How Well Can You Swim?

How Well Can You Swim?

To answer this question personally, I’d say I’m about average. In the early part of my, uh, ahem, seventies decade, I lap swim every Tuesday morning. I know the basics—back, side, breast, and crawl strokes. Truth be told, I never learned how to dive. It kinda scared me. If you’re thrashing about in the water, you may not want to count on me to rescue you.

I hop in our neighborhood pool with my grandchildren. Sometimes we lap swim together. They think Nana has always been a swimmer. I’ve never told them I didn’t learn to swim until later on in my adult life, and I had to take the YMCA Beginner Swim class twice!

But I’ll never forget hearing about the time my father, Walter Troyan, saved my uncle from drowning many years ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear about this incident until after his death. I would have liked to ask him more about it. My Uncle Thornton, my mother’s oldest brother, shared this story with me.

In the summer of 1946, WWII over, my father was a newlywed, and he’d been discharged from the Navy, having served on a cruiser. He and my mother lived in Indianapolis but would visit her family in Linton, Indiana. My mother was the oldest of nine children, so the eight younger siblings were still living at home.

At this time, the Thomas family had no running water in the home, so baths were mostly taken in a small metal tub inside the house. Or, just wherever one could get a bath. And countless natural pools of water, called stripper pits, were not too far away. The area was called Thousand Islands, land that had been mined for coal and didn’t fill all the way up with water, so the many mounds of peaks looked like a thousand islands with individual pools of water.

One day in that long ago summer, my father and my mother’s two brothers, Thornton and Paul, dirtier than Pigpen’s dust cloud from working all day, and no good place for a bath, headed to Thousand Islands to refresh and cool off. The stripper pit pools were fairly clean considering the kind of “pool” they were, and the glistening waters invited many, back in the day.

The three young men knew it was best to only walk out to chest height water depth, but no further because of drop offs. But on this particular day, Paul, about age 13, went out a little too far and started drowning. My father went into action right away. With gargantuan effort, he dove down deep and pushed Paul up from the bottom, and when they both surfaced, my dad tugged at his neck to pull him to safety. Paul had a boatload of water in his mouth and slung his head around, coughing and spitting, frightened to death. Witnessing this harrowing scare, Thornton was beside himself.

When all three returned home, they had quite the story to tell my grandmother who was more than a little terrified just listening to the episode, even though her son’s life had been saved.

My Uncle Thornton says to this day he greatly admired the courage of my father, still new to the family, to risk his own life to save his young brother-in-law. His words: “Becky, your dad was an excellent swimmer. He knew just what to do. He didn’t even have to think about it. I think he learned his great swimming skills from serving in the Navy.”

So yes, I highly doubt I could rescue another swimmer in trouble. But I’m sure thankful my father could!

Any swimming stories out there? To make a comment, open in your browser and scroll to the bottom. I reply to all comments. Feel free to forward to a friend!