THE SEA surrounds me, a warm expanse of regal blue with gentle waves that barely stipple the surface. The calm is deceptive. I am trying to cut through a relentless cross-current with firm strokes of my own. Right arm, left arm, roll, breathe. The water lifts me; the land, another continent, seems distant. Relax, I tell myself. You’ll make it.
This is the Hellespont, known today as the Dardanelles, the storied channel separating Europe from Asia in western Turkey. Geographically, I am moving from one continent to the other, a passage more sensibly traveled by boat or plane. Historically, I am swimming at the threshold of what was once the known world. Ahead of me, on the eastern shore, lie the ruins of Troy, site of the decade-long war recounted in Homer’s Iliad that first confirmed the horrors of battle, an epic fought 3,200 years ago. Behind me rest the memorials to the men of both sides who died in the brutal Gallipoli campaign of World War I—the Swimmers’ War, it’s been called, for the innocents who bathed daily in the seas that soon ran red with their blood. These empty battlefields bracket centuries of conflicts over control of the waters that now buoy my body. Hittites, Mycenaeans, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Ottomans, Genoese, Venetians, Byzantines, Turks: all have ruled here. Achilles and Hector fought to the death for this fluid corridor; the Persian king Xerxes crossed it from Asia on a bridge of ships to invade the Greek settlements (after petulantly lashing the sea with whips when a storm destroyed his first attempt); Alexander the Great reversed direction to take them back. Jason sailed the Argo from here in search of the golden fleece; the fleece itself had swathed the flying ram on which Princess Helle escaped from her wicked stepmother. When Helle fell into this sea, it took her name: Sea of Helle, or Hellespont. History was transformed and empires crumbled in the wake of these mythic waters. The Hellespont has always been the route to something bigger—another conquest, another country, a new continent, a new adventure. And the legendary tale of tender new love.
One summer evening, so long ago that the date has been lost, an energetic young fellow named Leander met a beautiful maiden named Hero and fell in love—“at first sight,” as the poet Christopher Marlowe later wrote, thus delivering a lasting definition of romance. She was a priestess of Aphrodite, a virgin destined to remain chaste in her tower at Sestos, on the Greek shore; he was a townie from Abydos, on the Asian side. No way, said the elders; these waters exist to keep you apart. Which is not the sort of thing young lovers like to hear. So every evening, our hero, Leander, leapt into the water and swam across for a night of secret romance with his hero, Hero. She hung a lantern to light his way; he arrived gasping and briny, rank with the smell of fish. A few drops of rose oil, and they fell into bed together. At dawn Leander slipped back into the Hellespont to swim home, undetected. One night, the fury of approaching winter roiled the winds into a storm, dousing Hero’s lamp. The sea spun, the waves roared, and Leander, unable to find his way, drowned. When his body washed ashore the next morning, Hero, overwhelmed with grief, jumped from her tower to join him in the afterlife. A double tragedy for this aquatic Romeo and Juliet. But their loss of life was folklore’s gain: the doomed lovers became the costars of the most famous swimming myth in Western lore.
The poet George Gordon, better known as Lord Byron, himself a master swimmer with a fascination for all things classically Greek, was intrigued. Could it have happened? Was it possible to swim across these rough waters? On a Mediterranean journey in 1810, he decided to find out. Enlisting an officer from the frigate to join him, Byron made the crossing on his second try, establishing the Hellespont as a romantic challenge and becoming the poster child for overachieving swimmers around the globe. His companion, Lieutenant William Ekenhead, beat him across by five minutes but disappeared from the record books after he drowned during a drunken celebration of his promotion to captain some time later. Byron, on the other hand, boasted endlessly about his accomplishment and put the Hellespont at the top of the list of waterways he’d swum: London’s Thames, Venice’s Grand Canal, Switzerland’s Lake Geneva. “I plume myself on this achievement,” he wrote to a friend, “more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical.”
So what am I doing here on an August afternoon, 150 miles southwest of Istanbul, 5,000 miles from New York, my home? The Hellespont is a critical passageway, the final conduit of the unbroken flow from the Black Sea, south through the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara on its way to the Aegean.
