Wisła

I never cared much for swimming as an activity, or diving. I can swim and dive proficiently, well enough to stay alive in the water and not embarrass myself on a one-meter diving board, but the real joy (I suppose, if there is such a thing) of swimming must require rhythmic breathing, at which I do not excel. It requires having rhythm. And diving hurts my head. But I can tread water with anybody, which seems to be an apt parallel for language immersion—for me. After four months here, I can survive. I just don’t get anywhere, except as I drift, and I don’t drift fast. I’m okay with that.


No Swimming

Swimming in the Wisła anyway is banned, or technically, bathing of any sort. Not that anyone would want to. There’s no beach, and it’s a rather murky stream right at the Wawel bend and as far along it as I have walked. Driftwood plys the current, sometimes in floating nests, and snags raise their reptilian heads. Litter and plastic bottles form small, temporary sargassos, then break up. Odd sculptures bask inexplicably in the sun.


Swine Backstroke

But swans still wing along the Wisła’s lengths (okay, they’re sometimes a little on the dingy side) as do sculls, which the swans sometimes seem to mistake as swans and take up after. The Wisła still connects all of Poland, from the Carpathians to the Baltic. And it glitters yet under the sun, a bathing against which there is no proscription, even in your underwear, and regardless of age or beauty. I keep my head up out of the water to see this Wisła.