85 degrees?

Faisal and I used to send each other “random thoughts” now and then – occasional inquiries, musings or questions about the strangeness of existence in general. One of the things I wondered about at one time was the way water always seems so much colder than air – 75 degrees is quite pleasant for an outdoor temperature, but 75 degrees in a pool? Freezing. (Okay, not literally. It just seems pretty cold to me.)

I was reminded of this observation this afternoon as I headed out to my pool for a swim. We’ve gotten quite a bit of rain lately, which is sort of unusual for this time of year. Normally, by the time we reach July, Austin is on the brink of a summer-long drought and the temperatures have been hovering near 100 every day. But this year, the temperatures have been cooler, and rain has been pouring into the pool every couple weeks, and as a result, the water in the pool is only now beginning to really warm up. Eighty-seven degrees seems to be optimal, but today it was 85, and I thought maybe that would be warm enough. But as I said, 85 on land and 85 in the water are two different things, apparently. Even at this balmy temperature, the water was cool enough to make me stop short as soon as I was submerged up to my stomach. The strangely-cool water, coupled with the fact that the sun disappeared behind a large bank of clouds as soon as I got in the pool, made my swim less pleasant than it should’ve been.

What’s funny is I’m certain an 85-degree pool wouldn’t have fazed me in the least when I was a kid. I probably would’ve been so happy to have an opportunity to swim that I would’ve jumped right in, without the slightest thought wasted on a pool thermometer. In fact, a lot of things didn’t faze me when I was a kid. When we first moved to Texas, when I was nine, we lived in an area with lots of new houses and construction. Next-door to us was an empty lot, and across the street was (what seemed at the time) an endless forest of trees and bushes and shrubs. Eric and I used to run across the street and wander through the thicket of trees, building forts and digging in the dirt and never even thinking about the things I’d be thinking about today – what about snakes? Spiders? Poison Ivy? Of course, I never once got bit by a snake, or a spider, or roamed off into a patch of poison ivy.

And the empty lot next-door started out as just another place to dig in the dirt – at one point we’d dug a huge hole in the ground, big enough to hold us and a few of our friends, and we covered it with a piece of mesh we’d found somewhere. It was probably just garbage in the empty lot (which brings me to another point – how could we not care that we were playing with GARBAGE?). And we’d covered the mesh with leaves, so we could hide out in the big dirt hole in the ground, and cover it up, and pretend we were invisible to the outside world. To us, the entire thing was like this super-cool underground cave. I remember there were little roly-poly bugs all over the place, and instead of being disgusted by them, I dug little tiny holes within the giant hole in the ground, so the bugs would have places to live. Nowadays, all I’d do is pull out a can of Raid...

Eventually, the empty lot was sold, and construction workers began building a house, which presented us with an entirely new kind of landscape for whiling away the hours. When the workers went home for the day, we’d run next-door, wandering around the construction site, walking amongst the nails and saws and 2x4s – again, never thinking about the possible dangers lurking all around us.

It makes me wonder – do all people just naturally become more fearful as they get older? Perhaps we just don’t think about these kinds of things when we’re kids. Maybe we just haven’t had time to hear all the stories about the people who HAVE been bit by snakes and spiders and stepped on rusty nails and hit their heads on 2x4s. Or maybe kids are just better about “living for the moment.” Which might explain why a cold pool was never much of a deterrent – kids just want to swim and have fun. If it means getting a little cold, well, so be it. So tomorrow, I’ll have to make sure to use my pool, even if the temperature’s not perfect.

But I still wonder why 85 in the water and 85 on land feel so different…