Water Markers: Essays on Swimming

By Ian Bull

In the confrontation between water and the rock, the water always wins. Not through strength, but through persistence.

These essays are meditations on life and change over the years, through the eyes of a life-long swimmer.

Donald Ian Bull grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Under the pen name Ian Bull, he has written four novels. Liars in Love, set in San Francisco in 1980, Facing Reality (A Love Story), set in Los Angeles in 2000, and the thriller series The Quintana Adventures. The Picture Kills and Six Passengers, Five Parachutes are the first two books in the series, and The Danger Game will be out soon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intersection Productions
• Release date: May 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948873130

Ian Bull

Donald Bull is a thriller writer who has a side gig working in the TV industry. He grew up in San Francisco and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Book preview

THE WATER

I swim. I choose it as my verb, and I seek its slippery meaning as I move through and against the random currents of life. This is my story of that choice.

I'm standing waist deep in a dark Canadian lake in line with six other preschoolers. It's summer, and I'm four. The wind makes me shiver but the black mud oozing between my toes is warm. We're learning how to open our eyes underwater, and the instructor puts his fist just beneath the surface in front of me. I go under, open my eyes, and I see his fist glowing like shimmering silver against black.

He flashes two fingers. I jump and shout, two!  He laughs.

Later, he teaches me to jellyfish float. I hold my breath, sit down and grab my knees. I wait on the bottom convinced that he has lied to me, but then I rise and as I break the surface he tips me forward and I can feel the sun on my back.

A year later when I'm five, my brother and I are at the public pool waiting for our lesson to start. The instructor blows his whistle and shouts that today we will learn how to breathe in the water. All the kids jump in except me. He yells at me, but I refuse -- I know only fish breathe in the water, and I'm not a fish, I'm a mammal. I might die. The instructor tells my mother to bring me back when I can follow instructions.

The next year my family moves to cold San Francisco, where the pools are inside cement and steel buildings with huge sloped windows. In summer, you can see the blustery fog sweeping past outside. I'm with a pack of kids from Summer Day Camp, and we wait in our swimsuits in the tile corridor between the locker room and the pool deck. I’m already shivering. There's a button on the floor, and the lifeguard steps on it, and nozzles on the ceiling douse us with cold water. We scream. It’s a bad start to the day.

The next year my brother and I take swim lessons at the medical school where my father is a physician. The halls are long and quiet and filled with the smell of alcohol, and the pool is small and so warm it steams up the windows. There’s a motorized platform in the shallow end where people in wheelchairs lower themselves into the water. I want to play on it, until I see the wheelchair people with their shrunken bodies. I stare at them.

After my lesson, I play, diving to the bottom for red and blue rings and black rubber bricks. My brother and I see our father waving for us through the foggy windows, which means it’s time for chocolate bars in the commissary. I tell my friends about the warm pool but find out they can’t use it, they don’t have access, and I’m aware for the first time of privilege.

Most of my instructors are teenagers: some are kind and clever, others are stupid and cruel, but I somehow manage to learn what every kid should know. I have basic survival skills that I can call upon when I need them. Swimming is not my verb yet; it is just a basic skill that you learn as a kid, like riding a bike. But then something happens to change all that.

My father is granted membership in an athletic club in downtown San Francisco and my brother and I join as junior members. My brother is twelve and I am ten, and my father wants us to learn sports. We are complete city kids by now, jumping streetcars downtown and then entering the club through a side door that has a one-way mirror. You knock once, flash your junior member card, and a member