Steve Mentz - New York, USA
When I’m in the water, head down, little to see or hear, I’m in a private fluid space of concentration and mind-wandering. I think a lot about writing when I’m swimming. Sometimes I recite poetry to myself. Sometimes I compose new sentences. Sometimes I don’t think at all.
“Ocean swimming connects me to the largest physical body on the planet. Swimming in salt water brings me into an embodied meditation practice. I spend my time thinking in this wet sensory deprivation. Sometimes I’m thinking about form, the way my arms and legs are moving in and through the water. Swimming rewards attention to form, and it works through feeling. I grab the water with outstretched hands, and I feel it spill away as I pull back toward my torso. I come out of the water recharged, with little muscle-fires burning. Pool swimming does something similar for my body, but the mental feeling isn’t quite so intense.
“When I think about swimming now, I shift back and forth between two ideas, the same way I breathe on alternating sides when I swim. The first idea, breathing to my left I might say, considers swimming as meditation, in which I’m using the solitary time to connect with my self and the watery world. The second, on my right side, embraces swimming as communal artistic practice. In recent years, I have been collaborating occasionally with water artists, including Vanessa Daws, Marina Zurkow, and a few others especially in and around New York City. I’m looking forward to finding ways for the meditation and the art to engage with each other.”
What were your earliest memories of swimming Steve?
“I think I learnt to swim pretty early, maybe aged five or six. I’m not exactly sure. I know I learned to swim at a man-made lake in New Jersey, the Copper Springs Club, which had a beach and tennis focus.
“Copper Springs had a swimming badge system to reward progress - Green Frogs, Gold Dolphin, plus other badges with ‘aquatic’ names.
“I was into badges at the time, so making progress through the range of badges was a big motivator.
“I recall I learned breaststroke from my Dad as a young kid. Just before I was ready to learn it in the next swim class level it became evident he taught me the wrong rhythm! He taught me to glide with arms at my side and with my head a few inches underwater. It was a shock when I had to re-learn the pull-kick-and-glide method from the instructor! It was maybe the first time I realized my Dad might not know everything.
“The other place I recall swimming often in those early days was in the Atlantic Ocean, in Bay Head, New Jersey – which is a place I still take my own kids every summer. (Or, every summer when there’s no Covid pandemic.) The beach there is fairly gentle, with small to medium waves. That was where I learned to ride waves into shore on my belly, New Jersey-style – with my head down in the water, hands in front of me, planning together like the bow of a boat. It’s a good way to ride into a gently sloping beach, but when I’ve tried it in steeper beaches like La Jolla, California, or bigger surf as at Kuta Beach in Bali, it can have pretty drastic, head over heels results. But whenever I find a likely shore break, say in Santa Barbara or last October at Manly Beach in Sydney, I still love to ride waves with my face buried in white water, so that I can’t see in front of me.”
Swimming and student life had its ups and downs
“I started swimming for a team pretty soon after I first learned, and kept at it through my high school years. By the time I reached maybe 9th or 10th grade I started to burn out on the competitive aspect of swimming.
“My high school varsity coach (grades 9-12) was also my 10th grade English teacher, and our personalities clashed on many occasions. It started being a fight about writing, and ended up about swimming.
“He had a very strict essay format into which he wanted to fit my writing, which my teenage self was not willing to accept. I didn’t do what he asked me to do, and we squabbled all year. In the pool I think he always figured I could have been a much faster swimmer than I was, which was probably true. But I still think I had the better argument about the writing.
“Those years of conflict seem strange in retrospect, given that I ended up being captain of the varsity swim team when I was a senior in high school, somewhat I think to my coach’s dismay (I was elected by the team) and now I’m an English professor, writing and teaching writing for a living. Swimming and writing have always been intertwined practices for me.
“Those years put me off competitive swimming for a while, both in and after college. I played rugby in college instead, which was lots of fun. Immediately after college, in the last quarter of 1989, I spent three months in Sydney, Australia. I lived in Randwick, just up the hill from the beautiful Coogee Beach, where I swam almost every day. I remember a particularly gorgeous day, Christmas of 1989, spending hours next to a bunch of guys who decorated a plastic pine tree with red and green cans of Victoria Bitter (a local Aussie beer).”
