The Right Word Is the Key that Unlocks

When I was four, my mother took me to a pool in Alexandria, Virginia, and paid for me to have swim lessons. I was terrified. The instructor said, “Don’t worry, if you drown your parents will sue me, so I won’t let that happen.” This was cold comfort, and the lesson was an abject failure. We never went back.

The next summer, we found a pool closer to home and an instructor whose instincts were nearer to the heart. He was gentle, methodical, and patient, and under him I thrived. By the end of the summer, little me was lapping the fifty-meter length. With the fervor of the converted, water became my passion. I took years of swimming and diving lessons, became a lifeguard, made friends with people who owned boats, got my open water diving certification in a quarry in a December so cold I heard my teeth crack, bought a twenty-five dollar beater surfboard and drove to the Maryland shore to attempt to surf. When the mountains began to take their sway over me, I submersed myself in their waters, too: tarns, creeks, rivers, lakes, waterfalls…if I could get fully under, I was in.

Never once did I think any of this was unusual or radical or revolutionary. It was all just water, and once I had the confidence of the proficient, it felt like home. So, when I stumbled upon the uniquely British concept of wild swimming some years ago, I was at first amused, then curious. The term was invented by Roger Deakin, a writer and environmentalist, who initially swam in the moat on his farm, then started swimming in the UK’s public waterways, which were mostly off-limits to citizen bathers. Those acts of subversion and civil disobedience, their message amplified by Deakin’s 1999 ode to wild swimming, Waterlog, sparked a countrywide swimming movement and led to a widespread opening of public waters. Today, in the UK, wild swimming is more than just a thing: As writer Jessica J. Lee and photographer Mark Griffiths show in this issue, it’s become an important and popular method of healing for people in need of relief from the stresses of modern life, PTSD, body insecurity, and anxiety and other ills that ail us.

The idea of wild swimming perhaps could only arise in land as domesticated and pastoral as the United Kingdom, but it holds a lesson for those of us elsewhere, too: that incongruent or unexpected words can frame an activity in new and powerful ways. Wild swimming is just swimming, right? Well, what if it’s more than that? What if it’s an act of intention and planning and philosophy? What if it’s not just something you do, but who you are? And what if recalibrating the language makes you see the world, that activity, and yourself in a new light?

Wild swimming reminded me of sleeping rough, the phrase a Canadian friend uses to describe his quest to bed down in as many unusual places as he can. It reminded me, too, of backcountry, of overlanding, even of wilderness—and how a word created in contrast to an existing idea is embodied with a specificity that becomes an imperative. Would couloir skiing be anywhere near as cool if we called it gully skiing? No, and a small army of skiers owes a debt to the French because of it. The right word or phrase, invented or imported, shapes not just how you think or speak, but how you act, and in the process can feel like a key.

After learning about the notion of wild swimming, my own relationship with water took on new force. Every time I was around it, I felt a lost opportunity if I didn’t jump in. I kept a folder of GPS waypoints called Places I’ve Swum, both for the satisfaction of remembering past submersions and the motivation to make more. In Iceland, despite being warm and content, I left the comfort of a natural hot pot to dip in a shivery fjord, squealing the whole way. On a photo shoot in the eastern Sierra, I begged for ten minutes to jump into the Owens River and learned, for the first of many times, what a great towel socks can be. In New Zealand, I sat on the shore of a glacial lake and watched icebergs bobbing in the stiff wind before mustering the motivation to dive in. And in the Zion high country, while the world baked in hundred-degree heat, I came upon a tiny spring-fed waterfall, stripped down, and slipped under its stream. I sank to where my eyes were just above the surface, the falls splashing off my scalp, breathing only when I needed. After a while it felt elemental. It felt right. It felt cold and it felt…wild.