Swimming Outside the Lines

I have always been pretty much a rule-follower. I was teachers’ pet all through my childhood, and can count on the fingers of one hand, with a couple to spare, the times I got in trouble in elementary school. I did have a few years of minor teenage rebellion, but I’ve NEVER had a speeding ticket, and there is only one place I regularly ignore the “no turn on left” sign at a quiet intersection, and then only if there’s no traffic around (and no police cars lying in wait).

I learned to view the value of this rule-following character trait with some skepticism in an intensive 10-day training for community organizers I attended nearly 15 years ago. During the debrief of an involved role-playing session, the one person who questioned the authority of the trainer and operated outside the rules established for the role play exercise got the highest praise from the trainer in the end. Lesson: You can’t be a true leader / activist if you unquestioningly follow the rules.

Despite my general rule-following nature, somehow when it comes to swimming, I seem to have decided that certain rules don’t apply to me. For instance, the cardinal rule of open water swimming: Never swim alone. I’ve been lake swimming alone for a few years now, without incident. Perhaps the more we break a particular rule with impunity, the more we think it doesn’t apply to us. Lest you think me completely lacking in caution, however, I do take a lot of steps to make it safer (and less scary). Here’s my process:

1) I check the weather carefully – including using an app that identifies the wind direction and speed, and how far away the nearest lightening strike is.

2) In Madison, I check the water quality on the Dane County beach report website. If the beach is open but the date of the last report is not recent, and if there has been a major rainfall since the date of the last test, I may not go, especially later in the summer (runoff of goose poop, fertilizer, etc. can cause high levels of bacteria).

3) I bring a flotation ring, attached with a string to a “Livestrong” band around my ankle. When necessary I ride on top of the ring to get past the plants until I get to more open water. The flotation ring is bright pink, providing visibility to boaters (even in a no-wake lake like Wingra, paddlers have a hard time seeing swimmers if there are any waves). And I can rest in it if I need to. (I’ve just ordered a more commercial version called the SaferSwimmer to try also.

4) I check the string on the flotation aid before entering the water every time I swim (well, nearly every time).

5) I usually tell someone where I’m going and when I expect to be back.

6) I watch for and avoid large accretions of algae (certain kinds are toxic).

In addition to breaking the “never swim alone” rule, I also frequently circumvent restrictions about where to swim. Most delineated swimming areas have rules about not going beyond them, whether or not a lifeguard is present. While I’d much rather swim back & forth in a roped off area than not swim at all, I’d much rather swim in an open lake than within the ropes. I’ve ignored this rule with impunity on a number of occasions in a number of different lakes in Wisconsin.

However, on a recent road trip to Indiana, we took a side trip to an Illinois state recreation area where I swam and learned that some places take this rule quite seriously even when there is no lifeguard present. Moraine View State Park has a lovely swimming area ($1.00 admission) and a sign saying something like “ropes indicate limits of swim area.” Now, truth be told I did see the slightly odd sign, and thought, well it doesn’t actually say “do not swim outside designated swim area,” and wondered if the non-lifeguard staff would call to me to stop as I ducked under the ropes with my large pink ring. Hearing no objections, I struck off and had a lovely, long swim.

I decided to turn around before getting out of sight of the beach, lest Don worry (and also I could hear gunshots coming from the far side of the lake – now THAT was a new danger that hadn’t occurred to me while lake swimming before!) When I returned around 40 minutes after setting out, I noticed Don waving at me rather more vigorously than usual, and I was greeted on the beach by a man in a uniform saying “Ma’am, I need to speak with you.” “Uh-oh,” I said lightly, “am I in trouble?”

It turns out that the attendant had called the ranger, and the ranger had been calling, waving, blowing his whistle, and all manner of things (including trying to get Don to somehow reel me in). While the ranger went to make a call and I dried off, Don explained to me that the poor guy was basically suffering post-traumatic stress from previous incidents where he’d had to rescue people or pull their dead bodies out of lakes after drowning.

The ranger returned and I acted like I didn’t know I had broken a rule. Normally I am a terrible liar (because as I said I’m a rule follower), but in this case it was easy, since the truth was I didn’t think it was a rule they would enforce! He did make me feel a little guilty when he said he was worried that kids would follow my bad example, but he was very nice and when I was very nice in return, and very apologetic about scaring him, and clearly still quite alive, he eventually relaxed and thanked us for being so nice and called off the sheriff and the rescue squad who were apparently on their way! He told us some of his story, and I told him some of mine, and he told me the gunshots were probably squirrel hunters….

He said since we were being so cooperative he wouldn’t give me a ticket, and thanked us several times for being so nice (“usually people aren’t”). Some say we all have one of four automatic reactions in times of conflict: Fight, flight, freeze, or appease. Though I briefly considered bravado (fight) as I approached the ranger on the beach, I opted for the more familiar, teachers’ pet, “appease” pattern, and it paid off in this case (though Don thinks my bald head had a lot to do with it). I’m not sure whether this incident will reduce my appetite for swimming outside the lines, but it definitely reduced Don’s willingness to be my accomplice.