Miracle Swimming With Melon Dash

By Mary Roach

I was raised in a sedentary household. I can't recall seeing either of my parents swim or throw a ball or even break into a trot. My father's sole concession to fitness was a pre-cocktail hour round-trip stroll to the end of our road, about a sixteenth of a mile distant, with stops along the way to chat with anyone who happened to be out raking the yard or unloading groceries. My mother had a gizmo she referred to as an exercycle, a set of chintzy pedals — no chain, no resistance — mounted on a small aluminum stand. This enabled her to "exercise" while sitting in her easy chair, which she did while sipping Sanka and watching Walter Cronkite. I don't think it ever occurred to her to that it might be nice to purchase an actual bicycle and take it for a spin in the New Hampshire countryside.

Accordingly, my parents raised a pair of academically accomplished but dismally uncoordinated paperweights. I believe we were the first two children in New Hampshire ever to have reached puberty without learning to ski. A perfunctory attempt was made to teach me to swim when I was about six. This was prompted by my brother nearly drowning as a toddler at Newfound Lake, where my parents would occasionally go to set up lawn chairs and read and sip martinis and generally lose track of their offspring. My mother, chastened by the near loss of her first-born, carted me off to swim lessons at Storrs Pond. The water was cold, and I had a tantrum. There was no second lesson.

Over the years, the occasional well-meaning friend has tried to teach me to swim. I remember my grade school pal Martha Dean launching herself into waist-deep water and creating a thrashing churn that suggested Martha had been the victim of a rare New England piranha attack. "Just do this!" came a voice from somewhere inside the chop.

Years later, my college roommate Steph tried to show me how to tread water. Her arms and legs whirled at eggbeater speed in a complex, contrapuntal fashion. I once saw a man go on "The Ed Sullivan Show" spinning plates with his arms while simultaneously hula-hooping rings on his ankles. What Steph was doing seemed no less improbable.

I gained the impression that swimming was a series of frenzied but intricately coordinated moves. If you faltered, if you dropped one of your plates, you would sink to the bottom and drown. And so I grew up to be, in the carefully prepositioned language of the Transpersonal Swimming Institute, an "adult afraid in water."

	Students explore water playfully in Melon Dash's classes.

I recently enrolled in a six-day TSI "Miracle Swimming" beginner's class in the Bay Area, where I live. The Institute — founded by a former competitive swimmer named Melon Dash — offers swimming and snorkeling classes and learn-to-swim vacations in nine cities. Dash taught adult swimming as a graduate student, using a conventional Red Cross-approved curriculum. She so often saw anxiety in the faces of her students as she sent them off down the pool to practice a kick or stroke that she petitioned the college to let her design a class that addressed beginners' fears. From that class came the idea for the institute, which now has its own videos, workbooks, and gear with the memorable TSI logo: a hybrid of a human and a dolphin. (Unsettlingly, the transition line runs lengthwise, rather than across the waist, mermaid-style. A dolphin with a human arm growing out of one side and a head of black hair is shown frolicking in the sea, coping well with its disfigurement.)

My goal has never been to master a particular stroke. It's far simpler. I want to be the guy in the iced tea commercials of my youth, leaning back into a swimming pool, smiling, arms outstretched, taking "the Nestea plunge" I would like to find the prospect of immersing myself in deep water to be refreshing and appealing, not alarming.

It is day five, just past three in the afternoon. Sunlight is making an art school movie on the white-tiled floor nine feet below me. The class, four of us in all, meets in the charmingly derelict Berkeley High School Natatorium. ("Natatorium" meaning that the structure houses nothing but swimming pools, two of them plus locker rooms; "High School" meaning that we arrived today to find a chair and a fire extinguisher submerged on the bottom of the other pool.) Our instructor is Leticia Soto, an unshakably patient former TSI student. Soto swims with a fluid, measured grace and is obviously at home in water. She never splashes.

Soto is in the deep end of the pool with myself and a student named Anne, while a spotter, also a TSI grad, remains in the shallow end with another student, Anil. A fourth student is absent today. Anil is taking things more slowly than the rest of us because his lean, muscled legs make floating difficult for him. (For the same reason, Olympic swimmers are often, like Anil, "sinkers.")

While Soto works with Anne, I practice some of the things we've been learning. The back of our workbook has a list of skills we will master in the six-day course. There are 77 of them, which seems Herculean until you begin reading: "1. Getting into the water, 2. Walking in the water, 3. Putting my ear in water, 4. Putting [both] ears in water ..." I swim on my front for a while, watching Anne float like a Mafia victim while Soto's legs tread the water languidly at Anne's side. I roll onto my back to take a breath, drift there for a while, then roll back prone again. I right myself and then use my arms to propel myself vertically to the bottom of the pool, a place I never imagined visiting. I bend my legs and spring back to the surface, enjoying it all and generally feeling, yes, like a dolphin with hair. I have reached this point without a flicker of anxiety or self-loathing. Personally, I reserve the word miracle for religious references, but Dash is to be excused for applying it to what she does.

