Walter Higbee: Adventures in swimming

By Walter Higbee, Special to the Journal | Tuesday, February 10, 2004

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I learned how to swim at age 55. Yes, age 55!

I was definitely a slow learner at learning how to avoid drowning. Other boys tried to teach me when we went swimming in Otter Creek or the Ice House Pond. Army personnel tried to teach me in basic training. I outlasted them. When my children learned how to swim, I marveled at how smoothly they moved through the water and dived to the bottom of the pool. It didn't take with me.

Finally, at age 55, I learned how to dog paddle a little, then I managed a bit of what used to be called the Australian Crawl, or, now, the free-style stroke. I never got very good at it, but good enough so that I could save myself if someone threw me into a reasonably small body of water. I never mastered any fancy strokes such as the breast stroke, back stroke or butterfly. In fact, my free style is pretty free, all right. It is more like a free lurch.

In my early 50s, I felt the need for some physical conditioning so I took out membership to use a local swimming pool. This allowed me to use their heated pool whenever it was not filled with travelers. In the wintertime the pool was used very little. I got in the habit of taking an apple with me for lunch and going there to swim over the noon hour. Very often I was the only swimmer there.

One winter day I was there doing my lurching laps when three young early teenage girls came in to swim. Shortly, two of them left the pool to play the nearby pinball machines. The third girl was playing around the edge of the deep end of the pool. It was obvious to me that she didn't know how to swim. As I came by her on one of my laps I noticed she had left the edge and was struggling in deep water. She was flailing at the water and floundering as she attempted to return to the edge. As I passed, I grabbed the back of her suit and propelled her to the pool edge.

As I pushed her up on the ledge she was gasping, crying, and attempting to thank me. Finally she sputtered, "Oh, please don't tell the other girls." I agreed not to tell them, but I made her promise not to be in the water by herself until she learned how to swim.

The incident reminded me of my own near drowning when I was 7 or 8 years old. In those days, we didn't have motel pools to paddle around in. Instead, we had the Ice House Pond or Otter Creek a couple of miles outside of town. One hot summer day, several of us boys had gone to the pond. Some of the other non-swimmers and I had taken along our automobile tire inner tubes to use as flotation devices.

Now, I was a pretty good swimmer then as long as I had my inner tube around my middle. I was having fun splashing and squirting water at the other boy when I noticed that I had wandered out to the middle of the pond. It was then that I heard something that startled me. It was the sound of escaping air. My inner tube was losing air. Immediately I started lurching toward the shore of the pond. I made it just as my inner tube collapsed completely. One of my buddies told me later that he had never seen me move so fast — in the water or out.

I never told my mother about my narrow escape. Had she found out, I wouldn't have been permitted to go swimming again. And since the teenage girl and I agreed not to tell anyone about her near drowning, the headline "Lurching Dog-Paddler Saves Careless Teenager" never appeared in the local paper.

Walter Higbee is a retired college educator living in Spearfish. Write him at the Rapid City Journal, Box 450, Rapid City, SD 57709.