Rachel, I’m Swimming, by Christopher Duerkes
Following text and photos by Christopher Duerkes.
Every now and then, something will remind me. For instance, I will be walking home from the station on a humid summer evening, a scrap of newspaper will kick up from the dusty city street, and then, just as I wipe the sweat from my brow, I’ll get that old melancholy feeling in the pit of my stomach that I should go for a swim.
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When I was 12, my family rented a place in the Venetian Gardens subdivision of Leesburg, Fl. Venetian Gardens was also a park at the front of the subdivision. The park was built around a snaking tributary of water that opened into Lake Harris. Along the water were wooden benches and several charming red bridges, but these were littered with duck poop and mostly, the luxury of having a garden was to be able to see it from the roadway as we drove by in our car. I have come to learn since that in the middle of the park, a monument reads “A TRIBUTE TO THE BLACK PIONEERS OF LEESBURG With Gods help, the black pioneers of Leesburg endured slavery, racism and segregation to raise their families,” it goes on. I cannot remember if this was present when I lived there or not.
But we lived in the back of the Gardens, on S. 8th Street. So you drove all the way back along that road past all of the preps I came to know (they had the waterfront homes) and arrived at our unspectacular but modest place. It was pretty enough. We had palmetto trees and oaks along the yard, an open car garage, and a forking driveway in the back, but the house had its share of quirks. We dated the house and the pool to the 1950s or thereabouts. The pool leaked constantly. The water level fell to a foot below the surface and stayed there and the bottom did not curve as in a regular pool, but fell off at sharp angles. It looked like the bottom of a paper hot dog tray. There was a bomb shelter beneath my sofa. The water level down there not falling away like in the pool was steady at two or three inches.
I’d go down from time to time to remember the place, but you didn’t go down there often. It was just too moldy to live with for longer than a few minutes and you could see the space beneath my house and that was unsettling to me. I’d stand there in the water and just breath for awhile and think about this hole in my house and the way the mildew reminded me of the boat ride El Rio del Tiempo at Epcot. I rarely climbed down to see it because you had to push aside my sofa to get to the hatch door, and your feet would be wet when you climbed out and you’d track it all around. Still, I’d go down and there was the same old flimsy table, a few glass milk bottles, and a pile of Playboy magazines that I wanted so badly to work for me, you know, to pay off somehow, but I guess that payment was hard to come by 50 years ago, and the humidity didn’t help because it made the pages stick together. So you had to peel them apart with more care than I could muster and I usually gave up. It was the kind of space that you would forget about if you could, and you thought you did; but memory is strange and sometimes memory is a thing and not a thought, and so it lingers.
I don’t know. There was something about the place that just never set well in my stomach. It hung about me like a fog. I think it was the humidity that did it. It was humid in Florida, but the house was especially dank because of the shelter beneath my sofa, and the leaking pool, and the palmetto bugs all over my house. One crawled across my shin while I was watching television one night. Their feet feel very sticky, and I’ve forever associated that stickiness, and that of the bomb shelter and humid air as one and the same, the same backwardness, and with that dark spot in my field of vision that I forever attribute to this.
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I live in New York today, but my memories of childhood are memories of summer in Florida. From the age of three to twelve years old, I lived with my family in a subdivision in southeast Orlando. We were located about four miles north of Gatorland Zoo and about fourteen miles east of Disney. None of this mattered really. As children, we spent most of our time in the neighborhood doing whatever little boys will do. We rode our bikes, played ball, and made all kinds of mischief.
It helped that our parents did not fuss about where we were going and exactly what were doing so long as we made it back in time for dinner. Well, this was the case for me anyways, but there were times that my friends got into more trouble than I did for different things we’d gotten into. Like the time we’d uncovered an abandoned house in the woods that was being occupied by vagrants. There were mattresses and beer cans in one of the rooms and there was a shed next to the house that had several dated license plates, a collection of hand tools, and six chicken legs that had been nailed to a piece of wood in two rows of three. When I took that home to Maria, my neighbor’s mother, she nearly freaked out. She was Catholic and Cuban and she made me throw it down the sewer right away, but other than times like that, we did fine on our own. One night that house burned down inexplicably. We were standing in our driveway and watching the flames pile up above the treetops. My father yelled out to the neighbors across the street who had also been watching the fire: “I think that’s the old house in the woods!” And I remembered the fact that Mark had built a small house in the woods for his girlfriend. Mark was a teenager and we were only children but we’d go back there at night sometimes to find him there with her. Then when he heard us sneaking up on him, he’d take an aerosol can and hold a fire to the spray and we’d run.
We were hopeful and young and in mischief there was fun to be had. One morning after sunrise we walked into the woods to cut down a tree. You see, we knew that behind a row of cypresses there stood a forest of pines that had rooted in the mud, and for this weakness of character, we reasoned, we could overcome a giant tree and cut it down. What for? We were children. The dark interior of the forest seemed to whisper to us. It said, “Come in.” And we did. We had been beguiled by the immensity of the forest and by it’s mystery and we felt snugly in the shadow and the warmth of the forest interior. So we speared around with confidence and stabbed at the spiders and their webs. “Look! A banana spider! Over here.” These creatures of god were the size of your palm, and spun gold colored webs that shone brightly in the patches of the forest where the light could make it through. We saw the white mouth of a snake gape open, but let it be. Then we selected our tree and hacked away at the roots, in turn, working from all sides. We carried on like this hacking and rotating for a good space of time, but the tree was tougher than we had expected. The ground withdrew from beneath our feet the harder we tried, and as we sank into the earth the mosquitoes continued to prick us. The sun tracked west. We grew tired. Next time, we said, but the tree was rooted solidly in the earth, and we called it a day. We said we’ll take it down the next time, but there never would be.
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Rachel, my dear little Springer Spaniel, she drowned in my pool in Venetian Gardens on the very first day that I got there. I found her floating face down in the water and I lifted her out. Later, I’d walk into this pool in winter with metal plates in my hands, imagining myself to be neutrally buoyant like Jacque Cousteau in the thick of an excavation at Grand-Congloué. In the years that have passed since then, I consider occasionally what it would be like to return to the old house. I think to myself, will I recognize the old feelings? The growing pains? Will it be the same as I remember it or will everything have changed?
This may be the most difficult part for every now and then something reminds me, a humid air or busy street, and that melancholy feeling wells up inside of me again. So it is this, this longing for childhood innocence and the ability to wonder that I believe is the genetic basis of my art. Here, the membrane is thin. Here in the deep, there is only darkness, only a heartbeat, only the retreat of a boy into the amnion of youth.
