CREATIVE NONFICTION

By Jocelyn Heath

My father calls to tell me that he has to give up swim­ming. His shoul­ders started aching awhile back, but he went on swim­ming until the pain buried itself so deep in his joints, espe­cial­ly at night, that he went to the ortho­pe­dist. His rotator cuffs, he found out, were all but shred­ded. Worn out and fraying like shirt seams. Surgery could fix this, but he wasn’t really a can­di­date given his age, the recov­ery time, and the blood thin­ners he takes. He could have cor­ti­sone shots for the pain, but con­tin­u­ing to swim would only wear the muscle thinner over time. “I guess this is what getting old means,” he muses.

I swam laps with my father from seventh grade through the week I left for college. We shared the medium speed lane closest to the stairs, as far as we could get from the triathlon jocks while also not plowing over the folks taking the pool at a slower pace. We were among the reg­u­lars, sharing the half hour with the balding fellow who swam an odd side­stroke, the bearded, stooped man who always had a pleas­ant word. The man­agers and life­guards often stopped at our lane to chat. My teen years smell of chlo­rine and Ultra Swim; they echo with the lawn­mow­er buzz of swim­suit dryers.

My father started swim­ming laps before me and has carried on after me. It must be almost thirty-five years—the better part of my life­time— that he’s had the pool as a routine. He has lived in Mary­land for more than forty—long enough to develop a fas­ci­na­tion with the body of water that bisects our state: the Chesa­peake Bay. It’s fitting that he chris­tened the base­ment family room “The Chesa­peake Room,” and over the years, he’s filled it with carved birds, model ships, and a paint­ing of a skip­jack gusting along the bay. His décor does not include one of the Bay’s most iconic crea­tures: Call­inectes sapidus, the Chesa­peake blue crab, whose name partly trans­lates to “beau­ti­ful swimmer.” These crus­taceans are the lifeblood of Mary­land: water­men build liveli­hoods catch­ing them on the Bay, and res­i­dents steam them at summer cookouts.

The next time we talk, he’s agi­tat­ed. Not swim­ming isn’t going well. His shoul­der seems to be healing, and he can do other cardio work­outs, but like me, he finds swim­ming med­i­ta­tive. Nothing can repli­cate the total immer­sion in clear, bleach-tinged water to be crossed back and forth, stroke by stroke to the sound­track of ambient noise or, when both ears dip below the water­line, virtual silence. Or maybe it’s the seacur­rent slush of an arm pulling through the motion of back­stroke. In the pool, your thoughts move in sync with your body, letting your mind process them—sometimes to com­ple­tion, some­times just enough to make them man­age­able so you can go on with your day more easily.

Human swim­mers move fluidly through the water, despite spend­ing most of our time out of it. Crabs moving on land, however, lack grace; they scuttle back, forward, and side­ways as though manip­u­lat­ed by a joy­stick. Their many legs, though partly tucked up under the mantle, look too much like an insect’s to be inher­ent­ly beau­ti­ful. But in the water, those legs flutter and steer; the mobile joints turn a tough­ened body in a full circle before sending it any way it wants to go.

Blue crabs also have the gift of auton­o­my: bodily inde­pen­dence that allows them to detach a limb to escape danger. At the con­nec­tion of leg to body lies a frac­ture plane—a car­ti­lagi­nous quick-release mech­a­nism designed to let go easily of the leg and with imme­di­ate clot­ting of blood to avoid undue trauma, used in the event of capture, injury, or disease. With auton­o­my comes regen­er­a­tion; a new leg will grow to replace what’s missing. Theirs is a body that heals itself.

With medical science, our bodies, too, can acquire this ability. Weeks after my father’s initial diag­no­sis, a new treat­ment method comes to light: autol­o­gous blood injec­tions. He explains that the doctor will draw some of his own blood and inject it back, but direct­ly into the rotator cuffs in hopes that the clot­ting and healing agents will help the muscles patch up the tears. It will hurt, but my father decides to give it a go. He’s not assured a return to swim­ming, but I can tell he’s hoping.

Swim­ming, in a way, saved my father’s life. One summer, he noticed a strange buzzing sen­sa­tion in his chest when his heart rate rose during lap ses­sions. He tracked it for a few weeks, then men­tioned it to my mother, who demand­ed he see his doctor imme­di­ate­ly. The angiogram lit up three large dams on the arid flood­plain of his heart. Once my father’s stents were in, the blood returned. His biggest block­age was in the left coro­nary artery, which car­di­ol­o­gists call “the wid­ow­mak­er.” Side by side, the angiogram images show a strik­ing dif­fer­ence: the pre-stent image is pale gray, meaning too little blood and soon to be anoxic. The other, dark as the waters of the Bay.

My father feels much better after the autol­o­gous blood injec­tions in that the pain has dwin­dled. But he’s still advised to stop swim­ming per­ma­nent­ly to avoid aggra­vat­ing the already-injured tissue. This is not accept­able to him; he’s decided to push for surgery, despite the risks and doctors’ hes­i­ta­tions, rather than stay out of the pool forever. He might face a month or more of recov­ery with no guar­an­tees if oper­at­ed on, but, weighed against another poten­tial ten years of life without swim­ming, that time seems to him a more than fair exchange.

But barely a month after making this choice, before surgery could even be sched­uled, he found his way back to the water anyway. A few weeks after the injec­tions, he tells us that he felt so back-to-normal the pre­vi­ous day, that he decided to give swim­ming a try. No aches after­ward. “If there’s no addi­tion­al pain,” his doctor said on a fol­lowup visit, “you’re prob­a­bly no worse off than before.” Whether he will relapse is hard to say, he muses, but he’ll go on anyway. Years later, he’s back in the pool as though nothing had changed.

Change, too, has come to the body of water my father holds so dear. For years, advo­cates have worried about the health of the Bay. The water sup­pos­ed­ly once ran so clear that a water­man could see his toes while stand­ing chest deep. Oysters, fil­ter­ers of the water, lay thick across the bottom, and crabs, the beau­ti­ful swim­mers, per­me­at­ed the current. When humans pulled too many oysters from the water and filled the bay with toxins, the water clotted up. Pho­tographed from above, the brachial water­shed, no longer ultra­ma­rine, ran pale brown with chem­i­cals and chicken shit. Fish floated dead to the shore­lines, and those who dared to swim broke out in rashes. What poi­soned one part of the Bay poi­soned it all.

The Bay, like my father, seems to be return­ing to health. Biol­o­gists raise and release native oysters to boost what pop­u­la­tions remain. Though they no longer tile the bottom with their ragged shells, many still suck the brack­ish water in and strain it out the cleaner. Vol­un­teers have planted native grasses in and around the water. Call­inectes sapidus, the iconic blue crabs, are still caught and eaten, but more are left to thrive and repro­duce. Someday, the waters may again run blue with beau­ti­ful swimmers.

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.

Photo by Omid Armin