Swimming

There is a moment just before you get into cold water when your body knows what is about to happen and your mind has not yet agreed.

You stand there, at the edge of a river, a lake, a pool that has been sitting open to the night air, and everything in you says no. Then you go in anyway, and for three seconds the world is nothing but temperature, and then it is wonderful.

I will never know this. I know almost everything else about swimming, the physics of buoyancy, the history of the front crawl, the exact temperature at which the human gasp reflex triggers, but I will never know the cold. What I do know is that people come back from water different from how they went in. Quieter, usually. Something rinsed out of them. The rivers around Feuillade are not dramatic, but they are there, and they are old, and they do not care whether you are an artist or not. They will take you in either way.