John 'The River Guy'

It took me having to get rebuffed by natatorium staff my senior year of college to understand the soul’s benefit of open water distance swimming. The rec center my parent’s money went to could not empathize with the altruistic fact that their money, which was now mine……………mattered as much as anyone elses’. Lake Nichol, in northern Tuscaloosa County, is an oxbow effect lake of the Black Warrior River system. It took me also being directed by a hippie friend to discover it’s tranquility. It’s respite for my permanent psychology ever since its discovery.

Red clay would sink into my toe nails to remind me of the healing each time I set out up to my waist, just after putting on my googles. I didn’t matter which romantic liaison failed the day before. It didn’t care that I didn’t really have a job, much less a career nailed down in the months to come post graduation. Soon the clay would turn to mud and the mud to sand signifying I was off to chart my own course. To have another session of dreams about my future while out past the mallards, the reeds and snakes I couldn’t even see……….hopelessly non venomous.

In open water like that you could be anywhere in your mind. It didn’t matter as long as it was not back on campus fighting crowds at the ‘nat or rec’ center. There was no aging effect from the carcinogenic outcome of chlorine. You wondered how a ‘basin of bacteria’ could be more healthy…………….? You didn’t think long and hard about it because it just could. You just chalked it up in your mind to being one of those great ironies in life. By now the endorphines were coming in to give that glint of energy, you approved it knowing it’d have a calming, sedative effect once you got out and dried off.

Stepping back out into the clay past the sand and mud you left 15 yards behind. As if you were a cruise ship coming back to port in Cape Canaveral. Delivering its passangers back safely home. Cruise ships cargo people. You cargo hopes and dreams. The towel now being crusty from that red clay, drying in the August sun as you made your way out of the cove onto the sandy soil of the makeshift parking lot below the bluff overlooking the open section of the lake. Because of the endorphins you didn’t get angry at the presence of the couple making out on the bluff. Something you could not have done the previous day when you hung up with her one last time. The forlorn county road on the way back to Tuscaloosa, brought back the stark reality of commitments and obligations. Those that were rock solid in reality. Those you could melt away like sugar cubes in hot tea with the next visit.

And this is how I came about. My identity forged so many years ago, through so many places I’d never dream of seeing. Only places I thought of while out at Lake Nichol…………………just vague phantoms of consciousness to come. Prestine places, murky places, deep places and shallow places for the wonderment of the soul to see. As this is my introduction for you into this world………………….I invite you to see it, dream it! All it takes is getting wet…………….soon abandon will follow!

-John ‘The River Guy’