Outside of reading and writing, the pursuit that has most accompanied my adult life may be swimming. Water is central to my intellectual life, but in a much different way: one defined by scarcity, centered on arid lands where it accumulates only seasonally and even then, fleetingly. Water as something rare and precious, not something whose presence you can count on. Swimming is different. Pools manufacture a synthetic sense of abundance, and when you submerge yourself, it is the body, not the mind, that perceives the water.

The pool where I learned to swim was located in the basement of a sports club. On chilly weeknights my brother and I would entertain ourselves for an hour while my mom swam a sidestroke mile. I learned strokes and turns in autodidactic fashion, studying instructional placards hung on the wall and trying to stitch their images together with my body in the water.

In my 20s, I moved to California for graduate school. There were pools everywhere, and my then-partner and some of our friends frequented them. The desire to join their routines began to thrum in me. Swimming is like ballet—an activity whose technique must be developed from a young age to become fully ingrained—but I was the type of person who sought fluency in second languages as an adult, familiar with drills and repetition. I decided to learn to swim in the same way I smoothed clunky, memorized grammars into something passably fluent.

First, I had to use my legs. The front crawl’s flutter kick seemed so natural in comparison to the arms’ motions that I discovered I had neglected it. When I began to think about kicking, my body’s propulsion felt reversed: I was no longer dragging myself through the water but inviting my arms to participate in my legs’ forward momentum. Then there were the turns. I struggled to exhale from my nose as I spun, always out of breath at the end of laps and scared of coming up frantically for air in the university pool. It took a summer in a city where I knew no one, going alone to a massive, empty municipal pool to contort myself again and again, before I’d gotten used to the rotation.

Finally, I had to learn to breathe out of both sides, not just the left, which felt more natural. One afternoon, my partner stood in the shallow end of the pool gripping my ankles as I made stationary strokes along the surface, practicing until I was rotating from my hips instead of my neck and freely gathering air from both sides. There was a freedom to the fullness of the rotation, an open presentation to the world in the place of a pinched bend. As time passed, I came into a new kind of coordination in my body, a sense of putting it all together that, even as a late learner, felt fluid and balletic. 

Swimming also seemed to train my brain in its own specific circuits. The lap pool was like a treadmill that folded back on itself, a conveyor belt that brought you along to its underside. So my mind gave itself over to a similar kind of mental activity: a forward motion that was also static, perfect for reworking a paragraph or perfecting a persuasive email, each 25-meter stretch a new pass over three or four sentences. I didn’t choose to enter the mental loop; my body’s motions brought my mind there.

Eventually, like a runner tired of the gym, I became curious to experience the sport in an extended form—a wilder, linear course in the place of the loop. The few people I chanced to meet who practiced open-water swimming filled me with curiosity and a degree of jealousy. I’d spent relatively little time near the ocean, and had never ventured beyond floating in shore-bound waves. Still, I imagined my laps as practice for this future step. So when my spouse and I planned a trip to Loreto, a town on the Gulf of California side of the Baja California peninsula famous for its protected bays, I was eager to spend it submerged.

Salt water, of course, is different from chemically-clean pool water or the cool, fresh water in rivers and lakes that chills the body from within. Water becomes salty when minerals—mainly, but not exclusively, sodium and chloride—erode from rocks on land and on the seafloor, dissolving as ions. The salts make the water denser than our water-filled bodies, so you float. They also coat your lips with a taste between sour and sweet and, if they splash you at the wrong moment, burn the back of your throat. The Gulf of California is saltier than the open ocean—it’s what scientists call a negative, or inverse, estuary: The arid climate of surrounding lands causes more water to evaporate than their rivers offer up to the bay, so it’s saltier near the shore than it is further into the water.

The first swim of our trip took place at a beach accessed down a dirt road through a town of humble cinderblock houses. It was a brown-sand beach, and the water was dark blue. Evening was approaching, just before sunset; the darkening light made all the colors richer—the water, the leaves on the trees, the rock cliffs, the sky. Two local families had set up camp chairs and a group of men pulled up to unload a fishing boat, prepared to stay out, they told us, until the early hours of the morning.

We had driven for days to arrive at these waters, and it had not been an easy trip. The hours in the car were uncomfortable, putting us both on edge. The 100-degree heat that we had been trying to escape in Arizona, where we live, enshrouded the Baja peninsula, too. Some of the natural places that my partner remembered driving through a decade before had been destroyed: An isolated stretch of coastal matorral was now taken over by a berry industry that had turned the shrubland to dusty fields littered with used irrigation tubing and Little Caesar’s boxes. It took work to stave off the disappointment and sadness that has increasingly accompanied travel for me, the conviction that tourism had spoiled and disenchanted the world.

