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A photo of the cover of Kate Camp's poetry book, Makeshift Seasons, on a beach.
Makeshift Seasons by Kate Camp at the beach (Photo: Caoimhe McKeogh)

Booksabout 1 hour ago

Why I won’t write about swimming

A photo of the cover of Kate Camp's poetry book, Makeshift Seasons, on a beach.
Makeshift Seasons by Kate Camp at the beach (Photo: Caoimhe McKeogh)

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. 

A photograph of Kate Camp walking out of the sea, smiling.
Freyberg Beach – Finishing the Bernard Freyberg memorial swim on Anzac Day (Photo: Supplied)

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. 

A photo of Kate Camp with her mum on the beach. Kate has one arm around her mum.
Kate Camp with her mum after a midwinter swim at Princess Bay – she’s become a year round sea swimmer too. (Photo: Supplied)

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. 

A photograph of Kate Camp on a yacht raising a mug in cheers.
Kate Camp In the Whitsundays after a 3km swim in the somewhat sharky waters. (Photo: Supplied)

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. 

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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

Three award-nominated books and authors that are all also appearing at Auckland Writers Festival.
Three award-nominated books and authors that are all also appearing at Auckland Writers Festival.

BooksYesterday at 2.00pm

The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending March 14

Three award-nominated books and authors that are all also appearing at Auckland Writers Festival.
Three award-nominated books and authors that are all also appearing at Auckland Writers Festival.

The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.

AUCKLAND

1 Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate, $38)

Dream Count is the first novel in 10 years from the author of Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, and Why We Should All Be Feminists. It tells the story of four migrant women (Chiamaka (“Chia”), Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou) and, writes one Guardian reviewer, explores how their relationships assert the power of female solidarity.

Here’s a snippet from the review: “This novel is ultimately wider-ranging than Americanah, with a collage of womanhood assembled around this incident, but threading together childbirth and pregnancy loss, abortions and hysterectomies, fibroids and female genital mutilation, sexual assault and sexual harassment, as if nothing less than the whole of female experience is within its scope. Yet at the same time it is painfully introspective, not only because it is set against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic, a built-in reminder of “how breakable we all are”, but also because it includes many moments – such as when, pondering one of her breakups, Chia muses about “how quickly mystery dissolves to dust” – in which one senses the subliminal gesture towards deeper traumas, the feeling of unbearable confinement alongside floating alienation, the hermetic numbness with which many of us experience grief.”

PS: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set to appear in a virtual event at Auckland Writers Festival in May.

2 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)

Last year’s Booker Prize winner and one of this year’s Auckland Writers Festival headliners.

3 The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House, $32)

Everyone is talking about this book that shows you how to not react to behaviours that disturb you and let go of controlling behaviours.

4 How To Be Wrong by Rowan Simpson (Electric Fence, $40)

“Drawing on two decades at the heart of New Zealand’s most successful technology companies – Trade Me, Xero, Vend, and Timely – Rowan Simpson unravels the messy reality behind familiar glossy success stories. Combining raw honesty and sharp analysis, he challenges conventional wisdom by sharing compelling firsthand lessons about focused execution, team building, and genuine ecosystem growth.

This myth-busting guide is essential reading for founders, investors, and policymakers alike. Simpson demonstrates that embracing uncertainty, recognising patterns, and learning quickly from mistakes are not just steps on the path to success – they are the path itself.”

5 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)

Read the book, go and see the author live at Auckland Writers Festival where she will be speaking to Jean Teng and eating food made on stage by the one and only Sam Low.

6 Amma by Saraid de Silva (Hachette, $38) 

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize along with the author of book number 1, above!

7 The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides (Michael Joseph, $40)
The retelling of Cook’s last journey.
8 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
Beautiful novel about ageing and grief and muddling through. Shortlisted for the Ockhams’ big fiction prize, and front and centre at, you guessed it, Auckland Writers Festival come May.

9 The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Portobello Books, $28)

Stunning, strange, small novel about female resistance.

10 Twist by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury UK, $37)

The latest novel from Ireland. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

“Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?”

‘Become a member and help us keep local, independent journalism thriving.’
Alice Neville
— Deputy editor

WELLINGTON

1 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)

2 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)

3 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)

4 Amma by Saraid de Silva (Hachette, $38) 

5 Understanding Te Tiriti by Roimata Smail (Wai Ako Press, $25)

The go-to guide to getting your facts straight around Te Tiriti.

6 Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate, $38)

7 How To Be Wrong by Rowan Simpson (Electric Fence, $40)

8 Route 52: A Big Lump of Country Unknown by Simon Burt (Ugly Hill, $40)

Observational writing from the roads between the Masterton and Waipukuarau.

9 The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House, $32)

10 Three Days in June Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, $36) 

More comforting, perfectly told fiction from Queen Tyler. Here’s a nugget from a glowing review in The Guardian: “There’s a scene near the end of Anne Tyler’s new novel, Three Days in June, where the two main characters, a divorced middle-aged couple named Gail and Max, compare their lives to the movie Groundhog Day, ‘where people live through the same day over and over until they get it right’, Gail reminds him. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the world worked that way?’ says Max. Instead, Tyler’s novels are records of the numerous ways people get things wrong and learn to live with it, and how the wrong things have a sneaky habit, eventually, of turning out to be right.”