At Siloam: Moana Pools, Dunedin.

At Siloam: Moana Pools, Dunedin.

Nerd the ageing Viking comes flexing and big-chested. He is positively Bjorn Borg-ing with Nordic sporting brilliance – until he enters the pool. In the water, all the poise, self-possession, and science are lost. He goes hard-out, with furious splashing, and gasping, and grunting . . . at a rate of approximately three lengths and hour. Sending waves to the far lanes, he is only a hare of the sunny season, come to challenge the weekly or daily tortoises. In less than ten minutes he rests. He hangs from the lip of the pool’s gutter, his arms outstretched either side of him; a beet-faced Jesus, crucified in defeat.

Nerd sulkily watches a woman, who is grim and horse-toothed with age, but who has probably been using swimming pools most of her life. She is prim and Kiwi, in a black one-piece swim-suit with silver swim-cap yanked down over fleecy steel curls. She fits her goggles with matriarchal no-nonsense, an elderly Mary Poppins eliminating a daily chore with assured but invisible enjoyment. She moves easily through the water, gathering distance in twenty-five metre lengths (the life guards have set the movable bulkhead to bisect the Olympic-sized pool since the pre-dawn elite swimmers left over an hour ago).

Next comes a white-haired old man, tanned and hunched over in navy board shorts, stiff and dry as sandpaper. Easing down the chrome-railed ladder, his bones still hold some flame. His eyes spark with it, wasted muscles might crackle with static desires. Prior to entering the water, a thick tuft of chest hair stands erect between his deflated breasts, like mould in the cleft of a decomposing peach. Ill-fitting skin, blighted with liver-spots, drinks. He finds the relief of relative weightlessness, and sprawls in the water like a croc, gliding, almost imperceptibly, upon his back.

The old man strays in the lane, perhaps deliberately causing that fleeting touch of a frictionless collision; the heat of human contact diluted to the more manageable tepidity of the water’s twenty-eight Degrees Celsius. Then he takes a squeaky tablet of foam, grasps it and holds it out in front, and kicks along like a paddle steamer. He offers everyone a questioning face in passing: Do you see me? Do I still count? Do you have some answer? Or directions to the fountain of youth?

Then a pair of slender, Aunt Sally-doll sisters arrive. In lilac Lycra, they enter the pool together. Perfumed hair is safely crammed under face-lifting swim caps, which give them a look of permanent astonishment. Their green eyes are cat-like. They cut the water, scissors leaving a scented wake. They close together again at the shallow end to giggle and chatter.

Next, an Amazon steps out from the women’s changing rooms, as though from the wardrobe leading to Narnia. She is a walking celebration of human will-power, the antidote of Nerd. Striding poolside, she is blockish, animated marble. Her heavy body is a marvel of two things in one – a profane mystery of nature shaped by culture, shaped by habit, shaped by discipline. The broad face under her swim cap and goggles becomes the mask of an androgen. A navy swim suit cuts across her chest, complementing a centaur-like quality; she has the head, shoulders, and arms of a muscular man; the breasts, hips, and thighs of a curvaceous woman. She looks almost impossible, a creature from a dream – until she dives. In real time, those disparate, stony limbs flow molten into repeated, well-practiced motion. She wriggles along, alligator fashion, before settling into the rhythm of her stroke.

Above them all is the recently installed portrait of Danyon Loader, Olympic medal-winning son of this proud city. There is also the black Perspex square of the clock. At its centre, the second hand sweeps a circle, like the turning sword of the angel, blocking the way back to Eden. But Moana Pools has been a paradise of sorts on any given day of the week since it opened almost half a century ago on November 14^th, 1964. There is an ethereal, metaphysical dimension too; the atmosphere steeped in something greater than any individual’s concerns, layered with several generations’ worth of Dunedinite comings and goings. It leaves an indelible reassurance with the citizens drawn to use it repeatedly, this place of community, oasis where mundane and sacred can intersect without distinction, if only you believe that you really can find heaven’s double here, like a reflection of early morning sunlight on the water, a mystery breaking in like a teenage jumper bombing from the highest board.

In spite of all the synthetic materials and the sinus provoking chlorine, the fallen flesh of young and old, the lonely, the hale and athletic, or the floundering, or the sick and disabled, will always discover the same cool embrace. The spirit of water still works tiny miracles, even in an artificial context. It whispers of healing, of an amniotic surrender that is perhaps not so terrifying after all. It promises something akin to a hypnotic amnesia, induced through the submission to muscle memory and rhythmic movement. In this pool’s communion, all find the calibration of body, breath and heart. And for some, maybe even the soul, too.

 <---- It's set in Dunedin, partly.