I stepped gingerly over the rocks lining the shore and onto the softer sand of the bay floor, the water warm at my ankles. As I glided into the water, I realized nearly immediately that my fantasy of transferring lap strokes to the ocean was foolish. The tide’s constant force worked at a different rhythm than my front crawl. Another unusual feature of the Gulf of California is its particularly forceful tide. All the energy of the Pacific is funneled into a narrow space. There’s also something called resonance, a term I loved for its evocative name but struggled to fully wrap my head around: The wavelengths of the currents align with the bay’s own frequencies, effectively joining forces and making the tide far more dramatic than that of an ordinary shore. 

It wasn’t that I couldn’t have muscled through, but that suddenly it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. I switched to a weak breaststroke that allowed me to better enter the sea’s rhythm, floating over each crest as it came. Then, I rolled over to take in the evening sky, the ambient noise, the salty, humid smell. Birds flew overhead and I was pleased to discover that I knew their names: Brown Pelican. Magnificent Frigatebird. Jacques Cousteau famously called the Gulf of California the “aquarium of the world,” and I liked imagining myself as part of its richness—one-third of the world’s marine mammal species, 90 species of fish, and over 500 species of birds, not to mention the crustaceans and the echinoderms, like starfish and sea cucumbers.

A sense of wholeness plunged over the scene, and a line of poetry floated to the surface of my mind. It was a line I hadn’t read in years, possibly not since I’d been an undergraduate in college, but now came to me out of aptness. “Once in a sycamore I was glad / all at the top, and I sang.” writes John Berryman in “Dream Song 1.” It’s a poem about the heaviness and destruction of the world weighing on you, but about how beauty can still free you, however momentarily. There in the sea, I felt as if I were having my own turn at the top of the sycamore.

This water didn’t need to be a treadmill, I thought. I settled into a kind of reclined chair pose, letting the flows direct my movement instead of insisting that they conform to my patterns. The appearance of the long-forgotten poem felt mysterious but oddly divinatory, eerie in the best way. Where had it come from? By letting the sea determine my shape instead of forcing my shapes onto it, I thought, I would see what else it might have to offer.

Two days later, I went for another evening swim. My partner wasn’t feeling well and had taken out some of her ill-feeling on me, so a kind of vacation claustrophobia was swirling in my mind alongside fragments of the things I had spent the free hours reading: a James Schuyler poem about onomatopoeia, a Harper’s article about conservative humanities institutes, and an autofictional Siberian novel in which I had been utterly immersed, a world of concrete apartment buildings, tuberculosis, and snowdrifts completely at odds with my humid surroundings.

The tide was coming in at a diagonal to the beach from which I alighted, another dark-sand shore where rock outcroppings appeared in the distance like the painted backdrop of a museum diorama. I swam against the current, but obliquely; the small ripples of its crests rubbed my underarm and breast. When I turned back, I tried to enter into the furrows between the waves and remain there as I swam, though of course the water shifted me as it pleased.

An image came to mind of the music theory concept of counterpoint—the mainly Baroque technique of combining multiple lines of melody instead of harmonizing a single tune. In the novel I was reading, I thought, with short sections that alternated between the narrator’s childhood, expository reflections on literature and other topics, and metacommentary about the process of writing, autofiction was also a kind of counterpoint: the narrative moving along to form one shape and the narrator’s thoughts creating another. But I was also thinking of counterpoint, I realized, because its notation was similar to the shape the waves and I were making: the tide moving along one vector and my body advancing along another, two lines neither in parallel nor opposition, but in a relationship in constant flux. I watched these thoughts rise and fall in me as I swam. The connections of so-called free association aren’t free at all, I thought then, but linked by joints that we cannot always perceive.

My final swim of the trip, days later, took place in a long, protected bay where I could swim out as far as I wanted to. This time, as I watched the water’s color change from turquoise to deep blue, a cinematic image came to mind: the swimming pools of Argentine director Lucrecia Martel. The pools of her films are metaphors within the plots of her screenplays, but also metaphors for her theory of cinema. I’d once seen her speak, years earlier, when she had brought along a Tupperware, held up its teal lid, and said, “This is the screen of the film.” Then she held up the clear container and said, “But this is the theater. Many times, people forget to use this space. The image doesn’t leave the screen, but the sound does.”

The lines from the forgotten poem, my newfound sense of wholeness, and these conjoined and contrapuntal associations, I realized, could only come from this: the additional dimension of the water and the freedom to move about within it. Instead of perception and movement being focused on the world in front of me, as it was on dry land, or constrained to a movement parallel to the surface, as it was in lap swimming, the buoyancy of salt water gave my body the space to move through unexpected circuits.

That was why the act of swimming in salt water could call up so many more associations than swimming in landed life. My limbs had so much room to move, and indeed were obligated to move, either to tread water or to propel me forward. I imagined flows of neurons escaping the brain and expanding their loops to irregular circuits throughout the entire body, carrying back with them memories that could only be accessed with the sculling of the hands or the free bending of the knees and ankles. Where I had once learned to swim by stitching together instructional photographs, now the fluent movement of saltwater swimming stitched together stills of its own accord, images trapped deep in my memory. They came from hidden corners of the brain and equally the body, and only salt water had the power to call them up. ♦