I am getting older. I feel it in my bones. I run many days but this winter I am noticing the cold in ways I haven’t ever noticed before. I even gave in and ought a proper running coat this winter. I guess I am finally starting to inhabit the body of the senior minister I have been for over a decade in churches now.
One not too cold morning in January I drove down to Britannia beach on the Ottawa River. I was on preaching about baptism the following Sunday and wanted to get a photo of a 20m swim lane someone carved out of the ice on the river so that some people could swim outside all winter. I wanted to make a joke about the next baptism would be done in that lane, as if we need anything more to dissuade people from getting baptized. I also wanted to talk about baptism as a moment of transformation, there is your life before it and your life after it, and it struck me that if you were crazy enough to swim in a frozen river there was probably just such a divide in your life, the before-i-would-swim-in-frozen-rivers phase and the phase in which diving into zero degree water seemed normal.
Some people think worrying abut cyclists in the winter is a waste because they cannot believe anyone would bike in the snow, I wonder what they think of people swimming in the frozen Ottawa.
I didn’t actually want to talk with anyone doing this and I figured if I went too early then it would be “busy,” well as busy as such a thing can get, I suppose, so I decided to go mid-morning when I hoped no one would be around.
I was not entirely certain where on the beach this thing was but I imagined it would be pretty easy to find. I hadn’t though about how far out from the shore it might be, in order for the water to be deep enough, or maybe to lengthen the season with the thicker ice? Anyways, I got out of the car and started walking, there was no sign of this 20m winter swim lane. Just as I started to kick myself for not planning well I saw a woman in a bright swimsuit diving into the ice.
So much for a solo adventure, but at least I could see where eI was trying to go.
Now I felt awkward, I didn’t know the woman and I didn’t want her in the pictures, I guessed she would not want to be in them, but it was cold, and windy, and while she was swimming in the zero degree water I was feeling a sense of urgency to get the shot and get on with my day.
So I started to take photos, angling the camera as she went by to try to get as wide a view as possible without her in it, though she had no way of knowing if I was being respectful or not, she didn’t stop swimming. Maybe being a winter river swimmer you get used to this sort of thing.
Suddenly there is this booming voice saying something about journalists, and respecting privacy. This giant man comes up to me, I wouldn’t say he was running, more just walking with authority across the ice. He gruffly—though mostly in a trying to be protective of the gal in the water sort of way that I could appreciate—asked what I was up to and if I had permission to photograph the woman.
I told him I was trying to keep her out of the photos and that I was taking pictures to help out a church service. He smiled, he had all sorts of photographers out but never this. He asked, “what brand?” And the woman, now out of the water and putting on a giant sleeping bag looking thing, laughed, made fun of him a bit and then forgot the word “denomination” herself and laughed again. Swimming in this water made these folks happier than average.
We all got to chatting about why they loved to swim in such conditions, the role distance swimming played in their lives, they both experienced what I was saying about the before and after of this hobby being a big deal, they said they weren’t religious but could see how baptism might be similar. Everyone was all smiles, I got the pictures I wanted, and wished them a good day.
As I left I heard him say to the woman, “that must be some weird kind of church” and being called weird by a man preparing to swim in an icy river with a lane carved out of the zero degree water reminded me of the time when I was a student working on tour boats all hungover and sweating as I cleaned the outside of the boat early one morning and a homeless man—still smelling of booze from the night before—complained that I worked too slow and that kids these days expect everything to be given to them.
Always, the woman responded with great authority, “well, I wouldn’t worry about it, he must be the youth guy.”
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