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.
……
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.
