The day I Iearned to swim in the Niagara River

 Funny what triggers a memory. I watched a short video on here today of a toddler jumping into a pool, swimming to the edge then with only a little help climbed out, turned around and jumped in again.

It reminded me of the day I learned to swim. My family had rented a cottage on the Canadian side of the Niagara River near Fort Erie, Ontario, for a summer. I am not sure of my age, I could have been 4, no older than 6. A family of friends visited one day and we walked out onto a small wooden dock extending into the Niagara River. That's right, the river that feeds Niagara Falls but way upstream, closer to where water from Lake Erie flows into it. My father used to swim off that dock. Well, this family included a girl my own age and unused to walking on a dock she fell off it.

Silly me, I jumped in to save her. So did my father. He located the girl quickly and brought her back to the dock. Then he turned aorund to look for me. But, by then I had managed to swim back to the dock on my own. 

From that day forward I could always swim and beyond that proved to be a strong swimmer. In my time on a whim I swam the length of Lime Lake in Western New York. I fell off my boat into Lake Chautauqua and fully clothed managed to stay afloat until another boat came by and picked me up. I used a trick I had only read about, removing the light, hooded jacket I was wearing, tying a knot in the neck and then lowering quickly from the bottom to catch air making a kind of float out of it several times over the period I was in the water. In high school I surprised even myself when trying out for the swimming team I swam two and half lengths of an Olympic sized pool, underwater without coming up for a breath. Even so I didn't stay on the team.

In short from that day on the Niagara River I always felt comfortable in the water. One regret is I never went for SCUBA diving. In later life operating boats my whole being was devoted to staying OUT of the water.

OMG. As I thought about it for a while after writing and posting this I realized I have lived much of my life that way: jump into something without knowing what I'm doing and then figuring out how to do it as I go along.