Sink or Swim

Sink or Swim

By Matthew Dicks  /  Illustrated By Sean Wang

I’m clinging to the edge of the pool. Tiny fingers gripping the edge. Feet kicking furiously under the water. I’m gasping for breath. If I reach down, my toes can barely scrape the bottom of the pool before my head dips below the surface. A couple of feet away from the edge, the bottom drops away…and I’m in over my head. The smell of chlorine fills my nostrils. I look up. A bird on a tree branch overhead chirps away, unaware of the battle going on below. 

I hate that bird. He’s so happy and joyful. He’s not fighting for his life. 

Then the man pushes me again. My grandfather is teaching me to swim. His lesson amounts to this: get in the water. No bathing suit, of course, because that’s an unnecessary expense. I’m wearing cut-off jeans that feel like a 50-pound weight strapped to my waist.  

Next, hold onto the edge. Prepare for combat. 

Then my grandfather places his open palm against my forehead and pushes. I’m thrust about five feet away from the edge of the pool into water well over my head. His instruction amounts to a single word: “Swim!” I paddle like hell to get back to the edge before I drown.

Then we do it again and again and again. This is how I learned to swim. 

Eventually, my father would throw me into the deep end and have me swim to the side. He would throw quarters to the bottom of the pool and allow me to keep any money I could scoop up; I learned to hold my breath and dive. 

Eventually, I watched others swim and converted my doggie paddle to a more traditional stroke. 

As a teenager, I swam a mile every summer at scout camp, jumped off rowboats into the middle of the lake without a life preserver and worked at the waterfront as a lifeguard. 

Total amount spent on my swimming lessons as a child: about $9 in quarters. It was all spent at The Dream Machine at the Lincoln Mall on games like Donkey Kong and Missile Command.  

Thirty years later, I have two children who are learning to swim. Both are teenagers and are still taking lessons at summer camp. 

Total amount spent on swimming lessons so far? About $8 million. That doesn’t even account for the amount of swimwear that my children own. 

When I was a child, I owned one bathing suit at most, and when it didn’t fit, a pair of shorts or cut-offs did the trick until a new suit could be purchased. I wore my suit during the day, hung it off the railing on the deck at night, and then put it back on the next morning, slightly cold and damp but otherwise fine.

A bathing suit can be wet when you put it on because it’s about to be wet. I’ve said this to my kids many times, much to their dismay. 

My son owns nine swimsuits (no joke), plus another dozen swim shirts. Also flip-flops and Crocs and swim shoes. 

Hundreds of dollars spent on a wardrobe so he can jump into a lake and sort of swim.  

Somehow, something that I learned via trial and error and the desire to avoid drowning now costs parents the price of a modest vacation home. 

For my children, it began with “Mommy and Me” swimming lessons at a local swim school when they were infants. My daughter and wife entered the pool and splashed around together while a highly trained professional watched them splash.

Cost? A year of tuition at a state university. 

When they were a little older, we sent them to the “best swim school in the area,” where they spent an hour at a time in the company of two or three trained professionals. They learned to dive for rings in waist-high water and swim across a pool while a team of lifeguards flanked them at all times as well as jump into water shoulder deep.

We could’ve visited Europe that summer. Instead, my kids learned to swim. Except they really didn’t.

Yes, they learned the strokes and were capable of remaining above the water for a bit. But absent any stakes, they hadn’t really learned how to swim in a way that might keep them alive. They still avoided deep water and had no desire to place themselves in a situation where they might need to swim for any length of time or drown.

Next came swim lessons at summer camp. These were blessedly cheaper than the swim school. Yes, we could’ve finally furnished our living room or maybe enjoyed a weekend away on our wedding anniversary. But no! More lessons with more highly trained people, summer after summer after summer after summer. 

The result: somehow, in some way, I am still a better swimmer than my children. 

Somehow, in some way, my grandfather’s high-stakes, analog swim lessons taught me better than the small fortune my wife and I have paid to teach my children to swim. 

It turns out that stakes matter. Hard lessons produce solid results.

“Sink or swim” is, unsurprisingly, a damn fine way to teach a kid to swim. 

Matthew Dicks is an elementary school teacher, bestselling novelist and a record 55-time Moth Story SLAM champion. His latest books are Twenty-one Truths About Love and The Other Mother.

Sean Wang, an MIT architecture graduate, is author of the sci-fi graphic novel series, Runners. Learn more at seanwang.com.