getting naked in the parking lot 🩱

an ode to swimming in open waters

the local sunday morning swim spot, summer 2022.

greetings, greetings to you, dear reader.

twice a week for the past two months¹, i’ve joined a merry band of local misfits in our pursuit of one of the wilder experiences of living a rural life. sure, we have bears (but only brown bears, which we liken to being timid), we have foxes, we have deer and wild turkeys and every farm animal you could think to name. we have fields and fields of corn and alfalfa and wheat and soybeans, soon to be harvested. we have hundreds of miles of trees arching across the highways. we have hiking trails that reach the tops of mountains and the depths of waterfalls, we have bike trail after bike trail, we have the summer activities of the winter ski slopes.

but the closest i come to wild, a wilderness within myself, is twice a week, when i step into the fronds of a local lake.

i recall a phone call with one of my people, an avid swimmer², at the start of the open water season:

“are you going to the swim today?” he asked.

“i’m not going to swim tonight, but i’ll go to the potluck after,” i responded. “and i haven’t open-water swam before, so i’m a little scared.”

“yeah, it is scary,” he responded.

on sundays, there are anywhere from five to ten of us.³ we meet at a boat launch for the lake at 9am. there are folks from the swim team, folks who only open water swim, folks who are kayaking along with us, folks who are curious, folks we haven’t seen in awhile.

and 9am is mostly a suggestion. there’s a group that heads out at 8am, who, i’ll say kindly are of the testosterone-driven nature. i arrive around 8:45am, because i like to take my time on the forty-minute drive from the front door of my apartment to the front door of the lake. and because it takes a few minutes to change into my swim suit.

others tend to arrive anywhere from five to twenty-five minutes after me, hurrying towards the end as the growing group moseys to the edges of the boat launch.

if you happen to be a more self-conscious individual who hasn’t spent ample time in a locker room, you might have changed into your suit prior to leaving your home. or, perhaps, you take the larger risk of changing in one of the porta-johns that sits adjacent to the boat launch.

i am neither of these people on sundays.

because i have mastered the not-so-subtle art of changing in a parking lot.

the spoiler alert is that you’re, at some point in this process, going to be naked in a parking lot. there’s a large likelihood that anywhere from fifteen to thirty other cars will be there with folks driving in and out at increasing frequency as the day wears on.

a healthy dose of confidence and boldness are required for this exercise.

here’s how i change into my swim suit:

first, i find a parking lot. ideally near a body of water, because otherwise i’m just changing into a swim suit in a parking lot and might look, to the passerby, like a fish out of water (more literally than metaphorically).

next, i open both of the car doors on the driver’s side (or passenger’s side) of my car. hope to god that there’s a car parked next to me and that no one is in it.⁴

and the third, and most important, step: i get ass naked and shimmy into my swim suit.

i’ve seen my fair share of towel-drapings to have a thought or two about the “right” way to cover yourself while changing into a swim suit, for those who aren’t ready to bare their ass to the whole world. there’s the sports-bra-over-the-top-of-the-towel dress, there’s the covering-half-of-your-body-at-a-time approach. there’s the oversized-sweatshirt-covering-your-whole-body-like-a-tent-so-you-have-enough-room-to-change-underneath style. and there’s the drape-the-towel-over-the-window-of-the-car-door curtain.

sometimes, i’ll go with the latter two, if i feel that the height of my pickup truck won’t give me enough coverage to avoid a public disturbance charge from the local police.⁵ but if i make it to the parking lot early enough, and i’m feeling a proper amount of short-heightedness as granted by my being five-foot-six, then i’ll give myself a ten-to-fifteen second window to get naked in the parking lot and put on my suit.

now, we’re cooking with gas.

i know, dear reader, that we’ve just spent around fifteen paragraphs / lines on the changing process before even getting into the lake. i haven’t even regaled you with tales of the swims themselves.

and perhaps this is by design. it’s worth trying yourself. it’s my first summer open water swimming. and although my (healthy) fear of sharks tells me that i shouldn’t be swimming in open water, my peers remind me that it’s awfully difficult to find a shark in a lake, let alone a shark in the part of the world we live in.⁶

one of the members of my swim team held my hand as i waded into the open water of a lake for the first time, my highlighter-pink, inflated swim buoy attached by clip to my waist. i gripped her hand until we went past the designated-swim-area demarkation. she and i looked at each other, as we asked: “ok, are you ready?” and proceeded to lazily head towards the rock on the other side of the lake.