Swimming fits into my life
“I like to get into the ocean every day from May through mid-October. Pre-Covid, I’d also swim in a pool probably five days a week during the rest of the year, when it’s too cold around here to go in the ocean. I used to keep track of my total distance over the course of the year, but I have dropped this habit in 2020.
“My favorite open water swimming area is in Long Island Sound, down the street from my house in Connecticut. The bay is sheltered by the 118-mile (190 km) barrier of Long Island, so we have a substantial tidal range but no surf. The bottom can be a bit silty when the water is low, so I track the high tide around the calendar, always swimming within an hour or so of the flood. I share the space with kayakers, paddle-boarders, the occasional jet ski, and Yale University’s sailing team, not to mention osprey, cormorants, sometimes jellyfish, and, especially in late summer and fall, schools of menhaden. These small, oily baitfish have been returning in numbers to Long Island Sound over the past few decades. It may be that whales and seals will follow them into the Sound, and eventually sharks will follow the seals. But no big sharks have made it into my waters yet!
“My favorite swim, which I’ve done almost every day since late May in 2020, starts at the little comma of sand just down the street from my house. I climb down a few rocks to the sand and start by swimming maybe 100m butterfly to warm up. I swim butterfly out to a buoy that marks off the swimming area, though that buoy is only up from June to September. After clearing the buoy, I turn left and swim along the shoreline for about a mile. I pass houses and buoys where people anchor boats during the summer. About halfway out the tail of Whale Rock sticks out toward me; the rocky body is fully visible only at low tide. I swim past the uninhabited Green Island, and usually make it across Granite Bay, which is the next bay up the coastline from Short Beach.
“My daily swims bring me great pleasure, rejuvenate me mentally and physically, and afford me private philosophy time.
“Whenever I can, I invite people to swim with me during the summer when the water is warm. Even if people don’t want to swim far, Short Beach a great place to splash around. When my kids were smaller we used to hunt oysters, build sand castles, and splash around on floaties.”
I’m in my space
“For the last decade or more, almost-daily swimming has been my private meditation. I love swimming with my family and with other people, including on some memorable occasions with water-writers or swim-artists. I also have had a great time connecting with other “aquademics” in watery places, from snorkeling at Manly in October 2019 to body-surfing in Santa Barbara in October 2014. But in truth swimming for me is usually solitary. With my face in the water, I am mostly in my own world.”
When I return to indoor swimming
“When the water becomes too cold for me, usually sometime in late October or November, I swim in a local indoor pool. Or at least I did before Covid! In 2020, I’ve not been in the pool since March. The March – May 2020 spring quarantine gap was the longest I’ve gone without regular swimming in many years.
“When I am back to the pool, I like to swim a mix of IM sets and descending distances of freestyle such as 500, 400, 300, 200, 100.”
Steve, are you part of a swimming squad? Or do you receive any coaching?
“Around 10 years ago the Masters Group at my local YMCA had an amazing coach, Frank Keefe, who had coached Swimming for Yale University (near to where I live) and even some Olympic squads over his long career. Retired, he coached a small group of us a few mornings a week. Eventually, Frank moved away, the squad sessions were not the same, and the small cohort went our separate ways in our swimming.
“I now mostly swim alone, though there are often other people in the water near me.”
Do you participate in any ocean swim events Steve?
“I like to do a few short-ish one to three mile (1.6 – 4.8 km) open water races each summer. A few years back, I did a few 10 km events – one in Bermuda, and one in the Hudson River in New York City. Someday, when travel allows, I hope to swim the Bosporus (6.5km swimming between Europe and Asia, starting in Istanbul,Turkey) and maybe the Hellespont (4.5km current assisted swim, also in Turkey).
“I do these kinds of races mostly for the swim-tourism: I love swimming in new water or past new places, as when I swam under the George Washington Bridge in New York, or around Harrington Sound in Bermuda. Alcatraz and the Bosphorus are on the list, and maybe some island crossings in the Aegean?”
Steve, what are some of your best swimming memories?
