Honors Thesis: On Learning to Swim; Or, How I Drank My Way Through College

The Connecticut River splits the state almost perfectly in half, running from north to south and emptying out into the Long Island Sound. There’s a little bend in the river about three quarters of the way down, and tucked into that bend is my hometown of Portland. Naturally, growing up right on the river meant that we’d go swimming in it all the time. My parents enrolled both my younger sister Haley and me in swimming lessons as soon as we were old enough, and we’d spend countless summer days splashing around in the river and in friends’ pools. I largely preferred pools thanks to my crippling fear of seaweed—just a brush of it against my shoulder would be enough to send me running out of the water—but Haley would swim in a dirty puddle if she could.

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Much to Haley’s and my animosity, we never got our own pool, but when we’d go on vacation every few years, my parents would try and find a hotel with some sort of decently nice pool. At the time, I thought they were just trying to be good parents, but I now realized it was more of a win-win situation: Haley and I did something that kept us busy, outside, active, and away from a screen, and my parents got to sit around and drink all the beer they wanted. We were good enough swimmers that they did not have to worry about us drowning and could sit back with their “beverages”, as they called them.

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My parents had always been big beer drinkers; in their younger years, they’d have six to ten beers every weekend or so, but they’ve since slowed down. I think turning 50 a few years ago had something to do with that. My dad used to brew his own beer in our basement, and Haley and I both hated having to deal with the awful smell, yeast and must creeping up the stairs and infiltrating the air of our living room. My dad would use a long, clear, skinny tube to transfer the beer from the tall white plastic buckets he was brewing it in. “It looks like pee,” I’d say, causing both Haley and me to giggle from where we were seated on the green carpet. Then my dad would chastise us both for using “potty language”, demanding we leave him in peace to finish brewing the pee-beer, and we’d scurry up the stairs, still laughing.

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I had my first sip of beer an indeterminate amount of years ago—long enough that I don’t remember how old I was, but short enough that I remember the actual event. I was at my cousins’ house in Massachusetts, just a few minutes from the New Hampshire border and just over two hours away from home. My cousins’ house was just a bit nicer than mine, just a bit cleaner, and the swingset we were swinging on was the exact same way—a deep oak brown, but slightly more sturdy and with less chipped paint than the one in our backyard. My dad came up to my cousins and I, a beer in his hand—not an unusual occurrence—and I asked him if I could try it. I was almost certain he’d say no, since he always said no, but this time, he said, “Sure,” and then handed the drink out to me. He raised one eyebrow (except he has a unibrow, so it was more like he raised half of his eyebrow) and stared me down. His gaze was level, but more curious than intimidating.

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I took the beer, held it in my two hands—I was too young to be able to hold a mostly full beer can in one hand—and took a huge sip.

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And then I immediately spit it out, all over the swingset and my shoes and both my dad and one of my cousins. The beer tasted like tangy, thin mud, malty and slightly grainy and quite possibly the worst thing I had ever put in my mouth. I coughed a few times, trying to dispel the bitter taste from my tongue.

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“Ewwwwww,” my cousin—I think it was Danny, the middle child of his two siblings—wailed. “She spit on me!”

My dad, ever an agent of chaos whenever we were with his side of the family, just laughed, took a sip of his beer (that he did not spit out), and walked away, leaving me still coughing and determined to never take another sip of beer in my life.

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But despite my hatred of beer, my parents did not feel the same way, and continued to drink a few beers a day every weekend. My dad had a strict rule—no drinking if he had to work the next day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him break it. My mom, however, is more willing to break this rule and treat herself to a drink—but only one drink—if she’s had a particularly hard day at work. Not after every hard day, though; sometimes, she’ll come home with a large vanilla bean Coolatta from Dunkin (that she can never finish, so I’ll usually have the last third or so), or a Jersey Mike’s sub (that she can also never finish, but she gets meat on them so my vegetarian self can’t help her there), or a big bag of cheddar caramel popcorn. Other times, it’s not even food—she’ll turn on a movie she loves, play some Animal Crossing, or queue up her favorite episode of whatever TV show she’s currently obsessed with.

On vacation, though, things are different. Some summers ago, when Haley and I were still in elementary school, my parents shepherded us into my mom’s dark blue Honda Pilot, gave us coloring books and Goldfish to keep us busy and quiet, and drove eight or so hours up to Montreal for just under a week. We spent time going to museums and wandering around the city, but also hanging out at our hotel pool for the “you two swim, us two drink” compromise. I remember the pool as being huge and much fancier than what we were used to, with a shallow end, a deep end, a diving board, and a waterfall built into one of the sides. We liked to stand under it and just let the water wash over us, but so did all the other kids at the hotel, so we had to take turns. Part of the pool was in the shade at all times, which I appreciated as someone who hated sunscreen but could also get sunburnt in the middle of a thunderstorm. While Haley and I swam in the chlorine-infused water, practicing our handstands and flips, my parents took solace at a table near the pool bar. My dad was making his way through a dictionary-length crossword puzzle book while my mom clicked through her Kindle Fire, looking at Yelp reviews for restaurants in the area.