The Creek Behind My Farm

The scared ones

Most children come to the water afraid. That is right and good. A child who is not a little afraid of water is a child who will get in trouble in it. The afraid ones were always my favorites, if I am honest, because teaching a scared child to swim is not really about swimming at all.

There was a boy named Marcus Reedy, back in, I want to say, the middle eighties. Marcus was six and he would not put one toe in that creek. He stood on the gravel bar and screamed like I was trying to feed him to something. His mother was mortified. The other children laughed, the way children do, until I gave them a look that stopped it.

I did not make Marcus get in. I have never once made a child get in. I sat down right there on the gravel bar in my suit, in the shallow water, next to a screaming boy, and I did not say a word about swimming. I asked him about his dog. He had a dog named Rooster. We talked about Rooster for a good long while, me and Marcus, with the water running over our feet, and by the end of that first morning he had his ankles in. By the end of that first week he had his knees in. By the end of those six weeks Marcus Reedy was jumping off the limestone rock hollering Rooster’s name like a battle cry.

His mother cried on the bank. I had gotten used to mothers crying on that bank by then.

There was a little girl, oh, twenty years ago now, Katie Sorenson, who had nearly drowned in a farm pond as a toddler before she could remember it, and her whole body knew the fear even though her mind did not. She shook like a leaf. For that child I did not even talk about the far side of the pool. I told her we were only ever going to learn one thing at a time, and the first thing was just to sit in the shallow and be a girl who was sitting in some water, nothing more. We did that for three mornings. The fourth morning she lay back on my hand and floated, and I watched her little face go from terror to astonishment to the biggest grin I ever saw, floating there under the cottonwoods with the sun coming through the leaves, and she said, Mrs. Ruth, I am doing it, I am on top of the water.

Yes you are, baby, I said. You are on top of the water. The water is holding you up. I have got you and the water has got you and you are not going to go under.

I meant it as a swimming lesson. I know now I was saying it to somebody else too, somebody who was not there, somebody who went under a long time before Katie Sorenson was ever born.