With my family - “Swimming with my family is something I cherish; we have always been a swimming family. My children are aged 18 and 19 now, and living close to the beach allows us to swim together regularly. We tend to build swimming into our family holidays, at places like the Jersey Shore, California, Greece, and Portugal. My daughter swam competitively for a couple years as a young teen, but neither of them really followed me in that way. My wife loves to swim, not so much the long swims with me, but we swim together all summer.”
In the continental rift in Iceland - “In the summer of 2012, I swam with my son and niece in Silfra, a body of glacial melt that sits right on the continental rift in Iceland. The water is 1 or 2 degrees Celsius degrees, so drysuits are essential. It was the clearest and most ethereal water I’ve ever been in. I wrote about it on my blog: “Alien and intimate water all around me, but barely wetting my skin” due to wearing a drysuit.”
Being part of the Little Red Lighthouse Swim - “Participating in the Hudson River Little Red Lighthouse swim (10.2 km, 7.8miles) in September 2013 is another special memory. The swim is named after a small lighthouse in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. Swimming under that big bridge, which I’ve driven across many times over the years, brought together my water-world with my city-world. We swam that day with a strong current assist, which meant the quick two hours in the water felt like going downstream all the way. I wrote about the swim in a chapter in my open-access book Oceanic New York (2015).”
Being caught in an ocean rip - “In August 1985, just before I was getting ready to start college, I went swimming after a late summer hurricane-ish storm near my family’s house in New Jersey. I probably should not have entered the ocean that day, because the surf was still too strong, and the undertow quickly whisked me out 200 meters plus. I couldn’t swim against it. I wasn’t really worried – the water was warm, and I’m comfortable ducking my head under waves even when they come close together – but it was a long, slow, messy return swim back through the rip. I don’t know if I was in terrible danger, but it was a moment when I thought about my exposure and safety.”
Swimming in icy open water every month of the year - “I went to college about an hour from the Jersey shore, and during my first year of college my room-mate and I had a pact to swim in the ocean every month.
“It was fairly easy to tick off the months until January through force of will, but in March and April the water felt super-cold. We were barely able to finish it. I don’t swim too much in the early months of the year these days, at least not in the northeast US.”
Body surfing at Hendry’s Beach - “In October 2014, I went to an academic conference at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I gave a keynote talk about Body-Surfing, which was fun, but the best part was gathering a dozen or so other professors and conference-goers to body-surf together in the Pacific at Hendry’s Beach the morning before the conference started. I loved sharing the waves and water with many brilliant academics and writers! That’s where I met the swim-artist Vanessa Daws, who’s usually based in Dublin and does swim-videography projects. She contributed the drawings to my book Ocean (2020).”
Where are the best places you have swum and recommend to other swimmers?
“Iceland for clear cold water, Greece, especially the island of Folegandros, for clear warm water. The Jersey Shore for body-surfing. Coogee and Manly beaches are my favourites in Australia, plus the Clovelly Pool where I had a great swim in October 2019.”
Is there a ‘bucket list’ swim you are determined to tick-off? And if so, what, where and when?
“I was signed up to swim the Bosporus in Turkey during the summer of 2019 with a buddy from California, but we eventually had to cancel. I’d like to do that when the world opens up to travelling again. I’d also like to do a SwimTrek vacation at some point – they are an outfit based in London that runs long-distance open water swim holidays, in places like Greece.”
About Steve Mentz
Professor of English, St. John’s University (New York City).
“I’m an English professor with specialities in Shakespeare, environmental literature, and the “blue humanities,” which means the cultural history of humans and water, especially but not only the ocean. So I write quite a lot about swimming and maritime literary culture, including ideas such as “wet globalization” and “swimmer poetics.” I also write poetry, most of which is either about parenting or swimming.
“Looking forward, I’m excited to move my own swimming away from its past as an athletic competition toward a future as an artistic and communal practice.”
Connect with Steve.
@stevermentz (Twitter); @smentz (Insta); Steve Mentz (Facebook); www.stevementz.com
Photo credit:
First image. Christianne Cain
Ocean swim. Olivia Mentz
Line drawing. Vanessa Daws
Body surfing. Vanessa Daws
