One rainy afternoon, Deakin, pensive, strokes through his moat and thinks of Neddy Merrill’s long swim in John Cheever’s story “The Swimmer.” Merrill decides to swim home after a pool party by using a suburban patchwork of backyard pools. The farm was his home base, where in 1970 he bought and began to restore a sixteenth-century Tudor ruin surrounded by fields, ancient paths, and crucially, a moat-a beloved, swimmable moat. “My house was once an acorn,” he wrote in his posthumously published Notes from Walnut Tree Farm. #ISPLASH SWIM SCHOOL REVIEW FREE#But, as he points out in Waterlog, swimmingĬertainly appeals to free spirits, which is why the talk is invariably so good in those little spontaneous bankside, beach or poolside parliaments that spring up wherever two or three swimmers are gathered, as though the water’s fluency were contagious.ĭeakin died from a brain tumor in 2006. More than anything, swimmers hear themselves breathe. Its soundtrack is burbles and plashes and amplified muffled roars, pops, and tinklings. As Thoreau “went to the woods,” Deakin went into the water. Its spirit, and the way it illuminates the joy and complexity of water, of swimming in the wild, places it next to Thoreau’s Walden. It might be the most romantic swimming memoir ever written. Though it is only now being published in the United States, it was released in the United Kingdom in 1999, and helped launch a national movement of outdoor swimming. Roger Deakin, the writer, activist, educator, and filmmaker: check.Īs I reread Deakin’s book Waterlog, I found it shot through with this sensibility. Hippiedom as sensibility rather than pejorative. Jonathan Miller, Michael Palin, and Simon Callow, crossed with Byron and the Shelleys. Poetry-fed, exuberant thespians and luvvies, accustomed to an audience. I realized that I had encountered this weight of shag within the bohemian spectrum before: the gentleman hippie. So these wilder and woollier natives blew my mind. From my Canadian perspective, the denizens of Britain, great and small, consisted of the bowler-hatted banker from Mary Poppins, Lady Di and the royal family, Merchant Ivory characters, and the Mackenzies and Strachans-the starchy founders of Upper Canada. In my head, I connected these sylvan beings to Stonehenge and Tumnus the faun. Guitars held vertically, played by things with pointy boots and ears. Nick Drake led to Syd Barrett, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Sandy Denny. But a random CD cover caught my eye: a shaggy, elfin boy-man wearing a rainbow-striped woven sort of sweater thing, beckoning, in soft focus. On this particular day, I was probably looking for Mazzy Star or Future Bible Heroes or anything from 4AD. I’d walk there from the room I was renting a few blocks away. There was a little music shop on College Street in Toronto called She Said Boom. Then I realized there was another kind of hippie: the British hippie. In my early twenties, whenever I heard the word “hippie,” I pictured the Haight-Ashbury version: Woodstock, Manson, tie-dye. Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, by Roger Deakin.
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