The 6 Things I Learned Swimming with Dogs in Lakes

1. Never let the odds (of your watery death) get in the way of what you know in your heart you were meant to do.

I think Chloe could hear her ancestors, centuries, perhaps millenia, of labrador retrievers, calling for her to come home to the water. She got a twitch in her tail when she saw the lake, and when someone threw her a short wooden stick twenty or so feet into the water, there was no hesitation. She dove into the water with all the grace of a swan with two broken wings and no legs. 10 feet out, we couldn’t see the stick anymore. 20 feet out, she clearly couldn’t see the stick anymore either.

2. Fake it ‘till you make it. (AKA Stay Positive)

She was 40 feet away from the shore and swimming aimlessly in search of her precious stick. I was stripping down to my bathing suit as fast as I could, and as I splashed in after her, I was forced to stop around waist height by the near freezing water. As we fertively called her name, she kept swimming, her little head barely visible over the water. I could almost hear her saying, “Oh I see it, it’s over there,” when clearly it was not over there.

3. There are always other sticks in the lake.

Our pitiable pleas had by this time caught the attention of the next family down on the lake. The alpha male of the family, or the dad as humans call it, was swimming out near Chloe by this time, waving something brown and oblong. She switched directions like a torpedo, locked onto the man’s stick, which of course, in her mind, was her stick. He tossed it to her when she was about 10 feet from him, and she turned instantly back towards where I stood, now shoulder deep in water.

4. Moving on from failure is almost as hard as moving on from success.

I swam out to meet her, her head raised triumphantly, the stick her victory banner. I gave her some flotation support as she made her way back to shore, and she gave herself a hardy shake when her paws where planted firmly back on the sand. It was decided that until we invested in some doggy glasses, sticks were probably not the best idea, so I called her out for some aimless floating. She hesitated on the beach for a moment, then sneezed, shook the water out of her ears, and splashed back in, leaving her hard won stick abandoned on the beach.

5. Don’t judge a dog by its paddle.

We swam straight out from the shore with no particular destination, me copying the classic doggy paddle to avoid splashing water everywhere and inadvertantly drowning my dog. I was busy taking in the wall of snow-capped mountains that surrounded us, the fluffy white-grey clouds in the sky, and the silence broken only by the gentle splish-splash of waves and the occasional bird song. I was so carried away by the magic of swimming in a  pristine mountain lake (that was nevertheless freezing balls cold) that I didn’t notice that Chloe was overtaking me and steering us towards the shore where a young family was setting up for an afternoon BBQ. It wasn’t until this moment that I realized how exhausting the doggy paddle is, and became suspicious how a 12-year-old, arthritic labrador was outpacing me. It was a “I really need to start going to the gym” moment. I caught up with her at the last second, lunging heroically for her collar, saving the family from the Chloe-based shower of lake water they almost received.

6. When the wild calls, answer.

After 40 minutes frolicking in the bitter cold water, the two of us were cold, tired, and a little delirious. But as Chloe licked some ambiguous slime off her paws and I wiped the dirt from behind (and around and inside) my ears, I couldn’t help but feel that wehad done something really real here today. Really natural. Humans have been swimming, bathing, and hunting in mountain lakes for thousands of years, and dogs and wolves for at least as long. Swimming in a pool may be more sanitary*, warmer, and more convenient than lake swimming, but there is something about the water, the shore, and the unknown-ness of the lake itself that makes lake swimming feel a little bit like praying, but praying in a sense that is older than religion. Swimming in a lake restores a little of the wildness that we strip away from ourselves everyday with our Starbucks coffee and our manicured lawns and our neat little post-it notes on our neat plastic desks inside our boxy little cubicles. And sitting on the front porch of our rough-hewn cabin, hearing the screech of a golden eagle over the silent prairie, I think I can hear my ancestors too. Not the ones that live in New York or Ohio or the ones that came hear on a ship 500 years ago, but the ones that we all share. Not the ones who new this as a nation or a state or a territory, but those who knew it only as The Land, Mother, Provider. I think that today, Chloe and I made our wild ancestors proud.

*questionable