{All images above are from Flickr. To learn more about a specific image, please click on its title to be taken to its respective Flickr page.}
There was a certain unmistakable magic to the first swim of the summer when we were growing up. Brave, with the sort of hearty gusto and disposition that only the earliest days of youth affords most, we'd sometimes plunge into the water in May (there may have even been one time we dared to do so in April), icicles all but forming on our eyebrows as we did. The air might have had almost-summer warmth to it, but the water temperature was still far more inline with the bone chilly days of winter.
Nevertheless, we'd put our brave faces, egging each other on to see who would dip their whole body underneath first, our small hands growing progressively more blue with each passing minute. Inevitably, at least when we were still young enough to require an adult to be present when we went to the beach, someone's mom or dad, if not my own, would always stand safely back from the shoreline and shout out, "Okay, kids, that's about enough, you don't want to get catch your death of a cold from that freezing water!", and we'd pretend to leave the lake's cool embrace far more begrudgingly than we really were (in addition to knowing full well, at least by a certain age, that you don't actually catch a cold simply from being cold).
We knew it we might as well have been using icebergs as air mattresses and that it would be a few more weeks still until one could safely venture into the water without needing a narwhal's body composition to stay warm while doing as much. And so we'd wait, as the days on the calendar ticked by, not only on the school year (which always let out us for us at the very end of June), but also on Penticton's two lakes (Okanagan and Skaha) to reach the kind of temperature where we could frolic and splash around until we were wrinkled like raisins, happily exhausted, and ready to retire to our waiting sun-kissed beach towels before getting a second wind and racing headlong into the gentle surf once more.
If the spring had been a particularly warm and favourable one, that usually started being able to happen right around this time of the year. Sometimes it might take a little longer, say closer to Canada Day, but by mid-June, you could almost always find at least a handful of robust souls in swimwear inching their way into the lake, that telltale look of surprise over the water's true temperature registering on their face from a mile away. It is the memory of those first swims of the year as a child that spurred on the visual inspiration for today's Flickr Favourites post and which has been on my mind frequently as of late.
Though, for many years now because of my health, I've not been able to much in the way of swimming, I still eagerly anticipate this time of the year, when I'll do a little wading or floating on my back in the water, before setting up camp on the beach and enjoying watching today's generation of children barrel across the sand and leap into the gentle waves. The sound of motorboats humming in the distance, jet skis bobbing noisily closer to shore, and the squeals of excitement coming from young and young at heart alike as they splash merrily in the waves.
In a few more week's time, when the dog days of summer are biting at our heels once more, both lakes will take on a near-bathwater warm quality that's hard to match anywhere else in this country (which is a large part of the reason that Penticton and the Okanagan as a whole has always been such an immensely popular Canadian summer tourist destination). A quality which, I swear, is all the more true if you're game for going for a night swim. This was something else that I sincerely adored doing as a youngster, when I'd paddle out a hundred feet or so from the beach and lay on my back, the rhythmic waves almost hypnotizing me into a zen-like state of serenity as stared up at the twinkling neon lights from all the motels and restaurants on the other side of the street.
These are the kinds of memories that endear summer to our heart and make us nothing short of gleeful to see it return once more, whether we'll be doing much actual swimming this year or not, and which will always help make the return of the warmest season every bit as fun and exciting as those ice cold plunges into the lake that we enjoyed so very much as children.
