Daddy Couldn’t Swim
September 9, 2020
Daddy couldn’t swim, really. He could dog paddle a bit, which is to say, he could just manage to be in water above his head and not drown. The extent of his swim training growing up on the farm consisted of being thrown into Spring Creek and left to his own devices.
But strangely, what Daddy could do was teach people to water ski.
On the farm where Mama grew up in South Georgia, Buddy (her daddy) had built a little pond for his cows, and on it a little cabin with a dock. Mama’s nephew Charles got crazy about waterskiing and so good at it, rumor was he could ski barefoot. Buddy liked for his family to have a good time, so he got a tiny little boat with an outboard motor, and in the summers when we visited, Mama and Daddy took turns driving it around the cow pond in a tight circle with somebody on skis behind it. Wheee!!! I have pictures of them, Daddy looking serious, and Mama, with that devil-may-care smile of hers. I stayed on the pier with a bamboo fishing rod and pulled in the occasional bass.
That little cow pond was where the Cunningham family got introduced to waterskiing. Mama loved it, so did Walker, and Daddy, like Buddy, liked for his family to have a good time. How to continue this fun thing when we went home to Virginia?
Daddy did a very untypical thing; he founded the Blackstone Ski Club. Untypical because Daddy wasn’t a joining type. Family, neighbors, church, those were enough for him. He recruited other families, got permission from Camp Pickett to use the Blackstone reservoir, made rules and regulations, set membership dues, posted a map indicating the proper routes for driving the boats, where to load in, drop off, etc.
Every summer Daddy taught a new batch of people to ski, several generations of them. Although he wasn’t a master of it himself, he could explain the steps to others, and despite our Evinrude motor being only 35 horsepower, Daddy could coax 200-pound beginners out of the water. He taught them how to ski on two skis, and when they’d mastered that, he taught them how to ski on one.
It never failed, though, at the end of every summer, Daddy decided he was going to try skiing on one ski instead of two. This was stressful on the rest of us. We tried not to roll our eyes but we always thought: why didn’t you start this in June? Mama, or Walker if he were home, would drive the boat. My job was to keep an eye on Daddy, whom, as you will recall, could not swim all that well.
Daddy put on several life belts. I’m not sure why we never had the vest kind, but we didn’t, so he made a little joke about needing two of the belts. He waded into the water, got the one ski on, the ski rope situated just to the side of it, bobbed sideways struggling to right himself given how the life belts were riding up, and yelled “HIT IT!” Mama gunned the engine to the full extent of its 35 horsepower and I watched as Daddy struggled—it was painful to watch—to rise up out of the water. He strained, he grimaced, I pulled for him to make it! Stand up, stand up! we yelled from the boat. But over he went. I screamed at Mama “He’s down!” Shaking her head like “Here we go,” she circled the boat around and got the ski rope lined up again with Daddy. Daddy had something to say about why he’d not made it that time. He bobbled in the water, grabbed the rope, wrestled with the life jackets, got stabilized—sort of— and yelled “Hit it!” again. Once more, Daddy did battle with the water, trying to pull himself out of it when he had told every beginning skiier to let the boat pull you out of it, he strained, the water churned, he grimaced—like he was having a heart attack— oh, oh, he’s almost up, c’mon, I yelled, you can do it! And alas, he fell this way, or that way, but he fell. Sometimes he never really got up. Sometimes it seemed like he was going to and we would rejoice, rejoice, this might be it this time we would think, but no, over he would pitch and around we would go again. We would do that close to ten times until Daddy would finally say he was calling it a day. We would joke, as we did every summer, that next summer, maybe he should get started earlier.
Daddy never did learn to ski on one ski. His swimming didn’t improve much either. But he sure gave generations of people the thrill of learning to ski behind that little boat on the Blackstone reservoir.
©2021 Joy Cunningham