Spring Break

Yesterday I spend the midday hours in what to me was a new kind of swimming pool. I got an invitation to this farm where they'd taken a swimming pool and rigged it so that the cold waters of a headwater spring creek flowed through it. The rain falls on the uplands, soaks down into the limestone, then percolates up into streams at a constant temperature of 55 degrees F. or so, winter and summer, and this being summer that's pretty refreshing. Trout live in these little streams because trout need cold water, and this water laughs off heat waves. And yesterday, so did I. You'd float about, surrounded by real, live stream water (midge larvae would float by occasionally, just like on the regular stream), looking around you at the farmhouse and barn, the lawn and flowerbeds, the fences and pastures, the swaying trees, the clouds passing in the blue sky. The sun hammered down as it has for days, but who cared? I was floating in water that was just about exactly the temperature of a perfectly chilled Chablis. The enervation caused by the heat dissolved and swirled away downstream, and that cold leached down into me and gave me a profound sense of refreshment. There's an old English phrase for people who are self-possessed in the face of danger: "cool as a trout." I wasn't in any danger yesterday, but I was cool as a trout anyway, and it was quite a pleasure.