12/01/2005. The pool at the Club Waou

Going for a swim at my local pool is a uniquely Parisian experience of exactly the sort that would have intimidated me during my first year here. First of all, I have to open the big double wooden doors that open the face of our building to the street. Then I get in my car, which is parked in its interior courtyard. I maneuver back and forth 3 or 4 times, craning my head alternately over each shoulder to make sure I don't touch either the big ostentatious Audi convertible or the brand new Honda Civic hemming in my progress. Finally I manage to align my car up straight with the narrow passage that serves as a chute to the street door. I nudge through the opening, which was designed to admit horsedrawn carriages (the courtyard used to contain stables), and creep out. As I can't see any pedestrians who may be approaching on the sidewalk, I want to be sure to give them time to avoid colliding with my car.

Straddling my fortunately small car between the sidewalk and the street, I get out to close the big double doors. I have to go inside to do this, and I let myself back out with the electric buzzer which opens half the door for human traffic. Once back in my car, I saw back and forth a couple of times to get out into the street, which is one-way, has cars parked on either side, including one jutting partway into my exit space. I've now done this often enough that it seems like second nature, and I no longer think ruefully of my American days of automatic garage door openers, wide streets, and spacious parking.

I drive to a small street where I enter a parking garage. The nose of my car tips precipitously downward and I hold the steering wheel cranked to the right as I spiral down 4 floors to where an illuminated sign announces "PLACES LIBRES". I slip my car between a concrete pillar and a big Citroën C5, into a slot that is just big enough to allow me to gingerly open my door, suck in my stomach, and slip out, with only a vestigial twinge of spatial anguish at the incredibly tight dimensions. Back before I had a car in Paris, I couldn't imagine ever mastering the narrow, bewildering maze that is a Parisian parking garage.

I grab my gym bag and get in the exit elevator, which deposits me in the bustling lobby of a Meridien hotel. This I traverse and exit without a thought, but there was a time when I would have been disoriented to find myself in a hotel instead of, logically, in the exit lobby of a parking garage. Now I know to expect the unexpected, because Paris is full of labyrinthine quirks like this one. I'm at the back end of the huge convention center/mall complex at Porte Maillot on the west edge of Paris.

I'm standing in the shadow of the garish oval tower of the Hotel Concorde-Lafayette. Skirting around it, I peer in the windows of one of its many restaurants to see the inevitable lively tables of people devouring huge lunches and drinking wine. But I'm not meeting a lunch date; I'm going to do some good old American penance...in the swimming pool.

I walk around to the main entrance of the hotel. Facing it, in sort of a no-man's-land between the hotel and a welter of streets, is a staircase leading downward. A casual eye would slide over it, dismissing it as an entrance to another underground parking garage. But I am now an initiate. Like a mole who just emerged from its burrow for a moment and, dazzled by the light, plunges back into the familiar darkness, I descend, push open a double door, and present my membership card. I have arrived in my gym club, Paris style--a warren of subterranean hallways connecting big rooms full of exercise equipment, mirrored studios full of sweating women and men, a beauty salon, a boutique, and...a pool.

Long-time readers may remember a previous postcard about my experiences trying to follow an aerobics class in French. Well, the aerobics bench has for me become just a wistful memory, as my problematic hip can no longer tolerate the pounding and twisting. Swimming is about the only form of exercise left to this rueful ex-marathoner. And while I enjoy swimming, I have always detested pools--their chlorine, their garish turquoise color, their ambience of see-and-be-seen. For me, swimming always meant a lake, a river, or the ocean.

But look at me now. I've been forced to become a pale aquarium fish. And my aquarium is rather small; in 14 strokes, I've covered the length of the pool. The light is dim and, well, watery, and if I were an indoor plant living here, I would be stretched-out and pale, searching for a nonexistent sun. At one end of the pool is a group of chaise longues, and, incredibly, some people come in here to read, poolside, as if they were on a sunny vacation. I simply drop my towel and key on one of them, shake off my flipflops, and don my goggles, completing the space-alien pool look of my drab, unsexy chlorine-resistant suit and silver-gray bathing cap.

I wade in and swim over to my preferred lane at the very edge of the pool. Midafternoon, the pool is nearly deserted, which is how I like it. Too many people in this tiny pool and it begins to resemble the Place Charles de Gaulle, where 11 streets intersect and people drive like they're in a bumper car court. Heaving a mental sigh, I start swimming laps, swearing not to look at the clock for at least half an hour.

The problem with swimming in a pool is there's nothing to see and nothing to distract you. You're like a big cat in a cage, pacing--back and forth, back and...the problem is sheer numbing boredom. My challenge when swimming isn't to push through the exercise itself, which is so nonstressful that I can easily swim for an hour with no fatigue. The problem is how to entertain my mind while I do it.

I try to get some of my worrying out of the way while I'm in there, but, strangely, I find it difficult to do a good job of worrying while swimming. So I dream things to write about, or good menus, or what I might cook for dinner. The last time I was in the pool, I started thinking of places I'd been swimming throughout my life. Perhaps it was the water all around me, but I was flooded with a series of astonishingly vivid memories.

