#SBRLLR: Some Things You're Just Born to Do (Part 1)

Some Things You’re Just Born to Do

“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

― Thomas A. Edison

There I was, no shit.

We’d been living in Annandale, Virginia, for not quite a year.  I’d made a few friends and was approaching the end of the fourth grade.  Summer was coming, but the sky remained cool and overcast.  A stiff breeze bit my ten-year-old skin.  The concrete pool deck was cold beneath my feet.  I had to swim the length of the pool without stopping to earn a spot on the Camelot Swim Team. I was chilled to the point of shivering, but I remained confident, too.  

I could do this.

Me with my bike, during a three day Boy Scout cycling expedition 
along the C&O canal in 1985.  My father served as Troop Leader.

My folks had sat me down a few days earlier for a Serious Talk.  Our house in Annandale was the nicest place we’d ever lived, and it gave Serious Talks a gravity which they might otherwise have lacked.  We usually wound up in the den for Serious Talks, a communal space set on its own floor beneath our kitchen and given over completely to my parents’ penchant for burgundy and hunter green.  With neither windows nor other sources of natural light, our den had a kind of dark ambiance that my father’s various military plaques and eagle-globe-and-anchor Marine Corps talismans only served to reinforce.  Dad himself loomed large in his scuffed brown leather recliner.  My mother sat at his side on their burgundy couch, her hands folded neatly in her lap.  A low coffee table sat in front of her, its edges dinged from a half-dozen or so military moves.

“Do you want to join the Swim Team,” my dad had asked, “or would you rather try the Diving Team?”

“Oh Tom,” my mother replied, “he can’t dive.  He’ll bash his head in and kill himself like that Russian kid did a few months ago¹.”

“The Russian Death Dive,” my father replied, feigning a grimace.  In truth, I knew that my father hardly minded a dead Russian.  In the Cold War 1980s, Dad cursed by calling people, “Communist!”

“So I have to swim?” I asked.  Is this really a choice, I wondered, or are they trying to get me to agree to a decision that they’ve already made?

My father nodded seriously.

My mother said, “You have to do something.”

“And it can’t be diving.”

“You have to try,” Mom explained.  “We want you to try all of the sports.”

I tried to parse this but could not decide what they expected me to say.  “Fine,” I said at last, “I’ll swim.”

My mother pressed the point.  “We had a pool in our backyard back in San Diego.  You should be good at swimming.”

“That’s right,” my father said, suddenly enthusiastic for my would-be swimming career.  “You already know how to turn your head to breathe and everything.  You should do really well out there.”

Dad was desperate for me to be good at something.  A six-foot, five-inch Marine infantry officer and the best natural athlete I’d ever seen, my father was the kind of guy who, with better habits and a more supportive home life, might have played middle linebacker for the New York Giants.  As it was, he’d been the center for his high school football team, had then walked-on to the varsity cross country team as a freshman at the University of Tennessee, and could also drive a golf ball some three hundred yards with relative ease.  He remained a serious recreational runner as a Marine, and he expected his only son to excel at sports in exactly the same way that he did.  

He wasn’t quite The Great Santini², but he sometimes liked to pretend that he was.  I did not want to let him down.

“I’ll swim,” I said again, trying to force some confidence into my voice.  “I’ll be fine.  You’ll see.”

Standing at the edge of the pool deck just a few days later, I knew enough not to show that I was nervous.  Being a Marine brat teaches you to never show fear.  It’s hard enough being a New Kid.  Let the other kids catch a whiff of uncertainty on top of your being new, and you’d be dead meat.  Even if you didn’t get bullied, you’d still find yourself ostracized and alone.  Established kids naturally drifted away from New Kids in exactly the same way that they ignored the meek and the shy.  Through years of trial and error, I’d learned to walk into unfamiliar situations with my head held high, exuding as much confidence as I could muster.  Learning to fit in over the course of many military moves had taught me that when I walked into a room like I owned the place, most of the other kids went along on instinct.  That was usually enough to let me win over the rest before they had time to start thinking of me as a New Kid.  

This was how I approached my first swim team tryout.  I was determined to at least look like I knew what I was doing.  It was easier in this case because I actually believed that I would do it.  What my dad had said was true.  I did know how to swim.  I had a chance here to impress not only my mother but her friends as well.  This was a critical opportunity to win some sort of reputation for myself beyond just, Dan Head, New Kid.

I stepped to the edge of the pool deck.  A coach and a couple of parents looked.  My friend Chris went first.  He’d been on the swim team the year prior, and as I watched, he dove into the pool and swam all the way across without any noticeable problems.  

My turn came next.  I stepped confidently to the lip of the pool, trying not to show my nerves.

At a nod from the coach, I dove in.

I hit the water and flash-froze.  All the air exploded from my lungs, driven out by the shock of mid-sixty degree water, while my feet and hands went instantly numb.  Panic shot through me, and for a long moment, I couldn’t think.  I came up spluttering and gasped for breath but then caught myself and forced my head back down into the water.  My coordination was gone, but I flailed determinedly with both hands, swimming for the moment as hard as I could.  I turned my head from side to side frantically, trying to force air into my lungs in exactly the ways I’d planned before I hit the water.  Rational thought had fled, however, obliterated by the shock of that blistering cold.  This left only grim determination and the idiot reactions I’d pre-rehearsed before diving in.  I gasped, panicked, and was soon close to hyperventilating.  I couldn’t make myself breathe out, leaving me no way to breath in.  This led to yet more panic, and soon I couldn’t make myself function at all.

I made it half a length before oxygen-debt forced me up, crying and humiliated, trying to make sense of my failure.  I couldn’t make sense of it, nor could I stop myself from crying.  I was mortified.  I’d failed—in public, in front of my mother and her friends—and this, I knew, was totally unacceptable.  My mother was not pleased, and I knew that when my father got home, things would get exponentially worse.      

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1. During the 1983 World University Games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Chalibashvili 

2. Patrick Conroy, The Great Santini, Random House, 1976. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Santini_(novel)