air itself. I’m like a daily, temporary monk. Yes, it’s a religious experience, and all I’m worshipping is the moment. The moment as I turn my head to breathe and glimpse my own arm, silhouetted against the sky like a dark, fleeting rainbow. The moment I turn my face back into the water, as blank and familiar as closing my eyes.
And that’s why I don’t write about swimming. I prefer to keep that particular miracle to myself.
Makeshift Seasons by Kate Camp ($25, Te Herenga Waka University Press) is available from Unity Books.
