GBasically it’s like this: Whoever stops running, stands still. If you stop swimming, you have a problem. The question of why we swim is existential. The answer can only be given by those who swim. If you don’t swim, you’re sure to drown. Who swims, maybe survives.
Guðlaugur Friðþórsson capsized on March 11, 1984 with the crew of the fishing trawler Hellisey VE 503 off the coast of Iceland’s Westman Islands. Two men drowned instantly, three began to swim. The coast was four miles away, the North Atlantic water five degrees cold. Friðþórsson made it. Since then he has been known as the “seal man”.
The layer of fat on his body, two to three times thicker than the average population, had isolated him. And before the joggers complain: even walking upright sometimes saves lives. After climbing ashore from the Atlantic on his home island of Heimaey, Friðþórsson had to walk more than a kilometer across a cold lava field through the frosty winter air to his hometown. Standing still would have meant death.
Bonnie Tsui swims
Bonnie Tsui tells the story of the Icelandic fisherman right at the beginning of her book Why We Swim, and it runs like a thread through the work, like a swimming line. Tsui flies to Iceland to speak to Friðþórsson, which he does, with the reluctance of a man who thinks even the most unbelievable stories shouldn’t be told too often.
And Tsui swims, takes part in Guðlaugsund, where the residents of Heimaey swim six kilometers on the anniversary of the accident – in a swimming pool, not in the Atlantic. Nowhere else are there more swimming pools in relation to the number of inhabitants. Icelanders know: the water around them is deep, dark and cold.
True abysses in the water
Bonnie Tsui not only swims in Iceland for her book, she also swims in the San Francisco Bay and in Japan. She was a competitive swimmer for ten years. She jumps from place to place a bit too quickly, a bit like a pebble polished by the surf, which doesn’t give her research time to gain actual depth, like the Canadian Leanne Shapton did a few years ago with her “Swimming Studies ” (German edition “Bahnen Pulling”) has succeeded.
Bonnie Tsui’s “Why We Swim” was published by the Harper Collins publishing group and costs 22 euros.
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People come to themselves quickly in water. The thoughts flow. Often enough then the real abysses open up. Tsui recognizes this, addresses it – and slides on. The fact that she discovers the “United Nations on a small scale” in the lesson that an American swimming instructor gives to the international staff accompanying the American invaders in the pool of the toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein reveals this superficiality. Sport doesn’t heal every injustice, not just since this year.
In the best part of her book, during her visit to Japan, Tsui explains that warriors also have to swim to avoid drowning. The art of nihon eiho, the classic Japanese form of swimming, developed from the art of the samurai of swimming in their armor. The floating of the body in the water leads to serenity of the mind. That, Tsui is told, is the real reason that drives people back into the water.
