Tucson Salvage: Water terrors, sunburns and a little warrior princess

My father dropped me at a public pool near our house for swim lessons, and he drove off. I was terrified, couldn’t yet articulate the deep fear of water I was suffering at that age. Even the sight of a swimming pool frightened me to tears.

The other 5-year-olds loved it. I cried, freely. These kids, each with a parent there, scooted away from me and into the water as I sat on the edge with my feet in the water. At the behest of an impatient kiddie swim instructor, I got into the water, weeping as I was, to blow bubbles and kick my feet. The sun, perfectly centered in a blue sky for maximum ensnarement was a merciless reminder of the day’s unyielding cook-fest of our flesh, combined with the unshaded baby pool, adjacent to the big-kid pool, it all told of a deep futility. I trawled for reasons as to why I was the odd kid out and hooked the saddest, most fearful thoughts. This is how it would always go, cornered in someone else’s head.

After the session of interminable panic and horror, I was dropped at our house on Kenyon Drive by some other kid-swimmer’s mother, a prearrangement, I guess. My dad returned that evening with a Baskin-Robbins mint chocolate chip ice cream cone, my mother soothing some kind of cold cream to minimize sunburn sting. My father remarked on my progress, though how could he know? Anyway, I could only agree with my father, if only to keep peace. Each day my stomach erupted with dread of another week, another swim lesson. Years later I discovered my father never learned to swim, not as a boy in Missouri, not as an adult. That fact was nothing he could or would say out loud to any of us five kids. Maybe water terrified him too?

After we moved to a bigger house on Tucson’s far east side, my parents somehow afforded a swimming pool in the back yard. I could mostly recontextualize my terrors of water and swimming pools by sheer force of will, and the hours spent cleaning the thing with a meshed net affixed to a long unwieldy aluminum pole.

Now the smell of chlorine evokes summers, mainly those before and just after 5th and 6th grade. Always Tucson, Sonoran Desert sun and Camp Adventure, where my parents sent my little brother and me to spend our summer days, from morning to late afternoon, so as not to burn down the house, our street or the desert. The camp was situated in a forest of mesquite trees near where East Tanque Verde Road bends and becomes Harrison Road, and smelled of cook-outs, glue crafts and kid body sweat. Elton John and Rod Stewart forever on the radio playing outdoors. I was a pretty good swimmer by then, but could hardly be alone by a swimming pool.

At the camp pool, my pale buddy and I would sometimes peel the burned dead skin off our backs in hopes of creating wild shapes we could name. This red-headed freckled kid, named Rusty, once peeled a layer from the tops of my shoulders all the way down to my lower back. In one piece. It shaped out the state of Texas. Badass. Don’t remember if it was pain or joy, but Rusty screamed as I gently skinned a giant frog off his back. We each tried to save our dead ectodermal tissue in our paper lunch bags, maybe to pin it to our bedroom walls at home, but the pieces would disintegrate by day’s end.

My little brother, too; his shoulders and nose conceived such ungodly shapes of fried skin from those summers, causing him immense pain and some creep in my guts, which I would sense again and again in ensuing years. His tender skin, my tender skin, we never tanned, only burned, so my relationship to the desert sun remains a complicated one.

Hats, sunglasses, sunscreen? Nah. In those days, we had what was called “sun lotion,” which, I’ve learned, had an SPF of two.

Decades later it is a Thursday afternoon in late July and I am walking my 3-1/2-year-old daughter Rickie to a swimming pool our neighbor friends are kind enough to let us use. Their university-bound 18-year-old daughter, Sophia, who is also a trained lifeguard and babysitter to our daughters, watches over Rickie too. Rickie’s one-piece swimsuit in the blue, pink and plum hues of Elsa from “Frozen” moves in tiny steps until a lizard appears, at which point her excitement is hardly contained, and her direction changes completely. The summer now is hotter, the famous sun even more brutal. We protect her from the sun with hats and glasses and plenty of shade.

When Rickie first stepped into the pool a few weeks back, she instantly learned the power of water, and some primal idea of how quickly life could be snatched away, yet any fear of unknowns seemed to pass straight through her, the fierce little warrior princess she is. If her head submerged she understood implicitly the consequences, after several coughs and eye wipes. I am amazed because I was never this way. My wife Maggie, a good swimmer, but who nearly drowned twice in her lifetime, still harbors water trauma.

Now Rickie considers the elements in action, a dry, unrelenting world transformed to aquatic wonder, and acclimates to them with a giddy sort of amphibious curiosity.

Here I am tearing up in another swimming pool in 2023. This time it is all about the sight of my daughter, laughing and splashing, learning to hold her nose, kick and blow bubbles, her eyes meeting mine as I hold on to her little ribcage and underarms, flapping her up and down. Her little pull, push and balance in my arms, tethered by a trust of her father, where every tiny hint of reliance has meaning to me, a sensation that fills me with yearning, which I know she soon won’t need, calls my world into being.

How she shrieks with glee at a quivering wasp floating in the pool, greeting the inky thing with love and hellos, making sure I cup it in my hands and free it from the water to safety. “He’s just drinking aqua, just a little.” She is so happy.

Our hour is up and there is no terror, no dread, no antipathy toward the next week’s swim lesson. If there was, she would tell me or her mother, in her way, and we would listen.

This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 2, 2023.