The Globe and Mail
This summer Ian Brown explores how Canadians are reclaiming their lives from quarantine, whether it’s the thrill of a haircut, the risk of a hug or a chance – finally! – to jump in a pool again.
The way to identify a serious swimmer in Toronto during COVID-19 is to determine whether she or he has a secret pool plan.
For instance, on this sweltering, swollen afternoon at Christie Pits – a rambling, city-run outdoor public swimming pool in downtown Toronto – Zahur Surve is quietly churning laps in the lane reserved for the deep-end test.
That may not sound like a genius move, but it is. Over the course of a broiling non-pandemic summer day, Christie Pits can handle 1,200 plashing patrons. It’s like swimming in a mosh pit. But since cash-strapped Toronto’s outdoor pools opened June 20 this year, no more than 40 physically distanced patrons can swim at any time. And they can swim for only 45 minutes before they have to leave, as the pool is cleared and its “high-touch surfaces” are swabbed and sterilized, whereupon a fresh twoscore of sweaty supplicants are admitted.
In other words, public pools in the largest city in the country are operating at a quarter of their capacity. Versions of this recipe for civic fury are in place in every province except PEI.
So, Mr. Surve, a 50-year-old who peels off 100 laps three times a week, pops by the pool two to four times a day, and swims his quota in batches in the lane the lifeguards keep clear to administer the deep-end test – a length of crawl for any kid who wants to rocket off the diving board.
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Mr. Surve isn’t alone. Louise Garfield – renowned producer, choreographer and performer, 66 – roams the reopening city to find an empty lane to lap in. “Did you ever watch The Swimmer? With Burt Lancaster?” she asks, meaning the strange 1968 flick in which a suburban stud named Ned Merrill swims home from a party, hopping from private pool to private pool. “That’s me.” Since reopening, she has waited an hour in 35-degree heat to swim for 45 minutes. “Sometimes I get in, and sometimes I don’t.” She has her best luck when it’s raining.
Failing that, she has a backup plan. “My ambition is to get an invitation to Drake’s ginormous pool. And I would be willing to sign a waiver of liability.”
As COVID-19 ebbs and resurges through a hot summer and a nerve-racking reopening, swimming in public pools beckons as a simple balm. (New COVID-19 cases were up again this week in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and B.C., mostly among 20- to 40-year-olds, mostly owing to private indoor gatherings.) Alas, in a pandemic, even a quick dip is a complicated plunge.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “there is no evidence that COVID-19 can be spread to humans through the use of recreational waters.” But pandemics and water have a history. Parisians swam and bathed in the Seine until cholera came along in 1850. At their peak in the 1940s and 1950s, polio epidemics killed or paralyzed half a million people, and emptied swimming pools until it was demonstrated that chlorine killed the virus. According to Katherine Ashenburg’s beautifully readable The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, the Black Plague arrived in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, and turned people off washing and bathing for the next 400 years.
Pandemics change a society’s habits. But water, and bathing in it, speak to ancient human longings – for forgiveness, for pleasure, for transcendence, for relief. They don’t call it the deep end for nothing. These days, in a virus-worn city that’s already $2-billion in the hole, the struggle to keep public pools open and safe stands out sharply against the good fortune of citizens who own a private one. The town is full of envy.
Drake posted a video of his new backyard pool in Toronto’s Bridle Path neighbourhood at the end of May, while shut-in Toronto wilted in a late spring heat wave. “Hope everybody in the city is just enjoyin’ the beautiful day,” he added. He made his money on his own, so he got off lightly for flaunting his privilege. The pool is roughly the size of the North Atlantic; he’s on record saying he wants to own the largest residential pool in human captivity. He already has an indoor pool (you can glimpse it and his home in the video for his song Toosie Slide, but his outdoor plunge, he claims, is even bigger than Kanye’s.
A private pool is the ultimate luxury in a pandemic summer. Your correspondent knows this because he spent part of a recent afternoon in a private pool on the striking property of another luxurious home in midtown Toronto. Your correspondent cannot tell you where the pool is because one of the conditions of getting to swim there, after asking to be invited, was that he not reveal its whereabouts.
