A winter lake swim

Text 1: Four Degrees, by Megan Atherley

An original contemporary blog.

The thermometer clipped to the jetty read four degrees. I read it twice, as if the number might improve with attention, and then I took off my coat.

Nobody tells you how loud cold water is. It is not the splash, which is small and almost polite, but the noise your own body makes the moment the lake closes over your shoulders: a gasp that tears out of you like something escaping, then another, then a ragged string of them that you cannot stop. Your skin does not feel cold so much as scalded. Your hands become someone else’s hands. Every instinct you own, built over millions of years, is shouting one word, and the word is out.

I have been swimming here every Saturday since October, and I know now that the shouting passes. You count. You breathe out longer than you breathe in. You fix your eyes on the far buoy, a small orange planet bobbing against the dark hills, and you swim towards it with the clumsy determination of a toddler crossing a room. Somewhere around the second minute, the panic loosens its fist.

And then, for a while, it is extraordinary. The mist lifts off the surface in slow white curls. A heron stands on the shingle, unimpressed. The water, which a moment ago felt like an attack, becomes a kind of silence that holds you, and the ache in your shoulders, the endless list of emails waiting at home, the argument you had on Thursday, all of it is rinsed thin and carried away.

Twelve minutes. That is my limit, and I respect it. I climb out shaking, my skin the colour of boiled ham, and fumble with my socks for what feels like an hour. Then I pour tea from the flask and laugh at nothing. Next Saturday, I will read the thermometer again.

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