In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse outside the ancient village of M

The Subversive Joy of Cold-Water Swimming

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2021-10-27 03:00:05

In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse outside the ancient village of Mellis, in Suffolk, and began a restoration, repairing stone walls and replacing roof tiles. Among the attributes of Walnut Tree Farm, as the house was called, was a deep, spring-fed moat. It didn’t surround the house, as with a fortified castle, but was excavated into the land, in roughly parallel lines, at the front and the back of the property. The moat had served its original, Elizabethan owner as a water supply, a cooler, and a status symbol. Over the centuries, it fell into disrepair, becoming silted up from falling leaves and rotting tree roots. Deakin had the moat dredged to a depth of ten feet; staked a wooden ladder by the bank, near the spreading roots of a willow tree; and began regularly swimming in the cold, greenish water. He gained what he called a frog’s-eye view of the changing seasons, and an intimate familiarity with the creatures sharing the moat, from dragonflies to newts.

In the mid-nineties, Deakin took inspiration from the protagonist of John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer”—who traverses his suburban neighborhood pool by pool—and made an aquatic journey around England, Wales, and Scotland, bathing in seas, rivers, ponds, and lakes. Deakin wrote a book about that adventure, “Waterlog” (1999), which has become a classic of British nature writing. His prose is sensuous—“At seaweedy Kimmeridge I mingled with mullet too lazy to move”—and his sense of humor is as dry as his theme is wet. A leech, he observes, keeps changing shape in the water, “looping and stretching out its black stocking of a body, as women do when they’re testing tights for quality in Marks & Spencer.” The book also displays a lively erudition: when Deakin describes a swim off the virtually unpopulated island of Jura, in the Scottish Hebrides, he notes that George Orwell retreated there to write “1984.”

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