What your correspondent can tell you is this: The pool is eight-feet wide and 45-feet long. There is another shallow pool beyond its far end. “Is that a wading pool?” your correspondent said to the owner, who replied, “No, that’s actually a sculpture.” There are teenaged oak trees and ginkgo trees and sycamores and giant mature locusts and clipped box hedges and teeming crowds of hydrangea lining its edges. Being in the pool is like swimming within a green formal garden. It is impossible to feel hot or anxious there. The water is cold, but not as cold as your correspondent thinks it will be as he hovers daintily, arms high, on tiptoe, before plunging. He swims some lengths, climbs out, towels off, warms up until he is just fractionally hot and dives in again. He stays cool for hours afterward, even back at his own house as he launches Google Maps to try to count the turquoise pool jewels set across the top of the city. He wants to visit every one of them.
Late last spring, as Toronto’s city managers canvassed immunologists and the Lifesaving Society to figure out if and how the city’s pools could open safely but quickly, two requirements instantly took precedence: the need for physical distancing, and the need for maximum hygiene. “The way to achieve that,” Aydin Sarrafzadeh, the city’s manager of aquatics, was informed, ”would be to reduce your capacity.” The new safe pool number was 25 per cent of a full load, with breaks for hourly sterilization. Lockers were off-limits. Time in the change room was to be minimized: Swimmers would be encouraged to wear their suits to the pool and home again. The goal, Mr. Sarrafzadeh says, “is to ensure we can run the program and still make sure everyone’s safe.” Those objectives front an equally serious one – the role pools serve as a safety valve, especially in a steaming city frustrated by pandemic restrictions. Mr. Sarrafzadeh is a skilled public administrator, so he puts it another way. “We believe that our role is to ensure access for all citizens, especially those who are vulnerable or marginalized. The opportunity to cool off assists with everyone’s well being.”
Louise Garfield suffers from three agonizing hearing afflictions – including tinnitus and an inner ear balance problem. Swimming is one of the few therapies she can administer herself. “When I swim, I don’t hear the noise. And you don’t need equilibrium to move freely in the water.” She has lobbied Toronto city councillors to install a system that would let swimmers reserve a lane – a system Mr. Sarrafzadeh claims is in the works for indoor pools this fall.
But here is the strange thing: If you brave the lineup and make it into a straitened public pool, it’s fantastic. Forty people is nothing. You feel like you have the place to yourself. Maintaining distance is a breeze. “It relieves all of the stress of lifeguarding,” says Andrew, the young man manning the front door and handing out bracelets and taking down e-mails and phone numbers (for possible contact tracing). He’s studying politics at McGill. “But the fear for your own personal safety is higher.”
Denied a locker, people pile their belongings on the pool deck, like a community of beaver huts. The quiet is astonishing. The diving board is closed, but there’s more time to look around. One-piece bathing suits are big this season. “If you don’t start behaving better, we’re going home,” a women in her late 40s tells a small pouting boy: He keeps taking objects out of his mother’s purse and throwing them at strangers, and is clearly bound for a federal penitentiary. Pedro Almeida, who is 16 and in Grade 11, is practising headfirst cartwheel flop dives with his pal, Simao Soares, who is 13 and in Grade 8, but much taller. Two young women, Rene Lewis and Olivia Zagouris, also Grade 10, laugh at everything the boys say and do. It is hard to tell if the girls think the boys are hilarious or idiots, or both. I would go with the third option. You can watch this kind of action with great pleasure in an uncrowded pool while you try not to become infected by a potentially fatal virus. Then you can stand up and tumblesault into the no-diving diving pool and sink to the bottom, floating and resting and thinking and encased. Swimming in a river or the ocean, one’s mind is preoccupied with one’s surroundings, with currents and rocks and creatures of the deep. Whereas a pool is contained, and a city pool especially so, and sets us free to meander.
But our 45 minutes are up. Everyone stands to leave. No one is in a rush, except for Simao and Olivia and Renee and Pedro, who dash around to the front gate of the pool to find only one wristband left for the next 45-minute swim slot. “We’re all loyal,” Simao says. “No one wants to go.”
On the way home, I try to remember the things that bobbed into my head as I floated in the deep end: my father’s face, my daughter’s voice, my brother leaping stoutly off granite rocks into stiff Atlantic waves. Things I love and things I miss. I did not once think of Drake and his enormous private pool.
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