Nonfiction | July 08, 2026

Beneath the Surface

When I was eight years old, I would bike the six and a half kilometers to the Rawhitiroa Pool on the outskirts of Eltham to slog through width after width for 5c a pop. It was my mother’s incentive to keep me out of her hair at holiday time in the era when kids were sent into the world in the morning and told to be home before dark.  

Ankle-high grass and slow-moving cows filled the paddocks on either side of the winding road. Chirping crickets and the buzz of cicadas were the only regular sounds as I pedaled and puffed along on my Raleigh Twenty. The final 150 meters was a steep climb, and I would break into a sweat, hankering to dive into the water and cool down. 

The twenty-five-meter pool was five or six lanes wide with a grass bank on one side that often smelled of cut summer lawns. Opposite that was a wire mesh fence that rattled in the wind, and near the entrance were the unpainted concrete-block changing rooms and the office. On clear days, I could see Mount Taranaki, the volcano that defines New Zealand’s west coast, commanding the horizon. It seemed so close that sometimes I felt like I could reach out and touch it. I’d pay my entry fee and hand over a pen and piece of paper to the person in the office who doubled as a lifeguard and ask if they could mark off each width I did. Three or four hours later, both sides of the paper would be covered with lines of single strokes.  

What started as a pocket-money earner evolved into a lifelong passion, starting with competing in club and provincial meets and school sports. One of my proudest possessions was a tan-colored rug I used to keep warm at meets. Onto it, my mother would stitch cotton “flashes,” small squares awarded to the top three swimmers with the name of the meet, race distance, and placement.