Nearly fifty thousand tankers and cargo ships funnel through here each year, one of the world’s busiest and swiftest freight lanes. Mind the currents, I’ve been told, or I could get swept out toward Greece. Mind the critters, I’ve been warned: stinging jellyfish and other natural enemies also swim here. But its lure is magnetic. I, too, am captivated by the classical world and have dusted off my college Greek to read up on the history; I, too, love to swim and am drawn by the passion of my predecessors. And at a stage of my life when I have more time to explore and mightier muscles to rely on, I, too, like a challenge and want to test my body and mind in these iconic waters. After years of tracing familiar routes at my own pace, what would it would be like to dip my toe into an alien ocean, to tackle a distance far beyond my longest laps? Will I find what blind Homer, writing some four hundred years after the Trojan War, called the “riptide straits” of the Hellespont or what Shakespeare (who never saw it either) dismissed as its “easy current”? Can I transfer years of paddling in perfect pools and lovely lakes and East Coast seashores to this wild strait dividing Europe and Asia? Can I, too, swim the Hellespont?
Swimming is my salvation. Ask me in the middle of winter, or at the end of a grueling day, or after a long stretch at the computer, where I’d most like to be, and the answer is always the same: in the water, gliding weightless, slicing a silent trail through whatever patch of blue I can find. Tell me, as the medical world does from time to time, to think of something pleasant and count backwards, and I’m back in the drink, enveloped by an ocean, a lake, or a turquoise box, carving long and languorous laps that lull me into serenity.
At one level, it’s purely sensual: the silky feeling of liquid on skin; the chance to float free, as close to flying as I’ll ever get; the opportunity to reach, if not for the stars, at least for the starfish. Swimming stretches my body beyond its earthly limits, helping to soothe every ache and caress every muscle. But it’s also an inward journey, a time of quiet contemplation, when, encased in an element at once hostile and familiar, I find myself at peace, able—and eager—to flex my mind, imagine new possibilities, to work things out without the startling interruptions of human voice or modern life. The silence is stunning.
Have I mentioned that I’m a Pisces?
Over the years, I’ve managed to satisfy my cravings in an eclectic collection of international water holes. I’ve swum in an outdoor heated pool during a snowfall in Utah and from a black volcanic beach in Greece, in a stream-fed pond in the mountains of northern Kenya and in the cool aquamarine of a pool in the Australian desert. I’ve shared the sea with flabby Soviet matrons in the Crimea and alternated lanes with perfectly molded starlets in Beverly Hills. At a beach resort on Koh Samui, in the Gulf of Thailand, I had my choice of an infinity-edge pool with freshwater, a freeform version with salt water, and the gorgeous gulf itself. I have never had a bad swim. But I choose carefully. Once, planning a trip to Mongolia, I contemplated a dip in the cerulean depths of Lake Khuvsgul, a pristine alpine wonder about the size of New York’s Long Island that is visible from the space station. It is the second largest lake in Asia (after Russia’s Lake Baikal), supplying 2 percent of the world’s freshwater, and I saw a perfect addition to my repertoire. What I hadn’t planned on was the ice, still keeping the waters frigid in June. I kayaked instead.
Swimming is, in short, an obsession, benign but obstinate. “How do you get through the day if you can’t throw yourself into water?” asks a character in playwright Richard Greenberg’s The American Plan. And swimmer after swimmer tells me that she or he just doesn’t sleep as well without a swim. That it restores their sanity—from the world, from their kids, from themselves. That it’s not something they can skip. “I’m sure I’d be an alcoholic if I didn’t have the swimming pool,” says Esther Dyson, the high-tech guru and venture capitalist who has been swimming laps daily since she was eighteen. “It’s my reset button.” Over brunch, after that morning’s swim, she tells me she used to write notes for her groundbreaking newsletter in between laps, keeping the paper dry on the bench. She still stays only at hotels with pools, posting an image of each on the web. Others turn up in her dreams. “Sometimes it’s a moat, and I just keep swimming,” she says. “Sometimes the pool is empty, just pavement. That’s anxiety.”
The lane line keeps us centered in more ways than one. The rhythm of our strokes brings order to our senses.
Water so clear you could
read a book through it.
The British writer Charles Sprawson, whose elegant meditation Haunts of the Black Masseur has become a cult classic among the water-obsessed, defines the historical swimmer as “someone rather remote and divorced from everyday life, devoted to a mode of exercise where most of the body remains submerged and self-absorbed.” Swimming, he writes, “appealed to the introverted and the eccentric, individualists involved in a mental world of their own.” When I telephone him at his home in London to express my admiration, Sprawson confirms that he’s describing himself. “Group swimming is not for me,” he says. “I like swimming in odd places with legendary backgrounds.” Like the Hellespont, which he’s crossed twice. “It will be jolly nice,” he encourages me before I go. “It will give you time to think.” 
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий