2013 read #73: Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain by Roger Deakin.

Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain by Roger Deakin
335 pages
Published 1999
Read from May 31 to June 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

It's hard to imagine anything more eccentric and British than this: A writer sets out to swim throughout the British Isles, dipping into ponds and estuaries, lochs and ocean littoral, trout streams, fens, abandoned moats, canals, flooded quarries, harbors, industrial rivers, hidden becks, a cave, even heated swimming pools. Along the way, Deakin gives rich details of the natural places and human characters he meets: "Making my way back along the bank in the wetsuit through a field of cattle, carrying my flippers, mask, and snorkel, I met the farmer, who said he had fished the Dart for thirty years. He wore tweed, I wore rubber and stood dripping, but he seemed not to notice, or was polite enough not to say anything, and we chatted away on the bank about otters and salmon for some considerable time." Attempting an illegal swim across a harbor channel, he is accosted by the coast guard: "Oh God, not you again!" As with Wildwood, the Deakin book I read in April, the charm and appeal of Waterlog is in the sensual, sensory detail Deakin lavishes upon each encounter, each hidden pool and remote stream bank. Read all at once, the effect can become monotonous, but the rich descriptive beauty of his ineffably British peregrinations is enchanting in small, measured doses.

I can't set this book aside without noting the annoyance I felt toward Deakin's casual scientific ignorance. Dating the Cambrian to "a hundred million years ago" is inexcusable; it would take five minutes to look up the actual time period on the internet or in an encyclopedia. His digression in support of the "aquatic ape" hypothesis, while suitably poetic from a romantic swimmer's perspective, is baffling; that "theory" was discredited from almost the moment it was first published, and its continued currency among literate but nonscientific circles is frustrating. Every crackpot seems to have their own pet theory of human evolution; a physics professor at my old university, of all people, derailed a lecture to advance the idea that the ability to throw rocks was the primary impetus of human evolution. You can say this is a pet peeve of mine. Granted, Waterlog isn't a treatise on human evolution, but it would have taken one phone call for his editor to say, "Hey Roger, can we tweak this section a bit? No one has taken that hypothesis seriously in like fifty years, if ever." Missed opportunities.

Oh well. This was still a beguiling and lovely read. Incidentally, I feel a tad bit responsible for this book; I inadvertently caused my library to purchase it, and I'm the first person to get my hands on it after they put it into circulation. I hope plenty of library patrons after me find its eccentricity as captivating as I did.