Learning to Swim
What better place to learn how to swim than the Mississippi River itself? Especially an eleven year old (myself) and a six year old, my cousin Danny. Danny and I were only children of divorced sisters who now had stepfathers. Aunt Jeannie had met an army Captain named Edgar Copelan and "Cope" turned out to be the love of her life.
My mother was not so fortunate the second time around because she and Al Botcher were drinking quite heavily and not getting along famously. My
mother was very headstrong and could bring out the worst in him, especially if they were drinking.
On this occasion, Jeannie and Cope were visiting and the four adults were invited to a party in a boathouse on the Mississippi River. There were six or eight people drinking and yucking it up in the boathouse, while Danny and I explored the dock, which protruded out into the water about twenty or thirty feet.
The river slid by rather peacefully but the Mississippi has a pretty good current in its narrower stretches. We had swim trunks on because in the little backwash areas around the boathouse we could splash about safely.
Aunt Jeannie had one particular obsession and that was her son, Danny. It is a testament to how drunk she and my mother were that Danny and I were able to fix our attention on the actual "Father of Waters" sliding by the end of the dock.
At some point I got the idea that we could jump off the end of the dock in the upstream direction and quickly splash our way back to the dock and grab it.
Neither of us knew how to swim.
It took a while to work up the nerve. I went first, jumping into the water about two feet out from the dock. I was splashing and had a hold of the dock before I even got very wet, being somewhat cowardly and a worry wart.
It was exhilarating! Before long I was jumping out four or five feet in the upstream direction because by the time I splashed my arms and hands like crazy, the current had me back even with the dock. I quickly developed a confidence that I would stay on the surface of the water and not sink like a stone.
Soon Danny was trying it, jumping out just a little.
Aunt Jeannie would have had an absolute panic attack if she had seen, but they were hooting and howling inside the boathouse, probably very happy that we weren't being a distraction to their fun.
I don't believe I was really swimming. Dog-paddling is what it was, but inside a half-hour of practice I had developed a real comfort with the water and my ability to get back to that dock. Ultimately I was running full tilt down the dock and leaping out as far as I possibly could into the river.
My mother would have had a fit, too.
Soon Danny was also becoming more adventurous and I think it is fair to say that we beat the odds and learned the first prerequisite of swimming, that of being able to extract oneself from the water. It was a liberating feeling.
That summer my mother and Al found out about a bus that took youngsters once a week to La Crosse to swim at the North Side Beach. It was probably a half hour trip. The beach was quite small and nondescript, but much safer than the boathouse location had been. That part of the channel is technically still the Black River, which pours in above the northside of the city and joins the main channel below the picturesque high bridge.
I probably went three or four times on this venue and in the safer waters of the northside beach, I could actually practice the different types of swimming strokes. I never became very well trained in any of them, preferring to just flail away with brute force, relying on dog-paddling to move around.
Mischief and endangerment was a recurring theme with my adventures with Danny, mostly because I was five years older but not much more mature in judgment. In Sparta Jeannie had bought Danny a little toy bow-and-arrow set with little rubber suction cups on the arrows. We (I) deduced that the arrows flew better without the little rubber cups and before long I shot one at him while he was joyfully leaping over the couch. It hit him right in the eye leaving a little red circle on the white of his eyeball. That was the end of the bow-and-arrow set.
My friends and I began to range a bit farther on our bikes and could ride, on occasion, about two and a half miles to the Root River which ran past the back cow pasture of one of my friends, Roger Johnson, who lived on a small dairy farm in the "bottoms" with his parents and brother Donnie.
We would jump off a little bridge over the river and wade around in the muck. When we would get out, there would be little bloodsuckers attached to our legs and we would have to search for them and pull them off. There would be clams in the muck and we would gather up a few big ones. I would take them home and put them in the watering tank for the cows in Al's cow yard. I could reach in and search for them along the bottom, feeling them clamp slowly shut when they were disturbed.
Only one further water adventure was available to us, thankfully for our safety. Tommy and Larry Langen and I would dam up the small creek that trickled down the valley from just below where I lived, past their farm. We would gather up mud and sod and pack it until we had an earthen dam. There was so little flow that we could keep ahead of it and soon we were able to create a nice wading pond, albeit quite muddy and not lacking in cow manure from the pastures above.
When a good rainstorm would come along, away went the dam until the spirit moved us to do it again.
