Excerpt From
Wayfinding: A Memoir
Colvill Park, 1976
Colvill Park, 1976
We waited in the cool early June morning in my small Minnesota town. The weather was just beginning to nudge toward a hot and humid summer. It was the summer of freedom. Our parents had signed us up for these swimming lessons weeks before, to keep us from drowning in the Mississippi and to keep us from asking what’s there to do fifty times a day. Now we knew the routine. We gathered on the sidewalk outside the hulking concrete and brick pool building, yawning, all bony arms and legs, shag haircuts, and red, white, and blue t-shirts, flagging the bicentennial. The pool building was just yards from the river, and we could watch the barges and tugboats trudging up and down the channel.
We changed quickly in the locker rooms, our toes starting to prune on the cold, wet, textured concrete floor. I tried to ignore the girl bodies around me, naked and awkward, as I ducked my head and maneuvered under my towel, embarrassed and nervous to display my body. My heart quickened, and my mouth dried. I constantly felt the sensation of someone watching me. I was hypervigilant, always. That morning was around the time I started separating from my body. Started to actively hate it. Started becoming interested in dieting and making my body smaller, less visible. That was maybe a way I could survive.
Swimsuits were problematic for me in so many ways. The summer before, or maybe it was earlier that year, my mother and I were shopping for swimsuits at the little department store on Main Street when the sky went deep green, then black. I was standing alone in a dressing room in my underwear when the store manager yelled for everyone to get to the basement. The tornado sirens were howling. The huge plate glass windows facing the street were starting to slightly throb from the pressure change. My mother screamed at me to hurry up, grab my clothes, run, and get dressed downstairs. But the idea of the store employees and customers seeing me in my underpants was more than I could stand. It felt worse than whatever the tornado was going to do. I put on my clothes as fast as I could and flew out of the dressing room. My mother and I scrambled down the wide stairs to the basement and took shelter along with everyone else from the store under big white tables covered with dozens and dozens of colorful bolts of fabric. That tornado popped those plate glass windows and we heard them explode, one after another. Some people say a tornado sounds like a train, but I think it sounds like a meat grinder hungrily chewing up everything in its path. The tornado blasted down Main Street, along the Mississippi, eventually traveling to our house, miles west of downtown. The tornado stripped leaves from our trees and peeled off much of the roof on our porch and garage, while my father, completely oblivious, worked downstairs in his woodshop, table saw running at full volume.
Once the tornado passed, my mother and I carefully picked our way through the glass-dappled store, got to our car, and drove home. When we got there, my father was still in the basement, and my brother, a toddler was taking a nap in his bedroom next to the porch. It appeared he didn’t even wake up during the tornado. I remember my mother, unhinged, unloading on my father for nearly getting their son killed. I don’t remember anyone asking me how I was doing.
On that June Tuesday morning, I was wearing my purple swimsuit with the bottom that always sagged on my skinny behind, and I was ready to swim. Or at least ready to get it over with. Whistles blew and lessons commenced. Our small army of almost-swimmers was ordered into the blue sea of the outdoor pool – Olympic-sized, unheated, the only one in town. We had already learned that easing into the water was the worst idea. We jumped in and clung to the rough sides of the pool, dozens of us treading water like shipwrecked sailors hoping for a miracle.
We were a competitive pack. American crawl, sidestroke, and butterfly were our currency. We were all striving to earn another Red Cross card by learning a new skill, practicing, and getting promoted to the next group by the end of the summer. Minnow to Fish. Fish to Flying Fish. Flying Fish to Shark. Or maybe it was just beginning, intermediate, or advanced. We followed a parallel path to the swimmers at the YMCA in town, with its indoor heated pool. In later years, I swam there too. Year by year, level by level, we progressed from wailing and tears to flailing in the water, to controlling our limbs and gliding with confidence. The holy grail was permission to fly off the highest diving board, more than 20 feet above the water. Arms and legs akimbo, or tightened like a human arrow, or curled into a cannonball, clutching our knees, it was a rite of passage and completely terrifying. It’s a miracle no one died.
