I Am So Popular: Summertime and the Swimming is Freezy

So for me, well, I can’t go to Barton Springs without thinking of one of my top five exes— a real distinction. He’s the one I call George, because that’s his name. The drama we co-created was such that, had Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee joined forces to try to capture it, they would’ve failed miserably.

George was a high tech geek, one who promised he’d have more time for me “after the IPO” (which never happened), and that if I left him, he just might have to off himself. (Yes, I am that popular.) The one summer we were together was his Man vs. Nature, premature midlife crisis year, when he determined he would prepare for a trip to Yosemite by hiking the Greenbelt regularly.

He always promised to take me along, but then would “forget” to call and say when he was going, not unlike how he would “forget” to tell me that he would spend his vacations banging an “ex” girlfriend up in Chicago. But two times, he did take me with him to the Greenbelt, and this was when I learned why he had previously left me behind.

George was afraid I couldn’t keep up with him. Hahaha. I am an avid hiker and, by the time I’d met him, I’d already had at least a decade of serious trekking under my belt, including daily walks of four to ten miles, often during the most brutal hours of summer days. Keep up? I could leave him in the dust.

On one of our trips, he passed out on mile thirteen. This was his own fucking fault. Not only was he lugging about two hundred pounds of water as part of his Yosemite “training,” he was also on the Atkins diet to try to impress the aforementioned slut in Chicago. I, on the other, more intelligent hand, had carbed up, and continued to do so along the way, happily gorging tasty treats. I also carried only just enough water, which I cleverly froze and carried low in my backpack to cool my lower back—and thus my entire body— hydrating myself as it melted.

He started to really wilt on mile twelve. Then he stopped and lay down upon the path. Then he wished aloud that there be no nearby fire ants, a wish akin to hoping that traffic will be flowing freely on a Friday afternoon on MoPac. His allergy to the little critters, which happily climbed upon his prone, 6’5” body, was severe enough that I could easily play an imaginary game of connect-the-dots with the huge red welts that bubbled up on his skin. He didn’t have a StimPak. I didn’t have a cell phone. Finally, I forced some real food down his gullet, since dragging his oversized ass out of there on a homemade stretcher wasn’t an option. The anti-Atkins nourishment did the trick and he limped the last mile back to the car.

Despite my excellent memory, I can no longer recall if it was during this hike or the other one that we wound up in Barton Springs. I do know we finished the fourteen miles midday, and it was July and triple digits. I remember I was wearing a shirt that said: Hernia Movers: The Potentate of Totin’ Freight. And I remember wondering, very seriously, as I plunged into that pool of liquid ice, if one could summon a heart attack by going so very quickly from so hot to so cold in mere seconds.

I was not in a hurry to get back into Barton Springs after that. I so embrace all things warm that I am one of those people who actually sleeps under multiple blankets in the summer. I threaten to leave Warren over the thermostat wars—the man will not turn on the heater in winter, even if it is thirty degrees out. I can knit a wool sweater at the beach.

Sure, I’d take visiting friends to look at the springs. But get in? No thank you. I prefer my water warmed by the pee of young swimmers. I like a nice, clean, concrete pool floor, preferably one that never dips deeper than four feet because, though I learned to swim when I was 38, I still like the option of putting my flippered dogs down upon a solid surface should my aquaphobia suddenly return.

But the other night, Warren informed me that, for the second night running, he was going down for the free swim, which happens every night at Barton Springs from 9 til 10 p.m. I decided I would go watch him freeze his nuts off and sit by the side of the pool and continue reading Sarah Bird’s new book, How Perfect Is That, which I am loving.

On the other hand, I am both extremely competitive and I also want people to like me. Which is why, unbidden, and despite the fact I already know how much Warren likes me, I continue to strive to impress him by doing things like trying to learn Hebrew in a weekend. Thus I decided that, though I realized it might literally kill me, I would attempt to get into the water to score points and to prove that if he could do it, well dammit, so could I.

Warren told me repeatedly that this was unnecessary. He has seen me shiver when the air temperature drops below 87 degrees. At first, I abided his decision, going only so far as to dip my legs in, mid-calves, as he swam away from me, delighted in the chill.

This is when I made the discovery that Barton Springs lends itself to massive quantities of unsolicited advice and chiding. And, in my experience, the advice is spouted from the loud mouths of pushy men into the disinterested ears of women who are content to stop at hypothermia from the knees down. A couple of dudes kept telling me why I needed to get in, and how, and what it would do for me, and how they might just help me “over the hump,” as they indelicately put it. But my experience paled to that of the young friend of a friend, more than twenty years my junior, who was subjected to the boundary crossing blather of a wading walrus trapped in a middle-aged man’s roly-poly body.

This young woman, who had not an ounce of fat on her body and therefore, no doubt, felt the cold far more easily than Big Boy, had made the choice to stand on the steps and shiver. Big Boy, dog paddling over to her, would have no parts of it and went on and on (and on and on and on and on) about how she had to get in. To the point that I nearly said to him, Look, Walrus, if you’ll shut your piehole and swim away, we’ll both get in.

But I thought the young woman knew him and, I later found out, she thought I knew him. Which kept each of us from giving voice to the rude thoughts of dismissal that filled our heads as he sat there blathering on.

In the end—and I am not giving Walrus or the two who preceded him any credit for this—as it turns out we each did get in the water. Warren was beside himself with disbelief, the sight of me up to my ears in brrrrrr enough to make him forget his own shriveled testicles for a few moments and hug me with pride.

And while I hate to say anything nice about such cold water, and while I will still continue to prefer hot showers and baby pee lap lanes over Barton Springs, I must say that there is something utterly transformative about taking the plunge. A half hour after the pool closed, we were over at Sandy’s getting chocolate dipped cones and I was still cooler than I preferred. Driving home, I quite seriously considered putting the heater on. I understood, at last, the real life root of the overused expression “chilled out” – even if I’d wanted to resume my normal resting state of Worry About Everything Incessantly, my brain was sufficiently frozen to prevent such perseverating.

Which is why I decided to go back. That and I got a note from the SOS people that there’s a full moon party with live marimba music happening (a party, sadly, that will have passed by the time you read this). I have no plans to become one of those polar bear lunatics that swim laps in Barton Springs every day of the year, no matter what. But I’m pretty sure that in a couple of more trips, I’ll be dropping that whole George association and replacing it with something far more refreshing.

Spike Gillespie is even more popular when she puts on a bikini. She blogs regularly for LaunchPad Coworking and at www.spikeg.com. She is also head mistress for the Dick Monologues. The July 2nd is sold out, but email her today at spike@spikeg.com to reserve seats for the August show.