June Water Still Belongs to Winter

Somewhere in the first half of June there comes an afternoon when the air lies about the water. The sun has been working on the gravel lot all day. Heat shimmers off the roofs of the parked cars, the grass at the edges has gone pale, and everything on shore has signed up for summer. The lake has not countersigned. It sits there flat and bright, entirely unimpressed, holding a temperature that belongs to a month with ice in it.

Someone has to go first. On most ponds that someone is a child, because adults have learned to suspect the truth and then spend twenty minutes calling it a health consideration. The child drops the towel on the dock, walks in to the ankles, lets out a brief wordless objection, and then goes all the way under anyway. That is the first swim of the year in its pure form: a complaint and an acceptance, taking turns at the surface.

The Lake Is Still Being April

The water never gets the message on time. It is slower than the air and more stubborn, and it takes a far greater amount of heat to move it a single degree than it takes to warm the same claim about the air. The sun works on the surface all afternoon, and the surface accepts the gift and does nothing with it, because the wind turns, or the cold keeps its seat in the deep places and rises when the warm water is pushed aside. What this means, for the purposes of the first swim, is that a lake can look like a bathtub and feel like a broken promise.

June is the month of that broken promise, and that is exactly why June owns the first swim. May is not warm enough to tempt anybody. By July the water has mostly surrendered, and by August it is soup, and a first swim would be a formality. But June keeps the winter in the water. The ice went out weeks ago, or a few days ago, depending on the year — ice-out, they call it in the north, as if the lake had been waiting all winter for permission — and the water has been grudgingly warming ever since, starting from a place that remembered February perfectly well.

So on the first hot Saturday of June, the arrangement is nakedly unfair, and everybody at the shore pretends otherwise.

The Body Says No First

The body has opinions and expresses them immediately. The first opinion is the gasp: the air hauling itself in before the mind has filed any report, the chest seizing as if the water had reached in and grabbed the lungs. It is the oldest position the body holds on the subject of sudden cold, the same gasp that greeted a snowball down the collar in February. The swimmer learns to expect it and then learns that expectation changes nothing at all.

Getting in is not one action but a series of small surrenders. The ankles go first and complain. The shins go next. The knees. Each new inch of water has to make its case, and each case is denied. The breath goes short and sharp. Some people solve the problem by walking deeper very slowly, giving the body time to argue itself tired. Others — the impatient ones, and the children — turn around and dive, and the cold lands all at once, and they surface with a sound that frightens the birds.

Then something shifts. After a minute, sometimes less, the body stops arguing and begins to cope. The water does not warm. It is that the swimmer joins it. The heart slows back down. The breath evens out. The swimmer floats on the flat bright surface and looks at the shore, which now looks unbearably hot, and the water, by comparison, starts to feel almost like a preference. The first swim of the year is terrible for exactly sixty seconds and then becomes the only possible way to be.

The getting out is the real reward. The air arrives on wet skin like a gift, and the sun that was oppressive a minute ago becomes exactly right. The shiver that sets in afterwards is a separate, smaller argument, conducted from a towel.

Every Water Has Its Own June

The character of the first swim depends on which water claims it. The Atlantic off the Northeast in June is not cold the way a pond is cold; it is cold the way a fact is cold, indifferent and complete. The Pacific keeps a deeper, older cold that does not respect the calendar. The Great Lakes hold their winter late, and their first swims are things the swimmers talk about afterwards with a measure of respect. A mountain brook in June is snowmelt wearing a disguise and is cold in a way that finds the bones. In the South, the pond has already won by June, and the first swim is a relief rather than a test, though the bugs provide their own form of suffering, and the warm water is never entirely trustworthy.

Wherever it happens, the pond acquires its regulars. There is always one person who walks straight in without a sound and claims the water is fine, and there is always the possibility that this person is lying, or that the nerve endings have simply given up. There is the swimmer who goes out to the middle and back, climbs out blue-lipped, and announces that the water is warmer than it looks. There is the child who cannot be kept out of any water that is visible, and who will spend the day in and out, in and out, until the shivering becomes a condition, and who will then do it all again tomorrow. These three keep the calendar honest.

The Cold Is the Point

A warm first swim would be a fraud, and everybody involved would know it. Comfort is August's business, and August's swims are pleasant and entirely forgettable. The June swim is the one that counts because it costs something: a gasp, a shiver, a minute of genuine regret. In exchange, it proves what the calendar can only assert — that the winter is finished, that the year has turned, and that the body has agreed to come along.

That is why the first swim is never a quiet thing. The swimmers remember theirs the way anyone remembers a small victory: the waterline creeping up the ribs, the breath held, the moment of choosing. The people on the shore remember it too, because watching is its own participation. And on the walk back to the house, wrapped in a towel, with the lake still cold in the hair and the sun finally warm on the back of the neck, the whole enterprise takes on the shape of a tradition that makes sense.

The water will be warm by August, but in June it is still telling the truth about winter, and the swimmer goes in anyway. The second swim, tomorrow, will be easier, and the third easier still. The first one: the cold, the gasp, the yelp, the sixty terrible seconds.