The actual divers, the teenagers, and the lifeguards, though, we worshiped like gods. We watched them practice, our eyes big, mouths slack, while we motored our feet furiously, clutching our kickboards. Later that summer, I got to dive off the low board, and I was thrilled. But the summer I was thirteen, the last year of Colvill Park swimming lessons, I got my chance to take on the high board. I remember making my way up the narrow steps, each wet and coated with sandy grit. I remember grabbing the silver metal bars at the top, and slowly inching toward the end of the board. It was my brass ring, my Valhalla, my one shot. I felt the other swimmers watching me intently. There would be no practice round. I stood near the end of the board, psyching myself up. At the last second, I chickened out on the dive and decided to just cannonball in. Unfortunately, I leaned too far back and hit the water with a flat smack. The air wooshed out of my lungs as my back felt like I had shattered it. I sunk deeper into the water. Luckily, I was able to get my bearings and somewhat frantically flap my arms like a windmill and make my way to the surface before a lifeguard, if they were watching, felt the need to jump in and save me. I slowly scissor-kicked my way to the side of the pool and rested my head on the concrete. I did it. I went off the high board. But I felt no sense of triumph. Only shame and the ache of failure. All I could focus on was that I chickened out on the dive. That was the only time I remember going off the high board that summer, or ever.
That fall, I was in seventh grade, and I joined the swim team. After several practices at the big junior high pool, I learned I was not very good. I was also bullied by some of the other girls, especially Mary Jo. She was my chief tormentor, but she had her henchgirls too. One afternoon, when we were practicing for our second or maybe third competition, I hopped on the white starting block, at the shallow end, as I had done dozens of other times. I perched, tensed, and waited for the whistle. Kim, the top henchgirl, lurched at me from behind and shoved me forward. The momentum drove me straight to the blue bottom of the pool, where my forehead smacked the unyielding concrete.
I must have hit hard enough to lose consciousness because the next thing I remember I was floating in the water and our coach, Mr. Featherstone, was blowing his whistle furiously and running. The next thing I remember after that was seeing Kim, Mary Jo, and the other girls giggling uncontrollably. After that “accident,” I took over as the stats manager and ran the clipboard for the rest of the season. I never dove into the water again.
At Colvill Park that morning, after our lesson, we made our way back to the locker room. I sat on the metal bench, under my tent of soggy towel, peeled off my swimsuit, and systematically reclothed myself. Once that summer, an older girl named Tina yanked off my towel and threw it on the puddled concrete. As I scrambled to cover my nakedness, she stood over me and laughed. When I started to cry, she pointed at me and laughed even louder. I don’t know which was worse, the humiliation or the terror this violation invoked. I didn’t understand at the time, but I was adding this trauma to my growing list.
Once we were dressed, wet swimsuits smooshed into plastic bags or rolled up into our towels, stringy hair poking our eyes, we stampeded the snack bar with coins jingling in our hands.
We sat at worn wooden picnic tables or on the matted grass, or walked around the park, slurping our Popsicles, and prying Laffy Taffy from our molars. Tired and satiated, we moved to the curb in front of the pool building, and waited for the parade of sedans, station wagons, and pickup trucks to arrive. Some parents were eager to hear about the morning’s lesson, and others hurried and calculated the minutes until they had to be back at work. Every kid was picked up, and the vehicles pulled out on Highway 61, in an untidy, unplanned caravan. Every kid but me.
More often than not, I sat on the curb after the caravan departed and the street and the park returned to birdsong. I sat alone. I stretched and listened for my mother rounding the corner to the pool house, my hope rising each time a car drove up. I strained until all I could hear was the buzzing in my ears. I waited until I couldn’t stand it any longer, until my anxiety skittered across my skin like an insect. I got up and shuffled into the dark pool building. Without making eye contact, I asked the teenager behind the metal counter if I could use the phone. I felt so ashamed. I had them dial my house phone number. I let it ring eight times and prayed someone would answer. Then I tried my grandparent’s phone number, the good grandparents, the kind ones, Carl and Eleanor, who lived a mile away from us. As a last resort, I had them call my father’s work, on the off-chance he was there. Eventually, as I sat stinking with chlorine and sadness, someone would arrive and drive me home.
While the other kids were horsing around with their siblings and orchestrating complicated sleepovers with their friends like they were military maneuvers, I was in my room, alone. I heard the neighborhood kids playing Marco Polo and kick the can until the streetlights came on, the signal that the day had ended and it was time for bed. I lay in my bed in the dark, holding my stuffed Holly Hobby doll with one arm. Listening. Waiting. Planning. Calculating. I had become skilled in the art and science of survival.
