Like many people during their young and dumb phase of life, a volatile combination of inexperience and hubris pushed me dangerously close to the edge more than once. Falling more than 700 feet down a snowfield on the Pfeifferhorn meant I was lucky to see my 18th birthday. But I also nearly didn’t make it to 19, this time facing an early death in the frigid waters of Jordanelle Reservoir.
My friend Liz’s family owned a cabin in the woods near Heber, Utah. We spent a few weekends there during the summer of 1998 while we were both on a break from university classes. We were always well-stocked with board games and piles of junk food and stacks of VHS tapes for cabin life — the best life. During the day we’d hang out at the beach — that is, on the shore of one of the two reservoirs in the area. We’d pump up a small raft, float around for a while, eat more snacks, sunburn our arms and legs, then head back to the cabin.
I loved being in the water. I’d roll onto my back and float on the surface, hearing only the rhythmic whoosh of waves, and watching clouds roll across the sky. These are high-altitude reservoirs, fed by snowmelt and mountain streams, so the water was bone-chilling cold. My friends often only lasted a minute before rushing back to the beach blanket. I learned I could tolerate the cold water much longer than them. They’d squeal as I plunged all the way underwater. My legs and arms would fill with fire. Through the tingling pain, I felt powerful.
I began dabbling with swimming, even though I was not a swimmer. I took swimming lessons as a child but only learned the basics. I possessed a paradoxical fear of water, even then, that wouldn’t allow me to put my face under the surface. My front crawl was slow and awkward. Still, the stroke propelled me forward. I loved swimming — the feeling of weightlessness, the silence, the deep breathing. Once, at Deer Creek Reservoir, I swam all the way to a small island and back. This challenge whet my appetite for something big.
It was nearly 100 degrees in the shade the day we set up our beach blankets at Jordanelle Reservoir. The air was too hot to feel comfortable even when floating around in the raft. My friends had huddled under a beach umbrella, napping away the brutal afternoon. I pointed to the far shoreline of the reservoir. “I’m going to try to swim there,” I announced.
Jordanelle is a long, thin body of water, but it was still probably at least half a mile to the other side. Summer water temperatures range from 55-65 degrees. At these temperatures, most swimmers reach the point of exhaustion in 45-60 minutes. This timeline is certainly shortened for swimmers without experience or conditioning.
But I knew none of this when I waded away from the scorching inferno and into the icy gray water. My skin was so hot that the effect was almost like a flash-freezing, an exhilerating jolt that brought me to life. My blood felt metallic, pulsing through my limbs as I pulled my body through the water.
A few times I looked back, and my friends waved. Then I was too far to see much more than their silhouettes, flattened by the sun glare. The far shoreline still looked so far. My legs and arms were starting to feel heavy, like slabs of meat on ice. They no longer tingled; they just felt numb. My legs had no power. My arms felt like they were encased in sandbags. My feet were stiff and cramping, curled into a painful claw. A primal urgency finally hit: “You’re in trouble. You need to turn around.”
Hypothermia had already gripped my core. It never gave me time to feel terror — truly, it was as though one minute I was exhilarated, and the next I was numb, both in body and mind. I sensed my situation was dire but had no real emotion about it. My legs were so heavy, and I was so, so tired. Have you ever felt intense sleepiness suddenly clamp down during a long drive? You feel your eyelids droop, and it feels so good to just close them for a second. Logically, you know that giving in to this sensation for even a second could be extremely costly, yet it’s so difficult not to succumb. My urge to fall asleep was like that, but with an intensity multiplied many times beyond any sleep monster I’ve battled since. Only this time, there was nowhere to pull over.
I knew at that most basic primal level that if I closed my eyes I was going to drown. And still, the urge was so intense. It would be so easy to just close my eyes and sleep forever. And swimming was so, so hard.
I’ve been thinking about that experience lately, when it seems like every day there’s yet another headline that knocks the wind out of me, leaving me heartbroken and numb. Today — May 24, 2022 — it was the Texas school shooting that left at least 19 children and 2 adults dead. Reading the headline was enough. The oxygen drained from my blood and I haven’t found the strength to read any further. There have been years of this now, decades, and our cultural and political climate only promises utter inaction on anything that actually matters: Climate change, war, pandemics, the erosion of democracy, elementary school shootings. We’re all so tired. We’re just so, so tired.
And it’s true, “Just Keep Swimming” has become a tiresome cliche. But what choice do we have? The alternative, I admit, often feels enticing. Just roll onto my back, watch clouds stream across the blue sky, and listen to the monotone hum of the depths until they engulf me. Nihilism is easy. Swimming is hard. But what choice do we have?
On that July day in 1998, I made the obvious and yet harder choice. Unlike that snowfield on the Pfifferhorn, where only luck and the Grace of God kept my spinning body away from the boulder field, on Jordanelle Reservoir, I made a conscious decision and did the hard work to stay alive. Thanks to the brain-deadening effects of hypothermia, I remember very little about the swim after I turned around. I somehow made it back to the shore. I must have seemed out of sorts because my friends came to my aid. When I “came to” with my face pressed in the sand, someone had wrapped me in a blanket. A chilled bottle of water was placed next to my head.
Slowly I came back to life. My friends thought it was quite humorous that I was cocooned in a blanket while sitting in full sunlight on a 100-degree day in July. The shivering didn’t commence until some time later, and then I spent much of the rest of the day quaking violently. When we finally started packing up, I struggled to stand. My legs were still completely numb. I said something about being extremely tired from my swim, and my friends helped me walk to the car. I continued shivering all the way back home to Sandy, and as I recall, for much of the night.
That was only the first of a few college-age brushes with drowning, and thus only the beginning of the mental scar that eventually closed around the peace I once found in the water. I now contain very little enthusiasm for swimming, boating, surfing, or anything of the sort. I would be perfectly content to live out my days with both feet on dry land — even winter travel on frozen bodies of water bothers me, although as an Alaska backcountry enthusiast, ice is tough to avoid.
So I don’t love the water, but I do know what it feels like to “Just Keep Swimming.” I know, at a primal level, that I can do it. And as much as I want to just give in to the despair and sink into the void, I know I will not. And I know that there’s hope in this knowledge, no matter how bad it gets.
Compare the quality of writing in my paragraph, to the clarity and interest with which you write. Rich Runser
I think you may be touching on the differences in people. Most are content to live comfortably in one place. A few will venture forth, and keep doing so. Doing genealogy, I find the great majority of my great grand parents burials in the Dakota Territory, and nearby states. Except for 1 out of a dozen is missing. A few of these are in far distant states, cemeteries we just stumble on. We have found barely existent small burial plots, searching for relatives; these plots are not on county or state records. Some of this 10 percent are adventurers, who do not easily give up on treks. Like you. Rich Runser