Melon (a contraction of M. Ellen) Dash excels at many strokes, but does not teach any of them — at least to new students. Her method teaches the novice swimmer one thing: comfort in water of any depth. From that, she maintains, the movements to propel oneself will follow spontaneously.

I was mildly skeptical until about ten minutes ago. I was, as I mentioned, happily lolling in the deep end.. Soto was saying something I could not make out, as one of my ears was underwater. I raised my head to ask her what she'd said. As I did this, without thinking, I moved my legs and arms in a manner that created some push to keep my head up and my body from sinking. With no forethought given, I was treading water.

Soto looked at me. "What are you doing, Mary?" The question puzzled me. What I was doing was fairly effortless, and so it did not occur to me that I was "doing" anything. I would have anticipated that my first efforts to tread water would be exhausting and spastic. What I was doing had been neither. You couldn't really even call it an effort. As Dash had predicted, it simply happened.

The key to this kind of breakthrough, and to this level of ease in deep water, is what Dash calls "staying home." It is synonymous with the New Age terms "mindfulness," and "being in the moment" or "in your body." (Young children live naturally in this state, and that is why they don't need a TSI class to learn to swim.) The James Joyce character Mr. Duffy has been cited as an exemplar of the opposite state: "Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body." It is this state, this Mr. Duffy-hood, that hinders people's efforts at mastering physical skills. The moment we become nervous or self-conscious, our focus leaves our limbs. We're in our head, not our body. We tense up, speed up, flail, and - in the case of swimming – start to sink.

Comfort is not a thing taught, but a thing maintained. TSI students begin wherever they feel comfortable and move forward from there. I'm told some students have begun the class sitting on the rim of the pool with only their legs immersed. Dash would have you start in the locker room, if that's what it took to make you feel calm. We try something new only when we're fully comfortable with the last thing Soto has introduced.

Last class, for example, we spent time practicing breathing while floating vertically in deep water. Soto had us get into a rhythm of dropping under the surface and exhaling, and then using our arms to bob up and out of the water to inhale. We did this until we were relaxed, bored, even. Feeling at ease while breathing in deep water delivered the freedom to experiment with kicks and strokes. No one taught me the breast stroke, but it was simple enough, with the breathing second nature, to work out a passable facsimile.

Because of the focus on staying comfortable and the baby-step approach that that requires, a TSI class can feel more like a support group than a lesson. We have been asked to "honor ourselves" for what would seem, to the swim-capable outsider, to be laughably minor achievements. Each step forward is prefaced by "If it's something that sounds like fun, go ahead and ..." I got used to the touchy-feeliness. I guess I even came to appreciate it. There is nothing hip about learning to swim in your forties. Best to bench your ego and cop to your vulnerability and your need for an instructor who is boundlessly supportive.

Learning to swim, for me, hinged on three or four simple physical discoveries. For instance: Inside your chest are a pair of unsightly but highly effective pool floats called lungs. Provided they aren't empty, they will dependably rocket you to the surface of the water, should you fall or jump in, and they will keep you there. You need only lean your head back and you will – barring exceptionally high bone density or lean muscle mass — float for as long as you want, face in the air. Raising the back of your head or your arms out of the water pushes you down for the simple reason that things are heavier in air than in water. Adult swim classes that focus on technique don't give students the chance to explore and absorb these basic, life-altering water truths. A new swimmer should have the luxury of spending some time simply exploring how she floats, feeling her torso rise as she inhales and slowly sink as she exhales. I remember discovering that if I raised my arms up toward my head as I floated on my back, the shift in weight would raise my legs to the surface and make me float higher in the water. Not that that's necessary to float safely. It's just something comforting to know about when you're heading off to the deep end of the pool for the first time.

You are possibly thinking: Duh. Doesn't everyone know these things? Everyone doesn't. Forty-six percent of Americans, according to a 1999 Gallup poll, feel afraid in deep water, even though they may know a few strokes. I don't seem to know any of these people, but I believe they're out there. And I am ecstatic to no longer be among them.

It's our last class, and for the first time I look like a typical swim student. I'm practicing a freestyle kick. Soto has given me pointers to help me move through the water more efficiently: kick from the hips, and let your feet turn inward to maximize the available surface area and gain more propulsion. I now have what all my friends assumed I wanted in the first place: the ability to get from one end of the pool to the other at a reasonable clip. More precious to me, by far, has been the ability to not get to the end of the pool: to hang – happily, calmly – in deep water.

I tell Soto there is one more thing I need to do. With her blessing, I climb the ladder and exit the deep end of the pool. I stand with my back facing the water, take a breath, and lean backward, arms out. By the second plunge, I am as comfortable falling into deep water as I am falling onto a bed. Big deal, you say. And you are right.

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