We waited in the cool early June morning in my small Minnesota town. The weather was just beginning to nudge toward a hot and humid summer. It was the summer of freedom. Our parents had signed us up for these swimming lessons weeks before, to keep us from drowning in the Mississippi and to keep us from asking what’s there to do fifty times a day. Now we knew the routine. We gathered on the sidewalk outside the hulking concrete and brick pool building, yawning, all bony arms and legs, shag haircuts, and red, white, and blue t-shirts, flagging the bicentennial. The pool building was just yards from the river, and we could watch the barges and tugboats trudging up and down the channel.
We changed quickly in the locker rooms, our toes starting to prune on the cold, wet, textured concrete floor. I tried to ignore the girl bodies around me, naked and awkward, as I ducked my head and maneuvered under my towel, embarrassed and nervous to display my body. My heart quickened, and my mouth dried. I constantly felt the sensation of someone watching me. I was hypervigilant, always. That morning was around the time I started separating from my body. Started to actively hate it. Started becoming interested in dieting and making my body smaller, less visible. That was maybe a way I could survive.
Swimsuits were problematic for me in so many ways. The summer before, or maybe it was earlier that year, my mother and I were shopping for swimsuits at the little department store on Main Street when the sky went deep green, then black. I was standing alone in a dressing room in my underwear when the store manager yelled for everyone to get to the basement. The tornado sirens were howling. The huge plate glass windows facing the street were starting to slightly throb from the pressure change. My mother screamed at me to hurry up, grab my clothes, run, and get dressed downstairs. But the idea of the store employees and customers seeing me in my underpants was more than I could stand. It felt worse than whatever the tornado was going to do. I put on my clothes as fast as I could and flew out of the dressing room. My mother and I scrambled down the wide stairs to the basement and took shelter along with everyone else from the store under big white tables covered with dozens and dozens of colorful bolts of fabric. That tornado popped those plate glass windows and we heard them explode, one after another. Some people say a tornado sounds like a train, but I think it sounds like a meat grinder hungrily chewing up everything in its path. The tornado blasted down Main Street, along the Mississippi, eventually traveling to our house, miles west of downtown. The tornado stripped leaves from our trees and peeled off much of the roof on our porch and garage, while my father, completely oblivious, worked downstairs in his woodshop, table saw running at full volume.
Once the tornado passed, my mother and I carefully picked our way through the glass-dappled store, got to our car, and drove home. When we got there, my father was still in the basement, and my brother, a toddler was taking a nap in his bedroom next to the porch. It appeared he didn’t even wake up during the tornado. I remember my mother, unhinged, unloading on my father for nearly getting their son killed. I don’t remember anyone asking me how I was doing.
On that June Tuesday morning, I was wearing my purple swimsuit with the bottom that always sagged on my skinny behind, and I was ready to swim. Or at least ready to get it over with. Whistles blew and lessons commenced. Our small army of almost-swimmers was ordered into the blue sea of the outdoor pool – Olympic-sized, unheated, the only one in town. We had already learned that easing into the water was the worst idea. We jumped in and clung to the rough sides of the pool, dozens of us treading water like shipwrecked sailors hoping for a miracle.
We were a competitive pack. American crawl, sidestroke, and butterfly were our currency. We were all striving to earn another Red Cross card by learning a new skill, practicing, and getting promoted to the next group by the end of the summer. Minnow to Fish. Fish to Flying Fish. Flying Fish to Shark. Or maybe it was just beginning, intermediate, or advanced. We followed a parallel path to the swimmers at the YMCA in town, with its indoor heated pool. In later years, I swam there too. Year by year, level by level, we progressed from wailing and tears to flailing in the water, to controlling our limbs and gliding with confidence. The holy grail was permission to fly off the highest diving board, more than 20 feet above the water. Arms and legs akimbo, or tightened like a human arrow, or curled into a cannonball, clutching our knees, it was a rite of passage and completely terrifying. It’s a miracle no one died.