the second time i swam open water, another member of the team joined me. seventy-five-years old and a former high school activities director, he ends up directing us on most of our sunday swims, in addition to finding ways to chide us about putting on more sunscreen (if we happen to be one of the few swimmers who is under forty years old and fair-skinned like me) and drinking more water and all of the things we ignored our parents on in our youth but need to do these days. jim, as i’ll call him, looked me in the eyes and said: “ok, my two pieces of advice. first, if you get stuck in the weeds, don’t start doing breaststroke. you’ll just tangle yourself up more. and that will freak you out. keep doing freestyle through the weeds, and you’ll pull yourself free. and second, if you need to take a break or you don’t feel right, you have your buoy on you, hold onto it.”

this sunday, we swam 1.7 miles. for the lane-eight swimmers (the fastest on the team), this is just a warmup. but we weren’t looking for a heavy swim today. that’ll come at practices during the week and at the second open-water swim on wednesday evening, rotating through a list of regional lakes we have the chance to visit.

we stopped six times during our swim this sunday. the first at a floating dock with a bright yellow flag waving atop it, a helpful line of sight as we peer out above the waterline to find our destination. the second a house with its second level sitting above the water and a white flag waving at its dock. the third an outcropping of rocks that one of our group members has been insistent upon finding each sunday, to no avail. (this sunday, we realized it had been marked by a white buoy with a red X, and, to help him save face, all insisted that they must have put this buoy here recently.)

each stop is a new conversation: where other swimmers are traveling this week, where folks are taking their kids to look at colleges, the ideal lake house that all of the swim team members would share (with a boathouse, of course), who we think will open water swim the latest in the season⁷, the workout at practice from the day before, if we could plan a group swimming trip to the bahamas, how we’re looking forward to eating bagels after the swim.

usually, jim, who is with us most sundays, keeps us moving from stop-to-stop, not encouraged by long periods of chattiness in the water. it’s not that he isn’t a chatty guy, but he’s here for the swim. we can talk when we’re out of the water.

i took up the mantle of jim’s role this weekend, but he and i shouldn’t really be compared. i was there, laughing at each stop, using my buoy as a makeshift floating chair, listening as i tried my best to pay attention to the weird, wacky, and wonderful differences that allow my group to share the same place. and then, a lull in the conversation would happen, someone would get antsy, and i’d suggest our next stop.

the fourth stop is an island towards the end of the lake. we usually don’t make it that far on sundays, as the weeds grow taller and taller at the bottom of the lake as the summer beats on. more of the lakes on our list become untenable to pass through in late july and august. and tendrils of the weeds have begun reaching towards the lake surface, with bubbles of air coming out the tops to aid in buoyancy. we sit around the rocks at the edge of the island, chatting. another swimmer yelps — she’s been bitten by a crayfish sitting under her rock.

there’s a point between the stops where i stop thinking. i stop trying to guess how much distance i’ve covered, i stop thinking about which part of my body is hurting. instead, i watch the weeds underneath pass by. the clear green water becomes so deep that i’m surrounded by a haze of nothingness, until i pop my head up to “sight” for my destination. i focus on getting my head parallel with the water when i breathe, which has been difficult in my recent flare up of pain. the sun is beating down, the trees are magnificently poised to my right-hand side. i stop every so often to make sure i’m still with the group. there were eight of us when we left the launch. eight shall return.

the fifth and sixth stop are the white and yellow flags headed back. the current, against us on the first half of the swim, pushes us quickly back to the boat launch.

we laugh as we hypothesize why none of our smart watches seem to get the distance right. we compare legs of the trip in miles and yards, add them up and subtract them, talk about the swims left in the season. and after sitting in the shallow end of the boat launch awhile, we slowly make our way out of the water, back to our piles of clothes and shoes and car keys.

this sunday, a “longer” swim by a margin of .3 or .4 miles, depending on whose watch you’re relying on, took an hour and forty-five minutes. one of the swimmers, one of the many named john⁸, usually brings bagels each sunday — but he found lemon pound cake at the farmer’s market on saturday instead and promised he’d bring bagels next weekend.

i throw my oversized sweatshirt over my swim suit. there are too many people here now to be naked in the parking lot. underneath, i shimmy out of my suit, cap, goggles, fins, and buoy into my non-swimmer uniform: shorts, a tank top, birkenstocks, and my hair up in a bun. i say goodbye to my group and begin the forty-minute drive home.

i stop for coffee on the way — there’s a new coffee shop on the route, ten minutes from home, i’ve wanted to try.

the calendar of rotating wednesday swims has us back at the same lake tomorrow. the eight of us from sunday morning all plan on being there.

onward,

sara

1. when my body has allowed me to

2. i’m underselling this by a huge margin.

3. for context, we’ve had thirty folks show up for open water swims at various times this season.

4. this is a DIY changing room, after all.

5. who seem to have enough knowledge about the events of sunday mornings to avoid the areas completely.

6. snapping turtles, though, are another story.

7. several of us think it will be aforementioned jim.

8. they’re not really named john, but they all have the same name!