The first was of the pond in front of our house during all my gradeschool years. Here's where I taught myself to swim, underwater at first, and then with the breaststroke which has remained the sum total of my swimming knowledge. The pond, with its frogs, scary mucky places, and pea-gravelled "beach", was good for endless hours of solitary entertainment. I would drag the slide from our rickety swingset out into the middle of the pond and use it as a diving platform. I remember swimming with my eyes open underwater for hours, until when I finally emerged onto dry land and looked around, everything had a white halo around it. After half an hour or so my waterlogged vision would return to normal.

I remembered going to Boca Raton, Florida, on spring break with my high school boyfriend and his family. That was the first beach I'd seen with palm trees. The water was very cold, but the air felt tropical and incredibly exotic. But my boyfriend only wanted to study for his midterm exams.

I remembered swimming in a swollen jungle river in Costa Rica during the rainy season. I had swum out to a rock in the middle of the river, to which I was clinging when I saw a large snake swimming downstream toward me. Having just been told in detail by my host about the proteolytic effects of fer-de-lance venom, I simply held on, paralyzed with fear, hoping the snake would pass on by. It did.

I remembered 'First Swims' in March in Indiana. This was a crazy ritual I adhered to my very young and foolhardy days wherein, the first time the temperatures neared 60 degrees, I'd take the plunge in the icy water of a woodland pond. It felt so good when I got out!

And from the same period, I remember skinny dipping in a lake that belonged to a nearby commune. The smell of the wooden pier in the sun, the feel of the hot wood against my skin, and the desultory conversations in the humid Indiana summer. I remember the wet clay along the shore, and our footprints in it. And the goose that would wait until you were way out in the middle of the lake to attack you, skating like a special-effects alien across the water from a hiding place on shore, flailing what seemed like six-foot wings, craning its neck and hissing like a serpent.

I remember swimming in the ocean somewhere around Long Beach, California. I was way out there when I saw a huge, rogue wave, floating all kinds of kelp and wooden debris, coming at me. As I have always had a primordial fear of big waves, it looked to me like a tsunami. Since I was wearing contact lenses, I squeezed my eyes shut, and dove under it. Nevertheless, I was somersaulted by a frightening weight of water and finally slammed face-down on the beach, my hair full of sand. Amazingly, I managed not to lose my contact lenses.

I remembered running farther from home than I'd ever run in Owen County, Indiana, and coming upon the most intriguing house I'd ever seen. Made entirely of local sandstone and built into a cliff, with a steep roof and deepset eyes of windows, it seemed perfect for a family of hobbits. Behind it was a cave from which flowed a small river, which tumbled through a series of weirs around the house and filled the air with the sound of rushing water. No one was there (it felt as if it were a vacation home) and I couldn't resist exploring this enchanting place. I climbed up a sort of butte behind the house to find a large, crystal clear, and very cold lake. I couldn't resist. Looking around to make sure no one could see me from the road or house, I stripped down and dove in. After six miles of running, the slap of the cold water on my sizzling skin was heaven on earth.

I remembered backpacking in Wyoming, and swimming in bone-hurtingly cold rivers full of trout. And on the same trip, coming into a huge valley filled with blue gentians as far as the eye could see and crisscrossed with streams of hot spring water. The bliss of removing clothing and boots and sitting on the clean gravel bottom of one of them, soaking in the heat, watching a far-off moose grazing the gentians.

I remembered swimming off a boat in a phosphorescent bay near Costa Rica at night. Every motion trailed by the light of a miniature milkyway of millions of flashing bacterial stars. Sheer magic.

I remembered swimming off Pralin Island in the Seychelles, in crystal clear, azure water of perfect temperature, and feeling as if I could just keep going until I got to that next island I saw on the horizon. And later, snorkeling in rough water off La Digue, watching twenty big sharks turning a lazy circle 30 feet below me. At dinner in the hotel that night, the hostess remarked to us that she heard an American had been out to see the sharks! Yes, I said, c'était moi.

I remembered swimming off a beach in Cape Cod with Denis' son, Benjamin. We walked out and started swimming parallel to the beach. We noticed we were swimming incredibly fast. Every stroke I took seemed to carry me three times further than usual, and beside me, Benjamin rolled like a porpoise. I had never felt so powerful in the water. It wasn't until we turned around to go back that, barely moving at all, we realized that a strong tide was running--now against us.

I remembered hiking down to a stream in the mountains of Corsica with my son Jesse, through hot, dry, fragrant maquis. We finally emerged on the banks of a leaping torrent which splashed around huge granite boulders to make a deep pool. Perched on a big rock in its middle was a solitary backpacker, with whom we shared our cheese and sausage, and exchanged trail tales. He was hiking the famous GR-20 trail, and for days afterward, Jesse and I fantasized about hiking it. At least, for me it was fantasy.

And guess what? The hour's up! I'm released from my lap pool sentence--for the day, anyway. Tomorrow, I'll have to find a new daydream to while away this Parisian chapter in my swimming adventures. And for those of you who are wondering about the weird name of my gym club, "waou" is the French spelling of "wow" (pronounced "wa-ooo", which is how the French ear hears "wow"). So, it's the Wow Club, okay? When the French want to be Extra-Cool, they like to use English words. Only the "Waou" clubs have swimming pools, and so, you know...Waou! Oh, never mind. Look, I didn't name the place; I only swim here.

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