The actual divers, the teenagers, and the lifeguards, though, we worshiped like gods. We watched them practice, our eyes big, mouths slack, while we motored our feet furiously, clutching our kickboards. Later that summer, I got to dive off the low board, and I was thrilled. But the summer I was thirteen, the last year of Colvill Park swimming lessons, I got my chance to take on the high board. I remember making my way up the narrow steps, each wet and coated with sandy grit. I remember grabbing the silver metal bars at the top, and slowly inching toward the end of the board. It was my brass ring, my Valhalla, my one shot. I felt the other swimmers watching me intently. There would be no practice round. I stood near the end of the board, psyching myself up. At the last second, I chickened out on the dive and decided to just cannonball in. Unfortunately, I leaned too far back and hit the water with a flat smack. The air wooshed out of my lungs as my back felt like I had shattered it. I sunk deeper into the water. Luckily, I was able to get my bearings and somewhat frantically flap my arms like a windmill and make my way to the surface before a lifeguard, if they were watching, felt the need to jump in and save me. I slowly scissor-kicked my way to the side of the pool and rested my head on the concrete. I did it. I went off the high board. But I felt no sense of triumph. Only shame and the ache of failure. All I could focus on was that I chickened out on the dive. That was the only time I remember going off the high board that summer, or ever.
That fall, I was in seventh grade, and I joined the swim team. After several practices at the big junior high pool, I learned I was not very good. I was also bullied by some of the other girls, especially Mary Jo. She was my chief tormentor, but she had her henchgirls too. One afternoon, when we were practicing for our second or maybe third competition, I hopped on the white starting block, at the shallow end, as I had done dozens of other times. I perched, tensed, and waited for the whistle. Kim, the top henchgirl, lurched at me from behind and shoved me forward. The momentum drove me straight to the blue bottom of the pool, where my forehead smacked the unyielding concrete.
I must have hit hard enough to lose consciousness because the next thing I remember I was floating in the water and our coach, Mr. Featherstone, was blowing his whistle furiously and running. The next thing I remember after that was seeing Kim, Mary Jo, and the other girls giggling uncontrollably. After that “accident,” I took over as the stats manager and ran the clipboard for the rest of the season. I never dove into the water again.
At Colvill Park that morning, after our lesson, we made our way back to the locker room. I sat on the metal bench, under my tent of soggy towel, peeled off my swimsuit, and systematically reclothed myself. Once that summer, an older girl named Tina yanked off my towel and threw it on the puddled concrete. As I scrambled to cover my nakedness, she stood over me and laughed. When I started to cry, she pointed at me and laughed even louder. I don’t know which was worse, the humiliation or the terror this violation invoked. I didn’t understand at the time, but I was adding this trauma to my growing list.
Once we were dressed, wet swimsuits smooshed into plastic bags or rolled up into our towels, stringy hair poking our eyes, we stampeded the snack bar with coins jingling in our hands.
We sat at worn wooden picnic tables or on the matted grass, or walked around the park, slurping our Popsicles, and prying Laffy Taffy from our molars. Tired and satiated, we moved to the curb in front of the pool building, and waited for the parade of sedans, station wagons, and pickup trucks to arrive. Some parents were eager to hear about the morning’s lesson, and others hurried and calculated the minutes until they had to be back at work. Every kid was picked up, and the vehicles pulled out on Highway 61, in an untidy, unplanned caravan. Every kid but me.
More often than not, I sat on the curb after the caravan departed and the street and the park returned to birdsong. I sat alone. I stretched and listened for my mother rounding the corner to the pool house, my hope rising each time a car drove up. I strained until all I could hear was the buzzing in my ears. I waited until I couldn’t stand it any longer, until my anxiety skittered across my skin like an insect. I got up and shuffled into the dark pool building. Without making eye contact, I asked the teenager behind the metal counter if I could use the phone. I felt so ashamed. I had them dial my house phone number. I let it ring eight times and prayed someone would answer. Then I tried my grandparent’s phone number, the good grandparents, the kind ones, Carl and Eleanor, who lived a mile away from us. As a last resort, I had them call my father’s work, on the off-chance he was there. Eventually, as I sat stinking with chlorine and sadness, someone would arrive and drive me home.
While the other kids were horsing around with their siblings and orchestrating complicated sleepovers with their friends like they were military maneuvers, I was in my room, alone. I heard the neighborhood kids playing Marco Polo and kick the can until the streetlights came on, the signal that the day had ended and it was time for bed. I lay in my bed in the dark, holding my stuffed Holly Hobby doll with one arm. Listening. Waiting. Planning. Calculating. I had become skilled in the art and science of survival.