If you live in a region with harsh winters, you know about the mania that comes over you on the first truly warm spring day. The first day you can wear a t-shirt outside is the day where you start to feel alive again, the icy block where your soul has been for the last six months is starting to become a puddle. You can finally touch grass again, and regardless of how you'll feel later in the summer, you soak up as much sun as you can, welcoming the non-synthetic vitamin D into your core.
This is all to say - there was a string of incredibly warm days this past week, some of the first this year, and following a May of endless rain and lower-than-average temperatures, and I lost my head. The sunshine seduced me and let me believe in things like warmth and being outside, and other similarly foolish things, like going for a swim.
Our vacation year at work inexplicably rolls over on June 1, and so I was using up the last of my vacation days at the end of May. Which happened to coincide with a few days in the mind-twenties, and a plan hatched in my mind. Possibly because I had just finished re-reading Small Bodies of Water, or because I was re-reading Turning: A Swimming Memoir1. Maybe because I need something bigger and bolder this spring than simply touching grass. Maybe something unlocked in me from the long weekend when I decided to take a drive out to a beach I might like to go to this summer and I wanted to see how far it was. Something I've missed since leaving Miramichi is having a beach so close to home. I live close to the harbour but it's not a place you go swimming, for many reasons.
I'm not going to find a beach within five minutes of my apartment here, but I can find one that suits me somewhere in the municipality.
So, on a warm day, so warm that I put on shorts, and so empty of plans that I needed to craft some, I turned to my memories, and decided to repeat a journey I hadn't taken in 12 years: I was going to take the bus to Chocolate Lake,
In the summer of 2013, the first summer of the first time I lived in Halifax, my cousin was living here too, subletting a room in an apartment from one of her brother's friends. The two of us were working menial office jobs before school started again; I was going to start library school in September and she was going to start her fourth year in environmental engineering. We spent many weekends together that summer (we both live here again now, but she lives further outside of the city core and has a two year old; nothing is ever the same as being 21 and having nothing but time). One very hot Saturday, we took to the internet to find the closest beach we could get to by bus, because neither of us had a car, and I didn't have my license then either.
It was an unusual 40 degrees in Halifax that day. I had gone to Walmart to get my passport photo taken. That passport, which expired in 2023, was what I carried around those ten years, with my hair plastered to my head from the sweat that poured off me from riding the 1 to Mumford and walking down. I texted my cousin after completing this task and we made a plan. This was before Halifax Transit's information was on Google Maps, and so we sorted through bus schedules, packed our bags, and met to take the bus out to Chocolate Lake.
Because it was a weekday this time, I took this same trip alone. Bus information is in Google Maps now, and I had a feeling that the bus routes had changed from what we did in 2013 (in fact I know that, because there was a big overhaul some years ago). I could have driven, except that my partner was working at his office and therefore had taken the car that day. I packed my bag: towel, sunscreen, towel poncho, goggles with sunglass lenses in them, library book, knitting, water bottle, plastic bag for anything wet. I considered bringing my water shoes, but I was pretty sure, from memory, that Chocolate Lake had a sandy bottom and it would be fine. Bus pass in hand, I set out.
The thing I'm dancing around in this piece is that it's a frankly unhinged choice to go swimming in a lake in Canada in May. It's particularly unhinged to so in the Maritimes, where spring arrives so slowly. Not a single body of water has had a change to warm up, a thing I know well. And still, I went.
I felt like I needed to go for a swim last week. I needed to plunge into the icy water, to kick off a season where I'll go swimming much more than I did last year, a second summer in my second time living in Halifax, one where I continue to re-attach my roots here. It was small but meaningful to make the decision to go for a swim on a day that didn't make a lot of sense, one that declared an intention for this season.
There were a handful of people lying on the beach when I got there, and one brave person in the water. As I was setting up my towel in the shade of a tree, they climbed out of the water and sat in the sun, eating a granola bar as they warmed up. I eyed them and the water.
But I didn't give myself a ton of time to dither, grabbing my goggles and putting them on. My partner told me that my goggles are overkill, but the reality is that I'm now so photosensitive from multiple eye surgeries and more than twenty years of wearing rigid contact lenses that I can't go swimming without them, plus I need goggles to protect my contacts anyway, so sunglasses/goggles makes sense.
The lake is blue with a hint of turquoise, the colour of cold. I hold my breath and I step in, not letting myself stop from plunging my body into the water, even though I very much want to run back into the breezy sun and sit huddled on my towel. I push my feet off the bottom, covering my body to the shoulders. I decide not to dunk my head today, my breath coming from my body in gasps as I try to get used to the icy knives skinning my body.
Bobbing in the water, kicking up to lie on my back, my breath slowly starts to return to normal. I've been this cold before, I like swimming in very cold water, but it's been a long time, and I keep telling myself that I need to wait out this painful part. After a few minutes, my body relaxes slightly in the water, no longer quite so cold.
I spin slowly, looking around the lake, and then back at the beach. I'm still alone here, the other person who was swimming has gone. I shut my eyes and tilt my head back to look at the sky. I will get out in a few minutes and lay on my towel, letting the cold prickles work out of my skin. For this moment, it's me, the water and the sky, gently together in peace.
The evening after my swim, I was reading Turning and found Lee writing about her own swims at Chocolate Lake, because she went to King’s. And I then realized we probably overlapped in Halifax too. It felt so perfect.
Oh, Alison, I loved every word of this! I can almost feel that cold, cold water right now. Wonderful!